For a while, there was an interesting little method for revealing the full name of 3rd degree and group connections on LinkedIn. However, LinkedIn has changed the “get introduced” functionality and UI for most people and effectively eliminated that method (albeit unintentionally, IMO).

Oh well – it was easy and fun while it lasted.

Fortunately, I’ve recently become aware of another way of revealing the full names of 3rd degree connections on LinkedIn with a less-than-premium account that I would like to share with you.

But before we get to that, I’d like to cover some basics as well as some things I have been noticing about LinkedIn – I believe they may be tinkering with free access profile visibility.

Oh, and if you’re on the fence about attending SourceCon in Atlanta next week, it’s shaping up to be the largest in SourceCon history, and you still have time to register and get a 10% discount using my SC12GC code.

LinkedIn Public Profile Search to View Full Names

Now that the nifty “get introduced” full name visibility trick is seemingly dead, people without LinkedIn Recruiter access can of course still grab one or more unique phrases from 3rd degree and group-only LinkedIn connections and throw them into Bing or Google to find their public profile and thus their full names.

For example, I can take the headline phrase and couple it with the location phrase from a LinkedIn search result…

…and enter this into Bing: “Senior Software Development Manager, IBM” “Ottawa, Canada Area”, and here’s what I get:

You can do the same thing with Google, but Google’s first result isn’t the profile we’re looking for – that’s why I favor Bing for this technique. Google seems to index all of the nooks and crannies of LinkedIn yielding “dirty” and irrelevant results when searching for LinkedIn profile word/phrase combinations.

Is LinkedIn Tinkering with Public Profile Visibility?

I am sure I am not alone in noticing changes to the standard LinkedIn X-Ray search results.

For example, while you could see the full names of 3rd degree and group-only connections after clicking on a search result even if you were logged into LinkedIn, now I am finding that if I am logged in, once I click on a Google or Bing LinkedIn site: search result, LinkedIn recognizes that I am not connected to the person at the 1st or 2nd degree and thus only shows me the first name and last name initial.

Here is a screenshot of my Google search and the result – the full name is displayed:

However, once I click on the search result, if I am logged into LinkedIn, I only see the first name:

I know for a fact this has not always the case – I’ve been training people on this for years and I’ve done this 1,000′s of times.

Big deal?

No – but I still find it interesting to notice changes like this because it means what we have all been wondering about (fearing?) may finally be coming – evidence that LinkedIn is working to limit or close off free access to LinkedIn data.

In fact, I’ve also been running into some seemingly random funny business with LinkedIn public profile URL’s. I have encountered a number of instances in which I’m using either Chrome or IE and I click on (or cut and paste) a public profile link, LinkedIn tells me that the profile is not found, when I know it does exist because I just looked at it.

For example here’s one I found while writing this post:

When I click on that link or cut and paste it in Chrome or IE, this is what I get:

So far, there is no pattern to it that I can tell – and I have only begun to notice this in that past few weeks.

I am not sure what it is indicative of, but wondered if anyone else has encountered this and might have some insight.

Using Alumni Search to View Full Names of 3rd Degree Connections on LinkedIn

Last week, Patrick Ryan, a former colleague with whom I stay in touch, sent me an email with something he had discovered on LinkedIn. I asked him if he minded if I wrote about it and he said no, so here we go.

If you scroll down your LinkedIn home page, you’ll find the “Just joined LinkedIn” section with Colleagues and Alumni.

If you click on the school name under Alumni, you’ll be taken to an attractive dashboard with some interesting information.

From here, you can change the years attended, show alumni that don’t show a graduation date, and of course search.

When you configure your search and see some 3rd degree connections without full names, this is what they will look like – first name only:

If you click on “Connect” and you’re using either Chrome, Firefox or Safari (not IE – sorry), you’ll get a pop up that will allow you to send the person an invitation, and it will also show the person’s full name.

Okay – I am sure some of you are thinking, “Cool – but this is extremely limited because I can only search alumni from my school.”

Sure, it’s limited, but let’s just say you can similarly search through any school that’s in the education section of your LinkedIn profile.

Oh, and each school as a school ID. For example, mine is 18570.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need to have a premium LinkedIn account to view any public profile and see the full names of people who are not 1st or 2nd degree connections.

However, it’s not safe to assume that the ways in which we can currently search for and view the information on LinkedIn profiles beyond our network will remain unchanged.

In fact, I believe we can expect LinkedIn to develop ways that limit the ability to find and view certain info on LinkedIn profiles for free – and why shouldn’t we? LinkedIn isn’t a non-profit, and just as any other for-profit company, it’s their prerogative to look for ways to make money and to reasonably limit giving away too much for free.

Will LinkedIn read this post and change the ability to view full names of 3rd degree connections via alumni search?

Yes, they will read this post (Hi LinkedIn team – special shout-out to the Ninja!).

Maybe they will do something to change the appropriate functionality.

If they do, I’m happy to have helped.

Have you ever had to find bilingual candidates or search for people who speak a specific language?

If so, you’re in luck – this week’s post focuses on a few ways of how do just that.

If not, no worries – the thought processes and search strategies I use in this post are helpful no matter what it is you’re searching for, because searching is 95% critical thinking and 5% Boolean syntax.

Boolean Search for Explicit Bilinguals

As with all searches, you must first realize that not all people who can speak more than one language will actually make mention of that in their resume, their LinkedIn/Google+/Facebook/Twitter profile or updates, or anywhere else they may leave information about themselves online. I’ll show you at least 1 way of searching for people who are highly likely to be bilingual, but do not make any explicit mention of languages or polyglotism later.

To find those that do make explicit mention of their ability to speak multiple languages, you can of course search for specific mention of the language you’re searching for. Here is the most basic and obvious example that anyone would think of:

• AND Spanish

However, while this will yield some people who are bilingual in Spanish, it will also yield false positives in many cases – pulling up people who took courses in high school or college, and people who make mention of Spanish because they have basic speaking or reading/writing skills. In most cases, employers looking for bilingual people are looking for people who are fully fluent.

Before I get to any more examples, I have to let you know I always hesitate to provide sample search strings because Booelan searches should be bespoke – specifically tailored to meet the precise information need.

And you must realize there is never a perfect/ultimate Boolean search string to find anything – all searches “work” provided they are syntactically correct, and practically any search can (and should!) be iteratively improved upon through successive searches for ever-improving relevance and results.

Also, although some people have a hard time wrapping their heads around this fact, every search you run both includes some people with what you’re looking for and excludes some people who have what you’re looking for, so no single search can possibly find all potential matches.

Now that you’ve read and accepted my Boolean search dislaimer, let’s take a look at a few more search string examples.

Let’s say you needed to find someone that was bilingual in Spanish. With any search engine/site offering basic Boolean, you could using something like this:

• __________ AND Spanish AND (Native OR fluent OR bilingual OR “bi-lingual”)

If you had access to Monster, you could leverage fixed proximity search to force the mentions of “Spanish” and Native OR fluent OR bilingual OR “bi-lingual” to be within 10 words of each other, increasing the likelihood that they are mentioned in the same sentence, which has extremely high semantic value.

• __________ AND Spanish NEAR (Native OR fluent OR bilingual OR “bi-lingual”)

Bing supports configurable proximity with its NEAR:X functionality, enabling you to tighten up the distance between the mention of a specific language and fluency. Here’s a few basic examples searching LinkedIn via Bing (I don’t combine them into one search because Bing’s NEAR:X doesn’t play well with OR statements):

• site:linkedin.com Spanish NEAR:3 bilingual
• site:linkedin.com Spanish NEAR:3 native
• site:linkedin.com Spanish NEAR:3 fluent

That works for text in LinkedIn profiles…

…as well as information entered into the languages section in LinkedIn profiles:

As you can see in the above example, however, Bing’s proximity works bidirectionally (forwards and backwards), so you may find people who mention that they are bilingual/native with another language other than your target language, and something less than native/bilingual proficiency with your target proficiency.

For example:

Leveraging Google’s 1 or more word wildcard asterisk, you could target the specific word order to compensate for Bing’s bidirectional proximity:

• site:linkedin.com “spanish * native” “location * greater new york city” -dir

Even controlling the order of the terms isn’t infallible, given that Google asterisk is a 1 or more wildcard, which allows Google to “skip” across 1 or more terms. In the 4th result from the search above, Google skips across the target language to another, as can be seen below in the Skills section of LinkedIn:

Granted, the person above claims to be fluent in Spanish and native in Portuguese, but you can see how Google “skipped” across the words “fluent” and “Portuguese” to connect “Spanish” with “native.” Because Google’s asterisk modifier is imprecise, it can and will at times yield imprecise search results.

Moving away from LinkedIn, you can use Google’s asterisk when searching for online resumes quite effectively. For example, you could start with something like this:

• __________ “bilingual * spanish”

Here is a basic example of a Google search for resumes of people who mention being bilingual in Spanish and also mention Java.

It works.

Of course, you can also experiment with the number of asterisks you put between “bilingual” and the language you’re searching for.

And for all of the above searches, you can and should mix and match a variety of terms that can be used to describe a high level of language proficiency (bilingual, bi-lingual, native, fluent, etc.), as well as any/all of the ways a person might refer to a language (e.g., Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese).

LinkedIn Language Searching

LinkedIn has built-in language search in their advanced search interface which ties into the languages section on LinkedIn profiles.

One of the limitations of using LinkedIn’s language search functionality is that not everyone will actually use the languages section on their profile – a person needs to consciously make the effort to add the languages section to their profile and then choose their proficiency.

Which leads me to the next limitation. As you can see above, you can search for a language, but you can’t search by proficiency level.

