Sourcing on AngelList

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AngelList has recently introduced a “sourcing” function. To source on AngelList, you need to define your company and post a job. Then, press the menu item “Recruit” to launch the Sourcing function:

The free search filters AngelList offers for Sourcing include keywords, role, location, looking for full/part-time, work authorization, years of experience, and skills. Many members have their resumes and social profile URLs attached to their profiles.

Additionally, AngelList would search for candidates based on your job description:

It’s worth using for sourcing, check out the new functions!

Please join me at the upcoming (our most popular!) lecture Sourcing without LinkedIn on Wednesday, April 4th at 9 AM PDT to learn about many more ways to source.

Sourcing Contest Answers and Winners

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Congratulations to our winners!

Here are the questions from our Social List Sourcing Contest, with the answers.

Q1. Find a person who lives in the state of New York, US, whose LinkedIn Headline contains all of the following:

  • “Open to New Opportunities”
  • CFO
  • “VP Finance”
  • Controller

What is the name of the town where he lives? [Hicksville]

Q2.  Find a person on LinkedIn who states his industry is “Libraries”, lives in Florida, and lists the abbreviation MBA as part of his last name. What is the other, libraries-oriented, degree abbreviation he also lists as part of his last name? [MLIS]

Q3. Find a person whose LinkedIn profile headline says that he is Sales & Marketing Head, and also includes a Gmail address. What is the Gmail address listed in this person’s headline? [[email protected]]

Q4. Find a person on Github who works at Microsoft, lives in Seattle, and has repositories in all of these programming languages: JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Java. What is the URL of the blog he links to from his Github profile? [http://www.eddylu.com]

Q5. Find a US-based person whose public ZoomInfo profile has his email address and who is a Pricing and Investment Manager at IBM. What is the email address? [[email protected]]

Q6. Find a female Google Scholar author who has a publication with a study of cats, dogs, and humans on an island in Spain. What is her verified email domain listed on the profile [ulpgc.es]

We had 43 contestants who came from the US, India, the Netherlands, Israel, and Switzerland. The time spent on the Contest was, on average, 36 minutes.

The participants did really well! Ten people have provided the right answers – and we have decided to give them all the first prize – three months subscription to Social List.

Our winners (in the alphabetical order) are:

  • Aakash Panwar
  • Bhawana Garg
  • Jan Bernhart
  • Maisha Cannon
  • Marc Colhoun
  • Riday Sopariwala
  • Sara Cannon
  • Scott Quinn
  • Sue Kumar
  • Zsuzsa Pecsenye

Well done, congratulations!

LinkedIn Accounts Comparison

booleanstringsBoolean, LinkedIn, LIR

Let’s take a look at what various LinkedIn types of accounts offer.

LinkedIn has “personal” and “professional” account types. Personal are basic, career, and business subscriptions. All personal accounts have the same search filters (there are no “premium” filters for a business account). Professional are Recruiter Lite, LinkedIn Recruiter (LIR), Sales Navigator, and Sales Navigator Team.

Number of Search Results

All LinkedIn accounts show up to 1,000 search results. There is no difference between accounts in the number of search results.

Personal and professional accounts differ in the search filters they offer. And it’s not that the more expensive accounts give us more filters – they are just different.

Unique Search Filters

Personal (basic/premium) accounts have these unique fields – absent in paid accounts

  • Profile Language (missing in Navigator and Lite)
  • Nonprofit interests
  • School Name

Professional accounts have these, not currently in personal:

  • Company size
  • Zip/radius

Sales Navigator has these additional fields:

  • All groups
  • Years at current position/company
  • Company type
  • Posted content words (unique filter)

Sales Navigator also gives us an advanced Company search.

Recruiter Lite has these unique fields:

  • Skills
  • Veterans
  • My groups
  • Recently joined

LIR also has, in addition, to Lite’s filters:

  • Spoken languages
  • Field of study
  • Degree
  • All groups
  • Project/team-related searches

What’s Missing

  • Personal accounts do not allow to search by zip code/radius, quite an inconvenience.
  • Recruiter Lite offers to organize the information in projects and with tags but doesn’t allow to search by those filters – which makes it rather useless.

