Three Sites for Healthcare Sourcing

booleanstringsBoolean

As I am running a recruiting project searching for Registered Nurses in NYC and Indianapolis, the main challenge remains. It is finding potential candidates’ contact information or ways to message.

Compared, for example, to IT sourcing, I am finding that the Social Media presence of RNs is much lower. However, the web is rich with all sorts of Healthcare-related lists. There are great directories of specialized RNs – like pediatrics, dialysis, or ER, but I need to find “just” RNs with two-plus years of experience. There are plenty of those, too.

  1. site:nursingnetwork.com/users – a zillion directories by location and interest. There is no contact info but you can join, become friends, and message. Alternatively, X-Ray (but the results are limited): site:nursingnetwork.com/nurses.
  2. https://bearsofficialsstore.com has a directory of the University of Michigan among others. No contacts but a nice level of detail and good coverage.
  3. allnurses.com – it’s a forum and members mention their emails in conversations. I found ~2K emails looking for posts from RNs, with a location mentioned, and the match on Recruiter was excellent.

“Appendix”

Below is a list of State Boards of Nursing websites. On some, you can search and scrape, on others, you need a name to search. Typically, they would have the zip code, license number, and validity, and name, of course.

AK https://www.commerce.alaska.gov/web/cbpl/ProfessionalLicensing/BoardofNursing/ApplicantInformation.aspx
AL http://www.abn.alabama.gov/
AR http://www.arsbn.arkansas.gov/Pages/default.aspx
AZ https://www.azbn.gov/
CA http://www.rn.ca.gov/
CO https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/dora/Nursing
CT http://www.ct.gov/dph/cwp/view.asp?a=3143&q=388910
DC http://doh.dc.gov/service/board-nursing
DE http://dpr.delaware.gov/boards/nursing/
FL http://floridasnursing.gov/
GA http://sos.ga.gov/index.php/licensing/plb/45
HI http://cca.hawaii.gov/pvl/boards/nursing/
IA https://nursing.iowa.gov/
ID http://ibn.idaho.gov/IBNPortal/
IL http://www.idfpr.com/profs/nursing.asp
IN http://www.in.gov/pla/nursing.htm
KS http://www.ksbn.org/
KY http://kbn.ky.gov/Pages/default.aspx
LA http://www.lsbn.state.la.us/
MA http://www.mass.gov/eohhs/gov/departments/dph/programs/hcq/dhpl/nursing/
MD http://mbon.maryland.gov/Pages/default.aspx
ME http://www.maine.gov/boardofnursing/
MI http://www.michigan.gov/lara/0,4601,7-154-72600_72603_27529_27542-59003–,00.html
MN http://mn.gov/boards/nursing/#/list/appId//filterType//filterValue//page/1/sort//order/
MO http://pr.mo.gov/nursing.asp
MS http://www.msbn.ms.gov/Pages/Home.aspx
MT http://b.bsd.dli.mt.gov/license/bsd_boards/nur_board/board_page.asp
NC http://www.ncbon.com/
ND https://www.ndbon.org/
NE http://dhhs.ne.gov/publichealth/Pages/crl_nursing_rn-lpn_rn-lpn.aspx
NH https://www.nh.gov/nursing/
NJ http://www.njconsumeraffairs.gov/nur/Pages/applications.aspx
NM http://nmbon.sks.com/
NV http://nevadanursingboard.org/
NY http://www.op.nysed.gov/prof/nurse/
OH http://www.nursing.ohio.gov/
OK http://nursing.ok.gov/
OR http://www.oregon.gov/OSBN/pages/index.aspx
PA http://www.dos.pa.gov/ProfessionalLicensing/BoardsCommissions/Nursing/Pages/default.aspx#.V08pGPkrK00
RI http://health.ri.gov/licenses/detail.php?id=231
SC http://www.llr.state.sc.us/pol/nursing/
SD https://doh.sd.gov/boards/nursing/
TN https://tn.gov/health/topic/nursing-board
TX https://www.bon.texas.gov/
UT http://www.dopl.utah.gov/licensing/nursing.html
VA https://www.dhp.virginia.gov/nursing/
VT https://www.sec.state.vt.us/professional-regulation/list-of-professions/nursing.aspx
WA http://www.washingtonnurselicenses.com/?gclid=CPz569S6h80CFQckhgodgmsGdg
WI http://dsps.wi.gov/Boards-Councils/Board-Pages/Board-of-Nursing-Main-Page/
WV http://www.wvrnboard.wv.gov/Pages/default.aspx
WY https://nursing-online.state.wy.us/

 

 

Two Sourcing Methods: “Backwards” and “Shooting In the Dark”

booleanstringsBoolean, LIR

I have described the Backwards Method in the previous post. To summarize:

Step 1 – collect as many email addresses as possible from pages that may contain relevant ones. Get emails from Google results, pages containing contact lists, anything remotely promising. But probably keep your searches returning only results from the past 2-3 years since both emails and careers get changed fast.

