If you’re in HR or recruiting, you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to (and likely believe in) the concept that proactively building passive talent pipelines is critical to talent acquisition success. Some would say that pipelining passive candidates is one of the sacred cows of recruiting – you just don’t question it.

It’s my opinion that the belief in talent pipelines is driven heavily by the fact that it can be incredibly difficult to quickly find suitably qualified candidates once you actually have a hiring need if you don’t already have the right people identified and queued up.

As such, it seems only logical to begin to identify potential candidates prior to your actual need so that when you do need to hire, you have a number of people you can contact, engage, interview and make a final hiring decision from.

Sounds great in theory, doesn’t it?

I thoroughly enjoy sacred cow tipping, and I’m hard-wired to automatically question anything that seems to be generally accepted as truth. So if you’ll indulge me, in this post I am going to expose you to a critical flaw in the actual practice of passive candidate pipelining that no one seems to like to talk about.

What is a Talent Pipeline?

A talent pipeline is a group of people that you have identified and engaged who have skills and experience that closely match a specific future hiring need. You don’t pipeline prospective candidates for a job you’re looking to hire for ASAP.

Talent pipelines typically consist of passive and non-job seekers, because you can’t really pipeline active job seekers as they will likely have taken a new job with another company by the time you are ready to hire.

The Passive Candidate Pipelining Problem

Once you engage a passive or non-job seeker who looks to be a great match for a future hiring need, if they are interested in the opportunity to join your organization at some point in the future, you may succeed in adding them to your talent pipeline.

What you will also undoubtedly succeed in doing is plant the seed of the idea of transitioning out of their current role and employer.

Once that seed is planted, it can and often does grow beyond your control.

After you’ve engaged them about potential future opportunities with your company, they begin to think more about the next step in their career.

The moment you engage a passive or non-job seeker and discuss the idea of leaving their current employer for another opportunity, you often effectively convert them into a casual or even an active job seeker. It may not happen immediately, but that’s not the issue.

The issue is that you were trying to build your talent pipeline with someone who wasn’t looking for a new job so that they would likely still be available to be recruited when you were ready to hire.

However, once you plant the seed of the idea of making a career move with your company at some point, most people logically begin to wonder about other opportunities – what else might be out there for them.

That’s when they reach out to their professional network. They start to pay attention to all of those calls, emails and InMails they get from recruiters that they have historically ignored. They start to notice those targeted jobs on the right side of their Facebook page.

They might even begin searching online for jobs just to see what else might be available.

Fast forward to 1 or 2 months down the road when you actually have funding and final approval for your job openings and you reach out to your passive talent pipeline – what do you think happens?

Although they weren’t really looking to make a change when you first engaged them, you should not be surprised to find many of the people in your pipeline are no longer available, having accepted offers elsewhere – in the worst-case scenario, with one of your competitors!

What’s the Solution?

The inadvertent conversion of passive and non-job seekers into casual and active job seekers is a critical flaw in the concept and practice of passive candidate pipelining that no one seems to like to talk about, most likely because they don’t have an answer to the problem.

Is there an answer?

Is there a better way?

I have my ideas, but I’m more interested in hearing yours.

While no company has a flawless recruiting system, process or solution, there is a glaring problem shared by many corporate recruiting functions from which the Fortune 500 and the Big 4 are not immune.

As some of the most respected companies in the world invest quite a bit of time, energy and money into social recruiting efforts, interactive recruiting solutions, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and career site optimization, one critical piece of the recruiting puzzle seems to be all but completely overlooked.

Before you read any further – do you believe you have an idea of what I might be talking about?

From the conversations I’ve had over the years with many corporate recruiters and recruiting leaders from small companies all the way to the Fortune 500 and the Big 4, as well as the contract recruiters who are hired to help these companies source and recruit talent, I believe that the #1 mistake in corporate recruiting is the failure to fully realize and take appropriate action on the value of the human capital data they already possess.

