I’m very much an anti-hype, anti-bandwagon person.

I neither like to nor want to get caught in the undertow of the emotional rush associated with being excited about something that nearly everyone else seems to be excited about, where everyone celebrates the new and “cool factor” with little-to-no critical thought.

When that next bright and shiny object comes along, it’s all too easy to be blinded by it.

Rest assured I have not been blinded by #socialrecruiting. I’ve been using social media for a little while now (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogging), purposefully remaining calm and collected on the subject - choosing to explore the true potential rather than get caught up in the hype. 

So whether you’re a social recruiting evangelist, hater or n00b (I’ve been all 3, not necessarily in that order), you’ll find some value in this post because I am going to strip away all of the hype surrounding social recruiting, demystify it, and cut straight to the heart of the real opportunities associated with using social media for sourcing and recruiting.

So What’s the Big Deal About Social Media and Recruiting?

Many people want to know - what exactly IS the big deal?

Well, from my perspective, the advent of social media affords sourcers and recruiters with easy and unprecented levels of access to more people than ever in the history of recruiting.

For free.

Using just the “Big 3” social networks, recruiters have the ability to find, communicate with, engage, and build relationships with well over 100,000,000 million in the U.S. alone.

That’s kind of a big deal.

Hasn’t Recruiting Always Been “Social?”

That’s always been my question! As if there ever was antisocial recruiting?

“Social recruiting” is simply the use of social media and social networking sites to find, engage, communicate and build relationships with potential candidates with the intent to network and recruit.

Yep, it’s that simple.

However, using social media to communicate and build relationships with potential candidates is no more “social” than using the phone to do the same thing, or actually doing it live and in person (that still happens, right?).

To demystify social recruiting, it is simply the use of specialized Internet-based technologies and websites to perform the same standard and basic recruiting practices that have been conducted over the phone and in person for decades - finding candidates, initiating contact and engaging candidates, and building relationships with candidates.

Social Recruiting: Finding vs. Attracting

Suppose you only use a social network such as LinkedIn to find potential candidates, and you use other means to initiate contact and engage them - isn’t that social recruiting?

Social recruiting purists would say no – that using social media only to identify candidates but not to communicate with them isn’t “social recruiting.”

I don’t think it’s so black-and-white an issue.

If I identify a potential candidate on Facebook or Twitter, cross reference them on LinkedIn to find out where they might currently work, use the phone to initiate contact with them, then invite them to connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn as an additional way for me to stay in touch with them - is that not social recruiting?

I’ll let you decide, but I think the answer is obvious.

Isn’t Social Media Just a Big Waste of Time?

Can a recruiter waste a lot of time using social networking sites? Most definitely. But don’t be silly – social networks don’t waste time, people do.

Carol Rozewell, a VP/Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, explained brilliantly in her “Resisting Social Media is Futile” blog post that, “An employee wasting time on social media is a performance problem. Don’t blame it on social media. Productive employees are too busy with work to spend lots of time in social media having personal conversations. Instead, they use social media as a means to get their work done.”

Enough said.

Social Recruiting Doesn’t Work For Everyone

When it comes to social recruiting – one size does not fit all.

If you’re hiring Information Technology professionals, you can easily use social media for recruiting and get results.   That’s because there are many I.T. professionals using social media.

However, social recruiting won’t work so well for you if a large percentage of your target talent pool isn’t using social media. For example, Jerry Albright has observed that many groups of candidates seem nowhere to be found on Twitter. Jerry’s a recruiter, he’s social, he blogs, he’s on Twitter- and yet recruiting with Twitter still eludes him for one simple reason: the kinds of people he typically recruits for are scarce on Twitter.

When it comes to fishing – you go where the fish are.

When it comes to recruiting – you need to go where the people are. If the people you need to recruit aren’t on certain social networks, you obviously don’t need to go there to be a successful recruiter and to get results.

