Recently, I wrote about the intrinsic issues associated with searching LinkedIn for potential candidates with specific industry experience, and how using the “Industry” field can actually prevent you from finding the people you’re looking for. 

A number of readers responded by suggesting a logical solution to the issue – searching by specific company name(s) instead of using LinkedIn’s ”Industry” field.

It is a logical solution, but a potentially flawed one nonetheless.

I’m going to show you some reasons why, and if you read this post within the next 5 minutes, I’ll even throw in a LinkedIn  company search anomaly as an added bonus.

User Generated Content has Issues

As William Uranga pointed out in his comment, “Behaviorally-speaking, you need to use the fields in your search that most profiles have completed. “Industry” is not one of them. ‘ Company name’, ‘title”, and using geographic modifiers still yield the best results when searching your network. Even ‘keyword’ is not reliable.” 

I agree that when sourcing candidates on LinkedIn you need to use the fields that most profiles have completed – but from my research, it does appear that when you create a LinkedIn profile, you actually do have to choose an industry. I tried not selecting an industry and leaving it at “Choose industry” and LinkedIn would not allow me to save my profile without selecting one from the list – I got an angry red “Please enter a value” for my efforts.

So it appears that every LinkedIn profile will actually have an industry selected – but the issue remains that it may not be the industry you’d assume people would use.

I agree with William that searching by keyword is not reliable – there are many LinkedIn profiles that do not have any text entered into the description field under each work experience. I’m curious to know the exact percentage of these “skeletal” LinkedIn profiles that only have company names and titles entered, but something tells me LinkedIn wouldn’t be motivated to release that number. If I had to hazard a guess based on my experience searching LinkedIn, I’d say at least 40%. 

Searching LinkedIn using the ”Company” and “Title” fields as William suggests generally does yield good results. However, with these fields we are dealing with user generated content. Instead of choosing from a fixed list (which has its own set of issues), people can choose to enter whatever they want into these fields – and it may not be what you’d assume.

Allow me to demonstrate…

Searching by Company

For some companies, there may only one way in which a company’s name can be expressed/written. However, there are many companies where people can and do write the company names in a wide variety of ways - not only on LinkedIn, but on their resumes as well.  

Financial Services Example

Let’s say you were looking for people with experience in the Financial Services industry, and after reading my recent article on the industry search issue, you wisely realized that people who work in the Financial Services industry might not actually select that industry when they create or modify their LinkedIn profile. So instead, you start thinking of target companies to search for using the “Company” field.

So you start selecting companies, and let’s say one of the companies you’d like to target is JPMorgan Chase. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’d know that the first thing you’d need to do is obey the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing, which states that for every term you are thinking of including in your search, consider how many ways it can be expressed.

Okay, so to find people who have experience working for JPMorgan Chase, you need to think of all of the other ways that people who’ve worked for the company can express that fact. An easy one is JPMC. Others would include JPMorganChase, “JPMorgan Chase,” and “JP Morgan.”

Here’s positive proof:

There might even be more (such as WAMU, etc.) – but my point here is that if you go beyond searching by industry (which you actually have to), you must be careful to think of all of the various ways people who have worked in your target industry and target companies could possibly express that experience.

If you don’t – you create Hidden Talent Pools of candidates that exist in LinkedIn (or wherever you search), and you cannot find them.

Pharmaceutical Example

If you were looking for people with big pharma experience, you might want to target GlaxoSmithKline. To do so, you’d quickly and correctly assess the fact that not everyone who has worked for GlaxoSmithKline will actually write it that way on their LinkedIn profile (or resume).

Similar to the JPMC example above, we can safely assume some people might abbreviate the company name down to GSK. Of course, some people might also write “Glaxo SmithKline,” “Glaxo Smith Kline,” or “GlaxoSmith Kline.” And they do:

If you didn’t think of those alternate ways of expressing experience working for GlaxoSmithKline, you quite simply would not and could not find those candidates. You would not even be aware that they exist.

