Excellent Grades: a Sourcing Challenge

Have you ever had a need to find LinkedIn members who have earned high grades at a University? It’s hard. No LinkedIn account, including Recruiter, will search for the entered grades. You can search for something like “cum laude” OR honors OR honours OR hons OR distinction (etc.), but, unless they have mentioned these in the summary or education description, LinkedIn will miss them.

I had hopes for the “Test Scores” section that some members use – but, upon testing, found that LinkedIn misses it as well!

My current project is to find students of Computer Science in several European countries. Let me share what I have observed.

While people use “cum laude” or GPA internationally, each country has its own grade system. I Googled for university grades <country name> (example) to find additional terms. In Germany, it is a number between 1 and2 (1, 1.1., 1.2, etc.); in Italy, 110/110.  (But if it is “5” or “A”, the terms did not help much due to multiple false positives). Then, I searched on LinkedIn for a long OR of the “excellence” keywords to find members who did put them outside of the University grades and test scores.

To find the missed ones, I went to X-Ray: Google searches for all words on profiles, including University grades. I used all the previously found good grades words. But the most effective term that worked internationally, was “GPA * *”, for example,

site:ro.linkedin.com/in “GPA * *” “computer science” student

It is easy to pick the high GPA profiles from the search. If there were lots of results, I scraped them with Instant Data Scraper first and filtered:

Another approach that finds those whom LinkedIn does not, is using the AROUND operator, for example,

site:uk.linkedin.com/in Bsc AROUND(3) hons “computer science”.

(Note: if you want to be found for high grades, add them in the summary.)

Finding current students was another challenge. I will write about it in a future post.

Refresh your X-Ray skills by taking the Advanced X-Ray class.