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.

I just updated my free sourcing and recruiting resources page!

You can always navigate to the free resources page at any time by using the top nav bar which will escort you to a library of nearly 50 knowledge-laden links!

All in one page you can find a collection of articles related to sourcing and recruiting, including the 5 levels of talent mining/candidate sourcing, candidate sourcing best practices and mistakes, social recruiting, how to search LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Spoke, ZoomInfo and Jigsaw for free, Boolean logic, semantic search, Lean / Just-In-Time sourcing and recruiting, and automated candidate sourcing and matching solutions.

Click the image below to be taken to the free sourcing and recruiting resources page:

Be sure to bookmark or tag this page as I will continue to add more free sourcing and recruiting resources. Also – please “pay it forward” – share this page with anyone who might benefit!

Thanks!

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!

It’s been a long time coming, but I have finally gotten around to creating a resources page that essentially contains a “best of” compilation of Boolean Black Belt articles. It contains 10 “How-To” posts ranging from how to search Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and Google for candidates, as well as articles on semantic search, Boolean, extended Boolean, and the top 15 common e-sourcing mistakes.

Here’s where to find it:

Enjoy!

I recently wrote an article that definitively defined the “Boolean Black Belt” concept. In this post, I explain how to become one. The good news is that you don’t have to be born with the “Boolean gene” (no one is). The bad news (for some) is that it requires a great deal of what is known as “deliberate practice.”  

The Talent Excuse

As I have worked with and trained many recruiters over the span of my career, I’ve often had people “explain away” my ability to leverage technology (ATS/CRM, Internet, Social Media, Job Board databases, etc.) for talent identification and acquisition with the excuse that I have a “talent” for it. In my first few years in recruiting, I accepted that at face value. I never really wondered where my ability came from - I assumed I actually did have a “talent” for talent mining.

Talent is Overrated

Over the years I’ve come to understand and appreciate that I don’t necessarily have an innate ”talent” for leveraging sources of human capital data - no one is born with an e-recruiting gene. What I actually have is 2 factors that I believe have contributed significantly to my skills and ability. 

#1 I have a combination of personality traits that have likely facilitated my learning of the art and science of talent mining: I’m competitive (I hate to lose), analytical, detail oriented, don’t give up easily (okay, maybe not at all), and I really enjoy figuring things out. Nothing really special there – certainly not a rare combination of traits, and I’m sure many people share them. However, personality traits are not something most people have a choice in.  

#2 Lots of “deliberate practice.” This is something anyone can choose to do, and it’s what really separates world-class performers from everyone else. 

Not All Practice is Created Equal

Back in October 2008, I read an article in Fortune magazine titled “Why Talent is Overrated,” by Geoff Colvin. It completely changed my understanding of my own so-called “talents” and how I came to achieve them. If you haven’t read the article or the book that Geoff wrote (Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else) – I strongly urge you to do so. They are fascinating reads that will give you significant insight as to exactly why some people are so much better than others at what they do. 

In both the article and the book, Geoff Colvin articulates the concept of “deliberate practice” very well - it is a unique kind of activity, characterized by several elements that when combined, form a powerful whole greater than the sum of their parts. As I read Geoff’s content, I realized that I owe a great deal of my e-recruiting skill and ability to ”deliberate practice” and I firmly believe anyone for the most part can replicate the conditions under which I learned the art and science of e-recruiting.

I will only briefly summarize all of the critical elements that define and differentiate “deliberate practice” from what most people think of when it comes to practice, because Geoff Colvin does such a fantastic job of going into significant detail when explaining the concept. Trust me – at least read the article, if not the book.

#1 Deliberate Practice Improves Performance by Design

Deliberate practice is specifically designed to improve performance by continually stretching you just beyond your current ability. Unfortunately, when most people “practice,” they are just doing what they’ve always done – which does nothing to improve performance. Unlike many professional athletes, most business professionals (including sourcers and recruiters) do not go to work every day specifically trying to get better at what they do. It’s something many people may talk about, but very few people actually do.