You can get quite creative in Googling. Don’t forget to dig deeper into sites that promise more content judging on snippets.

It is not a problem even if your collection has 98% emails that are “wrong”.

Collect emails. No other info like names is required. Create an Excel File and paste the emails into the first column. Make the second column pass the test for “full names”. Put the full name as “a b” – it will work.

Step 2 – it is best if you have the “old” LIR. Upload the emails, 5K at a time. Tag uploads to search for them later.

Now, when you search for the tag(s) and your requirements, the results will be people whom you can directly email. No InMail points needed.

(If you do not have Recruiter, you can do cross-referencing with other tools and databases.)

That was the Backwards Method.

The Shooting In the Dark Method is similar, but Step 1 is extended further so to speak.

Step1 Advanced – Google for an expression that would point to an email, like a free email domain, or relevant companies’ email domains (also, try several at a time) AND your requirements like the job title and locations. Do not put any limitations on the type of pages. (But always keep an eye on the sites to explore.) Search for something as silly as

<job title> <location> “gmail.com” “directory”

plus a few words to narrow it down to better results if necessary (perhaps, add another job title).

As I run the searches, I keep Julia Tverskaya‘s Email Extractor on in the background. I pause to gather and upload the emails in two cases: 1) the volume is getting close to 5K, 2) I am interested in the addresses from a particular source (so I may tag that upload to “View Insights”).

I won’t recommend running these open-ended searches as a solution for any project. But it’s worth testing what the picture is like for your opening. It has worked very well for me with one of our positions – Clinical Research Coordinator. I was able to figure contacts for a few dozen CRCs out of a couple of hundred LinkedIn members matching the requirement. It is far not everyone, but it didn’t take any time.

Googling this way is creative and fun 🙂

 

Contacting Registered Nurses

booleanstringsBoolean

I am truly excited to be sourcing for COVID-19 Treatment trials. It’s like a dream come true! It is both helping and getting much deeper experience (and fun) sourcing in the Healthcare industry. We need to find:

in NYC and Indiana, several people for each of the four openings, and it’s urgent. Unlike in our typical sourcing projects, we also need to get potential candidates’ interest and screen them before submitting to the client, a Healthcare startup.

This project, naturally, poses the challenge of reaching out to massive numbers of people. Here are some solutions I am using. It’s not an exhaustive list, of course.

  1. As the first idea, when looking at someone’s profile, you can use some of the contact-finding Chrome extensions. Then, send an email. It “works when it works” but is somewhat slow – clicking on a bunch of tools takes time – and the success rate for these demographics is low.
  2. You can guess the work email based on the employer’s email format. I have done quite a bit of that. First, I pick the name of a particular employer, like a large hospital, and find the first and last names of its employees (RNs) by Googling and in other ways. I insert the names into Excel and run a formula to generate the emails according to the hospital’s email format (which is always easy to find). I have not tried mass-mailing to the auto-generated lists (and am afraid the bounce rate will be high), but I have uploaded them into LinkedIn Recruiter – and few point to members.
  3. It’s something I have been doing on various occasions and find to be productive. But when colleagues hear about it they shrug their shoulders (I don’t know why.) I have been talking about it, yet I know nobody who practices the technique except David Galley. I think I should give the method a name, for better recognition. Any suggestions?

Contact-Emails-Finding Method

Step 1. Google in various ways trying to catch some emails that might belong, in our case, to Registered Nurses in NYC. I simply Google for job titles, locations, and something like “gmail.com”, or “email me at *” examining websites that sound promising – for example, look like attendee lists based on the snippets. If I find a “good” file, I X-Ray the site for more files like it and “see what I can do” on the site itself. To speed the gathering up, I use our Email Extractor that follows me from one page to another, appending scraped lists.

The goal is to collect as many emails as possible. As long as some of those are “ours”, it doesn’t matter that the rest point to the wrong professionals. Their deliverability also does not matter. Any other info including first and last names is not required.

