No matter how large your LinkedIn network is, without the benefit of searching LinkedIn with a LinkedIn Recruiter account, you will inevitably come across search results with “Private” displayed where the name of the person should be.

While many people are aware that this kind of search result is actually just representative of an “out of network” profile, have you ever wondered if truly “private” profiles exist?

I have, and as far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to actually configure a LinkedIn profile/account to be private. However, there are things a person can do to be very difficult to find and identify.

Additionally, there are some people on LinkedIn that you cannot specifically search for and identify, regardless of the level of your LinkedIn account (yes, even the mighty LI Recruiter).

Let me show you.

LinkedIn Account Settings

When you click on your LinkedIn account settings, if you take a look at the “Privacy” settings, you can see that none of the privacy settings actually have anything to do with the visibility of your own profile to others. I find that interesting.

Where you can control the visibility of your profile is actually under “Public Profile” in your Profile Settings.

Here is where a person can actually take some control over what is shown in publicly. While you may be familiar with these settings, you would be surprised how many people are not, and the implications of changing them.

By default, and as LinkedIn recommends, LinkedIn profiles are published to the web in “Full View.”

If you are a sourcer or a recruiter, you not only understand what it means to publish your LinkedIn profile to the web, you’re happy to display your full profile view.

However, I have found that most non-recruiters #1 don’t give much thought to their public profile settings, #2 don’t really understand exactly what “publishing their profile to the web” actually means and its implications, and #3 don’t change their settings from default.

Non-Public Profiles

Sourcers and recruiters know that they can effectively search for and view public LinkedIn profiles using any one of the major Internet search engines, even without a LinkedIn account. What is common knowledge to those of us in the recruiting profession isn’t common knowledge to those who are not.

There are, however, some people who have taken the time to make changes to their LinkedIn profile settings that make them unfindable using an Internet Search engine.

If someone selects the “None off” setting for their public profile, their LinkedIn profile will not be published to the web and thus cannot be found via Internet search engines. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you won’t be surprised to learn that it would be these profiles that fascinate me. The only way you could be aware that these people exist on LinkedIn would be from finding their “private” profile result in a search using LinkedIn’s search interface.

Moreover, you can’t specifically target and identify people who are outside of your LinkedIn network and cannot be found via an Internet or X-Ray search of any kind.

Within LinkedIn, the best you can do to try and search into this Hidden Talent Pool is to filter the results by relationship (3rd + Everyone Else) and sort the results by keyword.

A great many people don’t touch the default results sorting setting from “Relevance,” which will always favor in-network results and bury out-of-network results altogether – sometimes beyond the 100, 300, 500, or 700 you can view with a free or premium account (other than Recruiter). Sorting results by relevance will almost always guarantee that you won’t find and become aware of people outside of your network.

Even with specifically searching “3rd + Everyone Else” and sorting results by keyword, if you have a very large network, you may still not actually find and be able to view (again, depending on your account) any results that are not in your network.

But they exist.

Awareness is the first step on the path to sourcing enlightenment.

The Lead Blanket to X-Ray Searching

Some people do publish their profile to the web, but selectively choose precisely what is published. Although likely a small percentage of all LinkedIn profiles, it is hard to estimate exactly how many people do this because these people are, as you will see, very difficult to find, isolate and identify.

For example, if someone chooses “Basics” for their public profile settings – the only information published to the web and thus crawled and retrievable via Internet search engines is the person’s name, the industry they selected, their location phrase, and their number of recommendations.

A great many sourcers and recruiters use the headline and/or title and employer phrases when using an Internet search engine to identify people who were returned in their LinkedIn search results as “private.”

However, if someone selected “Basics” for their public LinkedIn profile, you cannot use an Internet search engine to find that person’s public LinkedIn profile using the headline and/or title and employer phrases, quite simply because the information isn’t published to the web to be indexed and rendered retrievable.

When some recruiters find a “private” profile inside of LinkedIn and get 0 results when they go to Google or Yahoo to try and find the public profile and name of the person they identified with their LinkedIn search, they assume the person has a “private” profile.

Yet, there is no such thing as a truly “private” profile. What’s actually happened is that the person simply either chose to not publish their LinkedIn profile to the web, or they selectively chose NOT to publish their headline, positions, or any other piece of information that can be used to easily identify them via Internet search.