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

If you are looking to master talent mining – you must specifically design your approach at work to improve your performance – not simply meet goals and objectives. You will need to specifically practice what you are not currently good at, always seeking that which is just beyond your ability. Do you passionately attack positions that you’ve never worked before, that you don’t have a pipeline for, that are difficult for you to understand, or that require a rare combination of skills that is difficult to find? Or do you post the job, hope for the right people to respond, and move on to something you’re more comfortable with? When you finally do find a candidate, are you relieved at your success and acheivement, or do you ask yourself whether or not this is the BEST candidate you could find?

#2 Deliberate Practice Requires High Repetition

Properly conducted, deliberate practice involves a high amount of repetition, and it is critical to choose an activity that is just beyond your current ability. When it comes to deliberate practice, Colvin points out that volume matters, explaining that ”Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent.”

If you seek to become a Boolean Black Belt, you will need to practice the entire process of analyzing and interpreting job requirements, translating the requirements into Boolean search strings that are highly likely to find the right/best people, analyzing the results for relevance, and continuously refining the search strings based on the observed relevance and intel gained from each successive search - A LOT. When it comes to deliberate practice, volume of repetition is key.

#3 Deliberate Practice Involves Continuous Feedback

When performing deliberate practice, feedback on results is ideally continuously available. When applying this concept to practicing talent mining, the continuous feedback should be painfully obvious – with every search you run, you are either finding a large volume of highly relevant results (well matched/qualified candidates), or not (lots of results, many false positives, and few highly relevant results). 

As Colvin points out, the aspect of continuous feedback may seem obvious, but not necessarily so when results require interpretation – in many cases a coach, teacher, or mentor is a critical factor in providing feedback. You may think your search results are highly relevant, or perhaps represent the best candidates a particular source you are searching can offer – but until a highly proficient mentor reviews and assesses the results objectively, you may actually be in a dangerous state of ignorant bliss. You don’t know what you don’t know, and you can’t find what your Boolean search strings are incapable of returning. 

#4 Deliberate Practice is Mentally Challenging

Deliberate practice requires a high degree of mental focus and concentration, differentiating it from simple and mindless repetition. Specifically focusing on the analysis of the relevance of your search results, questioning whether or not you in fact found all of the best candidates that a particular source has to offer, and continually seeking ways to not only improve the relevance of the results, but also to increase the quantity of high quality results requires significant focus and concentration. Talent mining is 90% thought process and strategy, 10% Boolean operators and syntax.

#5 Deliberate Practice is Hard Work

As Colvin so aptly points out, “Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.” Deliberate practice requires you to specifically target what you’re not good at, which can be an uncomfortable and perhaps painful, if not enlightening, process – which explains why most people actually shy away from deliberate practice. If it were easy and fun to become truly great at something – everyone would be so. That explains why there are so few true top performers/masters in every endeavor. 

Most sourcers and recruiters can run Boolean search strings to find candidates in ATS/CRM applications, on the Internet, social media sites, and job board resume datbases – so it seems easy. But just because you can do something, it doesn’t actually mean you’re actually any good at it, or that you’re getting ALL of the BEST results possible. This goes back to point #3 – many people are not capable of objectively judging the quantity and quality of their search results and also rarely have access to a basis of comparison. If you are not even aware that you could be getting more and better results more quickly, talent mining seems simple and the idea that you need perform hard work to practice to improve your skills and abilities may seem preposterous.

Being satisfied with your current level of ability at anything is a sure sign that either #1 you’re actually not as good as you think you are, or #2 you don’t prioritize or commit to improving your skills – or perhaps both!

#6 Deliberate Practice Focuses on the Process, Not the End Result

To become a top performer, you need to set goals that specifically focus on improving your skills and ability. Colvin explains that ”…the poorest performers don’t set goals at all; they just slog through their work. Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome – win the order; get the new project proposal done. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.”

When I read that, especially that last sentence, I literally had an epiphany – looking back at my career in recruiting, I was never really focused on achieving placements, which appears to be the obvious goal of recruiting. I was always specifically focused on finding the best possible candidates for the positions I focused on each day in the least amount of time. As a result, over time, I got really good at quickly finding a large volume of highly qualified and well matched candidates – which resulted in a record number of placements.