As a conclusion, if you cannot have a subscription to LinkedIn Recruiter, Sales Navigator presents a pretty good set of features and search filters. Of course, a decision, which account to choose, depends on everyone’s goals and budget.

Please check out our presentation – Overcoming LinkedIn’s Limitations, with extensive advice and multiple tips for various accounts.

Introduction to Social List, a Cool Sourcing Tool

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Social List is a Sourcing Tool that lets you instantly generate lists of target social profiles and export them. The tool searches for public profiles on LinkedIn, Indeed, ZoomInfo, Github, Meetup, and several other social sites. Designed with Recruiters in mind, the tool can also be helpful to Sales and Business Development professionals.

Here is how search looks in Social List. Unlike X-Raying (Googling) the search filters provide precise search.

Here is what the results look like. Each profile is shown with a detailed preview. Since the tool searches for public profiles, it would show profiles both in and out of your network. The tool will not lead to any restrictions on your LinkedIn account.

You can export search results in Excel format, which looks like this:

Here is what our user Laurie Miller, a Senior Talent Sourcing Specialist at Bose Corporation, writes about Social List: “I’m a fan and have been using it for several months. It is more precise than traditional xray searches so I can target candidates quicker. The cost is reasonable and definitely worth it.”

Try Social List now!

Social List Trial! Sourcing Contest!

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I am happy to announce a Social List Trial and a Sourcing Contest, running in parallel this week.

Social List (https://sociallist.io) is a tool for Recruiters and Salespeople. It allows to instantly collect and export lists of public Social Profiles matching your requirements. Social List brings precision and intelligence to X-Ray searches. It is easy to use and boosts your Sourcing productivity. Here is a short overview of the tool.

THIS WEEK, March 19-25, 2018:

SOCIAL LIST TRIAL: We have opened up Social List for a one week trial. You can sign up and experience the tool until March 25th at https://sociallist.io/signup/contest2018.

CONTEST: The Sourcing Contest is open for your submissions until March 25th. At the end of this period, we will select a winner. The prize is three (3) months subscription to Social List.* Best of luck, Sourcers!

You don’t have to run a trial of Social List to solve the contest. (But it would come in handy, you’ll see!)

You don’t have to participate in the Contest to run a Social List trial. We are glad to help you to make the most out of your trial. Any questions – please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

*If you are already a subscriber, you would win 3 free months of the tool usage.

Facebook Graph Search – New Tips

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Here is a new site helping with the Facebook graph search queries – Who Posted What (Idea by Henk van Ess, Developed by Daniel Endresz,) The site (still in Beta) offers to search for comments by a user with a given keyword or posted within a certain date range. The Facebook ID that is required can be easily found via https://findmyfbid.com/.

Apparently, the template string to search for somebody’s posts with a keyword is –

https://www.facebook.com/search/<FB ID>/stories-by/str/<keyword>/stories-keyword/intersect

Example search for posts.

Now, if you wanted to find comments containing a given keyword by a certain person, the template, similarly, can be, as I have discovered –

https://www.facebook.com/search/<FB ID>/stories-commented/str/<keyword>/stories-keyword/intersect

Example search for comments.

I find these searches helpful in locating posts and comments from given people on given topics of interest.

Please check out our popular Facebook Sourcing Mastery class for a thorough coverage of Facebook Sourcing.

 

Five Hidden Google Operators

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Many Sourcers know that adding “&filter=0” to the search URL would “tell” Google to “search with omitted results included”.

There are several other ways to control search results that cannot be expressed through the Google advanced search operators.

These include:

  • narrow to a language – set in the Advanced Search Dialog
  • narrow to a country – set in the Advanced Search Dialog
  • search Verbatim (i.e. without interpreting the search) – available through “Tools” after we have searched
  • search within a date range – available through “Tools” after we have searched

Just like “&filter=0”, these filters are expressed through various additions to the Google search URL. We can set these options via appending the search URL with the appropriate strings.

