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

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

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

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

User Generated Content has Issues

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

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

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

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

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

Allow me to demonstrate…

Searching by Company

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

Financial Services Example

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

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

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

Here’s positive proof:

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

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

Pharmaceutical Example

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

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

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

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

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

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

How about Microsoft?

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

I know of at least one way:

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

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

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

Going Confidential

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

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

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

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

Company Research on LinkedIn

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

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

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

… you’d get 50 results.

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

Me neither.

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

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

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

I got almost 1700 companies. 

That strikes me as more accurate than 50.

Interesting, yes?

No?

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

Special Thanks

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

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

When I was working on the LinkedIn Search: What it COULD and SHOULD be post, I noticed a couple of things in the video of Esteban Kozak searching for Lucene Open Source Engineers and I realized it would make for a perfect example of the importance of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing. I know Esteban was just giving a demonstration of LinkedIn’s search functionality, but I could not resist offering some search advice. Hey – it’s what I do. 

I originally wrote about the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing in this SlideShare presentation a few months back – it states that for every term you are thinking of  including in your search, #1 Consider whether or not everyone would say it, and #2 Consider how many ways it can be expressed.

Applying the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing to LinkedIn’s search for engineers with solid Lucene experience, I would not necessarily recommend searching for the term “open source,” nor the title of “engineer.” While there is nothing inherently “wrong” about including “open source” in a search for people with significant Lucene experience, or searching by the title of “engineer,” master e-sourcers would stop to think before using those terms in their searches. Why?

Pay close attention – this is the “good stuff:”  

Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing: Part1

Part 1 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing would require you to think about whether or not every person with extensive Lucene experience would necessarily mention that Lucene happens to be open source in their LinkedIn profile (or resume, etc.). The answer is no, every person with Lucene experience will not mention “open source.” Because Lucene is intrinsically open source, Lucene pros may find it unecessary or redundant to mention “open source” when writing about their experience and expertise, perhaps even assuming anyone else would simply know that Lucene IS open source. They could also just as easily simply forget to mention “open source” when writing about their work and experience.  

Let’s test this theory. Using Esteban’s search parameters for Lucene, open source, and a title of engineer (and limiting results to the U.S.):

We get 167 results:

Now let’s search for people who mention Lucene but do not mention “open source” – we can do this by using the NOT operator:

We get 408 results:

So we can see there are many more people who mention Lucene but do not explicitly mention “open source.” The 408 results from this search and the 167 results from the original search are mutually exclusive – there is no overlap between them (there can’t be).

Going one step further, let’s try putting the term “search” into the list of keywords. This may help us narrow the results down to people who don’t just mention Lucene somewhere in their LinkedIn profile, but who have experience specifically implementing, configuring, and developing search functionality with Lucene. Adding “search” to the query will find people who text search, enterprise search, search engines, etc.

We get 249 results:

Even adding the additional term “search” to the query yields more results than the original search (167) that included “open source.”

Here is a particularly interesting result from my search:

Grant is on the Lucene Project Management Committee, he’s an Apache Software Foundation Member, and he doesn’t mention “open source” on his LinkedIn profile. You can’t and thus won’t find Grant if you’re using “open source” in your search. Ouch!

Missing great potential candidates like this happens literally every day to sourcers and recruiters all over the world as a simple result of not stopping to wonder whether or not all potentially qualified candidates would explicitly mention the search terms used in their queries. Perhaps the worst part is that without strictly  and consistently applying Part 1 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing, sourcers and recruiters don’t even know they are actually eliminating great candidates from their results – candidates that exist in their ATS, in LinkedIn, on Monster, etc., but they’ll never know they were even there.

Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing: Part2

In this specific search example for engineers with Lucene experience, Part 2 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing would require you to think about all of the potential titles that someone who has significant Lucene experience might have. Starting with “engineer” is a good idea, but you have to be aware that there are other potential titles that people who have significant Lucene experience might have, especially because most people don’t get to choose their title – it’s determined by their employer in most cases, and not all companies conveniently use the same titles for the same roles and responsibilities.

Titles other than “engineer” that people with Lucene experience might have could include architect, developer, programmer, consultant, specialist, and many more. However, we don’t even have to bother with trying to think of all of the alternate titles qualified candidates could have – we can easily find them by using the NOT operator to make sure that we only return results of people who mention Lucene, search, and have not had a title of engineer in their career. 

Here’s the search:

And we get 108 results:

So let’s examine the results and see what kinds of titles these people have had:

I see architect, consultant, specialist, and lead (the Director of QA that came up as result #2 isn’t a directly relevant hit, however, she might know people!).