Yeah, But this Doesn’t Apply to MY Industry…

If I haven’t got your mind racing on how you can apply this process to your own sourcing efforts, perhaps thinking that I picked a couple of “ringers” with JPMC and GSK – think again. This phenomenon isn’t limited to any particular industry, nor is it limited to the more obvious companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC, “Pricewaterhouse Coopers,” etc.).

In fact, inherently one-word company names aren’t immune either.

How about Microsoft?

How could someone who’s worked for Microsoft mention the company other than “Microsoft?”

I know of at least one way:

Yeah – there’s a couple hundred of those in the U.S. alone on LinkedIn.

Are there other ways people might express working for Microsoft? Maybe

Trust me – your target industry and at least some of your target companies are not immune to this principle. In fact, it’s highly likely that you’ve been missing candidates in your sourcing efforts for a long time now because of the intrinsic issues associated with user generated content.

Going Confidential

Let’s not forget all of the people who don’t actually list the names of the companies they’ve worked for.

If you’re searching by company name, you simply cannot find people who actually work for your target company but do not list the company, who instead use “confidential” as their employer.

There’s over 5,000 U.S. LinkedIn profiles like this.

Have you ever specifically searched for people who list “confidential” as their current employer? If so, I’d say you’re a rare breed of sourcer – perhaps 1 in 100 sourcers have ever even thought to do this. It’s not rocket science by any stretch, but most people simply don’t think enough before they search for candidates. This technique is pretty obvious once I point it out though, right?

Company Research on LinkedIn

Remember that LinkedIn anomaly I alluded to in the intro of this article? 

Well, let’s say you are doing some research on LinkedIn to find the names of other companies in your target industry to include in your search, and your target industry is “Defense and Space.”

If you select “Defense and Space” from the industry list…

… you’d get 50 results.

But do you think there are only 50 companies in the defense and space industry represented on LinkedIn?

Me neither.

I noticed that when I select an industry under LinkedIn’s company search functionality, LinkedIn enters keywords for me:

I didn’t type in “Defense And Space” – LinkedIn did it for me. LinkedIn will do it for any industry you choose – try it for yourself.

Being the curious guy that I am, I wanted to see what happened if I deleted the words automatically entered by LinkedIn and searched again:

I got almost 1700 companies. 

That strikes me as more accurate than 50.

Interesting, yes?

No?

Well, it should be - because anyone who uses LinkedIn’s quite robust company search/research functionality (you do, don’t you?) may be getting seriously short-changed in their search results if they don’t delete the auto-populated keywords and re-run their searches when attempting to get comprehensive lists of companies in target industries.

I have reason to believe that at least a couple of LinkedIn employees read my blog. Let’s see how quickly they fix this anomaly. 

Final Thoughts

Hidden Talent Pools (Google the term) are very real. If you’re not careful to stop to think before you search, you can all to easily and unknowingly create pools of candidates that you cannot and do not find. But they’re there.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – any social network profile consists mainly of free form user generated content (just like resumes), and when people have the ability to enter whatever they think is appropriate to describe their employers and work experience, you’re going to get a wider variety than you might assume. Before you conduct ANY search – take a moment to think about all of the various ways your quarry could possible express what it is that you’re looking for.

Oh – and one last thing: What I’ve detailed in this post also applies to X-Ray searching LinkedIn for people who have worked at specific companies within a target industry as well. 

Special Thanks

Eric Jaquith- thank you for telling my that my site looked like crap on iPhones.

At his suggestion, I installed the WPtouch plugin and now the site is much easier to read and navigate on iPhones, BlackBerries and other smart phones. From this point on, if you ever read my site using your mobile device – you owe your enhanced mobile BBB experience to Eric!

One of the most common forms of group training in the sourcing community is the webinar.

Some are free, others cost money. Some are internal corporate trainings, and others are delivered by 3rd party trainers.

Although web based training is relatively easy to deliver and it offers the ability to train large numbers of people across multiple locations – the question must be asked – how effective is it as a training method?

The ultimate measure of any training method’s effectiveness is the extent to which trainees can reliably and properly execute the techniques, tactics, and strategies that they were exposed to during the training.  The reality is that most people do not absorb and retain information effectively by watching and listening to a trainer – this applies to web-based training as well as live classroom training.