URL addition Meaning Example
&filter=0 include omitted results
&lr= narrow to a language &lr=lang_af
&cr= narrow to a country &cr=countryAF
&tbs=li:1 search Verbatim
tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:<date_start>,cd_max:<date_end> search by date range &tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:3/1/2017,cd_max:2/1/2018

You can find documents with more URL parameters explained by searching for some of the parameters.

Please check out the Boolean Basics class that covers all things Boolean.

 

 

 

 

The Full List of Google Advanced Search Operators

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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
info: Shows page info
define Gives a definition
The quotes (“”) Search for a phrase
The minus (-) Exclusion
OR Alternatives
Numrange (..) – no longer works Search for a range of numbers
Asterisk (*) Stands for a word or a few words
AROUND (n) Proximity search

The above chart shows all of the currently supported advanced search operators in Google. (Google’s help no longer lists most of them!)

[Edited] In April 2019, Google introduced the operators before: and after:

[Edited] October 2019: Numrange is back!

Get the Boolean Basics class for extensive coverage of all things Boolean.

LinkedIn Recruiter: More Confusion

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Remember, LinkedIn Recruiter finds more results when we enter a company name vs. point to a company object? We discussed this in LinkedIn Recruiter: Not WYSIWYG.

Well, it turns out that, when searching for job titles, it is the opposite: selecting a value (Software Engineer, in the screenshot) brings many more results than entering the same words in quotation marks – or even writing Software AND Developer.

So what is going on here, why is there such a difference?

The answer to that is: in the first case, LinkedIn Recruiter also brings synonyms of the job title (the way it guesses them). By using the quotes or the operator AND, we eliminate any such guessing and Recruiter brings only the results for members whose title is Software Engineer (or, perhaps, Senior Software Engineer).

How well does LinkedIn identify synonymical job titles? Sorry to say, not so well. Here are some job titles that came up as synonyms for Software Engineer. Only some are correct – others are not:

  • SDE
  • Architect/Programmer
  • Java Developer
  • SAS Programmer
  • Quality Control Inspector/ CMM Programmer/Operator
  • Recruiting Coordinator – SWE (OOPS…)

To avoid getting these false positives in your results, it’s best to use the Boolean search syntax for job titles, i.e. add the quotation marks, AND, OR, or NOT. Or simply add a space at the end of Software Engineer.

Recruiter Lite has the same deficiency.

LinkedIn interpretation of its data can be improved.

P.S. The Mastering LinkedIn Recruiter class on March 7th will cover these and other recent LinkedIn Recruiter changes and challenges. Check it out and register soon, seating is limited.

Sourcing Training Library and Certifications

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Our Sourcing Certification Program is now in its sixth year. We have had hundreds of professionals enroll in our Subscription and take the Exam. I wanted to update everyone on our offerings.

The Training Library has twenty recorded classes, to study at your own pace. The classes cover a variety of sourcing topics in-depth. Some webinars include two sessions, a Lecture, and Practice. Every webinar comes with one month of unlimited support on the topic.

We also offer interactive workshops on “Sourcing without LinkedIn”, “Finding Contact Info”, and “Advanced Googling” – you can always find the scheduled live classes at Upcoming Sourcing Webinars.

We administer the Certification Exams quarterly; the next upcoming dates are in April of 2018.

You can get all of the above – full access to the Training Library, the Exam, and, additionally, the Boolean Book by joining the Training Library Subscription. The Subscription costs just $99 per month ($1188 billed annually); that is an over 75% discount compared to getting webinars and the Exam individually.

While many people choose to subscribe, some have also taken five or six webinars from the Library (contact us for suggestions) and taken the Exam. The most requested classes have been:

If you are interested in the Program, you may want to take a webinar first. You can then upgrade to the full subscription, saving the cost of the webinar.

Finally, we have trained multiple Teams. We have customers who have subscribed their recruiting teams and have all Recruiters take the Exam. We have also delivered series of customized sourcing classes to various teams, both online and face to face. Our customers include a number of Fortune 100 companies and large recruiting agencies. To inquire about your Team training, please reach out to us.