The #1 Mistake in Corporate Recruiting

In my opinion, the single biggest corporate recruiting flunk is the failure to accurately value and appropriately leverage the human capital data they have in their applicant tracking and/or CRM systems.

Let me show you the depth and complexity of some of the contributing factors of this issue.

The Shiny New Candidate Syndrome

A bachelor’s degree in psychology certainly doesn’t make me a psychologist – but it doesn’t take an advanced degree to recognize that it seems to be human nature to want what they don’t already have.

Certainly I cannot be the only person to be confused by companies investing a large amount of time, focus, energy and money into social recruiting, fancy and high-tech job posting systems and optimized career sites in order to identify and attract new candidates when they might already have the best candidate sitting in their ATS.

Getting a shiny new candidate via your Facebook advertising campaign or your LinkedIn Recruiter account is perceived by some to be “cutting edge,” sexy and seems to afford bragging rights at recruiting conferences. Heck, anything recruiting related that can be tagged as “social” is certainly cooler than ATS mining (for those few companies that can and actually do mine their ATS!).

However, who is to say you don’t actually have faster and lower cost access to better qualified candidates already in your database?

To be sure, the most recently identified candidate is not necessarily the best candidate, and I can speak from experience when I say that some of the best candidates I have ever placed came from “old” resumes – some as old as 4 years since the last update. Someone I recently trained was happy to report he had made a placement by calling a candidate whose resume had not been updated in over 6 years!

Instead of focusing so heavily on trying to find “new” candidates from external sources, companies should spend more time leveraging the candidates they already have at their fingertips.

Resumes acquired in the past that were never reviewed by someone are essentially new candidates – they might be “old” in your ATS, but they’re new to you when you finally dig them up and review them for the first time! There are plenty of “new,” unidentified candidates in corporate ATS/CRM resume databases – you just have to look for them!

The Big Fat Ugly Assumption

Why are so many companies and recruiters focused on looking outside their own database in places like LinkedIn, Monster, Twitter, Facebook, etc. for talent?

I’ll tell you why.

Although largely unspoken and unrecognized, the big fat ugly assumption in recruiting is that every candidate captured in an ATS/CRM has been reviewed, and that if a candidate fits for any position, someone would know.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

I’d estimate that a good portion of every ATS consists of candidates whose resumes have been acquired, but not reviewed, and thus not identified. If that sounds a bit backward, that’s because it is.

When relying on job posting for the majority of the acquisition of candidate resumes, you can actually acquire a resume that is not reviewed. And if you haven’t reviewed a candidate’s resume, you can’t identify them as a potential match for any position, let alone the one they responded to.

If your organization isn’t putting enough emphasis on searching your resume database, you can be assured you have plenty of candidates that have technically been “acquired” because you’ve captured their resume, but have not been identified because no one reviewed them, and thus they cannot be matched to any position.

Even if a company does review 100% of all applicants for the positions they apply to, many great candidates are still overlooked, are not properly identified and are never matched to positions they are qualified for. See “Right Candidate, Wrong Job,” and “The Time Value of Resumes” below.

Do not make the mistake of assuming that someone has searched for and reviewed every possible candidate match in your corporate ATS/CRM. As I said above, there are plenty of “new,” unidentified candidates in corporate ATS/CRM resume databases – you just have to search for them.

A Heavy Reliance On Posting Jobs

Many companies rely heavily on posting jobs for talent attraction and acquisition. I’m aware that some companies get such a high volume of responses from their online job postings and career sites that their recruiters are so buried with reactively processing applicants that they practically have no time to proactively source candidates from their own ATS.