Social Recruiting at the Corporate Level

Companies have an unprecendented ability to engage millions of potential candidates where they live online – at little to no cost.

As I said before – when you’re recruiting, you go where the candidates are. When you can create a Facebook Fan Page to represent your corporate brand, socialize your hiring needs, communicate hiring events and post videos to attract talent for free on a site where there are over 130,000,000 monthly unique visitors from the U.S. alone (sorry, www.compete.com only shows U.S. data), why wouldn’t you?

When you can create a corporate Twitter profile for free to communicate in real time with 1,000’s of people who are interested in your company, why wouldn’t you? 

No-brainers.

However, companies that limit their “social recruiting” efforts largely to posting jobs on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn aren’t really performing social recruiting in my opinion. Job posting is job posting – there’s nothing “social” about it.  

Final Thoughts

Social media and social networks that enable and facilitate social interaction have without a doubt given recruiters unprecedented access to large populations of potential candidates where they live online, but social media is no more “social” than attending a user group/networking event or simply picking up the phone and speaking with a potential candidate.

Social media simply gives sourcers, recruiters, and employers one more way to find and interact with potential candidates - sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are not replacements for in-person or telephonic interaction.

The basics of the “human element” of recruiting - effectively communicating and building relationships with candidates, understanding candidate motivators, consultative selling, etc. – none of these have been changed or altered by the emergence of social media.

Social media and social networks merely give recruiters a 3rd medium through which they can perform the same thing all good recruiters have been doing over the phone and in person for decades. Having said that, I do think that a recruiter or recruiting organization that effectively leverages all 3 mediums (in-person, over the phone, online) will outperform anyone who is only leveraging any 2 of the 3.

If you happen to be a social recruiting non-believer, please know that you aren’t qualified to say that social recruiting doesn’t work for you or your organization unless you’ve actually tried it in the first place, beyond posting jobs on Twitter and LinkedIn groups and creating a Facebook Fan Page.

Bottom line – you should use recruiting methods that work for you and produce the best results - not what the industry is buzzing about.

I’ve been making a habit of posting the U.S. traffic data for the “big 3″ social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter – the ones that seem to matter most to sourcers and recruiters) on a monthly basis.

Last month, I predicted that all 3 of the sites would experience a decline in monthly unique U.S. visitors, and as it turns out, I was right only about 1 of them.

And I was quite surprised to see which one it was.

Facebook Unique U.S. Visitors Declines for First Time in a LONG Time

Amid all of the recent press Facebook has been getting for crossing the 300M user mark and finally becoming cash flow positive, I haven’t come across anyone who’s pointing out that Facebook’s monthly unique U.S. visitors actually dropped in August. So, I’ll step up and be “that guy.”

Facebook’s unique U.S. visitors has been on a tear upwards over the past 12 months – and I can’t recall the last time (if there WAS a time) when Facebook’s visitors has declined. I don’t have premium access to www.compete.com, otherwise I could tell you definitively if Facebook’s monthly visitor count has declined in the past 24 months. Does anyone have access to Facebook’s unique visitor data for the past 2-5 years? If so – please share!

Okay, so exactly how much of a decline did Facebook experience? Well, Facebook’s unique U.S. visitors only dropped by .37%, or 456,197 visitors from July to August. Admittedly, that’s a VERY small drop. However, it’s a drop nonetheless, and I personally find it odd that it’s dropped at all while Facebook is at the same time passing the 300M user mark.

Perhaps Facebook is growing more on a global basis, adding a higher volume and percentage of non-U.S. users? Perhaps more people in the U.S. are creating Facebook accounts, but are not returning on a monthly basis? I don’t have the answer, but I do know that although the total number of U.S visitors shrank slightly in August – those visitors actually visited more often: total U.S. visits to Facebook in August rose 4.69% to 2,202,528,780. 

In any event, regardless of how small a decline it may be, I find it newsworthy (and interesting) that Facebook’s monthly unique U.S. visitors declined in August, for the first time in a long time, and in the same time frame that Facebook crossed the 300M user mark.

