Thank you for reading, sharing, and commenting! My blog has reached one million views.

Starting my blog has lead to the worldwide acceptance of the term Boolean Strings, and I am proud of it! 🙂

Here are some of the latest most popular posts:

Searching for Grads: a Hands-On Example
LinkedIn Groups Upcoming Decline
Cross-Referencing Individuals
Two Interesting Sourcing Tools
Eight Strings To Find Code Authors
Finding Facebook IDs for Companies Hack
How to View Resumes with Names on Indeed for Free
A LinkedIn Recruiter Flaw You Should Know About
How to Find Facebook Graph IDs for Job Titles
Facebook Graph Search Important Changes
Automated Search? Not Any Time Soon
New Email Extractor/Collector

Also – I have just updated the List of Sourcing Tools.

If you would like me to cover any Souring topics, let me know in the comments.

Would you be interested in publishing a guest post on my blog? Please get in touch!

I share Sourcing tips, techniques, hacks, and concepts on the blog. I am glad to contribute to the Sourcing/Recruiting community! At the same time, my blog helps to market and attract professionals and teams to the Sourcing Training Programs that we provide; the tips I post on the blog serve as a preview of the type of material we teach. Thousands of the Boolean Strings blog readers got access to the informative, in-depth Sourcing Training Materials in the Training Library, attended our Live Classes, and signed up for the yearly Sourcing Training Subscription, that also includes the Boolean Book. All of our training webinars include one month of support on the material and the subscription offers year-round support on all things Sourcing. If you are interested in serious Sourcing Training, check those out!

Happy Sourcing!
Irina

LinkedIn has a people search filter that LinkedIn Recruiter doesn’t have: searching by keywords in the School names. Searching by school names is especially helpful if we are looking for professionals who have moved from one country to another.

Here is an example. I am currently sourcing for an HR Director for the San Francisco Bay Area office of an Israel-based company. They would prefer to hire someone who has moved here from Israel and understands the culture. Searching for graduates of Israel-based schools living in the Bay Area is an excellent way to find those candidates.

First, I assembled a list of colleges and universities in Israel on LinkedIn. I ran this search for schools. I collected the school names from the results using Instant Data Scraper from Webrobots.io and created an OR statement with the school names:

“Afeka Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering” OR “Bar-Ilan University” OR “Ben-Gurion University of the Negev” OR “Bezalel Academy of Art and Design” OR “Coding Academy Israel” OR “College of Law and Business” OR “Developers.Institute” OR “Eastern Mediterranean International School” OR “Gvahim” OR “Habetzefer – הבצפר” OR “IDC Herzliya” OR “IDF Junior Command Military Academy” OR “IFI – Israel Financial Institute” OR “Israel Academic College” OR “Israel Tech Challenge <itc>” OR “Kivunim” OR “MLA – The center of Academic Studies” OR “Netcraft Academy” OR “Ono Academic College” OR “ORT Braude College” OR “ORT Colleges” OR “ORT Guttman” OR “Ruppin Academic Center” OR “School of Pharmacy/Institute for Drug Research,Hebrew University of Jerusalem” OR “See-Security: Cyber & Information Security College” OR “Shalem College” OR “Shapell’s/Darche Noam” OR “Shenkar – Engineering. Design. Art.” OR “Tech Career Israel” OR “Technion – Israel Institute of Technology” OR “Tel Aviv University” OR “Tel Aviv University – Coller School of Management” OR “Tel-Hai College” OR “The College of Management Academic Studies” OR “The Department of Asian Studies – University of Haifa” OR “The Open University of Israel” OR “University of Haifa” OR “Vatel Israel” OR “Weizmann Institute of Science” OR “Yeshiva Keter Shlomo” 

Next, I pasted the above string into the Schools field, along with additional parameters, resulting in this search.

Note, if you are a LinkedIn Recruiter subscriber, you won’t be able to run a search like that; you need to run it from your personal account.

Hello Sourcers:

Take part in our latest Sourcing Contest if you haven’t yet! Here is the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SocialListContest

Hurry – the deadline is EOB Friday, August 24th, 2018.

Your prize is a three-month subscription to our awesome Sourcing Tool – Social List (https://sociallist.io).

Hint: you can easily solve the challenge by using Social List.

Once the Contest is over, I will update the post with the winners’ names.

Good luck everyone!

Update:

Thanks to all who have answered the contest questions! We had participants from the US, India, South Africa, the Netherlands, Russia, Ireland, Poland, Slovakia, Argentina, France, the UK, and Australia.

Congratulations to the winners! They are:

Alicia Priselac
Catia Sousa
Dilip Anjaria
Florian Bonnet
Galina Meriakri
James Galvin
Jan Bernhart
Jeremy Tatom
Jonathan Tarrico
Marija Zivanovic
Martin Freeman
Nagajothi Edumban
Naresh Kumar
Sankar David
Scott Quinn
Shane McCusker
Shivkumar Gurram
Susanna Frazier
Tatiana Durkot
Tatyasaheb Kolage
Trish Wyderka
Vidhya Lingappan
WP Strauss

Well done! Everyone on this list will get a three-month subscription to Social List.

Cross-referencing is a major sourcing method. Everyone should be using it as part of a sourcing process.

“Cross-Reference”: starting from incomplete initial data, build up professional profiles by locating and assembling the professional bio details.

Let’s take a look at some cross-referencing techniques.