For example, try to isolate and identify this person using only an Internet search engine (no cheating!):

Name Reveal

Although some people on LinkedIn simply cannot be searched for, isolated and identified using an Internet search engine to discover their name, all is not lost. Recently, Irina Shamaeva posted an interesting piece on her blog demonstrating a method of revealing the names of “private” profiles. This may be the only direct method available to  find the names of people who have chosen to not publish their LinkedIn profile to the web, or have selectively chosen to not publish easily searchable and identifiable LinkedIn profile information to the web.

There are No Private LinkedIn Profiles, But…

As I’ve shown, there are no truly private LinkedIn profiles, only profiles beyond your network that you may or may not be able to search for and identify using an Internet search engine.

What’s more, I hope you are intrigued by the knowledge that there are people on LinkedIn whom you cannot specifically target, even if you are fortunate enough to have a LinkedIn Recruiter account with full name transparency. At this time, there is no way to specifically search for only those people who are not in your network, regardless of your level of LinkedIn account.

Who’s to say that these profiles don’t represent the most valuable people in all of LinkedIn?

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?

After recently writing about moving beyond the hype of social media and recruiting, I took some time to reflect quite a bit on the topic, and focused a critical eye on exactly what “Social Recruiting” is.

While there is no shortage of what people think “Social Recruiting” is, quite frankly - I’m not satisfied with any of the definitions and explanations I’ve found – most are too surface level and one-dimensional, as well as inaccurate, in my opinion. It seems that a large portion of what many people seem to be happy to accept as “Social Recruiting” is really nothing more than traditional job posting and employer marketing and branding in a 2.0 environment.

However, I can definitely appreciate the challenge of trying to nail down an accurate and concise definition of “Social Recruiting” – it’s quite the slippery fish. So rather than trying to answer the question of “What is Social Recruiting?,” I’m going to tell you what I think Social Recruiting is NOT.

Social Recruiting is NOT Posting Jobs and Press Releases

Posting job openings on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is not Social Recruiting – it’s simply posting jobs on social networking sites. Job posting is job posting – there’s nothing ”social” about it, regardless of where the jobs are posted.

On Tuesday, January 19th, 2010, I posed this question on Twitter: 

Here are some of the insightful responses I received:

• @CMcKenzie77 Where’s the “social” piece if a company only posts jd’s & news releases? #socialrecruiting -Its missing conversation..Rt?
• @IrishRecruiter If company only posts job and press releases on Twitter, it is NOT #socialrecruiting. It’s nothing…
• @mysensay No, that’s just a corporate website or job board dressed up as a Twitter account.
• @jeroenkneppers no way. Both posting jobs & press releases is 1.0 sending in a 2.0 environment. Social Media is about conversation
• @aglogan No not IMO. Personally I don’t think it’s any different to advertising on a job board. The tweets offer no value.
• @julesmontgo If your admin can do it, it’s not #socialrecruiting. No offense to the admins…
• @anniechae Where’s the human touch in job posting/press releases? I prefer connecting, relating & interacting with what’s b/t the ears
• @tombolt There can be active or passive recruiting, but only using twitter passively is missing the point of #socialrecruiting.
• @TimDineen it’d be best if corps forget “managing” accounts /strategy and just be human #socialrecruiting
• @jayveniard no it’s not social recruiting its social media marketing…corporate TA will say it’s recruiting
• @davecarhart Definitely not. Unfortunately that style accounts for the good majority of corp recruiting accounts

These talent acquisition professionals on Twitter all agree that just posting jobs and press releases on Twitter isn’t social recruiting. In fact, I did not receive a single response to the contrary.

I particularly liked @jayveniard’s assessment that posting jobs using Twitter is social media marketing. I agree. Posting open jobs anywhere is simply promoting and distributing an opportunity for employment. Can anyone make a solid argument that posting jobs is “recruiting,” regardless of where the jobs are posted?

Social Recruiting is NOT Sourcing Candidates on Social Networks

Searching LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to find potential candidates isn’t Social Recruiting. Talent identification is only 1 step in the entire recruiting life cycle (albeit a critical one!). If anything, it’s “Social Sourcing.”