Here is the list of proficiency levels a person can choose from when adding a language to their LinkedIn profile:

I love the fact that LinkedIn included languages to profiles, but they left many unanswered questions. For example – what’s the real difference between “Full professional proficiency” and “Native or bilingual?” Would someone choose “Professional working proficiency” if they were fluent? What level of fluency could that represent?

It would also be nice if you could search by fluency level, but even if you could, there would have to be some kind of definition/description of what each level is supposed to represent so people could intelligently and accurately select their own proficiency, as well as enable others to more accurately search by proficiency level.

When I searched for Java developers and selected “German” in the language facet, the top result was of someone who only had “limited working proficiency.” Not too helpful if I needed someone who was fluent.

LinkedIn Language Search: Skills

As I showed above with my example Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn, some people enter languages in their Skills section.

Here’s another example:

You can search for language skills in LinkedIn – here’s a Spanish example:

I love the Skills concept, but:

1. It’s still in beta
2. Not everyone uses them
3. They don’t appear to be searchable in conjunction with anything else (from inside of LinkedIn)
4. People can enter non standardized Skills

For example, this person entered a Skill of “Spanish – fluent.”

If you click on “Spanish – fluent,” this is what you get:

Boolean Search for Implicit Bilinguals

So how do you go about finding people who may be bilingual but don’t mention any languages on their resume/profile?

One way is through implicit search, which is the 3rd level of Talent Mining.

For example, try this search on LinkedIn, searching only the United States:

• Title: engineer
• Keywords: (Beijing OR Shanghai OR “Republic of China” OR Putonghua OR Guoyu OR Harbin OR Xian OR “Xi’an” OR Nanjing OR Chongqing)

Here is what the first page of results looks like for me:

If you click on the first result for me (sorted by Relevance), you will see that the profile shows that they have been working in the United States as early as 1999, and here is their education section:

Do you think they might be bilingual in English and Chinese? You’ll also notice there is no mention of any language, nor of being bilingual.

Taking this approach one step further, you should ensure that your searches are mutually exclusive of explicit bilinguals. To do so, simply NOT out the obvious search terms.

For example:

• -(Chinese OR Mandarin OR Cantonese)

If you modify my first example search above to make it mutually exclusive, here is what it would look like:

• Title: engineer
• Keywords: -(Chinese OR Mandarin OR Cantonese) (Beijing OR Shanghai OR “Republic of China” OR Putonghua OR Guoyu OR Harbin OR Xian OR “Xi’an” OR Nanjing OR Chongqing)

Click here to see the search results – there are 5,218, which isn’t much less than the 6,019 from the first search above. That shows that this technique definitely uncovers a solid amount of people who have a high probability of being bilingual in my target language who do not make any explicit mention of a language or polyglotism.

Now, the keywords I used in the example are FAR from exhaustive or complete – you could easily build it out to include most of the major universities in China, as well as all of the provinces and major cities. The first result in my search already gave me a new term to add to my search – Tsinghua.

This same implicit search approach could be used for any language.

However, please note that this is something that you can do after you’ve already searched for and found all of the people you can from the direct searching methods that you would typically perform first, including the ones I detailed in this post.

While this kind of implicit search can certainly yield false positive results, it taps into Dark Matter profiles (and resumes!) and is guaranteed to find you people who are bilingual that you CANNOT find through any direct search methodology.

Have Some Great Bilingual Search Techniques?

Now that I’ve given you a few ways you can try to find people who are likely to be bilingual, what are your favorite techniques for identifying bilingual candidates?

Take this chance to share with the international sourcing and recruiting community!

A Bit of Bilingual Search Humor…

Of course, when searching for bilingual professionals, it helps if they spell the language correctly.

Have you ever used Microsoft Word to build and save Boolean search strings to be able to copy and paste entire searches into LinkedIn, Monster, Dice, or your ATS ?

I did for quite some time, until I ran into a problem.

Many years ago, I noticed that several sites, including Monster, Dice, and LinkedIn were not “obeying” my request for exact phrases in my searches.

If I searched for “project manager,” I would get results in which “project” and “manager” were highlighted as keyword hits even though they were mentioned separately and not together as a phrase.

One day I contacted Dice to ask what was going on with my inability to retrieve exact phrases using quotation marks and the support rep asked me what I was using to build my search strings. I told her I was using Microsoft Word to build and save my strings and that I would copy and paste them into Dice, to which she responded with, “There’s your problem.”

She summarily explained to me that Dice doesn’t recognize Microsoft Word’s default quotation mark format (aka “smart quotes”). Turns out that Monster, LinkedIn, and many others don’t recognize “smart quotes” for exact phrase searching either.

Here’s an example of Word’s “smart quotes:”

She then suggested that I either enter my queries directly into Dice or use Notepad to build and save my Boolean searches because they produce “straight quotes.”

Well, I didn’t want to build my searches in Dice’s search field because I could not see my entire search string as I was building it.

This is an issue with just about any job board resume database, ATS, Internet search engine, and social network – the search fields are all ridiculously short (e.g., LinkedIn’s is 37 characters).

Oh, and if you need evidence that LinkedIn does not actually recognize Word’s smart quotes for exact phrase searching, try this search on LinkedIn:

After my call with the Dice support rep, I started using Notepad to build and save my searches so I could simply copy and paste them directly into any job board resume database, Internet search engine, social network, and my ATS and they would recognize and obey the quotation marks as a request for an exact phrase.

However, it turns out there is a way to force Microsoft Word to not use “smart quotes” and instead use “straight quotes” – which most sites, social networks, databases, and search engines will obey as a request for an exact phrase.

How to Create Straight Quotation Marks in Microsoft Word

First, go to File –> Options.

Then go to Proofing and click on AutoCorrect Options.

Once in the AutoCorrect options, choose the “AutoFormat As You Type” tab, and then ensure that the “Replace as you type – ‘Straight quotes’ with ‘smart quotes’” is NOT checked/selected.

From then on, whenever you type quotation marks, they will be “straight quotes,” which will work for searching for exact phrases on any site or system that allows for exact phrase searching via quotation marks.

This also works for MS PowerPoint, for those of you who may copy and paste Boolean search examples from a presentation from time to time.

How to Fix an Entire Library of Boolean Searches in MS Word

If you happen to have a decent amount of Boolean search strings saved in Word and you didn’t notice the difference between smart quotes and straight quotes, you can use Word’s Find and Replace functionality to quickly convert all smart quotes into straight quotes.

Simply invoke Word’s Find and Replace and enter each smart quote in the “Find what” field and a straight quote in the “Replace with” field, and then click “Replace All.” You’ll have to do this with the leading smart quote and the ending smart quote, as they are different.

Saving Your Boolean Search Strings – Beyond Word

If you don’t want to use Word for building, saving, and copying/pasting Boolean search strings, you can use Notepad.

You can also use Excel if you like, as Excel doesn’t use smart quotes. Excel has the added benefit of allowing you to automatically build large Boolean OR statements as well.

Another option is Google Docs, which allows for the ability to share and collaborate with a library of Boolean searches online with others. However, by default, Google Docs also uses smart quotes.

To switch from smart quotes to straight quotes in Google Docs, navigate to Tools –> Preferences:

In the Preferences menu, be sure to deselect “Use smart quotes.”

Happy hunting!

Have you ever wanted or needed to search for top students of people who have achieved high grade point averages in high school or college?

While GPA is relatively unimportant to many employers – to others, a high GPA is indicative of a person’s ability to achieve results in an unstructured environment (no one is there making you go to class or study for your exams), which can provide clues to self-management capability and the drive to excel.

Some employers simply won’t hire candidates for certain roles without a specific GPA or higher, with few exceptions (e.g. Google).

Regardless of your personal philosophy on the (in)significance of GPA’s, a grade point average is an objective measure of performance and achievement, and one of the very few that can be found on a resume or a social media profile.

LinkedIn Profile Search: Caveat Emptor

Before I show you how to specifically search for and target GPA’s when searching for people in LinkedIn, you must always bear in mind that most people who create LinkedIn profiles typically do not fill them out as they would if they were writing a resume.

That means that the majority of profiles you come across won’t actually have a lot of depth and detail with regard to their experience as well as their education, including GPA.

However, it does appear that more and more people are beginning to see the value in leveraging their LinkedIn profile much as they would a resume, and most people who graduate with honors tend to mention it on their resumes.

Additionally, LinkedIn is making a big push towards students and recent college graduates with Career Explorer, new profile sections designed for students, and their student job portal, and most students and recent grads who have achieved a high grade point average in high school and/or college see the value in promoting their achievement.

With that in mind, always remember that there are people who actually have what you’re looking for, but simply don’t mention the things you’re searching for – aka Dark Matter.

Searching for GPA’s on LinkedIn

While it would be nice if LinkedIn supported numrange search like Google (3.50..4.00), or even root-word/stem search like most job board resume databases (3.5* OR 3.6* OR 3.7*), LinkedIn doesn’t support either search functionality.

As such, you’ll need to actually type out each and every specific GPA within the range you would like to target.

Wow.

I know – that can be A LOT of numbers.

But, lucky for you, I’ve done the work for you (at least for the range of 3.5 to 4.0), AND – LinkedIn can process the longest search strings of any search interface/engine I have ever used.