It is a deceptively simple difference – focusing on the process of achieving the outcome rather than the outcome itself – but it does define the vast majority of top performers in every field.

#7 Deliberate Practice Requires Metacognition

Research has shown that top performers monitor what is happening in their own minds and ask questions of themselves. This process is known as metacognition. John H. Flavell, an American developmental psychologist, explains that metacognition “refers to one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes or anything related to them, e.g., the learning-relevant properties of information or data.” Colvin points out that top performers perform metacognition ”much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.”

To become an expert at leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition, metacognition plays a critical role in the process of anaylzing and interpreting job requirements and determining what terms to include in your Boolean search string as well as which ones to specifically exclude. This involves challenging your assumptions as well as the information in the job description and requirements, and pausing to reflect and observe your own thought processes: Do I really understand this position? How many different titles could candidates performing this role have? How many different ways can this type of experience be described in a resume, and how can I effectively search for all of them? Would ALL candidates with this type of experience ALWAYS explicitly mention the required technology and/or skills in their resume? Am I learning from every result/resume I review?

#8 Deliberate Practice Involves Continuous Improvement

Feedback on your e-recruiting efforts can come in many forms – from your phone screen and/or interview with the candidates you found through your searches (were they well qualified and interested in potential opportunities?), to the client’s/manager’s/team’s interview with the candidates you’ve sourced and screened (did both the candidate AND the hiring authorities feel it was a great match?), all the way to a successful hire that “sticks” (the ultimate feedback loop).

The final key to deliberate practice is how you respond after you’ve completed your work and evaluated the result. Average performers shy away from asking themslves the difficult questions. If some of the candidates you’ve sourced with your Boolean search strings ended up not being interested in your opportunity (regardless of whether or not they were actually available) – you should try and figure out how you can be more accurate with your searches the next time around. Don’t assume that it’s “normal” for some candidates to not be interested in your opportunity – if they’re not, your searches weren’t accurate and you’re calling the wrong people.

Even if your e-recruiting efforts have resulted in a hire – instead of congratulating yourself on a job well done, ask if you could have found an even better candidate more quickly. Top perfomers strive to figure out how to perform better the next time, regardless of the result, as they judge themselves differently than most people do – to a higher standard. 

Conclusion

I have never received any formal (or informal, for that matter) training in secondary sourcing/Boolean searching, nor have I ever used a cheat sheet. While training and materials can certainly help get you going in the right direction, if you want to be world-class at leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition – quite simply it takes a lot of “deliberate practice.” You can’t pick and choose from the list of the core principles of deliberate practice detailed above – it requires all of them combined.

Many people say they want to be the best at what they do and to achieve great results, but most aren’t willing to commit to the time, effort, and deliberate practice it requires. Being great at anything is hard work – there is no substitute, and there is no “easy button.” And that’s precisely why there are so few top performers in every field.

I’ve recently received a few requests from my European readers (thank you!) to write about how to use LinkedIn to simultaneously search multiple countries to identify candidates. In this post I will do exactly that – show you how you can search for candidates across multiple countries in one search. Although I will be using European countries in the examples, the same techniques can be successfully applied to any combination of countries.

LinkedIn’s Interface

If it was obvious how to search for people from multiple countries using LinkedIn’s search interface, I likely would not have received requests for help. I’ve personally never run into the need to source from a variety of countries, so I enjoyed taking on the challenge of figuring this out.

What I quickly discovered, as I am sure several others have, is that it’s actually impossible to simultaneously search multiple countries using LinkedIn’s search interface – you are limited to one country at a time.

Moving beyond LinkedIn’s advanced search form, I tried using LinkedIn’s advanced operators to create an OR statement such as (country:Germany OR country:France)

While the query executes, you can see that it is not processing the syntax the way that one would think it should. If you explore the results, you will find that all of the results are from France – I could not find any from Germany.

I even tried experimenting with quotation marks just to see the effect it would have on the search, changing the query to: (”country:Germany” OR “country:France”). While that does return results, it quite obviously does not work as intended – it pulls results that include people from the U.S., Luxembourg, Canada, and Pakistan.