It is critical to realize that NONE of these 108 results could have been found using the original search looking for the title of “engineer” and searching for “open source” – this is quite literally a hidden talent pool of candidates that the original search simply could not find. Using the NOT operator, I’ve isolated a set of people who have never had a title of “engineer,” who do not make explicit mention of “open source,” yet do mention Lucene as well as “search.” These are the kinds of candidates most people don’t find, because their searches actually CAN’T find them based on search term selection.

Every single last one of the 108 results does not mention the title “engineer” anywhere on their profile. Did you catch result #3 above – Vedant the project lead at Google? LinkedIn might be interested in him, but he was not even on the radar of the original search, because the original search could not find him. It’s very important to understand that.

So does Vedant have any search experience with Lucene?

Yes he does. How about some of the others in the results – do they have any experience with Lucene? Here’s a peek at snippets from 3 profiles of the page 1 results:

Perhaps the Associate Director is too high level for opportunities at LinkedIn? Well, that’s a lesson for another post, but I will say that you can’t know if he’s hands-on or off from his profile alone, and we also just uncovered a bit of Lucene intelligence in that now we know AT&T Interactive (in LA, btw) is using Lucene, which means there are developers and engineers with Lucene experience there. Hmm…interesting, yes?  Quite so if you’re looking for Lucene talent!

But Wait – There’s More!

I got curious and I decided to continue to take my own advice (sounds a little weird, I know) with regard to part 1 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing  – maybe there are people with Lucene experience who do not mention “search” on their profile who also have never had the title of “engineer.”  It’s easy to test this using the NOT operator:

This search yields 83 results (all completely NEW, by the way), and the first result is eye-opening.

Result #1 for me is Mark Miller. Mark’s kind of a big deal because he is a Solr and Lucene Committer at The Apache Software Foundation. Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on Lucene.

Mark looks like he might be someone we’d be interested in if we were looking for people with deep Lucene experience, right? Duh! The lesson here is that you can continue to dig up fantastic candidates by applying part 1 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing – always questioning your search terms. Mark doesn’t mention “open source,” he’s never had the title of “engineer,” and he doesn’t even say they word “search” on his profile!

Some of the best candidates don’t mention what you *assume* they will mention – as such, you often don’t/can’t find them. The dangerous part is that it is all too easy to unknowingly craft a search that, by design, actually eliminates some of the best candidates available. And you’ll never even know they were there to be found in the first place. Ignorance is bliss, unfortunately.

Conclusion

As simple as the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing seems to be, it is all too easy to overlook it. However, it is inescapably at the very foundation of effectively and exhaustively leveraging information system for talent identification. Hidden Talent Pools are very real – I’ve shown you in the many examples above that you can literally find hundreds of candidates that were previously hidden and literally “unfindable” by the original search.

So before you begin to search LinkedIn, your ATS/CRM, a job board resume database, or the Internet for potential candidates, always remeber to obey the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing: For every term you are thinking of including in your search:

#1 Consider whether or not everyone would say it

#2 Consider how many ways it can be expressed

If you don’t, I can guarantee you that you are not finding everyone available, and in many cases – you’re missing some of the best candidates.

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!

Top 15 Common Secondary Sourcing Mistakes

I’ve had the opportunity to assess, train and coach hundreds of recruiters from  corporate and agency environments responsible for performing sourcing functions, and I’ve been exposed to many myths, misconceptions and mistakes when it comes to leveraging information systems for sourcing and recruiting. I’d like to take a moment to share my observations on what I think some of the major mistakes that are commonly made in secondary sourcing efforts. Originally, I wanted to make this a “Top 10″ post – but if you read this post within the next 2 minutes, you get 50% more free! 

In no particular order:

#1 Overanalyzing resumes

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

#2 Running overly generic/basic searches

You’ll get correspondingly generic and basic results, typically what I’ve overheard people refer to as “too many.” People making this mistake unknowingly increase the size of the Hidden Talent Pool of candidates they don’t find.

#3 Making assumptions about candidates from their resumes

See mistake #1. Ever hear the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover?”

#4 Not spending at least 10 minutes thinking about and researching your search strategy before you start running searches and making calls
You should always take time to analyze your search criteria to assess the possibility that your search terms may not find all qualified candidates, and in fact might actually be eliminating viable candidates. I have found that the more time I spend on the front-end of a search, the more relevant my results become, which in turn increases my productivity by enabling me to find more and better candidates more quickly. Imagine that!

#5 Seeing each resume only as a potential match for the position you’re working on
Any resume database you have access to can be leveraged in much the same way as LinkedIn can – every person is actually a conduit to a larger network of people. So even if a particular resume you’re reviewing doesn’t appear to be an ideal match – they actually might be (see mistakes #1 and #3), and they may know someone who is.