LinkedIn U.S. Visitors Surge in August

LinkedIn’s monthly unique U.S. visitors climbed past the 14M mark for the first time ever in August, up 8.19%, or 1,077,955 visitors. While LinkedIn’s U.S. visitor traffic has cooled significantly this year, declining from January to February, and from March to May, LinkedIn has been on a bit of a upwards tear from June onward.

Not only did the number of unqiue U.S. visitors to LinkedIn increase in August, those visitors also visited more – with visits climbing 9.94% to 53,593,375 visits. It’s nice to see LinkedIn on the rise again after experiencing some choppiness earlier in the year.

Twitter Gains Visitors, Declines in Total Visits

If any one of the “big 3″ social media sites were to experience a visitor decline in August, I would have placed my money on it being Twitter. However, Twitter managed to thwart a decline in monthly unique U.S. visitors, growing by 1.27%, or 294,649 visitors. But all that glitters is not gold for Twitter, as they experienced a decrease in total visits in August by 2.99%. This is noteworthy, because it is the first such decline in total monthly visits for Twitter in 2009, with the last decline happening in November, 2008.

Still, Twitter logged 148, 651, 794 total visits in August, which isn’t too shabby considering that many Twitter users don’t actually visit Twitter at all, instead accessing Twitter through 3rd party applications such as TweetDeck and Seesmic.

Final Thoughts

I’m always interested in the traffic for the “Big Three” social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), and I discovered today that  www.compete.com just released July’s data. 

And here it is!

Facebook

While Facebook’s been on a tear of growth as it passed the 250M member mark, Facebook only added 117,142 unique U.S. visitors in July 2009 . That seems like a large number – but with how large Facebook has grown to,  that’s only 0.1%, which is the lowest growth rate Facebook’s posted in the last 12 months.

Could we see a drop in August?

We cannot overlook, however, that Facebook saw 2,103,776,022 visits July. Yes, 2.1 Billion – which is nearly an 11% increase from the 1,898,910,472 visits logged to Facebook from the U.S. in June. So while monthly unique visitors has stagnated, those who are visiting are visiting more. 

Twitter

After experiencing a decent 16.57% spurt of growth in June, Twitter slowed significantly in July, growing unique monthly U.S. visitors only by 1.25% to 23,284,395. Similarly, visits to Twitter grew only 1.54% to 153,227,857.  We’ve seen this kind of plateau before with Twitter from April to May before unique visitors jumped in June. It will be interesting to see what happens in August.

LinkedIn

In July, LinkedIn experienced a second month of growth in a row following 2 straight months of decreasing monthly unique U.S. visitors in April and May, growing 5.77% to 13,163,696 from June to July. However, visits to LinkedIn dropped slightly in July by -1.26% to 48,748,204.

With around 22M total U.S. profiles, 13.2 unique U.S. visitors in July means that approximtely 60% of all U.S. LinkedIn members actually visited the site in July.

An intriguing feature of Compete.com is that it will display top search terms for the sites you are researching. When digging into LinkedIn’s data, I noticed this:

Someone’s definitely trying to fish some MDM/data quality professionals out of LinkedIn via an X-Ray search! You go – whoever you are!

The “Big Three”

Here’s a graph of the 6 month unique U.S. visitor data for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook:

August should be an interesting month. With the significant cooling of monthly unique visitors for the Big 3 social media sites in July, I’ll go with a bold prediction of a decline in monthly unique U.S. visitors across them all. 

I will continue to monitor the traffic data for the “Big Three” and share it with you – please share this information with others. Thanks!

I routinely check www.compete.com for the latest traffic data for my favorite social media sites and was pleasantly surprised to find June’s data has been released. I will review the June traffic data for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (aka, the “Big Three”).