While it may sound like a good thing to have a steady stream of people interested in joining your company and applying to your job postings, no matter what technology or solution you use, there are some serious limitations and universal truths to using job postings to identify talent:

• Posting jobs is a passive candidate identification and acquisition strategy – you are 100% reliant on the right people finding or stumbling across your opening.
• Posting jobs offers no control over the qualifications of the candidates who apply – the phrase “post and pray” is quite accurate, because it comes from the fact that you are essentially hoping that the people you want and need actually find and apply to your opening.
• While 100% of the people who apply to online job postings are interested in the positions they are applying to, a good portion aren’t actually qualified for them (which is both a bad and a good thing – more on this later).
• Posting jobs – via web 1.0, 2.0, or x.0 – primarily attracts the attention of active job seekers only, which is the minority of all people. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that approximately 14% of all people are “actively” seeking a new job. Even if you add in the estimated 20% of people who are “casually” looking for a new job, you are still missing nearly 66% of the workforce if you rely heavily on posting jobs to find your next great hire.
• Passive and non-job seekers simply do not “see” job postings, even if you place them on their Facebook or LinkedIn pages. Sorry.

It is a HUGE mistake to place a large amount of the control over your talent acquisition strategy in the hands of others – the talent you’re hunting.

Without a strong focus on proactive ATS/resume database mining, you’re primarily in reactive mode, waiting for the people you want and need to come to you, and you can simply cannot target and tap into the elusive and highly valued “passive candidates.”

Right Candidate, Wrong Job

Assuming that every resume submitted into an ATS is reviewed (remember what I said earlier about this assumption), what happens to all of the people who apply online to job postings who are great people, but just aren’t qualified for the specific position they apply to?

If a person doesn’t meet the basic qualifications of the position they directly applied to, does that mean they don’t meet the basic qualifications of other open positions?

Of course not.

The unfortunate reality is that every company in existence is sitting on a pile of people who are a great match for a position other than what they directly applied to. Unless a recruiting organization focuses specifically on mining their resume database, a great many of these people will never be matched to the positions they actually are qualified for.

The Time Value of Resumes

What happens to all of the people who apply to positions that they are not yet fully qualified for, but will be in 1-3 years?

Unfortunately, in most cases the answer to the above question is absolutely nothing, which is both unacceptable and a significant opportunity for all companies.

If I had $1 for every time I have heard a recruiter say that it’s a waste of time to search “old” resumes because they’re old and “out of date,” I’d be a millionaire. Resumes don’t spoil, and they don’t have a “best used by” date – I cannot stress enough how shortsighted it is, as well as just plain wrong, to believe that a resume over 1 year old is worthless.

Just as a point of reference – not too long ago I spoke with someone in a recruiting leadership function from a Big 4 firm that mentioned their organization “purged” millions of resumes during a migration to a new ATS. Ouch!

Failing to search your resume database for people who applied to positions 1-3 or even more years ago is an epic #fail.

While I could write a small book on the many reasons as to why, for the sake of this post, let me just say that it’s quite easy to calculate a person’s career trajectory, and calling people with “old” resumes is a very effective way of recruiting passive candidates – including non-job seekers that you simply cannot identify and acquire through any other means.

Resumes do not lose their value as they age – they actually do gain value over time.

If your organization is burdened by a large collection of worthless old resumes – I will gladly give them a good home.

Black Hole ATS

Practically every company has an internal database filled with actionable information on thousands to literally tens of millions of applicants, candidates, and professionals.

You would think that a private internal database of people that an organization has actively and passively, tactically and strategically collected over the years would be a prized possession and be viewed and leveraged as a significant resource and competitive advantage.

However, this post on Weddles gives us a glimpse of just how wrong we would be to think such a thing. An Online Sourcing Survey conducted by TalentDrive found that almost two-thirds (64%) of the employers represented by the survey’s participants did not know how many qualified candidates were in their own ATS databases.

Yes – you read that correctly. Most companies don’t even know how many people are in their Applicant Tracking Systems.

Surprised?

While that is an especially disturbing statistic and a sad reality, I’m actually not that surprised.

Many Applicant Tracking Systems have horrible search interfaces and extremely limited search capability. Prospective candidates go in, but they don’t come back out. If you can’t easily search your internal database, how can you find the top talent hidden within, let alone determine the total candidate population?