Regardless of what you would like to label it - there’s nothing social about identifying candidates. You don’t even need to be human to source candidates from social networking sites – there are apps that can do that. 

Social Recruiting is NOT Just Having a Facebook Fan Page

Have a corporate Facebook Fan Page? Awesome! Have a bunch of cool ”What it’s like to work at…” and community involvement videos, links to awards from major magazines, press releases, etc.? Great!

However – is any of that really recruiting? Isn’t that just marketing and branding? 

Yes, it’s a no-brainer to have job search functionality directly on your Facebook Fan Page, to post jobs opportunities, and link to your corporate website from your FBFP. But job search, job postings, and website links do not a ”Social Recruiting” strategy make.

Social Recruiting is NOT Just Being on Twitter

While the “Big 4″ firms are often used as leading examples of how to leverage social media for recruiting, how “social” is it to only follow 15 people on Twitter? How about following only 1 person? Where’s the engagement and the 2-way communication?

Wait – it gets better. Is it very social to only follow your own Twitter accounts? 

I won’t name names – you can do the research. You’ll be shocked.

So if you have a corporate Twitter account and you don’t follow (m)any people, you don’t really respond to anyone, and you’re only posting jobs and content from feeds – how “social” is that? 

That’s called talking and not listening.

Which is really interesting given that many Social Media “gurus” claim that one of the biggest opportunities presented by Social Media lies in listening. 

#thingsthatmakeyougohmm

Social Recruiting is NOT Going to Replace Job Boards

It’s currently popular to trash job boards, proclaim they are dying, and say that social media is delivering the coup de grâce, but job boards aren’t going anywhere.

You see – for all of their supposed flaws, job boards actually serve a purpose.

It’s simply convenient to go to a place and find a large collection of jobs to search through. Sure, you can use any search engine to look for jobs, but that actually doesn’t make much sense. Why use an Internet search engine to search for jobs? 

Try going to Google anyway and enter something like: Java Software Engineer Jobs. Check out the results. 

I see Indeed, Dice, Careerbuilder, Monster, WashingtonPost.com, and LinkedIn (which most people think is more job board that social networking site, btw).

While Indeed is technically different “under the hood” from traditional job boards because it’s a meta/vertical search engine for job listings – it’s still a website with a bunch of jobs.

Which is what job seekers – active, casual, and even some “passive” – want and need. It’s simply convenient to go to one or a few websites to search for and review jobs. What’s the alternative? Individually search 100′s to 1000′s of corporate websites? Label sites like Indeed and Simplyhired whatever you want, but you won’t change the purpose they serve.

If you want to buy a car, you go where cars are sold. If you want to scope out potential jobs, you go where the jobs are. Yes, I know job boards are the root of all evil – but they actually serve a purpose, even if they’re imperfect and fail to serve that purpose as well as they could.

There is nothing that social media can do to eliminate the desire and need to conveniently search jobs on websites that have the most employers and opportunities listed. When you go shopping, do you really want to go to a store that has a small inventory with a limited variety? Some people, maybe? Most people, no. 

Your Thoughts?

“Social Recruiting” is the hot phrase in talent acquisition these days, but make no mistake - social media and social networking sites aren’t intrinsically “social.”

It’s the people using social media and social networking sites to be social – to listen, engage, and interact in two-way conversations – that’s the ”social” part. Unless recruiters and companies are using social media to have two-way conversations with potential candidates (instead of a one-way, one-to-many shotgun blast approach), social media isn’t any more “social” than a job board or a phone on the hook. 

Now that I’ve drawn a line in the sand and delineated what Social Recruiting is NOT, I’d like to hear from you what you think Social Recruiting IS.

Do you ever use social networks to such as LinkedIn to search for people with experience in a specific industry?

If you do, I can almost guarantee you that you are not finding everyone you’re looking for.

How?

There are intrinsic issues associated with any user generated content, especially when it comes to how users of social media identify themselves, and they can actually prevent you from finding the people you’re looking for.  

Telecommunications Example

Let’s say you are looking for software engineers with Java development and telecommunications industry experience. On LinkedIn, it would be logical to select the “Telecommunications” under the industries option list.