That means you can enter this string into the keyword field on LinkedIn when searching for people and you’ll get results mentioning high academic acheivement (graduating with honors/GPA of 3.5 or higher, in this case):

(GPA OR “G.P.A.” OR “Grade Point Average”) (“cum laude” OR “3.5″ OR “3.6″ OR “3.7″ OR “3.8″ OR “3.9″ OR ”4.0″ OR “3.50″ OR “3.51″ OR “3.52″ OR “3.53″ OR “3.54″ OR “3.55″ OR “3.56″ OR “3.57″ OR “3.58″ OR “3.59″ OR “3.60″ OR “3.61″ OR “3.62″ OR “3.63″ OR “3.64″ OR “3.65″ OR “3.66″ OR “3.67″ OR “3.68″ OR “3.69″ OR “3.70″ OR “3.71″ OR “3.72″ OR “3.73″ OR “3.74″ OR “3.75″ OR “3.76″ OR “3.77″ OR “3.78″ OR “3.79″ OR “3.80″ OR “3.81″ OR “3.82″ OR “3.83″ OR “3.84″ OR “3.85″ OR “3.86″ OR “3.87″ OR “3.88″ OR “3.89″ OR “3.90″ OR “3.91″ OR “3.92″ OR “3.93″ OR “3.94″ OR “3.95″ OR “3.96″ OR “3.97″ OR “3.98″ OR “3.99″)

Yes – that actually fits in the keyword search field.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. I’ve written about this a few times – with a free account, LinkedIn seems to have no limit to the number of characters you can enter into the search fields.

In fact, I’ve crammed 6 pages of text into a LinkedIn search and not only did it fit, there was room for more! LinkedIn search team – you get BIG bonus points for this!

Searching for Latin Honors

Notice that I included “cum laude,” which is a Latin honor for distinguished academic achievement.

“Cum laude” is also embedded into each of the most common higher honors of magna cum laude and summa cum laude – so searching for the base phrase will return all three. While the percentages (e.g., top 2%, 5%, 10%, etc.) or specific grade point averages required for each level of academic honor can differ from university to university, they will typically cover the range of high “B” to 4.00 grade point averages.

I have come across some profiles that do not mention a specific GPA, but do mention 1 of the 3 Latin honors, so I decided to throw “cum laude” in to catch those people.

The next step would be to search for people who mention “laude” but do not specify a GPA (notice the minus sign):

“cum laude” -(GPA OR “G.P.A.” OR “Grade Point Average” OR “3.5″ OR “3.6″ OR “3.7″ OR “3.8″ OR “3.9″ OR ”4.0″ OR “3.50″ OR “3.51″ OR “3.52″ OR “3.53″ OR “3.54″ OR “3.55″ OR “3.56″ OR “3.57″ OR “3.58″ OR “3.59″ OR “3.60″ OR “3.61″ OR “3.62″ OR “3.63″ OR “3.64″ OR “3.65″ OR “3.66″ OR “3.67″ OR “3.68″ OR “3.69″ OR “3.70″ OR “3.71″ OR “3.72″ OR “3.73″ OR “3.74″ OR “3.75″ OR “3.76″ OR “3.77″ OR “3.78″ OR “3.79″ OR “3.80″ OR “3.81″ OR “3.82″ OR “3.83″ OR “3.84″ OR “3.85″ OR “3.86″ OR “3.87″ OR “3.88″ OR “3.89″ OR “3.90″ OR “3.91″ OR “3.92″ OR “3.93″ OR “3.94″ OR “3.95″ OR “3.96″ OR “3.97″ OR “3.98″ OR “3.99″)

There’s about 400,000results globally.

Why Not Search for 4.00?

You also probably noticed I did not include 4.00 in the range of numbers. I originally did, but in testing the search string, I found that it produced too many false positives mentioning the 4.00 scale and a GPA that did not in fact meet my GPA criteria of 3.5x or higher.

For example:

However, the downside to leaving 4.00 out is that it will potentially miss those who did achieve a perfect 4.00 on a 4.00 scale and did not mention any Latin honors on their LinkedIn profile. I’ll leave that choice to you.

The LinkedIn GPA Search in Action

To narrow the results down a bit, I will add “software engineer” as the current title, and also add “Java” to the keyword search, searching globally.

Java (GPA OR “G.P.A.” OR “Grade Point Average”) (“cum laude” OR “3.5″ OR “3.6″ OR “3.7″ OR “3.8″ OR “3.9″ OR ”4.0″ OR “3.50″ OR “3.51″ OR “3.52″ OR “3.53″ OR “3.54″ OR “3.55″ OR “3.56″ OR “3.57″ OR “3.58″ OR “3.59″ OR “3.60″ OR “3.61″ OR “3.62″ OR “3.63″ OR “3.64″ OR “3.65″ OR “3.66″ OR “3.67″ OR “3.68″ OR “3.69″ OR “3.70″ OR “3.71″ OR “3.72″ OR “3.73″ OR “3.74″ OR “3.75″ OR “3.76″ OR “3.77″ OR “3.78″ OR “3.79″ OR “3.80″ OR “3.81″ OR “3.82″ OR “3.83″ OR “3.84″ OR “3.85″ OR “3.86″ OR “3.87″ OR “3.88″ OR “3.89″ OR “3.90″ OR “3.91″ OR “3.92″ OR “3.93″ OR “3.94″ OR “3.95″ OR “3.96″ OR “3.97″ OR “3.98″ OR “3.99″)

When I ran that search I got 1,039 results - here’s one example so you can see it works quite well:

One thing to keep in mind is that if you copy and paste the GPA string above and have any issues with the results, it may be due to the quotation marks. You can always use Notepad or even Word to change any curved quotation marks to the proper quotation marks if you have any issues.

LinkedIn Top Student Search Anomlies

When examining the search results, I noticed a number of anomalies.

#1 LinkedIn sometimes highlights single, non-GPA numbers throughout the profiles.

#2 Although I searched specifically for the title of “Software Engineer” using LinkedIn’s title field, I still got results with the single words of “software” and “engineer” highlighted throughout the profile and not just in titles. LinkedIn search team – this should not happen.

#3 Some results would have the word “a” highlighted by itself throughout the profile.

#4 In many cases, the actual GPA, as well as the mention of “GPA” or “Grade Point Average” were not actually highlighted, although they matched the search criteria.

For example:

I am not surprised by some of the anomalous results – many search engines have trouble when it comes to searching for numbers, especially those including decimals, and search terms including punctuation such as periods (e.g., G.P.A, B.S., etc.).

The Results

In spite of the anomalies mention above, from the random sampling of results I took, the GPA search worked quite well, with few false positives:

Targeting Specific Universities

Taking this GPA search approach one step further, you could combine it with targeting specific colleges and universities.

For example, I took the same GPA search from above, included ”Java” in the keyword field, searched for a title of (engineer OR programmer OR developer), and looked for profiles of people who graduated from one of these schools:  (harvard OR Duke OR Yale OR MIT OR UCLA OR Berkeley OR Dartmouth OR “Brown University” OR Princeton).

Click on the image to be taken to the LinkedIn search results.

Not surprisingly, Google has the most results.

As you can see, the search works quite well:

Sweet!

LinkedIn X-Ray Search

The other way you can search LinkedIn for people with specific GPA’s is to leverage an Internet search engine such as Google and perform an X-Ray search of LinkedIn profiles.

While this approach comes with the intrinsic limitations of the inability to precisely control many of LinkedIn’s search fields/parameters (location by zip radius, current company, etc.), it does afford you the ability to leverage Google’s numrange search and you can view any public profile, whether they are in your network or not.

For example, here is a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn targeting profiles in the N.Y. metro area that mention java and 1 of a few common titles (developer, programmer, engineer), that also mention a GPA from 3.50 to 4.00. site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -dir java (engineer OR programmer OR developer) (GPA OR “G.P.A” OR “Grade Point Average”) 3.50..4.00 “location * greater new york city area”

Click here for the results.

Although you will get some false positive results, you can see that using Google to X-Ray search LinkedIn for top students and using Google’s numrange search functionality for targeting GPA values works quite well!

Final Thoughts on Searching by Honors and GPA

While some people will never have a need or the desire to search for potential candidates by GPA, others do and will – and it’s nice to know that you actually CAN reliably search by specific GPA ranges in LinkedIn with relatively few false positives.

You or your organization may not be degree and/or GPA “snobs,” but there are more than a handful of Fortune 1000 companies who notoriously are.

Plus, if you ever find yourself searching for recent grads and/or junior level folks, you could search for high GPA’s first to narrow your results down if you’re getting too many.

The choice of if, how, and why you apply this LinkedIn GPA search is up to you.

Beware, however, that in attempting to target numbers – specifically those including punctuation such as decimals - in a search can produce false positives. For example, certain information technology applications/products have a 4.0 version. Additionally, the searches I created above do not take into account universities that have a scale that goes beyond 4.0 (I’ve seen some that go to 6.0 and other values).

As always, happy hunting!

11/13/11 Note: I’ve provided some updated LinkedIn X-Ray search string syntax examples at the end of this post.

I recently received a message via LinkedIn from Gary Cozin, an accomplished, well known player and knowledge sharer in sourcing circles, asking me a question:

“You know when we xray Google for LI profiles we can insert “current * financial advisor” in our string to bring back ‘current’ job titles we want. Do you know how would that be done in Bing?

Now, I have been a long-time user of Google for X-Ray searching LinkedIn. However, Google’s recently made some changes to the way LinkedIn X-Ray search results are returned that has made sourcers and recruiters add additional terms to X-Ray strings to an already lengthy search string to return only profiles (e.g., -inurl:dir, -inurl:jobs…).

Not long after Google made those changes, Shally Steckerl posted an article detailing a novel approach to X-Ray searching LinkedIn using the phrase “Public profile powered by,” which seemed to allow searchers to not have to resort to the cumbersome (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs, etc. search syntax.

While that approach definitely works, Irina Shamaeva and I have found it doesn’t seem to find and return all available results. Even so, there is no denying that it is a much simpler (and shorter!) method for finding LinkedIn profiles via Internet search engines. Why unnecessarily over-complicate search strings?

So, with Google’s recent changes coupled with their annoyingly overzealous blocking of more complex searches (in some cases you don’t even get a chance to use a CAPTCHA to prove you’re human!), I was happy and curious to see if there was in fact a way to accomplish what Gary was looking to do using a search engine other than Google.