However, I do want to take this opportunity to show you something you may not have realized before – you can search an entire country with a single search. There is no need to actually enter in a postal code and limit yourself to a maximum of 100 miles/160 kilometers. If you leave the postal code blank, you will effectively search the entire country.

Here we can see that there are a total of 465,084 people living in Germany who have created a LinkedIn profile.

Going Outside of LinkedIn

If using LinkedIn’s search interface doesn’t work, our only other option is to use an Internet search engine in an attempt to find profiles of people across multiple countries at the same time.

In order to do this, you’ll have to do a little (or a lot, depending on the countries involved) research to find out what LinkedIn’s verbiage is for each major metropolitan area in the countries you’d like to search.

For example let’s take a look at France. If you already know the postal code for a major city, you can enter it. Otherwise, you’ll need to click on “Lookup.”

That will open another window that will show you the postal codes for that country. You can either enter a city name to search, or scroll down the list and find the appropriate code:

Once you have the codes that cover all of the major metropolitan areas for your country, you’ll need to plug them into LinkedIn’s search and examine results to find LinkedIn’s exact verbiage for each metro area. For example, let’s take a look at Nice (06000) and Paris (75352) to demonstrate how this is done.

Running the search, we can view a result and make note of the exact phrase that is listed on profiles of people on LinkedIn who live in the Nice area of France.

Doing the same thing using the Paris postal code, we find that LinkedIn’s location verbiage for Paris.

Now that we’ve done 2 metro areas in France, let’s do the same thing for 2 areas in Germany – Cologne (using postal code 40225) and Frankfurt (using postal code 60311). I repeated the process detailed above for Nice and Paris, and discovered that LinkedIn’s location phrases for those two areas of Germany are ”Cologne Area, Germany” and “Frankfurt Am Main Area.”

So far, it’s looking as if LinkedIn’s location verbiage for areas in Europe (CITY Area, COUNTRY) is more consistent than those of U.S. metro areas, whose formats can vary widely (much to many a sourcer’s chagrin!).

Important Note about Quotation Marks!

I build all of my queries in Notepad, which ensures that the quotation marks I use are exactly the same as those of Google and pretty much any search engine, database, or social network. You will see “curved” quotes in this post (my WordPress theme alters them) – and if you attempt to cut and paste search strings directly from this blog, they may not work properly for exact phrase searching because of the font which affects the quotation marks. It sounds silly, but I assure you it’s true. Be sure to use the proper quotation marks as demonstrated below:

It’s X-Ray Time!

Now that we’ve gathered a few of these location phrases across France and Germany, we can put them to use in an X-Ray search string.  Going to Google, we can use my standard inclusion-focused (sounds fancy, doesn’t it?) X-Ray search and add all 4 location phrases we’ve researched for Nice and Paris in France and Berlin and Frankfurt for Germany into an OR statement:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory (”Nice Area, France” OR “Paris Area, France” OR “Cologne Area, Germany” OR “Frankfurt Am Main Area, Germany”)

Click here for the search results.  As you can see from the screenshot below, this search string pulls people from each metro area and country:

Let’s Get Crafty

While it’s great that our search strategy worked and enabled us to search for people from 4 metro areas across 2 countries, Google limits you to 32 search terms in a query. Once you start adding search terms to your query and throwing in location phrases for a large number of countries, you’re sure to run out of space in some instances.

So I decided to see if I could get away with shortening those location phrases for LinkedIn down to “Area, France” and “Area, Germany” to see if I could effectively search an entire country with a single phrase, without having to search each major metro area.

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory (”Area, France” OR ”Area, Germany”)

It actually worked quite well, but I noticed a little more “noise” in terms of false positives such as recently updated profiles. So I refined the search further to remove those:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:updates (”Area, France” OR “Area, Germany”)

That actually works surprisingly well, retrieving results of LinkedIn profiles across various areas of France and Germany, with relatively few false positives. Click here to explore the results. Here is a sample screenshot:

Adding More Countries to the Mix

I decided to take this experiment a little further and choose 2 more European countries. I used LinkedIn to look up a postal code for Kensington in the United Kingdom (W8), and Zurich in Switzerland (8001).

