No Dynamic Filtering/Sorting Options for Profiles

[ShubhamMalekar]

Problem: Currently, users can only search textually. There’s no way to filter by country, industry, experience, or role, nor can users sort by parameters like alphabetical order or recently added.

Solution: Add a filter sidebar (multi-select: country, role, industry) , Implement sort options (A–Z, newest first, most popular) , Use client-side filtering for performance.

[sophiabrandt]

I do not think that it's possible to add a filter section right now. As noted in #3445 we do not have data validation on existing data.
So, I am unclear on how you would want to add a filter on e.g. the "role" (do you mean job title), when existing data can have dozens or even hundreds of different entries. A filter only makes sense if there is a predefined set of filter options. Otherwise, the user experience would be quite bad.

Maybe you can explain how you plan to implement this and/or make a proof of concept that would work with the current code base.

[ShubhamMalekar]

Thanks for pointing this out @sophiabrandt , I see what you mean

You’re right that without validation, fields like “role” or “industry” can have dozens of different variations (e.g. “Software Engineer”, “Engineer”, “Dev” all meaning the same thing). A direct filter wouldn’t make sense in that case since it would end up showing way too many inconsistent options.

Here’s what I was thinking as a first step:

Client-side only filters: Instead of starting with strict predefined sets, we could generate the filter options dynamically from whatever data already exists. That way, the sidebar would simply reflect the current dataset (even if there’s some inconsistency). Not perfect, but it still gives users some way to narrow down profiles.

Incremental cleanup: Over time, once we have validation in place (like what I suggested in the schema issue), we can start to normalize fields such as country and role. That would make the filter experience much smoother. But I think it’s still possible to get value even before that, just by showing the existing tags as-is.

Proof of concept: To make this clearer, I can work on a small POC branch that:

1. Adds a sidebar with dynamically generated filter options.
2. Implements simple client-side filtering/sorting (e.g., country, alphabetical order).
3. Doesn’t require backend changes or predefined enums right now.
4. This way, contributors and users can see how it would look in practice, and we can improve it as the data quality improves.

Would you be open to me drafting that POC so we can evaluate if it’s worth pursuing further?

[MattCSmith]

@ShubhamMalekar For sure, I would love to see that.
My only comment, would be to ensure that it doesn't complicate the creating of new profiles.

[sophiabrandt]

Opening this issue up for other contributors if anyone is interested.