Those of us who source for diversity know that reviewing profile photos is one of the key filtering techniques in sourcing for several kinds of diversity. But today, I want to tell you how to find some female candidates with no photos included.
I came up with this hack while sourcing for a Director of Data and AI in Berlin, whom the client would like to be a woman ideally. (It is a very male-dominated field.) I noticed that public XING profiles without a picture have two different generic images depending on gender. So here is what you can do to find women without a profile picture – search by a generic female image while X-Raying XING:
(My friend Glenn Gutmacher noticed that this type of search starts doing something odd when you use phrases in quotes or operator inurl:. Make sure you screen your results.)
Another such site is Healthgrades. It allows the same sort of search for females:
Searching in images and by images gives you an additional sourcing boost. There are more results in image X-Ray searches (typically, twice as many). Research, translation, diversity sourcing, and a free filtered LinkedIn member search can be implemented through image tools. Additional scraping and “in-scraping” (following links for data) will make your X-Rays perform better than searches in LinkedIn Recruiter.
Sourcing nerds and all those who want to source in less-traveled places –
Check out our brand new webinar, “Sourcing in Images!”