This problem is not isolated to small companies with home-grown Applicant Tracking Systems. I recently spoke with a corporate recruiter from a well-known and highly visible Fortune 500 brand who told me that it’s easier for her to find candidates on Monster and then cross reference the names in her ATS than it is to actually source candidates from her ATS.

Epic #fail!

If you’re sitting on a stockpile of resumes and applicants, you should be able to quickly, easily, and precisely retrieve exactly what you need. If your ATS/CRM doesn’t have advanced information retrieval capability – it’s time you took action to remedy that so you can begin to fully leverage all of the human capital information you’ve harvested, likely at significant cost.

You Don’t Need LinkedIn to Leverage 3 Degrees of Separation

One of the great features of LinkedIn is that it is easy to see beyond your direct connections and to leverage 3 degrees of separation.

However, you don’t need LinkedIn to leverage degrees of separation. To think the value of an ATS resume database is limited solely to the direct access to the people contained within is a serious mistake.

Every person in an ATS database knows other people, who also know other people.

The resumes you have direct access to essentially represent 1st degree connections, through which you can reach 2nd and 3rd degree connections and beyond.

You’d be surprised what happens when you call people from your ATS simply to network with them and ask for help. Why more companies don’t realize that the value of their ATS goes FAR beyond just the people contained within is a mystery to me.

Lessons to be Learned

While it is a huge mistake for companies and recruiters to fail to fully realize and take appropriate action on the value of the human capital data they already possess, mistakes are simply opportunities to learn.

It won’t take much effort for recruiters and the companies they work for to begin to fully leverage the human capital data buried in their ATS databases.

Lessen the obsession with finding the next “new” candidate via external sources and bright shiny social channels and focus more time extracting the value from candidates that are already in your possession but have yet to be truly identified or acted upon. Not fully leveraging an internal resume/candidate database, which has likely been built through significant time, effort and money is a serious flaw in any talent acquisition plan. In some way, shape or form, every candidate record in an ATS has been paid for, and there is simply no sense in paying for something that you don’t use.

Recognize that while posting jobs online can open the candidate floodgates, posting jobs to attract talent some serious limitations, not the least of which is the fact that it is a completely passive talent acquisition strategy offering no control over candidate qualification variables. Also, don’t forget that job postings can only attract active and casual job seekers, limiting you to only 1/3rd of the talent pool available at best.

Mining your ATS is a proactive sourcing and recruitment strategy which affords you significant control over critical candidate qualification variables, and you can specifically and strategically target and tap into the other 66% of the talent pool by searching for resumes that have not been updated or acquired in over 6 months. If you get “too many” applicants to your job postings, make sure there is at least 1 person (ideally more!) who doesn’t have anything to do with processing applicants – you need to have resources that spend 100% of their time proactively mining your ATS as well as external sources.

Ensure your ATS/CRM is highly searchable – if your ATS/CRM is as easy to search as it is to put candidates in, you will be able to fill more of your company’s openings from talent you’ve already sourced. Any opening you can fill with candidates already in your internal system saves you the time, effort, and cost of advertising and searching for “new” candidates. Filling openings with candidates already in your ATS can afford you significant and measurable cost-per-hire, time-to-identify, and time-to-fill benefits.

Having a highly searchable ATS/CRM can help you reduce your reliance on paid resources if you currently use them (LinkedIn, Monster, etc.). Strive to ensure that your ATS/CRM is more searchable than LinkedIn, Monster and even the Internet itself. It should not be easier to search and identify potential candidates via external sources than it is to mine your own private candidate database!

In addition to high searchability, your ATS/CRM should have robust and easy to use contact management functionality to enable recruiters to stay in touch with the people who enter the ATS. Maintaining regular communications with candidates, regardless of their job search status, allows an organization to be ready to take appropriate action when the candidate’s status changes, or when a new position opens for which the person is an excellent fit. Plus, staying in touch with candidates ensures that resumes never get too out of date (if you’re bothered by that sort of thing)  - it’s easy to request an updated resume each year using solid contact management functionality.