My First Bing Current Title X-Ray Search Experiment

When using Google to search LinkedIn to find people with specific current titles, this is the area of LinkedIn profiles people target:

With Google, you can leverage the asterisk (single or multiple word wildcard) to “bridge the gap” between the word Current and the Title, because you can’t actually search for the bullet separating the two For example, “current * financial advisor.”

Bing and Yahoo (which uses Bing’s search) don’t have a similar operator or functionality. However, I was curious to see what Bing would do if I simply searched for the phrase “Current Financial Advisor:”

site:linkedin.com “current financial advisor” “greater new york city area” “public profile powered by”

A little over 1100 results, and they look clean (profiles only) and accurate to me:

When you click on a cached result, you can see our current title phrase search is working, despite the bullet separating the word “Current” and “Financial Advisor:”

It is important to note that if you click through the results, out to page 17 for example, you’ll notice Bing drops the estimated number of results from over 1100 down to 373.

Although the results look good, my sourcing sixth sense is telling me that we’re not seeing all of the available results.

Deeper Down the Bing X-Ray Rabbit Hole

Trying to think of another angle to take, I took a closer look at the structure of the LinkedIn profile.

I noticed that title phrases are always in the format of “TITLE at COMPANY.” In the above screenshot, it’s “Financial Advisor at Wachovia.”

Because of this consistency, I thought I would try dropping the search for the term “current” altogether and isolate and target “Financial Advisor at”

site:linkedin.com “financial advisor at” “greater new york city area” “public profile powered by”

Over 2000 results, and they look accurate and clean (profiles only):

Checking out a cached result verifies it’s working they way I wanted it to:

If you click through the results of this search, you’ll notice the total number of results drops from an initially estimated 2000+ down to 728, but that is still nearly double the number of real results returned by the “Current Financial Advisor” search. Turns out my sourcing sixth sense was right.

All is Not Perfect (or Current)

Dropping the word “current” from the search string and simply targeting the phrase “TITLE at” works, and it works especially well in the above example. Even though every single one of the random samples I viewed from the 728 results from the [site:linkedin.com "financial advisor at" "greater new york city area" "public profile powered by"] search appeared to be profiles of people who are currently financial advisors, dropping “current” from the search string and strategy doesn’t always work so well.

For example, when you run this string on Bing…

site:linkedin.com “branch manager at bank of america” “greater new york city area” “public profile powered by”

… some results are of people who state they are currently a Branch Manager at Bank of America, but other results are returned of people who are currently doing something else, but had previously been a branch manager at Bank of America.

This is bound to happen given that we are no longer forcing the word “current” to be in a phrase along with the title we’re targeting. However, in some cases, as with the financial advisor search, this search approach can yield results with nearly all profiles having the target title as a current title.

One of the reasons for this is actually due to the fact that a great number of LinkedIn profiles are not very rich in content or complete. Many people join LinkedIn, add their current position, and then don’t ever modify it – this results in many searchable profiles for which there is only a current job, because no previous jobs were ever entered.

This is one small way in which LinkedIn’s often shallow data and many incomplete profiles actually works in your favor – if you’re trying to target people by current title and want to find the maximum number of available results without having to be limited by trying to use “current TITLE” in your strings.

What’s the Shortest Effective X-Ray String?

Looking at the “Public profile powered by” phrase in the search strings, I was curious to see if the entire phrase was even necessary to get good results.

I shaved the “public profile powered by” all the way down to just “powered.” It seems like the most unique term and unlikely to produce (m)any false positives.

site:linkedin.com “financial advisor at” “greater new york city area” powered

Over 42,000 estimated results.

-

That’s a lot of results – certainly more than the two previous searches. Of course, the 42,000+ is just an estimate and we can’t see past 1,000 results – but I decided to check the integrity of the results out to the maximum you can view (1,000).

As you can see from the image below, you can actually view 1,000 results, and impressively, most (but certainly not all) of the results appear to be all  profiles of people who are currently financial advisors – even out to the last page. That’s a significant improvement from my previous best Bing search which yielded 728 financial advisors.

Sweet.

As Irina Shamaeva has speculated, the Internet search engines obviously don’t index every element/word/phrase of LinkedIn profiles. However, it does appear that the word “powered” is indexed more than the entire phrase “public profile powered by.”

Is there a more simple and elegant search string structure for searching LinkedIn via an Internet search engine to find as many public profiles as possible than site:linkedin.com “TITLE/KEYWORD” “LOCATION PHRASE” powered? If so – please let me know!

Is Google Down and Out?

Going back to Google, we can use a “standard” LinkedIn X-Ray string to compare results with the above Bing search for the exact same parameters:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs “greater new york city area” “current * financial advisor”

1600 estimated results looks good, right?

Not so fast.

Notice the 4th result, Shannon Sweeney? He’s not currently a financial advisor:

Using the asterisk in the phrase “current * financial advisor” is not a flawless solution – it will yield false positive results.

Also, navigating through the results, you can see that they actually end at 479. Less than half of our short and sweet Bing X-Ray search of LinkedIn. Interesting, yes?

Can Google Return Good Results with a Short LinkedIn X-Ray String?

Then I was curious to see what Google would make of the short and sweet Bing LinkedIn X-Ray search string:

site:linkedin.com “financial advisor at” “greater new york city” powered

While Google estimates over 94,000 results – you can see from the first 10 that they are mostly directory results and not profiles. Blech!

To add insult to injury, if you navigate out to page 46 – there are actually only 457 results, which is less than half of what Bing returns (which are all profiles and not directory results!).

The Coup de Grace

And now, for my finishing move, I will unveil one of Bing’s (no longer) secret weapons – <insert dramatic music>- proximity search.

Irina brought to my attention via Twitter that Bing actually supports the near: operator. I wasn’t previously aware of this, as I haven’t historically used Bing that much (sorry MS folks), and I had never before heard of Bing supporting proximity search.

A quick bit of research returned this information directly from Microsoft, showing that the near: operator “constrains the distance between terms so that documents that contain instances of the specified terms within ten words of each other are returned before those that don’t.” Interestingly and importantly, that explanation technically leaves Bing the option to return some results in which the near: operator is not strictly obeyed.

Additionally, Bing gives you the ability to move beyond fixed proximity (i.e., near: = within 10 words) and into the realm of configurable proximity by adding a number to the operator, taking precise control over the distance. For example:  java near:4 develop

It is also important to know that the order of the terms when using the near: operator is also considered when Bing ranks results. In the above example, pages that contain “develop” 4 words or less after “java” would receive a greater boost in rank than pages in which “java” appears 4 words or less after “develop.” However, depending on the rest of the query, this does not necessarily mean that the former would be ranked higher than the latter.

In other words, Bing favors the original order of the query terms over the reversed order.

So why is this all a big deal?

Well, using Bing’s proximity search effectively allows you to target the current title “phrase” found in LinkedIn profiles, and this is a “cleaner” approach than using Google’s one-or-more-word wildcard asterisk. For example:

site:linkedin.com current near:2 “financial advisor” “greater new york city area” powered

Unlike all of my previous search experiments, we can be more assured that the results are going to adhere to the intent of the search, which is finding the phrase “Financial Advisor” precisely within 2 or fewer words of “Current.” Now, we know that there aren’t any words that separate these two on the LinkedIn profile – its actually a bullet, but this proximity search can be nearly guaranteed to return results where the current title phrase we’re targeting is intact.

Interestingly, even though Bing estimates over 1900 results, when you navigate through the results, you end at page 41 with 410 results. While that is more real results than my first “current financial advisor” search that returned 373, it is less than some of my other search experiments above.

I have my theories as to why this is the case, but I am curious to know what your thoughts are.

If you were curious (I was), here is the search narrowing the distance down to 1 word between the word “current” and “financial advisor:”

site:linkedin.com current near:1 “financial advisor” “greater new york city area” powered

361 real results.

LinkedIn X-Ray Search Summary

• Using Google to X-Ray LinkedIn and target current titles with the “current * TITLE” phrase isn’t foolproof. It will return some accurate results, but it does not return ALL available results, nor are all of the results accurate (current titles).
• You can use Bing or Yahoo to simply search for “current TITLE” and you will return some accurate results. As with Google, however, it will not find ALL available results. Unlike using Google’s “current * TITLE” search technique, all of the results will all be of people with the targeted current title.
• Using Bing to search LinkedIn with the phrase “TITLE at” is also an effective way of targeting current titles without being limited to searching for the word “current,” although it can also return some false positive results (past titles) as well.
• The shortest and most effective LinkedIn X-Ray string to find as many public profiles in a particular metro area as possible appears to be this string structure on Bing or Yahoo: site:linkedin.com “LOCATION PHRASE” “TITLE/KEYWORDS” Powered
• You can leverage Bing’s support of proximity search to target the current title phrase:  site:linkedin.com current near:1 “financial advisor” “greater new york city area” powered
• Being curious, questioning status quo and always asking, “I wonder what will happen if…” are critical keys to discovery and innovation!

Conclusion

Bing/Yahoo 1, Google 0.

From my testing, it appears that you can forsake Google and confidently use Bing (or Yahoo) for nearly all of your LinkedIn X-Ray searching needs. It certainly seems that Bing allows you to find a higher quantity of higher quality results, and you can get them with very short and effective search strings, as well as through the use of configurable proximity search, all without all of the non-profile results that Google returns and the annoying CAPTCHAs/you’re not human insults.

Which leaves me wondering – what is going on with Google’s search engine that causes it to return such garbage (non-profile) results when searching LinkedIn?

As a final note – I would never suggest using only one Internet search engine for all of your searching, for obvious reasons. Having said that, Bing has now become my search engine of choice for sourcing and recruiting research.

11/13/11 LinkedIn X-Ray Search Syntax Update 

I’ve received some comments about 1 year after writing this post and there have been some changes and discoveries with regard to using Bing and Google to X-Ray search LinkedIn to find public profiles.