Twitter

Twitter experienced explosive growth from February 2009 to April 2009, going from 7.9M to 19.4M unique U.S. visitors before leveling off around 19.5M visitors between April and May. However, after that brief cooling period, Twitter has experienced another spurt of growth, adding approximately 3.2M unique U.S. visitors (16.57%) to hit an all time high of 23M unique U.S. visitors in June. Okay, 22,997,148 to be exact.

Those ~23M visitors hit www.twitter.com 150,752,603 times in June, which is a 12.05% increase.

Twitter 6 Month Compete.com Traffic

LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s experienced a bit more of a rocky path than Twitter has over the past 6 months, with unique U.S. visitors decreasing from January to February and from March to May. In June, however, LinkedIn’s number of unique U.S. visitors grew 6.07% from 11.73M to 12.45M visitors, who logged 48,371,121 visits.

LinkedIn 6 Month Compete.com Traffic Data

Facebook

I’ve been seeing Tweets referencing how Facebook had crossed the 250M member mark and was curious to see their traffic data. It’s no surprise to see them continue to grow, which they did by 8.45% in terms of adding nearly 10M unique U.S. visitors from May to June, for a total of 122,559,672 visitors. A truly staggering number comes in the form of the 1,898,910,472 visits logged to Facebook in June. Yep – almost 2 Billion visits to Facebook from the U.S. alone!

Facebook 6 Month Compete.com Traffic Data

The “Big Three”

Here’s a graph of the 6 month unique U.S. visitor data for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook:

Twitter LinkedIn Facebook 6 Month Compete.com Traffic Data

Of note is Twitter passing LinkedIn in terms of unique visitors betwwen February and March of 2009, but the real standout on the chart is just how many more people in the U.S. visit Facebook over LinkedIn and Twitter. Yes, I know they are 3 totally different types of social media/networking sites – but the size of the chasm is quite dramatic, and Facebook does not show any signs of slowing down any time soon.

I will continue to monitor the traffic data for the “Big Three” and share it with you – please share this information with others. Thanks!

I define E-sourcing as leveraging information systems for active talent identification – searching the Internet, social media, job board resume databases, and applicant tracking systems to find candidates. The proper use of technology in the sourcing and recruiting process should increase your efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness.  I’ve created the SlideShare presentation below to cover a number of different ways for you to maximize your ability to find more of the right people more quickly, to accelerate and enable your recruiting efforts.

Click on the presentation below to review:

• Boolean operators and common query modifiers
• Searching LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook
• X-Ray searching Social Media
• Search automation and aggregation
• Semantic search: manual and artificial intelligence matching solutions
• Search ROI – a comparison of the searchability and data depth of the Internet, Social Media, Resume Databases, and ATSs
• Talent Warehouse concepts

I recently wrote a post on how to search for candidates on Facebook where I featured all of Facebook’s “built-in” search capabilities. Shortly after publishing the article, I received a question from one of my regular readers asking why I did not include searching Facebook using the site: query modifier (as Google calls it), also known as X-Ray search.

It was a solid question, and the answer is that I purposefully did not include it in my “searching for candidates on Facebook” post, as I wanted to focus on the highest ROI search methods.  I’ve taken cracks at Facebook with the X-Ray search technique, and I’ve never been very pleased with the results. Facebook’s site architecture certainly doesn’t make it easy to X-Ray like LinkedIn and Twitter.

However, while Facebook isn’t very “X-Rayable,” you CAN get SOME relevant results from searching Facebook with the site: query modifier. What you’ll see below is a series of videos (my first!) of me driving through my attempts to X-Ray into Facebook.  

No Diving Allowed – Shallow Data!

First – let’s review the 2 major limitations of searching Facebook:

• Not every person on Facebook actually publishes location information on their profile
• Many people on Facebook do not include occupational information on their profile

Now Let’s Get to X-Raying!