Read the full article here on The Source Newsletter.

I firmly believe that candidate identification is the most critical step in the talent acquisition/recruiting life cycle – you can’t build a relationship with, receive a referral from, network with, or hire someone you haven’t found in the first place.

From the very beginning of my recruiting career, I’ve leveraged technology for talent identification, and I’ve learned that searching databases, the Internet, and social media offers intrinsic advantages over other methods of candidate sourcing, and I’ve compiled a list of what I believe are the top 10 best practices for searching for candidates.  

So whether you’re searching LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Monster, your ATS/CRM, or you’re Googling for candidate leads on the Internet – following and integrating these search best practices into your candidate sourcing routine can dramatically increase your ability to more quickly find more of the right people. 

In no particular order:

#1 Think Before You Search

“Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first 4 hours sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

That’s become one of my favorite quotes to use when stressing the importance of thinking before throwing some keywords together and hitting “search.”

Too many sourcers and recruiters are unknowingly picking up dull axes and begin taking swings. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried chopping down a tree with a dull axe, but it’s neither efficient nor effective, and requires considerably more effort than necessary. If you just take the time to think, develop some semblance of a search strategy, and experiment with various searches (sharpen your axe!) – you can get to more relevant results more quickly.

For many hiring profiles, you should spend at least 10 -20 minutes thinking about and researching your search strategy, as well as experimenting with search strings and reviewing the results for relevance before you start using the results to begin making calls. 

1. Analyze, interpret, and fully understand the job opening/position requirements
2. Adhering to the Cardinal Rule of Candidate Sourcing, take your understanding of the position and intelligently select titles, skills, technologies, companies, responsibilities, terms, etc. to include (or purposefully exclude!) in a query employing appropriate Boolean / Extended Boolean operators, query modifiers, and semantic search techniques
3. While reviewing the results of your initial searches to assess relevance, scan the results for additional and alternate relevant titles, search terms, phrases, and companies that you can incorporate into your next search
4. Based upon the observed relevance of and intel gained from each successive search, modify the search strings appropriately and run them again
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until an acceptably large volume of highly relevant results is achieved 

You should always take time to analyze your search criteria to assess the possibility that your search terms may not find all qualified candidates, and in fact might actually be eliminating viable candidates. I have found that the more time I spend on the front-end of a search, the more relevant my results become, which in turn increases my productivity by enabling me to find more and better candidates more quickly. Imagine that!

Here are a couple of examples of applying the Cardinal Rule of Candidate Sourcing: #1 Searching for Java Developers with JMS, and #2 Searching for LMS Plateau professionals.

#2 Do Not Overanalyze Resumes

Chances are that the people you are trying to find and recruit are not professional resume writers. Whether they are software engineers, lawyers, physical therapists, project managers, or database administrators – they are NOT professional resume writers, nor do I think we should expect them to be.

Writing a great and 100% complete resume isn’t easy. What IS easy is to forget is some of your responsibilities and every little detail of your professional experience (applications, environments, etc.). Candidates may not think to express every last bit of their experience in their resume – and if you’re looking specifically for one of those little bits and it’s not there – it’s all too easy to assume that the person who wrote the resume doesn’t have the requisite experience you’re looking for. Don’t make assumptions about candidates from their resumes – give them the benefit of the doubt. Ever hear the phrase, “Don’t judge a book by its cover?”

Resumes are by nature imperfect and are poor representations of a person’s experience and capabilities, so I suggest you apply what I call the “10 second rule:” Don’t read resumes – scan them. If you can’t absolutely disqualify/rule out a candidate based on reviewing their resume in 10 seconds, pick up the phone and call them.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised. You’ll call people you would not likely have called before, and you’ll find out that some of those candidates actually DO have the skills and experience you need – it just wasn’t obviously or explicitly expressed in their resume.

Always remember – you (and/or your clients) hire PEOPLE, not PAPER.

#3 Do Not Run Overly Generic/Basic Searches

If you run generic searches with perhaps 1 title and a couple of basic keywords – you’ll be sure to get correspondingly generic and basic results. I’ve heard many a recruiter complain about getting “too many results.” People making this mistake unknowingly increase the size of the Hidden Talent Pool of candidates they don’t find. 