As such, here are a couple of examples of updated X-Ray search string syntax – substitute your location phrase and use your own keywords/titles:

Updated Bing LinkedIn X-Ray Search Syntax/Format

site:linkedin.com java “project manager” “location greater new york city area” -dir

Updated Google LinkedIn X-Ray Search Syntax/Format

site:linkedin.com java “project manager” “location * greater new york city area” “contact settings”

Writing Boolean search strings is typically a quick and simple affair, as most search engines and databases won’t let you construct anything longer than a few hundred characters.

However, if you’re not constrained to a fixed limit on search terms (such as Google’s 32 words) or characters, it’s no longer a simple matter of “this OR that.”

I wrote an article not too long ago in which I illustrated some of the serious limitations associated with using industry filters when searching LinkedIn (or any site, for that matter) for people with specific industry experience. In that post, I demonstrated that when accessing LinkedIn with a free account, there are no search string length limits, allowing you to enter long OR statements with 100′s of companies.

Building large OR strings can be very tedious and time consuming work. Thankfully, John Turnberg graciously commented on my article (thank you John!) and detailed how to use Excel to make quick work of creating large OR strings.

I am not an Excel wizard by any means, so it may have taken me longer than most to take John’s Excel advice and get it to work. If you’re not handy with Excel and would like a turn-key solution, I’ve saved you the effort of trying to build it yourself – you can download a basic Excel Boolean OR builder here:

Here’s a quick video clip of how to use it.

Concatenation

During my research into how to use Excel to accomplish what I wanted to do, I found out that while it’s easy to add/combine a range of numbers together in Excel (e.g., A1:A100), you can’t concatenate a range of text cells without manually specifying all of the cells in the range (e.g., A1&A2&A3…).

I’m using Excel 2010, and I’m still dumbfounded that you can’t concatenate a range of cells with text values – it seems like something you should be able to accomplish with a click of a button much as you can with AutoSum. Then again, maybe this functionality exists and I just haven’t found it yet?

Knowing that I could not possibly be the only person annoyed by this lack of simple functionality, some quick Internet searching led me to a few sites that claimed you actually could concatenate a range of cells, and one site showed how to do it with a VBA function.

Now, I’ve never used VBA, but I am a bit of a hacker (as much as a non-technical person can be) and I managed to get it working. You can download it here:

Once you download the file, you should notice this warning:

Be sure to “Enable Content,” otherwise the macros won’t work.

Here’s a quick video clip of how to use it:

Using Company Lists to Build OR Strings

There are many sites you can use to find lists of target companies by size and by industry. If you’re searching for Fortune 500 companies, you could of course go straight to the source. However, when copying and pasting from various websites, you may pick up some unwanted and unseen garbage formatting, even if you copy to Notepad first before entering the list into Excel.

When copying and pasting lists from Notepad to Excel, it is safest to be sure to right-click, select “Paste Special” and then select Text. I’ve had a few instances of trying to build OR strings from Notepad and an extra space was hiding at the end of every company name after pasting into Excel (e.g., “Lockheed Martin “), which ruined the integrity of the string.

Using LinkedIn to Build Company/Industry Boolean OR Strings

LinkedIn is a fantastic source of industry and company information – here’s a short video clip of how you can build industry-specific company lists using LinkedIn and one of the above Excel OR builders:

Cleansing and Improving your Company Strings

Ensure your data is clean by using Notepad to strip unwanted formatting before copying into Excel to build your OR strings, paying attention to lookout for hidden spaces.

Additionally, look over your list to identify opportunities to improve your string by adding variations of the company names that people are likely to use (abbreviations, adding/removing spaces between two or more names, etc.).

For example, although the company is listed as “J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.” on the Fortune 500 list, people are more likely to enter it as JPMC, or JPMorganChase, JP Morgan Chase, etc. Essentially, be sure to examine all of the companies in your list with a keen eye for any and all possible variations that people may use, even if they are quite wrong in doing so, as you cannot find what you don’t search for.

This is true in less obvious cases, such as Lowes vs. Lowe’s and Walgreen vs. Walgreens. To test whether or not people use a possible variant, you can isolate a test variant in LinkedIn like so, using the company search field: Lowes NOT Lowe’s, Walgreen NOT Walgreens. The force is strong with the NOT operator.

Also be on the lookout for common denominators of many/all potential variations. For example, a good number of companies have more than 1 word in their name, such as Honeywell International, Lockheed Martin, Publix Super Markets, Kraft Foods, Medco Health Solutions, Verizon Communications, etc. In those cases, there is only a very small risk of yielding false positive results if you simply searched for Honeywell, Lockheed, Publix, Kraft, Medco, and Verizon.

Here is a cleansed and modified Fortune 100 list I put together with 129 terms:

Once you download the file, you should notice this warning:

Be sure to “Enable Content,” otherwise the macros won’t work.

When you enter that string into LinkedIn’s company field and execute the search, you may notice a few results that seem to defy the logic of the string. If you’re up for a challenge – can you tell me why these exceptions happen?

Using Word to Automatically Build Boolean OR Strings

As long as you are not building strings with multi-word phrases requiring the use of quotation marks, you don’t have to use Excel to build long OR statements – you can actually use Word to quickly build Boolean OR strings.

For example, if you are interested in using LinkedIn for diversity sourcing, you can use Word to build first name-based OR strings, which would consist of a string of single word search terms which don’t require the use of quotation marks. In fact, one of the only reasons for using Excel instead of Word to build Boolean OR strings is because most search engines (including LinkedIn) don’t play nice with Word’s quotation marks. More on that in a moment.

Watch this quick video demonstrating how easy it is to use Word to create a Boolean OR string:

Wow – that was easy!

You could of course find ^p and replace all with ” OR “, but you will discover that LinkedIn and other search interfaces/engines won’t like the quotes generated by Word.

Feedback and Suggestions

Let me know if you find the Excel Boolean OR builders and the video overviews helpful, and don’t hesitate to let me know if I missed anything, if they weren’t clear and easy to understand and use, or if you have suggestions for improvements – I’d be happy to make them better!

When it comes to searching LinkedIn using Internet search engines such as Google or Yahoo, there are many different ways to construct your search string (“X-Ray” or otherwise) and get results.

Ultimately, the goal of any good sourcer or recruiter is to find all of the best available potential candidates that a particular source has to offer.

A short while ago, Gary Cozin sent me a link to an article recommending to “forget complex Boolean strings” when searching LinkedIn using Internet search engines.

I read the article and appreciated the advice to go with the easier, simpler, more elegant search solutions, as well as the suggestion to try “Public profile powered by.” I had never thought of taking that approach – but more on that later.

First, a Little X-Ray History

If you do some research online, you’ll find that the LinkedIn X-Ray search strings that experts in the industry were recommending for years looked something like this:

site:www.linkedin.com intitle:linkedin “current * test manager” -intitle:answers -intitle:updated -intitle:blog -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs -inurl:megite.com -intitle:profile -inurl:jobid

That string has 8 exclusions – effective, but far from simple and elegant.

A while ago, I came up with and recommended a simpler, more elegant approach to the LinkedIn X-Ray search that focused on inclusion rather than a long list of exclusions by specifically targeting profiles using (inurl:in OR inurl:pub), which allowed me to get away with only using 1 exclusion: -intitle:directory.

This approach yielded a simple, short and effective “core” X-Ray syntax of:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory

Short and sexy, right?

And Then….

Sometime in April, many people (including myself) noticed that when running a “standard” LinkedIn X-Ray string with Google, that rather than returning the familiar results of individual LinkedIn profiles, results would come back organized by first or last name. Additionally, many noticed that jobs would come up at the top of the results.

I checked into the matter and suggested to add a couple of exclusions, in the form of -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs to get back to the desired results of individual LinkedIn profiles.

That worked, but my simple, short and effective “core” X-Ray syntax of site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory got a little longer and uglier with the addition of -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs. I wasn’t particularly happy about that, but it seemed the only way to get rid of the new garbage, non-individual profile, results.

However, it’s still shorter and more elegant than the X-Rays of yore with massive multiple exclusions.

A New Approach

Going back to the idea of using “Public profile powered by” when using an Internet search engine to look for public LinkedIn profiles – I was intrigued by the concept of dropping the X-Ray string altogether and targeting a phrase that is found on every public LinkedIn profile.

It simply never occurred to me to try it, and I sincerely appreciate the novel approach.

Gary Cozin asked me what I thought of the idea. My first impression was that I found it interesting and I respected the mini-breakthrough in thought that produced it, but I told Gary that I needed to do some testing to be able to tell if it is as effective as other methods of searching for LinkedIn profiles on the web.

So I Performed Some Tests

First – remember that when doing any comparison testing of Internet searches , you have to configure them so that they return a manageable number of results – ideally a few hundred or less. Anything higher than that, and you can get into “estimate” territory.

Here is a simple comparison of the “Public profile powered by” vs. a “standard” X-Ray search on Google.

First up – the “Public profile powered by:”

Microsoft “Public profile powered by” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

That yields 7 results. You have to click on “repeat the search with the omitted results included” to get to 103 results. If you click through to page 10 of the results, for some reason there are only really 100. But you get the point.

Next we have a “standard” X-Ray search with the same criteria:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs “greater atlanta area” Microsoft “software engineer” java

That yields 287 results. But not really (thanks Google!). If you click through the results pages, you’ll be stopped on page 24 for a total of 232 results.

In that one search comparison, there is a difference of over 100 results, and I didn’t see any duplicates or bad results from my sampling with the “standard” X-Ray.