Let’s try and search for people who may be accountants in the NY area. I’m choosing to shoot for a mention of “CPA” or the title “Accountant” – hoping Facebookers who are CPA’s/Accountants might mention one of these terms on their Facebook profile/page. I’m also going to shoot for “New York” or “NY,” hoping to catch all of the various ways someone from NY might mention that they’re from NY on their Facebook profile. 

X-Ray search #1  site:facebook.com (”accountant” OR CPA) (”new york” OR NY)

Click here if you’d like to examine the 701 results yourself 

As you can see from examining the first 10 results of our first X-Ray of Facebook, you can get a wide variety in the types of results you will get returned in your search: people, pages, and groups; local and non-local results; and qualified and unqualified potential candidates.

Targeting “People”

Taking a hint from the URL of the first result returned by our first X-Ray search attempt:

- Let’s target pages that mention the word “people” in the URL in an attempt to avoid groups and pages and zero-in on people.  While Facebook groups and pages can be great sources of human captial, we have no control over where the group members or fans actually live – which is often a critical factor when searching for candidates in an attempt to fill or build a pipeline for specific positions.

X-Ray search #2  site:facebook.com (”accountant” OR CPA) (”new york” OR NY) inurl:people

Click here to peruse the 90 results  

Targeting the word “people” in the url definitely helped narrow the results down to individual Facebook members, and also produced a number of promising results, including people who appear to at least meet our basic qualifications (CPA/Accountant) and live in the NY metro area.

Digging Deeper Into Result #10

That was a good investigative sourcing exercise of exploring what appeared to be a dead-end or false positive result that actually led to uncovering a large group of 500+ fans of the New Jersey Society of Certified Public Accountants. 

Conclusion

While Facebook still ranks as the least searchable of the “Big 3″ social media sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook), it’s the biggest of the 3 by a wide margin, with over 175,000,000 people and growing rapidly. As such, if you’re a sourcer or recruiter – you simply can’t ignore Facebook’s vast repository of human capital.  One way of tapping into that talent pool is by using the X-Ray search technique.

It’s easy to get spoiled by X-Raying LinkedIn or Twitter. In comparison, X-Raying Facebook can be frustrating. However, as I’ve shown you – while you will run into your fair share of false positive results of people who are not qualified for your needs – you CAN find and locate candidates on Facebook who are likely to be qualified for AND live in the same metro area as your hiring needs by leveraging the site: query modifier and the X-Ray search technique.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now, you already know I am a fan of highly searchable, “deep” sources of human capital data. Unfortunately,  Facebook isn’t deep on professional data nor is it very searchable. When it comes to social media/networking sites, nothing comes close to LinkedIn when it comes to the “searchability” and depth of professional information that can be retrieved and analyzed. However, sourcers and recruiters can not and should not ignore the 130M+/monthly unique U.S. visitors to Facebook, so I am dedicating this post on how to search for them.

While there are actually many different angles you can take when attempting to search for talent on Facebook, I am going to focus on what I think are the 3 highest ROI methods: Coworker search, Profile search, and Yahoo’s linkdomain search.

Coworker Search

Using Facebook’s “basic” search interface, you can specify a company and search for “coworkers,” even if you’re not employed at the company you are searching for. Simply enter a company that you suspect might employ people that you would like to target. In this example, I’ll use Verizon.

Click “Search for Coworkers” and you’ll get over 500 results:

While it’s great that we can find “coworkers” at Verizon, through this kind of search we cannot control what these “coworkers” actually do for a living at Verizon, or where they live (how’s THAT for shallow and searchable?).

Leveraging Facebook’s coworker search is perhaps most effective with smaller to mid-sized companies that have fewer locations, as that would assist in narrowing down the location of the people and perhaps even roles to a limited extent. However, the intrinsic limitations of Facebook’s coworker leaves it to be largely a name-generation tool as opposed to a precision talent identification tool in my opinion.

Profile Search

UPDATE (1/15/2010) – Facebook has dropped their “advanced search interface” – making Facebook even more unsearchable than before, much to the chagrin of sourcers and recruiters. I’m only keeping the following paragraph and explanation for posterity, and a nod to what you could do with Facebook in the past.