If you made this logical choice, you would get everyone who matches your keyword search and who selected “Telecommunications” on their LinkedIn profile.

That’s great. But would you get everyone who actually had telecommunications industry experience?

No.

How do I know?

Let Me Show You

All you have to do is run a search for people who currently work for a major telecom company who mention Java, and then take a look at the industries they selected on their profiles. For my example, I’ll use Verizon. 

This is what I got:

I see 4 different industries in the first 4 search results alone: Internet, Information Technology and Services, Computer Software, and Telecommunications. 

And there’s more:

Looking at that industry list, we now know that if we wanted to use LinkedIn’s industry search option to find people who currently work at Verizon who mention Java on their LinkedIn profiles, we’d have to use the 10 different industries on the list above. 

If you didn’t – and I would estimate about 99% of sourcers and recruiters don’t - you would miss 474 people who actually DO have telecommunications industry experience (current, even). In fact, you would assume those 474 people don’t exist, because you wouldn’t even be aware that your search prevented you from finding them. This is a perfect example of what I call a Hidden Talent Pool.

In this example, sourcers and recruiters would be missing over 50% of the total relevant results available!

Why Does This Happen?

It’s simple, really.

When people create or edit their LinkedIn profile, they choose an industry from the list that they feel most accurately identifies them.

So even if someone works as a software engineer for AT&T, they could choose to select “Internet” instead of “Telecommunications,” because they identify themselves as an Internet developer, rather than a telecommunications industry employee.   

This phenomenon isn’t limited to telecommunications – it affects every industry. 

Let’s Try Pharmaceuticals

If a sourcer or recruiter were looking for director-level marketing talent in the pharmaceutical industry and they searched for a current title of “director,” a keyword of “marketing,” and selected the “Pharmaceuticals” industry, they would find  a lot of results – but they would most certainly not find everyone who fits the profile.

To illustrate this, let’s look for people who have worked for Pfizer, who have a current title of director, and who mention ”marketing” in their profile. We can see 3 different industries in the first 4 results alone: 

A sourcer or recruiter who relied on using the “Pharmaceuticals” industry selection to search for and find candidates would be missing at least 573 people who have worked for Pfizer, who have a title of “director” and mention marketing in their profile, because those 573 people selected an industry other than “Pharmaceuticals:”

I stress at least because if you noticed in the telecom/Verizon example as well as the pharma/Pfizer example, when you click “show more” on the industries list, you see 11 total options: 1 saying “All Industries,” and 10 specific industries - and yet if you look closely at the totals in both examples I used, the numbers don’t add up.

I suspect that when you click “show more:”

…LinkedIn only shows the top 10 industries in addition to “All Industries,” even when there are more than 10. I can’t state this as fact, but since the numbers don’t add up, I’ll chalk it up to an educated assumption. Only LinkedIn could actually confirm or deny. 

The Heart of the Issue

50% of the issue at work here is that many people have experience working in multiple industries, yet they can only select one on their LinkedIn profile.

If you’re looking for someone with “Defense & Space” industry experience on LinkedIn, you cannot find the people who have significant Defense and Space Industry experience who currently work in another industry, and happen to have selected that current industry on their LinkedIn profile. 

The other 50% comes from the fact that people can and will identify themselves in any way they want to – which may have nothing to do with the way YOU would identify or label them.

A marketing professional working for a pharmaceutical company can just as easily think of themselves in the “Consumer Goods” industry when making the selection on their LinkedIn profile. 

Final Thoughts

I hope that what I’ve shown you so far has your mind racing, thinking about all of the candidates you’re missing when you use LinkedIn’s industry search option.

If you think you’re not affected by this issue, think again.

This is not limited to any industry, skillset, or even a particular social network – Twitter and Facebook are even worse!

Anything above Level 1 Sourcing is 99% thinking, 1% syntax. Electronic talent identification requires curiosity, creativity, interpretive ability, and analytical thought - 4 things that Dr. Michio Kaku believes cannot be achieved with artificial intelligence.

I happen to agree.

So if you’re good at these things – creative thought, being curious and analytical, and you’re able to think outside of the box - you can feel confident you won’t be replaced by a matching application any time in the near future.

Happy hunting!