Category Archive

(Can I please ask you to read to the end?) It has eventually become such a mismatch in terminology. Most people in our industry refer to search strings on Google as “Boolean Strings”. However, the term “Boolean”, meaning AND, OR, and NOT, no longer applies to Google search best practices, and less so every day. Practical Google search strings do …

  A more descriptive title of this post could be “Hack: Check Whether an Email Address or Phone Number is Registered on LinkedIn in 5 Seconds or Less”. The “hack” does not reveal which member it is – it only returns a Yes/No answer. But it is a validation pointer for the contact phone number or email address you are …

In 2006, Christian Mayaud came up with a genius idea of LIONs – LinkedIn Open Networks. There was no connection limit; you could see the exact numbers of connections on profiles and the 4th level connections. But then, as now, people outside of your network were “invisible,” shown in search as “LinkedIn Member” with no details – and you were …

Recruiters are aware that most job descriptions lack some information necessary to source potential candidates. A job description is written to attract talent, and it is only one piece of data for Recruiters. We gain the extra info and Hiring Manager’s preferences through intake write-ups and meetings. We have designed our sourcing intake form Brain Gain Recruiting Sourcing Checklist to …

  Reverse Image Search is a favorite way to find online traces of someone by their social profile photo. But if you search by image on Google, you may be missing some results. Here is why and how to overcome that. #1. When you upload an image, Google (annoyingly) shows its “explanations” – sometimes even offensive – like “hair loss.” …

Last week, I ran a poll on LinkedIn- “Which site, do you think, is the best for sourcing Software Developers?” which attracted a massive 60K+ views and 1,400 votes. It was a bit of a trick question. I had hoped to facilitate a discussion on combining sites for sourcing – and so it did (see the comments). Other sites were …

I want to tell you a fast way to collect prospects’ email addresses from Google search results pages and then find the professionals on LinkedIn. The result is a target list of LinkedIn profiles for which you know email addresses. The method is free and requires no coding or being “technical” whatsoever. See the steps in a fun 7-minute demo …

Google Custom (Programmable) Engines are capable of finding particular values (such as someone’s location or employer) precisely with the aid of special search operators. The precise filtering ability is based on the “objects” defined by Schema.org – such as Person, Organization, or Place – which site creators can embed in the page code. The “custom” search operators are written as more:pagemap:<custom …

Yesterday I saw a recruiter’s post on Facebook asking for advice on how to figure out which candidate had texted them when they couldn’t see the name, only the number. (Has it happened to you?) A recurring problem in sourcing is dealing with insufficient information. You want to reach out only to relevant people, but the data (say, a Github …