Moving on to Facebook’s “advanced” search interface, you get more fields to search, but you are limited to searching only your “networks and friends,” OR people you can “see” that live in the same area that you specified on your Facebook profile – even if it’s only in the “Education and Work” section of the “Info” tab of your profile. In my case, it’s Tampa, FL, because that’s the HQ location of the company I work for and I did fill this field out on my Facebook profile.

I personally think it’s odd that “Tampa Bay, FL” shows up under “Network” when someone views me in a search result. Rationale?

So beyond my network and “friends” on Facebook, I am limited to searching for people who specified the Tampa, FL area on their Facebook profile as where they work.

Notice I said “where they work” – it is very important to realize that many people do not fill in their address on the “Contact Information” section of their profile on Facebook (I didn’t), and if they do, they can choose to make it so that only the people they specifiy can see it (which probably won’t be you if they don’t know you and you’re not already “friends”).

Let’s leverage Facebook’s Profile Search to look for people who work at Verizon and have the title “Software Engineer” (limited to Tampa Bay, FL in my case):

Here are some of the results of the search:

As you can see – because they are not my “friends,” I cannot see any details about them, yet I do know that they all list Verizon as their current employer, they all mention the title “software engineer” as a job title on their Facebook profile (the yellow highlighting gives it away, although we can’t view the profiles to see the actual “hits”), and they all list Tampa, FL as their location somewhere on their Facebook profile as well.

I can send them a message or try to add them as a friend - and I’ve heard that some people get as high as a 60-70% positive response from well-crafted messages/requests.

Of course, when it comes to the results of my Verizon/software engineer search – I certainly don’t know what KIND of software engineers they are (Cobol, Java, C#, etc.) – which goes back to how shallow a source of human capital data Facebook is, and how difficult it is to try and search Facebook with any precision.

As always, searching for a single title such as “software engineer” is horribly limiting, so I highly recommend going back and changing the target title as many times as possible to flesh out a quasi-org chart of sorts to get more and different results.

Now, if you were to change the location specified on your Facebook profile to another metro area – you would then be able to search for and see people in the new metro area as well….

Yahoo’s Linkdomain Search

While it’s cool that Yahoo now inserts Facebook profiles into search results, I personally haven’t seen this as anything of significant value to sourcers and recruiters. It’s certainly a nice feature, but if you want to specifically search for and target people on Facebook, Yahoo has a much more effective search capability – linkdomain.

Yahoo’s linkdomain command allows you to search for and find websites/pages that link back to a specified site. For example, we can leverage Yahoo’s linkdomain functionality to search for websites/pages that link back to Facebook groups and pages.

Let’s look for websites/pages that mention groups, organizations, or associations, “accounting,” CPA, and “New York” as well as link back to Facebook:

linkdomain:facebook.com (group OR association OR organization) CPA accounting “New York”

This search returns nearly 12,000 results of pages that mention our keywords and link back to Facebook.

Clicking on the first result (crainsnewyork.com), we can use CTRL F to search for and find the reference to Facebook:

Clicking on the link, it takes us here:

Leveraging Yahoo’s linkdomain functionality, we’ve found the Facebook page for the American Woman’s Society of Certified Public Accountants in NY, and its 49 members who have a Facebook profile. And that’s just the first of 11,600 results that yahoo returned!

Let your imagination and creativity run wild – using Yahoo’s linkdomain search functionality you can target Facebook groups of minority groups, industry groups, skill groups, etc.

For example:

linkdomain:facebook.com (group OR association OR organization) women engineers

Linkdomain Limitations

All is not perfect in linkdomain-land. Yes, 11,600 results from my CPA/Accounting search above is impressive – but when you click through many of the results you can see that there are more false positives than relevant results.