Don’t rely solely or heavily on title-based searches. Not all companies use the same titles for the same roles and responsibilities – so making this mistake contributes to you populating Hidden Talent Pools with every candidate that matches your hiring profile or job order but has a title that you didn’t think of and include in your search. See best practice #1 above. 

Don’t rely solely on using skill/tech terms (e.g., Java, Oracle, Accounts Payable, SOX, etc.) when creating your Boolean search strings. Technical terms such as programming languages, operating systems, and databases will only give you results of people who mention those terms in their resumes. Mentioning buzz words does not imply any degree of responsibility or capability.

The most effective searches reach beyond skill/technology term matching and into the realm of semantic search by include responsibility terms (administer, configure, create, manage, reconcile, coordinate, design, etc.) and environmental terms (enterprise, host*, etc.) where applicable. This is the first step in moving beyond simple buzz-word bingo.

#4 See Each Resume as More than a Potential Match for the Position You’re Working on

Any source of candidates you have access to can be leveraged in much the same way as LinkedIn can – every person is actually a conduit to a larger network of people. So even if a particular resume or social media profile you’re reviewing doesn’t appear to be an ideal match – they actually might be (see #3 above), and they may know someone who is.

If you find yourself scanning a search result that appears to be under- or over-qualified – remember to not make assumptions about candidates based on their resume/profile, and also be aware that people who are in fact too junior or too senior for your current needs might fit future needs. Additionally, people who are either too junior or too senior for a particular position might work with or know someone who is an exact match.

#5 Run Multiple Searches Across Multiple Sources

Now matter how strong your sourcing skills are or how many times you’ve recruited for the same position, you should always run multiple searches. It’s impossible for one Boolean search to find all qualified candidates.

It is also critical to leverage every resource you have available to you. You may be in love with LinkedIn, but the best candidates for that special position you’re working on may be tucked away in your database/ATS, or on Twitter!

If you think you’ve exhausted a particular source of candidates – believing that you’ve found all of the available matches and cannot find any more – you’re wrong. Invariably you’ve left behind Hidden Talent Pools of people who do match your positions, but you could not find them because your Boolean search strings and perhaps even your entire search strategy made it impossible to do so.

Being aware of this is a major step on the path towards sourcing enlightenment. See best practices #1 and #3. 

#6 Search ALL Resumes 

I’m aware that there are MANY users of resume databases (online or internal) who focus specifically on resumes posted/entered in the last 30 days, assuming these are the candidates to target because they are “on the market.”

You do NOT know anything about a candidate until you establish contact with them. Just because their resume was posted yesterday, it does not mean they are “actively” seeking a new position. I’ve spoken to many people who happened to recently post their resume into my own database on on a job board, and once I made contact, they explained they were just “checking to see what’s out there.”  Doesn’t dound too “active” to me!

Also, just because a resume is 3-6+ months old – you have NO idea what their job search status is. You cannot safely assume they are not looking and are “off the market.”

They could be #1 Still passively looking, having not found the right match yet, #2 Available because they are finishing up a contract position they took 3-6 months ago, #3 In a new position, but extremely unhappy because it’s nothing like they were led to believe it would be, #4 In a new position, but their a) boss is leaving, b) position is in jeoparduy due to layoffs, c) division is being acquired, etc. – you get the drift. 

Ultimately, you should want to find the BEST candidates possible, regardless of silly job search status labels (active, passive, blech!). Everyone is a candidate!

Never limit yourself to only searching resumes posted in the last 30 days – some of the best passive and active candidates have resumes 31 to 365 + days “old.” 

And most people don’t call them.

#7 Don’t be a Sourcing Snob

Despite popular opinion to the contrary, job board resume databases are not filled with desperate, low quality candidates. In fact, it’s statistically impossible. There are plenty of “A” candidates available in each and every job board resume database – major or niche.

If your experience suggests otherwise, perhaps it’s your searches or your search strategy. If you go fishing in the ocean and don’t catch the particular species of fish you were hoping to, would you be able to assume that there were no fish of that type in the ocean that day? Of course not. Just because YOU didn’t catch the fish you were looking for, it doesn’t mean they weren’t there to be caught.

