I am excited to be presenting our first “Competitive Intelligence for Recruiters” class on Tuesday, February 25th, with an optional workshop on Wednesday.

“Competitive Intelligence” (CI) is gathering and analyzing information about the industry, business environment, competitors, products, and services. CI is typically associated with business decision-making, but I know you would agree with me that it’s entirely applicable to Sourcing. (It helps when generating those long OR strings with company names, for example!)

Advanced search dialogs on the platforms where it is available supply useful intel right in the user interface. Entering search criteria will cause the search dialog to generate “Dynamic Insights” – a new term we are introducing – into the distribution of the results across various categories (e.g., companies, locations, industries, or salary bands).

For example, on Indeed Jobs and Resumes, you can enter a location and job title or skill and get a list of company names. Or, enter skills and see a list of common job titles for people with those skills. You can gain these insights without a paid subscription.

LinkedIn also offers interactive search dialogs, so it’s another site to gain Dynamic Insights. The dialogs working for the purpose are the Alumni and Company Employees search and the “old” version of LinkedIn Recruiter’s “View Insights” function.

Note that you can achieve a similar effect (to using interactive dialogs) by scraping and parsing search results, from Google or elsewhere, since you can then filter and sort the data in Excel.

Even without a standardized term, many Recruiters intuitively incorporate Dynamic Insights into searches. But if you are not doing so, now is the time to start!

If you want to learn how this and other CI methods can help improve your Recruitment performance, please join us at the Competitive Intelligence class. We expect this course to fill up quickly, so register now to reserve your place!

This is a guest post from David Galley, Director, Training Programs at Sourcing Certifications.

The #1 question people have when they start sourcing is, “what is the best Boolean string to find the people I am looking for?”

Searching for Secret Clearance is not straightforward, and there’s a significant demand for cleared specialists, especially in the Technology sector.

Sometimes a search is as easy as “I am looking for” “have secret clearance”, and other times it’s sufficient to flip through your favorite thesaurus to find some word variations to develop a monster like this one. But sometimes the key criterion cannot be found with a keyword search, no matter how many ORed variations you include.

Let me paraphrase a perennial example on various recruiting Facebook groups: How do you find people who hold US security clearances (e.g., Secret, Top Secret, TS/SCI, Q, or L)? A search for specific types of clearance, or even the terms “cleared” or “clearance”, finds a tiny fraction of the 4MM actively cleared workforce. Sure, not everyone is on LinkedIn, but even so, the numbers fall short of expectations.

The key to success in this situation is the concept of indirect (aka inferential or implied) search. What evidence can we search for, which implies that the people we find meet the criteria? Let’s start with the idea that there are companies, especially contractors in the intelligence and defense industries, that make active security clearance a prerequisite for specific roles. Whether or not professionals working in those roles list the clearances in online social profiles, we know they must be cleared.

So, which roles and companies are these? An example search path to learn which roles require clearances would be:

Step 1) Find a list of top contractors for the industry (e.g., defense), with a simple Google search list of top defense contractors

Step 2) Pick a list to work from, like this one from Wikipedia

Step 3) Search on job boards with terms relevant to the clearance you need, to learn which roles (and locations) within a given company require them. This search on Indeed active secret clearance company:Lockheed turns up several job ads, including a Senior Mechanical Thermal Engineer in Orlando, FL.

Step 4) Since we now know that Lockheed requires an active Secret clearance for Mechanical/Thermal Engineers in Orlando, we can search on LinkedIn for Thermal Engineers who work at Lockheed, located in the Orlando, Florida Area.

(A search for all Thermal Engineers on LinkedIn who mention “secret” on their profile finds far fewer people!)

Note that you can apply this same process to any search, even ones where direct keyword searches perform well, to discover “stealth” talent that you (and your competitors) may have previously overlooked.

Check out our next Sourcing Webinar – How to Find and Attract Technical Talent – Tuesday, February 18. Register and receive the slides, recording, and a month of support. Seating is limited – sign up now.

(And, we have a Competitive Intelligence webinar in the works. Stay tuned!)

Dev.to is a relatively new site where developers discuss how to build software, and it is quite a Sourcer-friendly site. 😉

A profile can have a location, education, skills, links to other profiles, content keywords, and, often, public email contact:

Internal search for members is too weak to be useful. But we can X-Ray the site for profiles like so:

site:dev.to -site:dev.to/*/* “united kingdom” javascript.

Since Google recognizes hashtags in search, and the site widely uses hashtags, we can search in a more targeted way, for example:

site:dev.to -site:dev.to/*/* #javascript “gmail.com”.

With a Google search like the above, it is not hard to scrape the results and get a list of prospects along with emails. It is a matter of picking the right scraping tool.

Please note, we are going to run an updated version of our always-popular Scraping Webinar on Tuesday, February 11th. If you are curious about the topic, it is a place to be.