As you could see from the screen shot – some of the hits are job postings that happen to have a link to Facebook somewhere on the web page.  You could attempt to clean these up by adding -job -jobs to your Boolean search string on Yahoo.

Other false positives come in the form of any page that uses a “share this on facebook” type of feature.

In other words, some of the search results may not actually be relevant web pages pointing back to a specific group on Facebook as we found with the NYC AWSCPA we explored above – they may just be web pages that mention your keywords and happen to have a link to Facebook.

Targeting Groups and Pages

Of course, you don’t have to use Yahoo’s linkdomain functionality to “fish” for Facebook groups and pages – you can shoot straight for them if you like, experimenting with search terms:

Conclusion

Is it just me or does Facebook seem to delight in severely limiting your ability to leverage the 175M+ people who have a Facebook profile?

For all of it’s search fields, options, and parameters – Facebook remains one of the least “searchable” social networking sites out there for sourcers and recruiters.  Additionally, and most people on Facebook use it for personal rather than professional use - so it can be quite light in sourcing/recruiting-relevant human capital data.

However, Facebook’s “coworker search” can be useful for name generation, the “profile search” feature can yield results of local people who work at specific companies and/or who specific titles, and you can hit the proverbial “jackpot” by searching for Facebook groups and fan pages that have large quantities of target professionals by leveraging Yahoo’s linkdomain functionality.

As frustrating as it can be to search Facebook for candidates with specific qualifications and experience, and who live in a specific area – sourcers and recruiters simply cannot ignore the HUGE number of Facebook users.

I recently received a request from a reader to come up with some example Boolean Strings for finding software engineers on Facebook who are from Top 10 schools (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, etc) and live in the Silicon Valley.

***Quick disclaimer***
I am definitely not a Facebook sourcing guru – I don’t see it as a high yield source for proactive and highly precise sourcing as it is a relatively “shallow” source of information, it’s search interfaces are quite limited, and when x-raying into Facebook you can’t see much information. I’d invite anyone reading this that has suggestions and best practices to please add them.

Okay, now that I got that out of the way, searching inside Facebook for people that you don’t “know” (they aren’t your “friends” yet) has become more and more restricted over time. There are a few ways to search for people within Facebook – I will cover 3.

Inside Facebook

#1 Facebook’s basic search interface
http://www.facebook.com/srch.php?ref=ffffc

As you can see from the screenshot, on this page you can search by school OR employer. Not a real help for what you’re trying to accomplish – finding web developers from specific schools. Although you can search by school here, it doesn’t allow us to drill down into interests, combine a school with an employer, or even pick a location.

#2 Another Facebook search interface

On the previous screenshot’s interface, I actually ran a search only choosing Berkeley and did not pick an employer. Here are the results:

Once you get the results – you can see it’s over 500 and they are from all years/graduating classes and locations. However, if you scroll down to the bottom, you can now add a specific company. I chose Sun Microsystems – that narrows the results down to 227

And you can sift through the results to check location and see that many of the results are in fact in the Silicon Valley, and also view each person’s friends to try and find more people. You could do this systematically covering all of the top schools you’d like to target and all of the top employers in the Silicon Valley you’d like to see people from. This can be a good start to reaching out to some of these people and becoming their “friend,” or taking the information you find here and performing some more research, cross-referencing LinkedIn, blogs, and other sites to find out more about them. However – with this search inside Facebook, we still don’t have any control over what these people actually do.

#3 Facebook’s “advanced” search
http://www.facebook.com/advanced.php

Here you can find Facebook’s “advanced” search interface – where you can search within your network and Friends or your location. So if you live in the Silicon Valley, you should be able to search profiles in your desired area.

Although this is supposedly an “advanced” search interface – you can see it is actually quite limited. On this page you cannot search by school. However, you can search by academic concentration (you could shoot for Computer Science and such), activities and interests (web development and design…), as well as company and position (target company and software engineer, etc.). However, because you cannot search by specific school – this interface does not enable you to achieve your goal of targeting people by skill/experience as well as college/university. But for other searches – this interface can yield results for you.