As a side note, searching for the word “Microsoft” using Google to search LinkedIn will get you many results with hits of common Microsoft software (e.g., Office), as well as the abbreviation “MS,” which even gets hits of Master’s degrees (I found at least 1 instance of this). If you want to force Google to only return the word “Microsoft,” you have to use quotes or the plus (+) sign.

So What Causes the Difference in Results?

That’s a great question. The phrase “Public profile powered by” does seem to be on every public LinkedIn profile, so why would searching for it find fewer results, let alone produce any difference?

Honestly, I am not really sure. Irina Shamaeva has some ideas as to what could cause the difference in search results.

Maybe some people at Google could shed some light on the matter? <not holding my breath>

The Bottom Line

Regardless of why Google isn’t finding all of the available public LinkedIn profiles by searching for “Public profile powered by,” the bottom line is that the “standard” (inelegant and longer) X-Ray string finds more.

Even if the results gap wasn’t as dramatically large as I found in that one test scenario (I did find some larger and smaller results variations), the fact that the results are different AT ALL is what makes me concerned. I don’t like to miss any results.

To make sure you don’t miss any available search results, I strongly encourage you to do your own testing of the various ways to search LinkedIn using an Internet search engine using relevant search terms for whatever you typically look for.

While I love the simplicity and appreciate the approach of searching for public LinkedIn profiles by not having to use the lengthy site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs, I would never abandon the uglier, longer string at the expense of missing any available search results (not even 1!).

Some More Google Fun

Taking the approach of targeting a phrase common to every public LinkedIn profile a step further, I also experimented with searching for the phrases “Create a public profile” and “professionals already on LinkedIn.”

Here’s a comparison:

Microsoft “Public profile powered by” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

Microsoft “Create a public profile” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

Microsoft “professionals already on LinkedIn” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

Approximately 103, 124, and 150 results respectively.

Did that get your attention?

Why are they different at all, when all three phrases appear on all public LinkedIn profiles? I don’t have the answer.

If Google allows you to click on a cached result without apologizing for thinking you’re not human (am I bitter?), you can clearly see Google indexes the other phrases:

So What about Yahoo and Bing?

Everyone has their search engine preferences, and my first choice has always been Google. However, with the recent changes in LinkedIn X-Ray search results as well as the issue of Google thinking everyone has suddenly become a malicious bot sending automated queries to their servers, I’m looking more at Yahoo and Bing.

Interestingly though, as Irina reminded me recently, Yahoo is giving up their search technology and in the near future will be using Microsoft’s. So technically – Yahoo search may not yield any different results than Bing in the future. Enjoy the results while you can.

Anyhoo…Yahoo does currently seem to do a much better job of searching public LinkedIn profiles with the phrase of “Public profile powered by:”

Microsoft “Public profile powered by” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

416 results! But don’t get too excited – if you click through to the end/last page (to keep Yahoo honest), you end up with 208.

Which is less than the 232 we found using a “standard” X-Ray string on Google.

Interestingly, Yahoo also does a better job of getting consistent results when using other phrases such as “professionals already on LinkedIn” (210 results, if you were curious).

What about Bing? Bing apparently doesn’t like searches like Microsoft “Public profile powered by” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java.

Final Thoughts

There is always more than one way to run a search, and there is no single “right way” to find people. Use multiple approaches, and always test them to understand and appreciate differences.

When searching any source, your goal as a sourcer or recruiter is to find all of the best candidates the source has to offer. Finding some people isn’t enough.

Regarding search string length when X-Ray searching LinkedIn – if you’re worried about the 32 word search limit that Google imposes, I’d argue you’re not taking into account that a large percentage of people with LinkedIn profiles don’t even flesh them out with (m)any keywords.

Always appreciate, understand and respect how the non-sourcer / recruiter / HR professional uses LinkedIn…most don’t use it as a full-blown resume.

So if you’re loading up your Google/LinkedIn strings with anywhere close to 32 words (e.g., site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java unix oracle linux application design develop C++ MySql J2EE Lead Senior SQL data javascript hibernate blah blah blah…), you are actually making it impossible to find all of the qualified candidates on LinkedIn.

Contemplate this on the tree of woe.

When it comes to my theories and best practices for leveraging information systems for quickly finding highly qualified candidates, I am often asked, ”So, how did you figure all of this stuff out?”

It’s a fantastic question, and I am happy to be asked it, but my answer doesn’t seem to satisfy anyone. 

The short answer is literally that “I just figured it out.”

The long answer provides some insight into how I figured some of this candidate search stuff out, but I think the real value and message of my personal story is that anyone can become quite proficient at electronic talent discovery – and it’s less dependent on any training you receive and more on how you approach your job.

When people ask me how I’ve managed to “figure out” all of this candidate search stuff, it seems they want to hear that I went through some specific training program, that I read a certain book, that I worked under some sourcing guru or something similar.

The reality is I’ve never worked under any sourcing guru, I’ve never attended any sourcing training classes, and I didn’t read any books on candidate sourcing. FAR from it.

In fact, when I started in the recruiting industry at a small, privately held staffing agency in Northern Virginia in January 1997, I received very little recruiting training, let alone any specialized training on how to find candidates.  I was shown a Lotus Notes-based C-PAS resume database and told “this is where you find candidates.”

It is important to know that I did not enter the staffing industry with any prior experience or advantages that would help me in leveraging information systems to identify talent. When I started in recruiting, I did not own a computer. I graduated college with a B.A. in Psychology, not “even” a B.S., let alone a technical degree like Computer Science or Information Systems. Although I was told that the company’s C-PAS database supported Boolean search, I did not know what Boolean search was. 

Not only did I not know what Boolean search was – I did not know you could find resumes on the Internet. I did not know about AltaVista, and Google did not exist yet.

In 1997, my company did not use any job boards – I did not know Monster existed (or OCC, for that matter – for those who recall where Monster got their search interface from).

My company’s main source of candidates came from people responding to newspaper classified ads who faxed their resumes in, which were subsequently scanned into the C-PAS database, and from resumes collected from job fairs which were also scanned in. I believe that the resume database had about 70,000 records or so when I started with the company.

My Training

My “training” (picture me using air quotes for emphasis) consisted of someone showing me how to navigate C-PAS, telling me about the AND and OR Boolean operators (nothing about NOT), and being told that you could find candidates in C-PAS by entering in keywords from job descriptions. There certainly wasn’t any “formal” training – I think this was all explained to me in about 20 minutes.

Yes, I am serious.

I was never trained on cold calling/phone sourcing – it never even occurred to me to try to call into a company to find people. Our database was how we found candidates, and how any recruiter at any other company found their candidates, for all I knew.

How I Learned Boolean Search

Absent of any real training and lacking a mentor, I essentially learned the art and science of leveraging Boolean search strings to find candidates the hard way – through trial and error.

“Trial and error” is really common language for the scientific method- investigating, acquiring new knowledge, and correcting and integrating previous knowledge. According to Wikipedia, “To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.”

Although I did not know it at the time, and I certainly wouldn’t have told anyone that I was learning my job through the scientific method, this is pretty much what I was actually doing. If something I was trying to do didn’t work – I didn’t have anyone else to go to for answers - so I had to get creative, experiment, and keeping hacking at it until I finally found a way that worked and got me the results I needed. This is a horribly painful and frustrating process, but I have since learned that it’s actually a very effective method of learning. 

For example, if I needed a QA Test Engineer with experience testing applications developed in VB, I’d throw all of the search terms from the job description and required skills in and run with it. Once I exhausted those results, if I didn’t have the candidates I needed, failing to cover the position I was assigned was not an option – I had to find another way. So I’d try something else (i.e., experiment and test a hypothesis) – like wonder if every QA Test Engineer who has experience testing applications written in VB would actually mention VB in their resume…and I would then use AND NOT (VB or “Visual Basic”) to target those people and start calling QA Test Engineers who didn’t mention VB in their resume and simply ask them what languages the applications they have experience testing had been developed in.

After 5 calls to people who did not mention VB in their resume, I found a woman who had in fact tested applications written in VB (and I subsequently placed her). Thus I learned part 1 of what I now call the “Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing,” which states that for every search term you are thinking of using in your Boolean string, first ask yourself if everyone with that skill, experience, or title would mention it in their resume. Because I discovered that many don’t.

I learned part 2 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing(which states that for every search term you are thinking of using in your Boolean string, consider every possible way that it can be mentioned)  through simple observation. As I reviewed my search results, I would notice terms in resumes that I did not specifically search for that seemed to mean the same thing as my search terms. I would make note of these alternate terms and incorporate them back into my search, continuously refining and improving the searches. 

My Performance

Although I am pretty good at what I do now, my career in recruiting didn’t start with any indication that I would be any better than average at finding and placing candidates. In fact, the owner of the company told me later that he was almost sure I would fail.

I started in recruiting on January 13th, 1997, and I did not make my first placement until March – it was a financial analyst at AOL (everyone remembers their first hire, right?).  

However, from April to December 1997, I placed 71 more candidates, which is an average of just about 8 hires per month, leading me to be recognized as the Recruiter of the Year, outperforming more experienced and tenured recruiters by a wide margin (the next closest recruiter had 30 fewer placements for the year). And this was accomplished in an environment without any candidate “ownership,” for those who are familiar with the agency vernacular.

I can tell you precisely how I achieved those numbers. While I had pretty good candidate relationship development skills, good candidate closing and control, good voicemail techniques, and good matching skills (as good as any recruiter with 3-12 months of experience), I had developed the ability to use Boolean searches to quickly find large quantities of precisely matched and highly qualified candidates in direct response to client/manager needs – faster and better than most. And, I planned every single day, without fail.

Interestingly, to this day, I find that most sourcers and recruiters do not come in each day with a call plan. Having a daily call plan to execute first thing in the A.M. that I developed the previous afternoon from my searches was definitely one of the keys to my productivity and my success. I eventually got to the point that if I searched for and built a call list of 20 potential candidates for a given position, I would have 2 A+ candidates submitted on the position within 24-48 hours, and typically have 1-2 backups. 

