It sounds sexy to Source without LinkedIn – and it should. One can do some exciting things outside of LinkedIn. However, you need to know quite a bit about people’s professional history to consider them potential candidates. Where else, except LinkedIn (or job boards, which have been deserted lately,) can you find someone’s job title, company, how long they have worked there, a description of what they did, a degree they got, and skills, plus location? It is hard or impossible to source entirely outside of LinkedIn, even for lower-level positions where only a fraction of potential candidates are members.
One of my recent sourcing projects was looking for Social Workers and Therapists with a LICSW (“licensed independent clinical social worker”) license in West Virginia. Searching LinkedIn for “LICSW” found some but had a low volume. I Googled and found a WV License verification site that happily revealed the list of all licensed at the press of the ENTER key. I collected a list of about 300 names of professionals with the correct, active license in the requested locations. The list did not have unique identifiers like email addresses, so I went with a long “OR” search of the first and last names on LinkedIn, narrowing it to a few more parameters. As a result, I found twice as many matching profiles as before – who had the license but did not add it to their profiles. For some, the last degree stated was Bachelor’s, while LICSW people must have a Master’s; but I knew they are Master’s from the license database. Locating LinkedIn profiles allowed me to look up their contacts with SalesQL, invite them to connect, message, and email them.
Another project was sourcing for Big 4 Partner candidates in Cybersecurity. I ran an X-Ray of a competitor, site:deloitte.com/us/en/profiles partner cyber security, and got a list of potential candidates, along with emails, to filter and review. LinkedIn provided me with their length of time at Deloitte and different ways to message.
As a third example of the approach, sourcing for Software Developers, I always go from Github to LinkedIn.
The key is to combine data from LinkedIn and other sites in real-time. That is what our new webinar How to Find Hidden LinkedIn Profiles (July 19-20, 2022), is about. There are two ways the combination flows: Research and Data Lookup, which we will discuss in the class, along with practical examples. No coding is required to perform the techniques we will share.
With data lookups, you are creating mini-people-aggregators of the moment, with the advantage that the data is fresh! We will also go over various ways to use the enriched data in messaging. Will you join us?
Comments 1
I love reading about your approach to uncover new and clever ways of sourcing. Thank you for sharing!