Here I ran into my first deviation of the “CITY Area, COUNTRY” format we found to be consistent across France and Germany. For the different locations in the U.K., I noticed the format changed to “CITY, United Kingdom.” However, Switzerland appears to bide by the “CITY Area, COUNTRY” format, as I uncovered “Zürich Area, Switzerland,” and “Basel Area, Switzerland” when I ran a search for 50 miles/80 kilometers from postal code 8001.

While adding “Area, Switzerland” to an X-Ray search should find people from all areas of Switzerland on LinkedIn, we cannot accomplish the same thing with LinkedIn’s location verbiage for the United Kingdom. However, we can try using Google’s asterisk wildcard query modifier, which represents one or more words.  Let’s give it a shot by itself before adding it to an OR statement to X-Ray LinkedIn across 4 countries.

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:updates ”*, United Kingdom”

Success! Review the results here, and refer to the screenshot below to see how Google pulled LinkedIn profiles from various areas of the U.K.:

I took a random sample of results from pages 1 through 10 and found a high degree of relevance – profiles of people from various areas across the United Kingdom – and relatively few false positives. I also experimented with using 2 asterisks (e.g., “* *, United Kingdom”) and it returned fewer results (2M vs 3M), but appeared to work equally as well in terms of relevance.

The Grand Finale - Searching France, Germany, the U.K. and Switzerland

Here we go – an X-Ray search of LinkedIn across 4 countries. Let’s throw in a couple of basic search terms as well:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:updates SAP “Business Analyst” (”Area, France” OR “Area, Germany” OR “*, United Kingdom” OR “Area, Switzerland”)

Click here for the results. When you look at the results, most appear to be dominated by profiles from the United Kingdom. However, if you scroll deep enough into the results, you can find proof that this search technique does in fact allow you to simultaneously search across multiple countries with a single query and get results from each:

Using Country Codes to X-Ray Search LinkedIn with Google

If you want to search beyond specific areas of countries and search entire countries instead, you can simply modify your site:linkedin.com to the appropriate country. As of 6/1/10, there are apparently 98 country-specific LinkedIn domains (the United States doesn’t get one) – click here to view the list.

To search all of the U.K., for example, you would simply use site:uk.linkedin.com with the rest of your standard X-Ray search syntax/criteria.

Conclusion

While LinkedIn does not offer the ability to search for profiles across multiple countries with a single query, we’ve proven that you can accomplish this feat through the creative application of the X-Ray search technique and Google.

If you are in need of searching a large number of countries concurrently, you will have to invest time to perform the necessary research to uncover LinkedIn’s specific location verbiage for each country. The good news is, you’ll only have to do this once, presuming you save your findings.

It’s convenient that LinkedIn’s location phrases for a number of European countries appears to be consistent in format, making it especially easy to exploit for effective and concise multi-country searching. It’s also nice to know that through the use of Google’s asterisk wildcard operator, we can also search entire countries that don’t share a similar location verbiage format.

However, whenever you employ a wildcard operator, especially Google’s (which can represent 1 or more words), you must be aware that there is a greater risk for returning false positives. When I was inspecting random samples from the results, I did come across a few false positives where the phrase “United Kingdom” was present yet it was not in reference to someone who actually currently lives in the U.K.. Thankfully, I found those to be few and far between.

Thank you for reading my blog, and I hope you found this article helpful. I like to hear from my readers – so if there is a particular challenge you’re facing with your e-sourcing efforts, let me know. I just might be able to put together a post to help you and others who are facing the same struggle.

LinkedIn is one of the most searchable social networks, and with many users filing out their profiles with as much detail as a resume, LinkedIn offers the deepest occupational and professional data of any of the social media sites. As such, it is extremely important that sourcers and recruiters learn how to master all of the various ways you can search LinkedIn to find potential candidates. 