For those who are interested, in my first year as an agency recruiter, I averaged over 3 external candidate submittals (candidates presented to client hiring managers) per day – my record was 14 in a single day. Most months I would have 65-70 external submittals and over 20 interviews (some call them send outs). As most recruiting managers/directors can attest to – it’s difficult to NOT get 6-10 hires per month from those numbers.

Based on my early performance, I was promoted to recruiting manager and then later to director of recruiting, where I focused most of my time on training and developing my recruiting staff. Interestingly, after the privately held company I worked for was acquired by a large publicly traded staffing firm, I took a position as a “market manager” of recruiting where I was responsible for personal production as a recruiter as well as for managing a team of recruiters. After 7 years of not “working a desk,” I was able to quickly ramp up and achieve “Platinum Performer” status (top 5% firm-wide) in less than 12 months.

When I hit the phones in 2005, I did not have a network of people/candidates – I started quite literally from scratch. I was able to quickly achieve high levels of performance based primarily on two things: #1 My ability to quickly find the right people, and #2 My daily planning. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Lessons Learned

I think it’s been a huge benefit to be self taught. By no means is the way I came to know what I know about candidate sourcing ideal, nor is it practical or scalable. However, by having to figure everything out on my own I had no preconceived notions about sourcing, recruiting, the “right way” to do anything, or what was possible/not possible. There was no proverbial “box.”

For example:

• Candidate Pipelines: I’ve literally never had to focus on pipelining candidates, because I’ve always been able to pretty much find whatever I needed within 24-48 hours. Many years into my career, I would read articles about the importance of developing talent pipelines, and my response was incredulity. I honestly could not figure out why anyone would have to identify candidates prior to having a confirmed need. It seemed like such a waste of time and effort based on my personal experience – what happens if the needs never come? What happens if the positions do finally come, but all of your pipelined candidates don’t match the requirements (they’re rarely exactly as forecasted), or are they are no longer available or entertaining making a change? Later I would learn that my instincts were surprisingly accurate, at least according to the Toyota Way/Lean philosophy. Why bother building inventories of candidates based on forecasts when you can achieve Just-In-Time recruiting?
• Active/Passive Candidates: I was never told that some candidates were “active” and that others were “passive,” nor was I brainwashed into thinking that “passive” candidates were always better than “active” candidates. If anything, I learned that everyone is a candidate. I never thought twice about calling a resume that was 1, 2, 3, or 4+ years old – in fact, some of my easiest, most frictionless placements came from people whose resume had not been updated in 4 years. It’s a funny thing – if you find the right people and present them with the right opportunity – you can turn a non-job seeker into one. Imagine that.
• Phone Sourcing: I’ve never had to make a truly “cold” call because I’ve always been able to quickly find the candidates I need, or find the people who know the candidates I need…and to be honest, after I learned that some people rely heavily on cold-call phone sourcing to identify candidates – it never really made sense to me, because it has many intrinsic limitations when compared to searching information systems, including low control over critical candidate variables, and a low ROI.

There is No Sourcing Gene

It always bothers me when people say I have a “talent” for candidate sourcing – that all too easily “explains away” everything I have worked so very hard to figure out. 

There is no gene for sourcing and recruiting. Besides, Talent is Overrated – deliberate practice is where it’s at. I literally come into work every day to get better at what I do. Most people don’t – they just come into work and do what they’ve always done. It seems like such a subtle difference, but I can assure you, it’s not.

I honestly don’t think there is anything unique about me – I am simply a product of my environment. If I had not started in the recruiting industry in a sink-or-swim environment, or if I had more in depth training (and learned the ”right” way to source/recruit) or if I had been taught that the only way to find high quality candidates was through phone sourcing and cold calling, I know for a fact that I would not have the skills or ability I have today, and you would not be reading this blog! Looking back, I am thankful for my lack of training and for the unique opportunity that I was given – it played a big part in making me who I am today.

While there is definitely no sourcing/recruiting gene – I do have to give some credit to my personality traits (there’s that B.A. in Psychology rearing its head again). I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I am very competitive (I hate to lose at anything), I don’t enjoy doing things unless I do them well, I really enjoy figuring things out/solving problems, and I don’t give up – I will find a way. 

If I were to self-diagnose, I’d say I have an obsessive personality. The more “PC” way to describe an obsessive personality includes “focused,” “driven,” “goal oriented,” “never gives up,” “has to be the best,” etc. I have a theory that most top performers in business or sports (or anything, for that matter) have obsessive personalities. But that’s another post entirely.

The moral of this story is that you don’t need any special training or any particular background to become exceptional at sourcing candidates or any step in the recruiting life cycle  - in fact, I’d argue that all you really need is the desire to become very good at it, and the focus and drive to put in the deliberate practice necessary to achieve your goal. If you’re truly committed and dedicated to mastering a thing, you will, or you’ll come close trying.

LinkedIn has been making changes to their interface and one thing I noticed back in March is that I could no longer select multiple invitations to connect and accept them all at once from the main inbox page.

It took a little bit of exploring the new inbox interface and functionality before I figured out how to be able to bulk accept LinkedIn invites like I had grown accustomed to. Then the other day I was on Twitter and I had made a comment about bulk accepting LinkedIn invites and received a number of responses from people asking how to do it.

I had assumed everyone knew how to select and accept multiple invitations to connect – but you know what they say about assumptions…

So – I’m here to show you 2 different ways of bulk accepting invitations to connect on LinkedIn.

Method #1

Navigate to your inbox.

Hover your mouse over “Received” and a drop down menu opens up and you can select “invitations.”

Once you select “invitations,” you will be taken to all of your invitations to connect, and this is where you can select the entire list if you like:

Then simply click the blue “Accept” button to accept all selected invitations to connect. After you accept the invitations you’ve selected, you’ll be taken to a page showing you’re the connections you just added.

Here’s the trick that many people miss – you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list of the people you just connected with and click on the tiny “See your other invitations” – which, if you’re not paying careful attention, you can easily miss.  

Am I the only person that thinks it’s a little weird that they tucked this so far out of the way? 

Once you click on “See your other invitations,” you’ll be taken back to page 1 of your inbox of invitations, which have likely all been accepted. Now you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to click on page 2 of your invitations in order to see other invitations to connect that you have not processed yet. Alternatively, you could bulk “archive” all of the invitations you just accepted, and then your “pending” invitations from page 2 would advance to page 1.

Once you get to page 2 – simply repeat the process of selecting the invitations you would like to accept, click accept, then scroll down to the bottom of the page of all of the people you just connected to and click on “See your other invitations,” and go to page 3, and so on.

Method #2

From the home page, you can “take action” on an invitation to connect:

Once you accept an invitation to connect in this fashion, you are taken to the “Add Connections” page where you can see the person whose invitation to connect you just accepted. You’ll have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find and click on “See your other invitations.” If I didn’t know better, I’d think that LinkedIn was trying to hide this.

Once you click on “See your other invitations,” you’ll be taken to your inbox of received invitations, where you can repeat the cycle detailed in method #1 above of: selecting the invitations you would like to accept, clicking accept, then scrolling down to the bottom of the page of all of the people you just connected to and click on “See your other invitations,” and go to page 2, 3, and so on.

So if you didn’t already know how to easily bulk accept LinkedIn invitations to connect, now you do. LinkedIn’s changes certainly added more steps to the process than the original process, and likely on purpose – but that’s a topic for another post. 

I think it’s poor functionality to be taken back to page 1 of your received invitations every time you accept a batch of invites – not sure what the thought process was there and why you’re not automatically taken to the next page of unprocessed invitations to connect, but I’m not a user interface designer @ LinkedIn, so what do I know?

If you’d like to see a video that details most of method #1, you can view Jonathan Duarte’s how-to video here. Nice work Jonathan!

Eariler this month Harry Urschel brought a post of his to my attention where he showed job seekers that you don’t have to have a huge LinkedIn network to use LinkedIn effectively to find a job. I wholeheartedly concur. Not only do you not have to have a large network of connections on LinkedIn, there are MANY ways to leverage LinkedIn to find a job.

Recruiters use LinkedIn to search for, find, and contact potential candidates on a daily basis – in fact, there are over 1,000,000 sourcers, recruiters, and human resources professionals on Linkedin in the United States alone! While I typically write posts for sourcers and recruiters to show them how they can more effectively leverage social networking sites like LinkedIn to find candidates, in this post, I am going to show job seekers how they can use the exact same techniques and strategies to find jobs, perform company research, and how to find and contact recruiters and hiring managers – even if you only have 5 connections!

First we’ll start with the basics. I’m going to save the best for last.

Job Search

Many people are unaware of all of the great features on LinkedIn for job seekers.

Once you click on “Jobs” you can use the basic search interface, or click on the “advanced” job search:

Once you get to the “Advanced Job Search” you have many self explanatory and standard job search options.  You can target specific companies, titles, industry, job function, location, etc. One thing to notice is the “Powered by SimplyHired” – I’ll get to that in a moment, it’s important.

Let’s say you’re looking for a job as an accountant in NYC. When you enter your search criteria and hit “search” you will be taken to LinkedIn’s jobs. When I say “LinkedIn’s jobs,” I mean the jobs that people/companies have paid to post on LinkedIn. I bring this up because there are other job postings you can find through LinkedIn that are free to post as well as jobs that are posted to the Internet – not LinkedIn. First, let’s look at what you can do with LinkedIn’s jobs:

When you’re looking at LinkedIn’s jobs, you can see the people who posted the job if they happen to be in your network. If there isn’t a name under the “Posted By” column, then you are not connected to the person who posted the job.

