New: language filter for Recruiter accounts, browser updates, and more

There’s a lot going on at Gaensemarkt this time of year, from the Christmas market on the square up to XING Engineering on the sixth floor of number 26. Once again, we’ve launched improvements and new features on the platform this week that affect nearly all areas of XING.

Import Events as a feed

We’ve offered the ability to export individual events for some time. Starting today, it’s also possible to import your own Events from XING to your MS Outlook or Google calendar. Just select the “Sync my Events” tab on the Events page. Here’s a tip: Don’t share the feed URL with other people – after all, they’re your private events.

References and the “Introduce” option

We’ve made an improvement to our popular References feature to fix a glitch that prevented a person from writing a letter of reference for a contact whose reference was refused.

We removed the “introduce” button from members who do not permit messages to be sent to them, because if they do not receive messages, they cannot be introduced or receive introductions. The error messages up to this point were sometimes confusing in this case.

Improved searches for basic members

Up till now, when you would search for a person whose name is also the name of the company as a basic member (if you were looking for “Ford Maddox Ford”, working at Ford Motor Company, for example), you would not be able to view the profile. We’ve changed that now, and these search results are visible. Otherwise, the search capabilities for basic and Premium Members have not changed.

Improved searches for Recruiters

Recruiter Members can now search for language skills of candidates – this was a frequent request in UserVoice, and we’re happy to oblige.

Browser: Internet Explorer 8, Google ChromeFrame, Firefox 3.6

After the launch of IE8 this year after a lengthy beta phase, like many websites we took advantage of the compatibility mode which allowed the browser to act like its predecessor IE7.

Now we’ve had time to study the changes made to its display and script properties, and adjusted our code where necessary. Now, following months of testing, we’re happy to announce the XING website is now fully IE8 capable.

In the past, the Google ChromeFrame extension, which replaces the Internet Explorer display engine with that of the Google Chrome browser, led to difficulties when editing one’s personal profile.  We’ve fixed this bug now as well.

Furthermore, we’ve optimized the XING Plugin to be Firefox 3.6 ready (you can find the plugin here).

After all these changes, it’s time for at least some of us to take the elevator down to the ground floor and enjoy a bit of gingerbread or other Christmas treats…