Through text and video, in this article I will show you how to extract the most value and results from LinkedIn’s search interface, X-Ray searching LinkedIn, unlocking out-of-network results, and leveraging LinkedIn’s unique advanced search operators. 

LinkedIn’s Search Interface

LinkedIn’s search interface is quite robust, supporting full Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT) for both keyword and structured field search (current/past title, current/past company, and school), allowing you to create complex and precise search strings.  Interestingly, I haven’t hit the limit of LinkedIn’s search capability yet in terms of the maximum number of characters/words it can accept – it appears bottomless. Also of note is that even with a free LinkedIn account, you are able to save up to 3 searches.

Click the image below to watch a short video of how to use LinkedIn’s search interface effectively, how to save searches, and a demonstration of LinkedIn accepting a search string of 1000 words.

As you can see, pretty much the only ”nice-to-have” search capability missing from LinkedIn is root-word/stem search.  

X-Ray Searching 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.

Exclusion-Focused X-Ray String for Google

This string is designed to find and retrieve profiles by excluding non-profile results:

site:linkedin.com -intitle:answers -intitle:updated -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs -intitle:profile -inurl:blog -intitle:groups -inurl:events

Inclusion-Focused X-Ray String for Google

Instead of trying to exclude a long list of false positive non-profile terms, this string is designed to retrieve results by targeting ”in” or “pub” in the urls of LinkedIn profiles - a Boolean Black Belt exclusive:

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

Click on the image below to view a brief video on how to effectively X-Ray search Linkedin, which details how to target local candidates, and how to search by industry:

I will leave the comparison of inclusion-focused vs. exclusion-focused X-Ray strings to another post, or to someone else feeling frisky enough to tackle it.

X-Ray String to Search for Current Title

This string employs Google’s wildcard (asterisk) operator to target the phrase on LinkedIn profiles where current title is listed:

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 will inevitably at some point 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:

Advanced Operators

IMPORTANT NOTE: 8/24/09 It apears that since LinkedIn implemented their “dynamic refinements,” they no longer support their advanced search operators. I’ve written them and have not received a reply at this time. I’ll keep you posted.

In addition to supporting the standard Boolean operators, LinkedIn has their own set of unique ”advanced operators” that allow you to “hand-code” search strings that control most of LinkedIn’s structured fields (current/past title, current/past company, school, industry, joined, and location) without having to use the advanced search interface. In my opinion – this is one of the coolest and most useful aspects of searching Linkedin.

Click on the image below for a brief video showing you how to take advantage of LinkedIn’s advanced operators, and how you can combine them with standard Boolean queries to find people:

Conclusion

When it comes to searching LinkedIn to find candidates, you have several options – be sure to master and employ them all! 

Here’s a breakdown of the Pros/Cons of each:

LinkedIn’s search interface:

Pros:

• Full Boolean logic in keyword, title, company, and school fields
• Ability to create insanely long and precise search strings
• Can search structured fields including current/past title, current/past company, school
• Precise location search, down to 10 mile zip code radius

Cons 

• No root-word/wildcard search (LinkedIn, are you reading this?)
• You can’t see people who aren’t in your network (by design, I know)
• You’re limited to viewing the first 100 results with a free account

X-Ray Searching LinkedIn:

Pros:

• You can see ANY public profile, whether they are in your network or not
• You can view up to 1000 results
• You can leverage configurable proximity search (via Exalead) to find people on LinkedIn based on what they DO, not just what they say

Cons 

• No support of full Boolean logic (via Google)
• Limited to 32 search terms (via Google)
• No structured field search (current/past title, current/past company, school)
• Limited to metro area search (no precise zip code search)

LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators

Pros:

• You can hand-code search strings using both Boolean operators and LinkedIn’s advanced operators to search for keywords and structured field data, controlling practically all of LinkedIn’s search fields
• All of the benefits of using LinkedIn’s search interface
• You can save your searches in Notepad and simply copy and paste them any time you need them, as pseudo-saved searches

Cons 

• All the limitations of searching within LinkedIn (can’t see out-of-network results, limited to 100 with a free account)

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

Click on the presentation below to review:

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