And last but certainly not least – be sure to recognize that the value of your ATS database goes well beyond the people contained within. Every person in your internal database knows people, who in turn know other people. Leverage those degrees of separation for professional networking and ask for help in the form of referrals.

When most people talk about “passive recruiting,” they’re referring to the practice of targeting and recruiting so-called “passive candidates” – people who are not actively looking to make a move from their current employer.

If you accept that notion – what would be the opposite?

Active recruiting?

Think about it for a moment. Neither phrase even makes sense grammatically. The “passive” in “passive recruiting” isn’t being used to describe the type of recruiting being performed – it’s being used to describe the type of candidates being recruited. 

In this article, I challenge the notion of “passive recruiting,” implore you to retire the phrase, and introduce the concepts of active and passive sourcing.  

Passive Recruiting?

What could “passive recruiting” possibly mean if you’re not using “passive” to describe the types of candidates being targeted?

Recruiting is intrinsically an active process - it requires action and active participation. So “passive recruiting” doesn’t actually exist!

However, if you don’t want to let go of the oft-overused phrase, my take on “passive recruiting” zeroes in on the talent identification phase of the recruiting life cycle. It actually is possible to take a passive role in candidate sourcing.

How?

If you’re sorting through, contacting and recruiting candidates who have responded to your job postings – you’re not having to actually find the candidates…they’re coming to you.

If you’re tracking down, contacting and recruiting candidates that have been referred to you by employees of your company or other candidates - you’re not having to actually identify the candidates…someone else has already done that for you.

Make no mistake – recruiting people who have responded to job postings and people who have been referred to you is an active process, whether the people are looking to make a change in employment or not. However, the candidate sourcing step is passive and reactive – the people have already been identified for you. 

So if you simply must use continue to use the phrase “passive recruiting,” please make sure that you use it to describe the process of recruiting people who have already been identified for you. 

Active Recruiting?

As I’ve already mentioned – recruiting is intrinsically an active process. Anyone who performs the recruiting function is performing “active recruiting,” regardless of the candidate’s job search status (active, passive, not looking…).

However, you can probably guess how I would distinguish the opposite of my more accurate definition of “passive recruiting.” Yes – it has to do with the candidate sourcing step of the recruiting life cycle.

If the candidates aren’t coming to you by way of ad responses and employee referrals, you’re taking an active role in the talent identification phase because you have to go out and hunt them down with no help from anyone else.

Let’s Move Forward!

Just because a whole bunch of people use the same phrase over and over to describe something, it doesn’t make it right. “Passive recruiting” is one of those concepts that has been perpetuated for years without much thought as to what it really means, which has resulted in widespread misuse.

Not only does it not make any grammatical sense – it doesn’t even really exist. It’s impossible for a recruiter to take a passive role in the recruiting process – you’re either recruiting someone or you’re not.

If you happen to be recruiting people who are passive and non-job seekers - you’re not passively recruiting…you’re actively recruiting passive candidates!

Don’t be a lemming and continue to follow the crowd – just let it “passive recruiting” go.

Now when you overhear someone use the phrase “passive recruiting” to describe the process of recruiting passive candidates, you can be “that” recruiter who says ”Actually, you know the phrase ‘passive recruiting’ doesn’t make any sense…”

Passive and Active Sourcing

In all seriousness, I would like to advance and update the recruiting vocabulary by introducing the concepts of passive and active sourcing.

Passive sourcing: Not taking an active role in finding candidates to recruit because the candidates are identified for you – identifying potential candidates primarily through job postings and employee referrals.

Active sourcing: Finding potential candidates to recruit that don’t come to you – identifying potential candidates primarily through e-sourcing and cold calling. 

Notice how the adjectives of “active” and “passive” are not describing the job search status of the candidates being found (which is actually irrelevant, IMO), but rather (and correctly, I might add) describe to the type of sourcing being performed. 

Recruiting is intrinsically an active process, regardless of candidate job search status. However, the means of identifying the candidates you recruit isn’t.  

What do you think?