Step 2. I cross-reference the list against LinkedIn using Recruiter import (I am glad we have the “old” version again). I tag all imported records to be able to find them later. Then, I run Recruiter searches with our target locations and job titles. For the profiles identified, I can now message them in Recruiter without spending the points (which I usually do, to record the activity) or email. After cross-referencing, I can be confident the outreach messages are relevant. If you are curious about the numbers, it depends, of course, but after I spend fifteen minutes collecting and uploading lists, I get about a dozen matches for both RNs and CRCs.

There is a way to cross-reference email lists with a basic account, as well!

There are other tools and databases for cross-referencing email lists that I sometimes use, but doing it with LinkedIn would produce results for sure. It would be very far from a complete list, but we only need to find so many.

(By the way, in its help, LinkedIn mentions the possibility of cross-referencing with phone numbers but I have never seen it working.)

There is a lot more to say about the topic. For example, I have found endless scrapable directories of Healthcare professionals, often, with contacts, and now have gigantic lists to utilize. I’ll write about some discoveries in future posts. We have also long wanted to deliver a Sourcing webinar for the Healthcare Industry and now are getting the right experience. It’s better to teach what you practice, right? 😉

So in this case, I spend most of my time outside of LinkedIn and only go there to look up the contacts I find elsewhere or use other tools to find additional prequalified professionals. At that point, I already have their contact emails.

Many of the ways we apply in the COVID project are ways to source on the web that work across industries – and source mostly outside of LinkedIn since (for us) has a tiny fraction of our population. It’s not too early to sign up for the popular Sourcing without LinkedIn Workshop. If you do, make sure you bring concrete challenges to see them addressed in demos.

How Many Results Do You Wish to Get?

booleanstringsBoolean

There is always a limit on the number of search results you can view. It is 1,000 on LinkedIn with any account. On Google, you will not get more than 300-500 results for any search.

If you are a “perfectionist” and always want to see as many results as possible (and maybe with the Verbatim filter), sorry, you are wrong.

For the majority of Google searches, sourcers, as everyone, look just for one, maybe 2-3 top results. We need these searches to gather Competitive Intelligence:

In other types of searches, where you want to see as many results as possible (for example, as many public profiles from a social site as possible) – append &filter=0 to your search URL. You will get more results from each site.

However, remember that the number of search results Google shows is always misleading. You will not get to see more than 300-500 results for any search – even if it shows the number in the millions. The number may change as you go through the pages of results. It may change “the wrong way” if you use Boolean logic on large result sets. Bottom line, ignore the number 😉

Check out my full presentation on Google along with five other recordings on all topics sourcing from seven international practitioners and speakers at our Online Sourcing Learning Day.

Digital Pass

Digital Passes for Online Sourcing Learning Day Are Available

booleanstringsBoolean

Hello Sourcers:

Did you miss the Online Sourcing Learning Day on May 6th? We got a big international crowd and awesome reviews, see below.
Not all is lost! 😉 You can now order a “digital pass” which provides access to six (6) hours of recordings and sets of slides from seven international Master Sourcers here –

-> https://onlinesourcinglearningday.com <-

– it is available to those who couldn’t attend the event live. And before you ask, yes, you can keep the materials.

We have made it affordable. I would say the digital pass will supply you with the most practical sourcing info you can get for the price anywhere.

All the speakers are experienced practitioners; our topics cover both concepts and hands-on techniques. Together, the diverse presentations would improve your future experience and sourcing outcomes. But expect to review the material since it is packed with tips and things to practice!

(If you attended on May 6th, please feel free to share your feedback in the comments).

With any questions, PM me or email [email protected]

The rest of my post is to show off a bit. 🙂

So, we did something right. (I think it was the content as well as speaker personalities.) The event had 234 attendees from 23 countries! Speaker’s average rate was ~7.90 out of 10, with higher scores for different speakers varying between submitters. Here are a few random quotes from participants:

  • Well done! I would most definitely attend future events and would also encourage and recommend to others as well.
  • Great information and training.
  • Great and super practical. Though sometimes the pace was a bit fast.
  • Learned new content, re-established other, de-mystified more!
  • I loved the more informal platform and accessibility to each speaker.
  • Great content, a range of areas, all valuable. I loved the depth while covering breadth. Excellent presenters.
  • Excellent! Very detailed and clear, just keep it that way.
  • I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn good sourcing practices.
  • Funny, friendly and useful 🙂
  • Awesome. Very clearly communicated and presented.
  • Interactive presentation, with concrete examples and easy to follow, even from a total beginner.
  • 6 hours evening EU time session, very focused was extremely useful. An online format works perfectly.
  • Solid takeaways and new innovative sourcing techniques from every speaker. Highly recommend it!

P.S. This was our first event, and we feel it was a success. So now we plan to repeat OSLD with different content, stay tuned! In August, maybe.