This Custom Search Engine – http://bit.ly/devtoprofiles (X-Ray Dev.To) – will look for Dev.to profiles. Using it eliminates the need for the operator site: and allows to search for members’ profiles, for example:

#javascript amsterdam

There is not a whole lot of “structure” on the profiles (much less than on Github’s, for example), but we can search specifically for bios with a Custom Search Engine:

more:p:person-description:java.

I hope the resource will prove useful to some! Let me know if you have any questions.

We are running the How to Find and Attract Technical Talent on Tuesday, February 18th. Join to get a complete IT Sourcing toolbox. (Some tools are cross-industrial.) Seating is limited.

The beauty of our tool Social List is that you can get a list of professionals in split seconds. As I offered to source for colleagues in my post, I got many beautifully diverse requests. Here are some sourced lists, as examples of what Social List can do, shared on the Boolean Strings Group on Facebook.

1. Franchise Business Consultant in restaurants based in DFW
2. API Developer in Arizona
3. Java Developer, Montréal
4. Dental Hygienist
5. Commercial construction general contractor (estimator), Los Angeles
6. Search Engine Advertising Consultant, Berlin
7. Enterprise Account Executive, Sydney, Australia
8. Clinical research associate, Pharma, CRO
9. Statistician in Austin, TX
10. Software engineer, front end, React/JavaScript, Toronto
11. Design engineer, solidworks, rf or microwave, Providence RI
12. Product designer with B2B & SaaS, Mountain View
13. Software engineer mid-level PHP JavaScript, Kyiv
14. Executive Housekeeper, Wisconsin
15. Data analytics professionals in Procurement industry in Dublin Ireland
16. Mechanical Engineer
17. System Architect, precision mechanics/machine building, Eindhoven (The Netherlands)
18. Citrix engineer in Fribourg / Switzerland

You should try Social List if you haven’t!

• Sourcing Function and Metrics in Recruitment
• Sourcing Skill Assessment Methodology
• Six Core Areas of Competence
• Assessment and Interview Aid: new eBook “Sourcing Answers” (120 Questions and Solutions)
• Example Questions
• Strengthen Your Skills – Get Educated
• Get Certified
• Assessment, Certification, and Education for Teams

• Slides
• Video

Hello Sourcers:

A brand-new “privacy-first” web search engine OneSearch.com from Verizon is out.

Unlike Google, Bing, or Yandex, OneSearch does not have its own index. The search results are Bing-based.

There is no documentation on search operators, but it looks like the operator site: works, and so do a few more, including the Bing-only operator, contains:, which looks for pages with links to files of specific formats. Oddly, as Balazs has pointed out, OneSearch has trouble understanding NOT. I hope we’ll collectively solve that mystery!

The “privacy” aspect can be improved, as some critics say. What is of interest to us though, is that private search engines like OneSearch and DuckDuckGo are not putting users in a “filter bubble.” We can use them to widen our searches.

Web search has a drop-down of the page age restrictions; we can set different time intervals by manipulating the search URL (for example, replace &age=1m with &age=1y). I don’t know if it’s possible to restrict to a language or locality.

OneSearch has a nice set of image search options.

I have found it slightly annoying that OneSearch doesn’t consistently show and highlight keywords in the results. It could be Bing’s quality too; I do not use Bing that often and will need to run some tests. On the positive side, it seems much faster than Bing itself.

Please share your OneSearch observations in the comments or on our

Boolean Strings Facebook Group.

I am happy to announce a new eBook, “Sourcing Answers,” that David Galley and I have just e-published. We had initially conceived the book as an aid to prepare for our Sourcing Certification Exams. However, the book can also serve to help to assess your and your team’s Sourcing skills (whether your goal is to get certified or not) – or perhaps choose questions from the book to use at interviews when hiring Recruiters.

In our industry, assessment of Sourcing skills is vital due to the apparent lack of adequate performance measurements for a Sourcer. Assessments can improve Recruiting performance by identifying Sourcing skill gaps and taking action to fix them. Reviewing solutions and correct answers to the concrete challenges are always educational, as well. This book can serve as an aid in assessments.

By trying to solve the sample questions and comparing your solutions with the ones provided, you will improve your sourcing skills, knowledge, and confidence. The eBook offers “learning by doing” as well as “learning by example.” You would be experiencing optimal approaches to a task, the right way of thinking, and proper tool selections.

The questions in the book are just like those we give at our exams. There is no need for paid subscriptions to any sites. Each question should take you between one and six minutes to answer.

Our test-takers have reported feeling accomplished, having improved their skills and understanding of Sourcing – and having fun taking the exams! We hope you enjoy the questions as well. If you decide that you are ready to get certified, the next Exam week is January 25-31, 2020.

This is our third book, following “300 Best Boolean Strings” (now in its 4th edition) and “Sourcing Hacks” (2nd edition).

Happy Sourcing!