I recently had a recruiter ask me if there were any way to be able to search LinkedIn for people who have worked at a specific company in the past, but who are NOT currently working for that company.

I can see why some Sourcers and Recruiters would want to specifically target people who are not currently at a company, but have worked there in the past. I’ve done a bit of digging on this, and I have yet to find a way to reliably targeting past experience while ensuring that you only get results of people who are not currently working at the target company.  When searching within your network on LinkedIn, as you may know, the only controllable option you have is to be able to search for people who are currently at target companies. If you leave the “current companies only” option unchecked, you will get results with a mix of people who are currently employed at your target company as well as those who are no longer working there. Also – when searching inside your own network – you are limited to results of people to whom you are connected up to the 3rd degree.
 
Going beyond your own LinkedIn network, you can try using Google and other Internet search engines and employ the site: command to search into LinkedIn – but we have to be aware that this is not a method that affords you precise control over current or past experience.  However, I’m going to give Google, Exalead, and AltaVista a thorough LinkedIn Boolean workout.

Let’s begin with some Google basics. For example – if you were using Google to search into LinkedIn and try to find people who have worked at Lockheed Martin at some point in their career and, for the case of this exercise, currently live in the Denver area, you could use this search and enter any additional specific search terms you might be targeting where I have SKILL/TITLE1, SKILL/TITLE2, etc:

That gets pretty clean results – I checked several pages worth. However, if you run into false positive hits like answers or jobs, you can try adding the following:

-inurl:jobid -inurl:answers

When you execute the search, you’ll see that it pulls results of people who are currently working at Lockheed Martin as well as people who have worked there in the past. Not really different from attempts made searching within your LinkedIn network  – with the exception that you will likely find more people since you are no longer limited to the size of your personal network or LinkedIn’s limit of 500 results.

Exalead
I thought of using Exalead (www.exalead.com/search) in an attempt to exploit the fact that Exalead recognizes the NEAR proximity operator. Using the NEAR operator, we can try to force certain words to be close to the word “past” or NOT in their current position in an effort to try and search people’s past experience specifically.  This is not an exact science, but it’s worth a shot.

This search is trying to find people who mention Lockheed on their profile, but who are not currently employed at Lockheed:

site:www.linkedin.com -inurl:jobid -inurl:find -intitle:directory -inurl:answers -inurl:updates “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (current NEAR Lockheed)
 
Checking the results, you can see that it works relatively well, but not perfectly, mostly due to the structure of LinkedIn’s profile page – current and past experience are listed so close together that trying to use the NOT/- operator in conjunction with NEAR will cause problems, such as eliminating results we actually want. FYI – Exalead does not appear to recognize “-(current NEAR Lockheed)” exactly as it does “NOT (current NEAR Lockheed).”  Running searches back to back switching out the – and NOT yield slightly different results.

I tried a variation of that theme, trying to avoid profiles of people who list Lockheed as their current/most recent employer in the career history section of their profile:

site:www.linkedin.com -inurl:jobid -inurl:find -intitle:directory -inurl:answers -inurl:updates “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (experience NEAR Lockheed)

This search seemed to work well – better than the above search, in my opinion, and it’s interesting to note that a good number of the page 1 results have profiles of people who have headers stating they are currently at Lockheed, but when you scroll down to their experience section, they are in fact, not currently working at Lockheed. So this search string worked relatively well.

Here is yet another variation on the theme – what we’re doing here is avoiding profiles of people who mention Lockheed in the current title/employer field, and it appears to work well:

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (“greater denver area” NEAR Lockheed)

AltaVista
Now that we’ve given Exalead a workout, I figured I would turn to an old favorite of many – AltaVista.

I first tried running the last search I just ran on Exalead:
site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (“greater denver area” NEAR Lockheed)

It only returned 1 result – so Exalead wins this round. For anyone interested – the search executed exactly the same when I used “AND NOT.”