15 Unique Features of Custom Search Engines

booleanstringsBoolean, Diversity

As my friends know, I have been fascinated by Google’s Custom Search Engines (CSEs) for years. I have met several colleagues who have become as addicted to CSEs as I am; I feel as if we belong to a tribe. 🙂

I remain disappointed by the apparent CSEs’ low penetration into our industry tools. Part of the undeserved unpopularity is due to the lack of documentation from Google – or anybody else. (Google help no longer keeps the documentation of its advanced operators either.) The lack of info makes the operators like a medieval trade secret that is known to few (and, in our times, communicated via Messenger!)

David Galley and I contribute to covering the CSE documentation gap by blogging, hosting webinars, and preparing a book on the subject.

I have never seen a summary of unique CSEs’ advantages, so I came up with one. Many of the features have been there from the start (in 2006), but some unique semantic features are newer additions and deserve your attention. I have tried to make a full CSE feature list; let me know if you think of something important to add.

CSEs can:

  1. (Invisibly for the user) include only given site(s) (e.g., linkedin.com/in, which will find only LinkedIn profiles)
  2. Exclude given site(s)
  3. Give priority to the given site(s) but search the entire web
  4. Give priority to pages with given keyword(s)
  5. Narrow to a language
  6. Narrow to a country
  7. Boost results by country
  8. Include multiple sites via patterns using an Asterisk (e.g., site:behance.net/*/resume)
  9. Automatically append a string to user’s search (for example – narrow the search to PDF documents by adding filetype:PDF)
  10. Define synonyms to process user’s input
  11. Use the Synonyms feature to run long OR statements (for example, search for common women’s names)
  12. Select pages with given Schema.org object(s) (like Person, Physician, or Organization)
  13. Search for the presence of Schema.org objects’ fields (for example, find pages that have the filed “email” in the Person object)
  14. Search within Schema.org objects’ fields (for example, search for Github profiles containing “love Python” in the bio or LinkedIn profiles containing “open to new opportunities” in the headline)
  15. Guide the search by selecting Knowledge Graph object(s) (for example, find pages that are “CVs”)

While the first 11 points have been there from the start, 12-15 are later additions and make CSE search truly semantic, quite a challenge for a global search engine, nicely solved. (The only things that are less nice about CSEs is the old-style UI and cryptic operators to write out).

Please join us for an online class on CSEs on Tuesday, May 19th – “Become A Custom Search Engines Expert”. The optional workshop is the next day, Thursday. Seating is limited, sign up now!

Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Recruiter Import Replacement – with a Basic Account!

booleanstringsBoolean, LinkedIn, LIR

We all dearly miss the free Sales Navigator extension and the related link to cross-reference emails. When LinkedIn announced that they are removing the SN Chrome extension, I posted a blog commenting on the Sales Navigator Death.

LinkedIn Recruiter (the “old” version) has an import function, which they call “Talent Pipeline,” capable of cross-referencing massive email lists at a time. But it’s available only to subscribers. And, the function was made into something much less powerful in the “new” Recruiter.

Now I am going to explain how you can do individual and mass-cross-referencing LinkedIn profiles against the emails they are registered with, just with a Basic or Professional account.

In the post on discontinuation of SN, I suggested looking more in-depth into uploading lists of emails to your LinkedIn account. You can upload emails from a CSV file or sync your Gmail.

At the time of the March post, all we had available to access the uploaded info was this link – https://www.linkedin.com/mynetwork/import-contacts/results/member/. Unfortunately, it only displays so many contacts, and there is no search. (You can also download the “Contacts” as part of your LI archive in preferences, but it no longer shows the names of people associated with email addresses.)

However, recently I ran across this function, which is new. It shows everyone uploaded (you have to scroll to see more). People who are identified by emails show the names, titles, and companies; those not identified show only an email address. The great thing is that you can now search within those imported contacts:

It is an interesting search function – clearly, they search within the beginnings of words. The search is performed in three fields:

  1. First name
  2. Last name
  3. Part of the email before @ (but not the email domain),

as shown in the screenshot:

(Apparently, the search is a bit buggy and shows duplicate results.)

So, here is what you can do. Create a CSV file with email address(es) in question and upload it to your personal LinkedIn. For the emails identified you will see the pictures, names, titles, and companies, but not the emails. Nevertheless, it is not hard to find any person in question using the search since we have the uploaded file to check with.