If you click on the name of the person who posted the job, you’ll see that you may have a number of options. You can see who in your network “knows” (or at least is connected to) the person who posted the job, you can request a referral from someone in your network who is connected to the job poster, you can check your connections within the company that’s posted the job, and you can also request an introduction by people in your network who currently work at the company that posted the job. All great features and options!

Non-LinkedIn Jobs

Remember when I told you to make note of the “Powered by SimplyHired” icon? Here’s where it comes into play – there are FAR more jobs posted on the Internet than jobs just posted on LinkedIn, and you can find a good chunk of them by clicking on “The Web” tab:

When you click on “The Web” – you’ll be taken to all of the jobs that match your search criteria that are on SimplyHired, which is a  vertical search engine for jobs similar to Indeed. This will expose you to MANY more jobs. In the case of my search for jobs with the title of “accountant” within 25 miles of 10001 in NY, I went from 7 jobs posted on LinkedIn to 1,110 on the web through SimplyHired!

One very cool feature of reviewing these results is that you can leverage LinkedIn’s “Jobs insider” – which allows you to check your LinkedIn network to see if you are connected to anyone within the company who posted the job.

It is important to know that when you click the “Who do I know at Company X” – you won’t just get people you’re connected to – you will get results of EVERYONE with a LinkedIn profile that lists that target company as their current employer. If they are not in your network, you won’t see a name listed, just a title. I will show you later how to use Google to “unlock” results of people who are not in your network. Stay tuned.

I clicked on “Who do I know at Tower Research Capital” and I got 59 results.  I then decided to see who I could find that’s currently working at Tower Research that has a current title mentioning HR, Human Resources, Recruiter, Recruiting, or Accounting Manager.

Here is the exact search I entered into the title field, and I selected “current:”

(“human resources” OR HR OR recruiter OR recruiting OR “accounting manager”)

Then I hit “search” and got 4 results:

I landed the Director of Recruiting and Human Resources, as well as 2 Human Resources associates. It appears that result #2 is a false positive (she works at The Lime Group – she probably forgot to put an end-date for her employment at Tower Research).

Using LinkedIn Groups to Establish Contact

Let’s say you want to try to reach out to Samantha Bartner. You can view her profile to see if she is a member of any groups. Why? Because if she is a member of a LinkedIn group, and you join the group, you can send her a message even if she is not in your network.

Let’s check:

Clicking on the group takes you to the group, and we can see that the group is open to everyone. Simply click “Join Group.” Some groups can take some time to join because a group moderator manually reviews all of the request to join, and this can take a while. In these cases, you can try sending a message to the group manager to let them know of your request to join.

After you’ve joined the group (or any group) – you can then send messages directly to anyone else in the group that’s opted to receive messages from group members (which is most people). Click on the “More” tab and you will be able to select “Members”

From the list of members, you will notice that you can click “Send message” to send the person a message even if they are not in your network:

Speaking of LinkedIn Groups

Remember when I mentioned that there are other places to search for jobs? LinkedIn recently added a “jobs” feature within groups, and it is FREE for group members to post jobs there. That means you can search for groups that might have jobs posted within them that you’re looking for.

There are a couple of places where you can search for groups – I’m using LinkedIn’s search bar to search for groups mentioning “accounting.”

There are 1,109, and some have 10′s of 1000′s of members.

Taking it one step further, I decided to look for groups that mention “accounting” and “new york” – there are 8.

Once you join a group, you can check to see if the group has enabled the “jobs” feature. If they have, you can see and click it here to look for jobs and respond:

You can join up to 50 groups – use them wisely!

What If You Have A Small LinkedIn Network?

Have a small LinkedIn network? When you search for people you don’t see many people’s names – just private profiles? No problem! I’m going to let you in on a little “secret” that many sourcers and recruiters know – how to X-Ray search LinkedIn.

The vast majority of LinkedIn profiles are “public,” meaning that they are published on the web. In fact, I believe that when anyone creates a LinkedIn profile, the default/recommended setting is “Full View,” which automatically makes the profile available for Internet search engines to index them and make them available for searching. Only if someone takes the time to go into their “Account & Settings” and change their “Public Profile” to “None/off” would they not show up in web (Google, etc.) searches.

If a LinkedIn profile is published to the web, it can be found by using Internet search engines. This means that anyone can leverage a search engine such as Google and use the site: command to X-Ray search LinkedIn for all public profiles – whether they are in that person’s network or not.

This is especially helpful for those who have relatively small networks and for those who do not pay for premium access to Linkedin. When X-Raying LinkedIn, LinkedIn doesn’t “know” who you are, so it cannot limit your search results to only those people in your network.  Also, with a free account, users are limited to viewing the first 100 results of any search when using LinkedIn’s search interface. Using a site like Google to X-Ray into LinkedIn, you can view up to 1000 results.

How to X-Ray LinkedIn

The reason it’s called an “X-Ray” search is because the site: command, supported by some search engines like Google, allows you to search 1 site instead of the entire Internet – so in a sense you are “X-Raying” (looking specifically) into LinkedIn through the Internet.

It’s as simple as copying and pasting this search into Google, and adding your location phrase, keywords, titles, and company (if you like).

Start with this – the core “X-Ray” search in Google:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory

Then add your location phrase in quotation marks - it’s what’s under the title and current company on local profiles:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory “greater new york city area”

Then add your keywords, titles, and/or company.  Remember that search we were trying to perform above where we wanted to find people with one of a few recruiting/HR titles who works at Tower Research? Let’s add the company (in quotations – any phrase more than 1 word needs to be in quotations) and title phrase.

Add this to Google and search:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory “greater new york city area” “tower research capital” (“human resources” OR HR OR recruiter OR recruiting OR “accounting manager)

This is what you’ll get:

Notice Samantha and Eve? They came up in my search on LinkedIn previously, but I happen to have a relatively large LinkedIn network. If you have a smaller network, when you search inside of LinkedIn using their interface, or searching through jobs to find people, Samantha and Eve’s profiles may come up – but you may not able to view their names because they may not be in your network.

However, if you use the above X-Ray search format to target a company and specific titles in a specific location (as we just did), you will be able to see ANY public profile and potentiall identify recruiters, HR professionals, and perhaps even hiring managers at companies you are targeting as potential employers.

If you’d like to see a brief video on how to effectively X-Ray search Linkedin, which details how to target local people, and how to search by industry, click the image below:

X-Ray String to Search for Current Title

You can take the X-Ray search one step further and try to target people with specific current titles. For example, this search string employs Google’s wildcard (asterisk) operator to target the phrase on LinkedIn profiles where current title is listed – you can insert your target title where I have TITLE:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory “current * TITLE”

Click on the image below to view a brief video on how to effectively X-Ray search LinkedIn targeting people based on current title:

Unlocking “Private” Profiles

When searching from within LinkedIn, you may encounter a result of someone that is not in your LinkedIn nework - there will be no name listed:

And when you click on a result like this, instead of showing you a name, it says “Private.”

When you encounter this, do not despair – you can unlock many “private” results such as these using the X-Ray technique. This is because many “private” results are not truly private – you just can’t see the profile and the person’s name because they are not in your LinkedIn network. However, unless the person went out of their way to change their account settings to not publish their profile to the web, Internet search engines have indexed the profile and it can be both searched for and found. And when you use a search engine to X-Ray search into LinkedIn, LinkedIn has no idea who you are, so it cannot prevent you from seeing people who are not in your network.

Click on the image below for a short video that walks through 2 examples of unlocking private profiles using the X-Ray search technique:

Company Research

I am surprised by how many people are unaware of LinkedIn’s robust company research functionality. With over 40M worldwide LinkedIn profiles and 21M in the United States alone, LinkedIn is able to “capture” quite a bit of employee data.

If you’re looking to research local companies that might be potential employers, LinkedIn is a great place to look. For example, let’s say you live in the NYC area and you’re interested in searching for companies to target for employment. Click on LinkedIn’s “Companies:”

Here, you can search for specific companies or keywords, or even by industry. If you want to see the entire list of industries, in the lower right hand corner you can find the link to do exactly that.

Let’s browse for Pharmaceuticals:

Be sure to delete the word that LinkedIn automatically enters in the keyword field – if you leave it in it will actually artificially reduce the results. Also, now’s the time to enter your location criteria to find local companies:

Now we’ve found that there are 345 pharmaceutical companies that have a presence in the greater NYC area. Even if you see that the headquarters are somewhere other than NYC (as per Sepracor below), there ARE Sepracor employees that live in the NYC area, and there is likely a Sepracor location in the area. You can also see that LinkedIn will tell you if any of the companies matching your search criteria have jobs – sweet!

If we click on Johnson & Johnson, we can see some current employees, former employees…

…as well as new hires, recent promotions and changes, and popular profiles – all of which may be people that could be useful for you to research and connect with in your job search. Additionally, here is where you click on the location (Greater New York City Area) to find ALL profiles of current J&J employees on LinkedIn.

Once you click on the appropriate location (NYC area in this case), you’re taken to ALL of the LinkedIn profiles of people in that metro area who list J&J as their current employer. Here is where you can enter keywords, titles, and even narrow the zip radius to find people who may be helpful to your job search if you are interested in employment with Johnson & Johnson.

For example, there are 277 people that have a title of recruiter, recruiting, HR, or human resources at J&J in the NY metro area.

Harness the Power of LinkedIn

If you’re ever in a position to seek employment, now you’re empowered to use LinkedIn effectively to find job postings on LinkedIn, the web, and in groups, as well as how to search for and find recruiters, HR professionals, and decision makers both using LinkedIn’s search interface as well as using the X-Ray search technique to find people who are not in your LinkedIn network. On top of all of that, you now know how to leverage LinkedIn’s robust company research features to find companies in your area and then drill down to people you might want to connect with to help you in your job search.

Happy hunting!