Remember, when LinkedIn acquired this company:

… and integrated its functionality into the main product, we got this menu item – Contacts. I became a fan of it early on. The Contacts became the foundation of LinkedIn CRM (contact relationship management) features for everyone. The “Contacts” combined the first-level connections, imported address books,  and “saved” profiles.

Initially, we could search using many facets and see a nice graphical representation of the Contacts’ locations:

The pretty location graph didn’t stay for too long, but we enjoyed the rest of the Contacts’ functions for a while.

We could leave notes, visible only to us, on profiles; that helped to communicate with others more efficiently. We could edit the contact information (perhaps imported from an old address book) when it got outdated or when obtaining additional info or websites for the person. Records imported from address books were automatically cross-referenced with existing LinkedIn profiles. (This popular email-finding technique relied on auto-cross-referencing.)

Those were the days, my friend!

Much of this CRM functionality still exists in LinkedIn Recruiter. Most of it, however, is gone from personal LinkedIn accounts (no matter, paid or not). Want to hear the details?

We can no longer save contacts. We can edit “notes” and add tags – but only for those profiles that have made it to the Contacts list by February 25, 2016. Of course, most prospects in everyone’s business practice haven’t been “saved” – and can’t be “saved” or tagged any longer; there’s no place to add the notes either.

The import functions for other address books, such as Yahoo or MS Outlook are still there, but LinkedIn no longer tells us which imported contacts have profiles on LinkedIn. The Contact records still look like this for previously imported contacts (hi, Jim!), showing the sources for the contact.

But if you try to import an address book today from Yahoo or MS Outlook, you will just see a list of email addresses with no other information.

Most of the mentioned feature removals happened in the Contacts. To add to this, the recent LinkedIn messaging redesign has also affected smooth communication. For example, we no longer have the checkbox to not let multiple recipients see each other. This is what it used to be like:

That checkbox is gone – now messages sent to several people often proceed to a “spam” loop, where each person is asking to remove them from the conversation and each such message is delivered, again, to all.

Maybe LinkedIn has removed the existing CRM functions while preparing some new and brilliant CRM functionality for the members? Who knows?

In the meantime, we’ll take a look at some alternatives at one of the upcoming Productivity Tools webinars

For starters, Prophet is not new any longer, but has gained much-deserved popularity since it was introduced and is absolutely worth using.

In the past few months, I’ve noticed a myriad of other tools, all of which will try to find an email address, starting from a social profile or, in some cases, from the persons’ and company names. It’s up to everyone to test the tools – and I’d recommend using more than one in tough cases.

Email Hunter offered by https://emailhunter.co collects visible professional email addresses everywhere – and is therefore in a good position to try and guess an address; it will tell us about the level of confidence in guessing. (Note, it’s a different tool from another Chrome Extension also called “email hunter” that collects addresses on the current page.) I have heard good things about it.

Charlie – I have not tried it long enough to share the email quality experience, but it also provides “social summaries” on profiles. Finding emails is its new feature.

The above two extensions nicely give each other screen space and it looks like this when viewing a LinkedIn profile (Hmm… I wonder what LinkedIn thinks about that.)

More tools:

FindThatLead, a.k.a. FTL is a tool made by a developers team in Spain. They launched their Chrome extension sometime ago and have now added a “dashboard”. They give us 10 searches for free.

LeadIQ is a nicely designed tool, oriented toward sales people, but very much applicable to sourcing and recruiting. It not only looks for emails, but also saves tables with data from the viewed profiles in Google docs. Check it out (25 free emails).

Datanyze Insider – similar to LeadIQ (with 10 free emails) it and also collects the data in a spreadsheet; this could be quite convenient for sourcing for those who don’t like working with data scrapers.

ContextScout – mentioning it here since I have seen a number of online discussions about it. However, I have not been impressed by their UI or by the quality of information in my tests – at least not so far. Additionally, it only provides a limited-time trial.

Well, there are others worth mentioning, but I think I’ll stop here for now. (An easy way to find more similar tools is to Google a few tool names.)

As a reminder, we now hold a regular 90-minute workshop on finding contact info (even in the cases where tools don’t know the answer). Check out the next session.