And if you’re the type who believes that the job board resume databases are filled with “active” candidates, you might be surprised to know that approximately 75% of all resumes in the major job boards resume databases are dated over 30 days old. Some are 2-4+ years old. Are they still “active” candidates? Do you think anyone’s calling them? 

Don’t be a sourcing snob. As I pointed out in best practice #6 – your goal should be to find the BEST possible candidates, regardless of what “side of the tracks” they live on.

#8 Don’t Submit the First 2 -3 Candidates You Find/Speak With

Sound crazy? I can hear someone asking, “Why shouldn’t I submit the first candidates I find that fit the requirements?” 

Well, ask yourself this – what’s the statistical probability that the first 2 people you find and speak to magically happen to be the BEST candidates you can possibly find? Or the most closeable and controllable? 

Recruiting candidates should not be conducted on a FIFO basis, but on a BIFO (Best In, First Out) basis.  Find and speak to 10-15 candidates and then submit your BEST.

Talent selection based on FIFO methods is like a single person walking into a bar and leaving with the first person that speaks to them. There is no “selection.”

You saw it here first. Think about it.  

#9 Seek to Continually Improve Your Candidate Sourcing Skills

As a sourcing/recruiting professional, one of your goals should be to get better at what you do on a daily basis.  Not just meeting your objectives and KPI’s – but actually improving your sourcing and recruiting skills and ability.

Geoff Colvin cuts to the root of the matter, pointing out that “Most fundamentally, what we generally do at work is directly opposed to the first principle (of deliberate practice): It isn’t designed by anyone to make us better at anything. Usually it isn’t designed at all: We are just given an objective that’s necessary to meeting the employer’s goals and then expected to get on with it.” Ouch – that hurts Geoff…but you’re right on the money!

As a sourcer/recruiter, you can perform deliberate practice, which is specifically designed to improve performance by getting you out of your comfort zone and continually stretching you just beyond your current ability. Ever hear the cliche of “if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse?”

Unfortunately, when most people “practice” on the job, they are just doing what they’ve always done, going through the same old motions – which does nothing to improve performance. Unlike many professional athletes, most business professionals (including sourcers and recruiters) do not go to work every day specifically trying to get better at what they do. It’s something many people may talk about, but very few people actually do.

Be one of those few. 

#10 Spend 80% of Your Sourcing Time Using High-Yield Sources 

Why spend a lot of time trying to squeeze blood from a stone? I feel there are many sourcers and recruiters spending too much time focusing on instrinsically low-yield candidate sources. 

For example – some people spend countless hours searching the Internet for candidate leads at the expense of not heavily/effectively leveraging their internal resume database/ATS. While you can certainly find great people on the Internet, the Internet is not indexed specifically to enable sourcing and requires many tricks and tweaks to yield relevant results. 

If you have access to an ATS or internal resume database – it’s specifically designed to store and retrieve resumes, and probably has more local and more qualified candidates than the Internet, and might actually have a better seach interface enabling more precise searching to find more of the right people more quickly.

To top it off, your ATS/CRM is filled with people that have already expressed interest in your company (at some point in time) and with candidates that you or other sourcers/recruiters found elsewhere and entered in! And when it comes to finding candidates on the Internet vs. the job board resume databases, see these 2 articles for an eye-opening apples-to-apples comparison of Monster vs. Google search results, see Monster vs. Google Round 1 and Round 2. Facts are facts, folks.

High yield sources of candidates are #1 Highly Searchable, and #2 Deep on candidate data. Of the social networking sites out there, LinkedIn is the most searchable and has the deepest candidate data, and you don’t need more than a free account to leverage it like a rock star. Also – if you have access to any of the major job boards – they have highly effective search capability, actually have a larger percentage of “passive” job seekers than “active” and they have some fantastic candidates – see best practices #6 and #7.

Final Thoughts

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I feel it represents some of the highest impact candidate sourcing best practices. If you have a candidate sourcing best practice to add to the list - please let me know. 

Thanks, and happy hunting!