More technical users can review the search page source code and get straight to all identified profiles from the uploaded list. Email addresses are invisible on the LinkedIn page but are present in the HTML code. Here is an example:

A person’s email address and his/her LI ID are both stored in HTML. Once you have the ID, you can go to the profile appending the ID to linkedin.com/in, like https:linkedin.com/in/ACoAAAHZeaEBmlz8ZQoTNUggLjPj3DJURl31XTE. It won’t be hard to write a script to collect those from the HTML code.

So that the new function allows us to identify someone on LI by an email address like SN Extension (former Rapportive) AND ALSO cross-reference whole email lists, as the old LIR does!

Finally, if you are interested in scraping results from “Contacts” into a table, get in touch with Andre Bradshaw. He has written some code for downloading results.

Enjoy! 🙂

 

How to Search by City Location on LinkedIn

booleanstringsBoolean, LinkedIn

The worst part of LinkedIn.com people search is that we no longer can search by any location other than a standardized one, like “San Francisco Bay Area” (where I live). But my area is large; people won’t commute from San Jose to San Francisco, for example.

The workaround for narrowing down to a “city” location, like “San Jose, California,” is to search in keywords. Interestingly, though on some profiles you will see only a generic area name, the profiles will be found if you put a location name in the quotation marks into Keywords. (Not quite WYSYWIG!)

I recently chatted with Henk van Ess who pointed out that if he searched just by a city name, he would get profiles in this area, in his example, “Apples.” I think I knew about this but have looked into it deeper this time.

Here you go:

  1. LinkedIn.com will find profiles in a search by a city location name. To avoid false positives, you need to enter the full LinkedIn location name in quotes. The location names are the ones you can see in Recruiter, but you can often guess.
  2. (Good for us!) LinkedIn.com does not search within work locations. So we won’t have too many false positives.

Here is an example from our discussion with Henk:

“Apples, Vaud, Switzerland.”

It produces a little over 70 profiles, all of which do reside in the area, though many won’t have it visible on their profiles:

Enjoy! 🙂

We have lots of other tips in our recording “Overcoming LinkedIn Limitations.”

The Full List of 21 Google Search Operators

booleanstringsBoolean, Google

Operator Meaning
Pages containing keywords in:
allinurl: / inurl: – the URL
allintitle: / intitle: – the Title
allintext: / intext: – the text
allinanchor: / inanchor: – the anchor text
filetype: – file types
site: Narrow results to a site
related: Shows similar sites (being phased out)
cache: Shows a page copy in the Index
define Gives a definition (or use “what is”)
The quotes (“”) Search for a phrase
The minus (-) Exclusion
OR Alternatives
Numrange (..) Search for a range of numbers
Asterisk (*) Stands for a word or a few words
AROUND (n) Proximity search
before:, after: Date search

(As you know, Google no longer documents most of these.)

Bookmark it! 🙂

150+ Favorite Sourcing/OSINT Tools

Using Your Hands vs. Boolean Builders

booleanstringsBoolean, LIR

 

My Dad was a simple man. For him, life was about figuring out what is right and wrong and then doing the right thing, which he expected of others – and didn’t hesitate to tell them. (Needless to say, I did many things wrong.) But, in his Partial Differential Equations, he was quite intuitive and subtle, often thinking and speaking in metaphors, as Mathematicians do.

I think Dad would have been able to appreciate an intuitive yet common sense approach to searching on the web as superior over “Boolean Builder” tools.

I would advise against Boolean-building tools. They seem attractive, there’s marketing angle to how they sound, and a long-lived tradition of (outdated) long OR searches that recruiters continue to share. Yet these automation tools are all ineffective; I can give you multiple examples using your favorite Builder and your current search. On a given search, they will have missed too many matching results and found too many false positives. Additionally, Boolean ORs are not a good practice on Google (see my latest post about it). A notion that Boolean Builders are for novices or busy, or non-technical people is a myth. It’s best to search “by hand,” and search on Google simply (and repeatedly).

“Boolean building” tools shift your focus to creating a “string” (or even “the string”) while your focus should be getting results, which you achieve by changing the searches all the time to get more and different data. I suppose there are exceptions, where you may need a long OR list of companies or schools to include. You can accomplish it by an Excel “OR” builder, but you would still need to review the list – to have the right coding, include abbreviations, etc. The output would be a string for LinkedIn because Google restricts you to 32 keywords.

Your comments are welcome (especially if you disagree)!

Please join my seven international friends and colleagues and me at the Online Sourcing Learning Day – May 6th! We already have over 100 participants – which we expect to double – from most US states, Canada, Mexico, many Europan countries, Australia, India, and are quite excited about it! If you have a team, please get in touch. I will be speaking on concepts like this one 🙂