Then I turned to one of AltaVista’s coolest and most powerful features- configurable proximity searching.  If you’d like a refresher on AltaVista’s advanced Boolean operators, check this link out: (http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/av/review.html)

This next search tries to eliminate results of people with profiles that mention Lockheed within 7 words of the word “current” on their profile:

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (current ~~7 Lockheed)

Strangely enough – that search only returned 6 results. The first result is odd because Lockheed is definitely mentioned within 7 words of Lockheed, but the rest seem to be good results – people who are not currently at Lockheed. However, 7 results is a little on the small side.

FYI – it appears to run identically with or without parentheses. However, switching between the – and NOT where we have (current ~~7 Lockheed) does change the results – not just the number, but the actually results themselves. Odd.

Here is another search we have already run on Exalead, which attempts to avoid results of people with profiles that have Lockheed mentioned within 10 words or so of “experience:”

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (experience NEAR Lockheed)

That yielded only 2 results on AltaVista vs. 61 on Exalead – so Exalead maintains its lead, pun intended.

Alright – time to try and get Black Belt on AltaVista.

I attempted to invoke AltaVista’s power of proximity AND order – trying to find profiles that mention Lockheed but not Lockheed mentioned before the word “past,” which, according to the standard LinkedIn profile structure (assuming everyone uses it, of course) would mean they are currently at Lockheed. Trying to prevent “Lockheed” from showing up before the word “past” SHOULD work based on the majority of the LinkedIn profiles I have seen.

site:www.linkedin.com “greater denver area” Lockheed -intitle:directory -intitle:updated NOT (lockheed < past)

This did work – but it yielded only 12 results and some of the people do currently work at work   at Lockheed.

I then tried to prevent “Lockheed” from appearing before the location on the profile – which is a field/area where, if utilized, is where many people list where they currently work.

site:www.linkedin.com “greater denver area” Lockheed -intitle:directory -intitle:updated NOT (lockheed < “greater denver area”)

This search did run, yielding 12 results. However, it definitely let slip through some people who do mention Lockheed before “Greater Denver Area”

And now…let’s give Google another shot.

While Google does not support proximity searching in the form of the NEAR operator or configurable proximity (shame on you Google – really), we can try to approximate proximity searching by making use of Google’s single word wildcard operator – the asterisk.

What I will try to do is use multiple asterisks, representing multiple wildcard words, and combine it with the NOT operator, to attempt to prevent results of people who mention “Lockheed” within 2 – 5 words of words that would indicate that they might currently be employed there, such as “current” or “experience” or “greater denver area.”

In this search, I am trying to avoid Trying to avoid the word “Lockheed” within 2-5 words after “Current:”

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed -”current**Lockheed” -”current***Lockheed” -”current****Lockheed” -”current*****Lockheed”

That search ran and yielded 106, but many of the results have “Lockheed” mentioned within 5 words of the word “current.”

Out of curiosity, I tried spacing out the asterisks:

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed -”current * * Lockheed” -”current * * * Lockheed” -”current * * * * Lockheed” -”current * * * * * Lockheed”

That search ran and yielded what appears to be the exact same 106 results – so spacing the asterisks does not appear to have any different effect, at least in this specific case.

Next, I decided to switch out the – to NOT for the Lockheed-related statements, again, mostly out of curiosity, and neither of the below searches ran:

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT “current * * Lockheed” NOT “current * * * Lockheed” NOT “current * * * * Lockheed” NOT “current * * * * * Lockheed”

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (“current**Lockheed”) NOT (“current***Lockheed”) NOT (“current****Lockheed”) NOT (“current*****Lockheed”)

Perhaps Google’s single word wildcard asterisk operator doesn’t work well when combined with the -/NOT operator.  Has anyone else experimented within combining them?  If so, please let me know.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this exercise in attempting to isolate and target profiles of people on LinkedIn who have worked for a company in the past, but are not current employees of that target company. I know I learned a few things along the way – that Exalead does a good job with proximity via the NEAR operator, that some of AltaVista’s proximity operators (NEAR and before) don’t seem to work as well as they should, and that Google’s asterisk operator doesn’t seem to play nice with the NOT operator.