#6 Assuming 1 search finds all qualified candidates

It’s actually impossible. Trust me.

#7 Searching only resumes posted within 30 days when searching major job boards

Did you know that 75% – 80% of all resumes on the major job boards are dated over 30 days old? You should never limit yourself to only searching resumes posted in the last 30 days – some of the best passive and active candidates have resumes 31 to 365 + days old online. And most people don’t call them.

#8 Not calling candidates that appear to be under- or over-qualified

First, see mistakes #1 and #3. Second, see mistake #5. Third, people who are in fact too junior or too senior for your current needs might fit future needs. Fourth, people who are either too junior or too senior for a particular position might work with or know someone who is an exact match.

#9 Submitting the first 2 -3 candidates you find that fit your job/hiring profile and moving on to the next open position

Sound crazy? I can hear someone asking, “Why shouldn’t I submit the first candidates I find that fit the requirements?” Well, ask yourself this – what’s the statistical probability that the first 2 people you speak magically happen to are the best candidates you can possibly find? The most closeable and controllable? The most “affordable?” Recruiting and staffing should not be conducted on a FIFO basis, but on a BIFO basis.  You saw it here first. Think about it.

#10 Thinking that after searching a particular source of candidates (your ATS, a job board, the Internet, LinkedIn, etc.) that you’ve found all of the available candidates and cannot find any more.

You’re wrong – invariably you’ve left behind Hidden Talent Pools of people who do match your positions, but you could not find them because your Boolean search strings made it impossible to do so. Being aware of this is a major step on the path towards secondary sourcing enlightenment. See mistake #4.

#11 Thinking that the major online job boards have poor quality candidates

Read this post on not believing the hype that the job boards have low quality candidates.

#12 Relying solely or heavily on title-based searches

Not all companies use the same titles for the same roles and responsibilities – so making this mistake contributes to you populating Hidden Talent Pools with every candidate that matches your hiring profile or job order but has a title that you didn’t think of and include in your search. See mistake #4.

#13 Not using the NOT operator

It’s the least utilized, and in my opinion, actually the most powerful standard/basic Boolean operator – it’s not just for getting rid of stuff you don’t want. I will dedicate an entire post to the NOT operator in the near future. Puns intended.

#14 Only using skill/tech terms (e.g., Java, Oracle, Accounts Payable, SOX, etc.) when creating Boolean search strings

The best searches don’t rely solely on skill/technology based terms, but also include responsibility terms (administer, configure, create, manage, reconcile, coordinate, design, etc.) and environmental terms (enterprise, host*, etc.) where applicable. This is the first step in moving beyond simple buzz-word matching.

#15 Spending 80% of your time using low-yield resources that can only provide 20% (or less!) of the potentially available results

For example – spending hours searching the Internet for candidates and not heavily/effectively leveraging your internal resume database/ATS. While you can certainly find great people on the Internet, the Internet is not indexed specifically to enable sourcing and requires many tricks and tweaks to yield relevant results. If you have access to an ATS or internal resume database – it’s specifically designed to store and retrieve resumes, and probably has more local and more qualified candidates than the Internet, and might actually have a better seach interface enabling more precise searching – see this post as a dramatic example of this point. Also – if you have access to any of the major job boards – they actually have a larger percentage of passive job seekers than active and they have some fantastic candidates – see mistakes #7 and #11.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it certainly covers some of the most common major mistakes sourcers and recruiters make while performing secondary sourcing.

Have a mistake to add to the list? Post a comment and let me know.

Thanks!

A significant step on the path to secondary sourcing enlightenment is becoming aware of, and not falling prey to The Sourcer’s Fallacy.

The Sourcer’s Fallacy is the conscious or unconscious belief that:

#1 If you haven’t found what you’re looking for in a particular database, social network, or on the Internet – that it’s not there,

And/Or

#2 After you’ve run searches in a particular database, social network, or on the Internet that you have found all that there is to be found.

Some quick secondary sourcing facts:

• No single Boolean search string can find ALL qualified candidates
• Unknowingly, most sourcers and recruiters employ Boolean search strings that make it nearly impossible to find every possible qualified candidate, let alone the BEST candidates
• Most people are not aware of the candidates they did not find – but that does not mean that they are not there to be found

Enlightened sourcers and recruiters are always aware that there are candidates that they are missing and not finding when they run Boolean searches to find people. This awareness drives them to consciously and creatively think of ways to uncover those candidates hiding in the Hidden Talent Pools of every source of human capital, which I estimate to be 30% – 40% of all total candidates.

Don’t fall prey to the Sourcer’s Fallacy. Stay tuned for future posts where I will detail tactics and strategies specifically designed to tap Hidden Talent Pools.