Outside of Facebook
We can use the site: command on most major search engines to look specifically within Facebook and try to find people.

• Sometimes people don’t enter all of their information – like school, experience, titles, skills, specific location, etc. If it’s not there – you can’t find it.
• When using a search engine to search into a site like Facebook, you’re not searching structured data. So searching for Stanford might yield a result where the word “Stanford” is mentioned on the profile somewhere, but it isn’t where the person when to school. That’s what I call a false positive.
• To my knowledge, you can only find public profiles using the site:command

I was not provided any specific programming languages or frameworks to target in my searches, so I just chose a few as an example – they can be switched up as you see fit. I also started with 2 of the schools that were mentioned – feel free to build out the list.

Using a search engine like Google:
site:facebook.com (java | php | python | C#) inurl:people “silicon valley” (stanford | berkeley)

You’ll notice that when you run that search and check the results – you won’t find a large number. I found 2. The issue goes back to the point I made about if a person doesn’t explicitly mention a specific search term you’re looking for – you simply can’t find them by using that search term. Facebook isn’t a resume database – most people don’t fully flesh out their profiles with tons of technical detail with regard to their skills and experience.

When it comes to reviewing the results – you won’t see the programming languages or even the college names (sometimes) because you aren’t connected to, or in Facebook-speak aren’t “friends” with the people – so you can’t see their profile page where the search terms are. However, they are in there somewhere.

Let’s look at one of the results I got:

You can try to add people like this as a friend and then contact them, or simply try sending them a message, or view his friends – and from checking them, several went to Stanford. But without digging more into each of them, we can’t tell from the surface what they do (web developers or lawyers…), or where they live. If you click on Kai you can see he is a Stanford ’05 alum.

You could run the same search but go a little North to the bay area just to check it out:
site:facebook.com (java | php | python | C#) CA inurl:people “san francisco” (stanford | Berkeley)

You could also search for groups that might contain web developers:
site:facebook.com inurl:group (software | web | internet | online | java | php | python) (~develop | ~design | ~architect) “silicon valley”

Here are a few I stumbled across:

Silicon Valley CodeCamp
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6125701762

Stanford Entrepreneur Network
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5950997467

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20463663760

LinkedIn

Since searching Facebook was a low-yield exercise, I’d feel guilty ending this post without getting you better results. So let’s focus the same kind of searches on LinkedIn and see what we get:

site:linkedin.com (Berkeley | Stanford) (java | php | python | .Net) (web | internet | software) (develop | design) “san francisco bay area” -intitle:directory -intitle:updated

569 results – and I only tried 2 schools. I used a San Jose, CA zip code in LinkedIn – it considers the San Jose area part of the “San Francisco Bay Area” – a 50 mile radius. Searching into LinkedIn using the site: command is fraught with the same issues as we encountered when searching Facebook – it’s unstructured data. So do expect some false positives – it won’t be 100% perfect. I checked through the results and many are local developers who have gone to Stanford or Berkeley.

Of course, you could also search inside of LinkedIn – but that’s another post.

The Internet

And if you wanted to try and take a shot at finding resumes on the Internet itself:

(inurl:resume | intitle:resume) (java | asp | C# | perl | python | php) (design | develop) 94002..95156 CA (berkeley | Stanford | MIT) (web | internet) -job -jobs

That’s a 25 mile radius search from 95125 and yields 586 results. Sweet.

So can anyone see why I’m not crazy about using Boolean strings to search Facebook? Can you find great people in Facebook? Sure! Can you run precise queries to quickly find large volumes of highly matched people with specific skills and experience? No.

Would an oil company avoid drilling the largest oil fields they have access to and instead spend tons of time and money looking for and drilling the smallest oil deposits they could find? It only makes logical sense for sourcers and recruiters to leverage high yield sources first and low yield sources last.

I hope you found this helpful!

-Boolean Black Belt