We start from incomplete – but promising – professional data. Our goal is to find additional information that would pre-qualify a professional as a potential candidate or prospect – or exclude the professional from further consideration.

Of course, a straightforward way to find that extra information is Googling. We can Google by the person’s name, adding his or her area code, employer name, employer email domain, job title, location, or skills. As soon as we find new information, we can include that in further searches, and find more.

Here is an example. Starting from a LinkedIn profile, I have Googled the person’s name along with area codes – and found the person’s resume, along with the contact information:

An excellent cross-referencing tool is the LinkedIn-owned Connectifier Social Links. It works on profiles on many Social Networks, including LinkedIn, and shows clickable icons that take us to the person’s other profiles:

If the info we already have includes the person’s email address, we are in luck! We can find quite a bit of professional information using some of these techniques:

• Google the email address in the quotation marks
• Find the LinkedIn profile by an email address using Sales Navigator Extension  or this browser-independent way
• Find the Google-Plus profile by pasting an email address in a Gmail new message; mouse over to see the profile
• Cross-reference on Twitter
• Cross-reference on Facebook
• Look up by email on Pipl

… and more.

Would you be interested in digging deeper and mastering the art of cross-referencing? We will cover it in-depth, along with multiple examples, as part of the class “Sourcing Methodologies” coming up on Wednesday, September 5th. Check it out!

I want to share two Chrome extensions that I have started using recently – and I like them!

ZAPinfo (formerly WebClipDrop) is a unique combination of a web scraper combined with data enrichment software. ZAPinfo:

• Collects and parses profiles or resumes from Social Networks, Job Boards, and other sites
• Enriches the records with contact and social info – I use this functionality as a back-up to contact-finding tools like ContactOut
• Exports to CSV; it can also fill out forms for you

You can find a (substantial) list of sites that ZAPinfo works with here.

Here is a screenshot of a ZAPinfo window with enriched information from a LinkedIn profile of my friend Jim Stroud (hope he doesn’t mind):

Instant Data Scraper by Webrobots.io is a scraper that works amazingly well out-of-the-box. It crawls “listing type” data from multiple pages. The tool uses AI to detect tabular or listing type data on web pages. All you have to do to start scraping is point it to the “Next” button. You can export the results in Excel format.

Here is a screenshot of a site and the Instant Data Scraper export:

You can find videos on both tools on the excellent UnTECH Youtube channel by Bret Feig.

Are you interested in an updated review and comparison of all the top Sourcing Tools available? Check out the webinar “Sourcing Productivity Tools” in our Training Library.

One of my favorite ways to source for Software Developers is in the “authors” files.

Software code repositories often have text-formatted “authors” files which list contributors, usually along with their contact email addresses.

Here are some Boolean Strings that find lists of code authors.

Search on github.com:

• inurl:authors site:github.com PHP (looking for a programming language)
• inurl:authors site:github.com django (looking for a specific technology)
• inurl:authors site:github.com “redhat.com” (looking for Developers from a given company)

Search on other sites:

• inurl:authors site:gitlab.com
• inurl:authors site:fossies.org
• inurl:authors site:bitbucket.org
• inurl:authors site:sourceforge.net/p
• inurl:authors site:googlesource.com

Are you well-versed in sourcing basics and interested in learning more sourcing hacks? Join me for a repeat of the previously sold-out webinar Sourcing Hacks, coming up on Wednesday, August 8th. In the presentation, I will cover twenty hacks that you can add to your Sourcing Toolkit. (See the webinar description for more detail). Seating is limited, and the class is already filling out – sign up now!

We have just announced a brand-new webinar and workshop “Common Sense Sourcing,” that I would like to tell you about.

I have recently posted two polls with suggestions of webinars that our colleagues would be interested in – on Facebook, in the Boolean Strings Group, and on LinkedIn. This topic described as “Common Sense Sourcing” workshop. Explaining hands-on techniques that would allow you to productively source on Google, Social Networks, and professional sites, with multiple examples got the largest number of votes. (Please feel free to add your comment about the choices of future webinars).

We have created the “Common Sense Sourcing” webinar material based on years of communicating with our webinars’ attendees, talking with recruiters at events, and reading sourcing-related blog posts. We have seen Recruiters failing to get the results they want because of the wrong assumptions, incorrect search syntax, or using only limited techniques and platforms. We want to help Recruiters to overcome the difficulties; lots can be improved without using advanced techniques or tools.

Sourcing is not just for nerds! It’s not rocket science! Everyone can learn to source productively, following some simple techniques that we will demonstrate, understanding why they work, and having the right expectations about sourcing on various platforms. By following the tips that we will show, you will start getting results (that your competition wouldn’t), raise your productivity – and have fun sourcing!

Here is what we will discuss, and we will provide multiple examples as well as ready-to-use search templates:

• The Main Search Principle and how it works in search engines and databases
• What you can and cannot find online
• How to expand and narrow the search
• Differences in search syntax on Google vs. LinkedIn and other platforms
• Locating associations, conferences and social sites where your potential candidates “hang out”
• Finding more leads once you have a matching profile
• How to create X-Ray templates, including Meetup, Crunchbase, Github, StackOverflow, and niche association sites from various industries
• X-Raying sites for professional bios and lists of leads with contact info
• “Implicit” search

… and more.

The webinar will be useful for beginner and experienced Recruiters alike, and for anyone who searches for professionals on the web as part of their job.

You can get a recording of the webinar in our Training Library at this link: “Common Sense Sourcing“.