As LinkedIn has informed their users, “On February 25th we’ll be removing the ability to save new contacts and sort your contact list by saved contacts. We’ve migrated the contacts you’ve already saved to a tag called “Saved_ Contacts” so you won’t lose anything you’ve already stored.”

This is an unfortunate turn for those of us who have used the Contacts feature to collect and tag profiles of LinkedIn members (not necessarily the first-level connections). If you have used the “save” feature, here is a shortcut to finding your previously saved contacts (sorted by “new”).

Since we are discussing Contacts, let me share a hidden way to search within them. (Hope it stays!) We can search within the Contacts (including first-level connections, saved profiles, and imported address books) using this dialog – it’s not referenced from anywhere on the current LinkedIn site, but it works and provides more powerful and user-friendly search than the current Contacts page.

This (very unusual) search shows all of the records in your Contacts; you can start here and narrow down to locations, companies, and job titles. You can sort the results by a variety of filters, not available on the Contacts page, including company and location. Of course, this search dialog is also not subject to Commercial search limits, that, once it’s “on”, affects even searching within the first-level connections.

As some sourcing tools are going away, I am becoming more interested (almost addicted!) to creating and using Custom Search Engines for sourcing. Recruiters have not yet utilized this resource to its full strength – especially, semantic search features, unavailable on Google.com “proper”.

I have already shared Search Engines for Accountants and for Physicians.

Here are five Search Engines, each with an example search string, to help to source for Information Technology professionals.

1. Search in Software Code – http://bit.ly/TheCodeCSE

Example – find Developers who have worked with Linux Kernel: linux kernel credits OR contributors OR authors

2. Search for creatives on Behance – http://bit.ly/BehanceResumes

Example – UX Designers in Austin

3. Search for resumes on Slideshare – http://bit.ly/SlideshareResumesCSE

Example – quality assurance automation new york

4. Search for Meetup members – http://bit.ly/MeetupPersonsCSE

Example – SAS Programmer Toronto

5. Search for profiles on Google-Plus – http://bit.ly/GooglePlusPersonsCSE

cloud engineering “lives in Seattle” “works OR worked at Amazon”

I will be discussing many more ways to find Information Technology professionals at the webinar How to Find and Attract Technical Talent. Check it out!

Are we experiencing a general tools decline? What are the most innovative tool concepts since people aggregators made their appearance a few years ago?

Here are some tools that have reduced functionality or are gone altogether:

• The latest version of MS Outlook no longer supports the Social Connector. The last Outlook version that still supports ir, the one from Office 2013, has stopped supporting LinkedIn.
• Topsy, the search engine that indexed all tweets “from the beginning of time” and searched better than Twitter itself, was shut down in December 2015, some time after Apple had acquired it.
• Broadlook’s desktop-based Contact Capture, well-debugged during its relatively long lifetime, is no longer supported or available for download.
• Lippl, an extension to uncover hidden information on LinkedIn profiles, has been discontinued.
• Connect6 PeopleDiscovery has not been updated since 2014.
• 360social, that was an extension for Chrome with a promise to become a people aggregator, stopped working for a long time; it seems, it may come back, but we have yet to see that.
• Connectifier, a well-known people aggregator, was just acquired by LinkedIn – and has already discontinued sign-ups; most of its staff is moving on. We are not sure, but we expect it will be shut down soon.

So which tools, among those we have left, work best, and what are some new kids on the block? Come to my Tools Webinar to find some answers!

If you are searching for Accountants, here is (yet another) new Custom Search Engine to try:

http://bit.ly/AccountantsCSE

I built it using the semantic mechanism available in Google’s Custom Search Engines, the same as the one I used for Physicians Search Engine in the previous post.

Example uses:

• Tax Dublin
• CPA Seattle
• contact “818 000…999”
• Quickbooks help
• small business tax “bay area”

Let me know if you find it useful!

Check out the upcoming Webinar on Sourcing Productivity Tools – Tuesday, February 9th at 9 AM PST/noon EST, with an optional Practice session on Wednesday.

If you are searching for healthcare practitioners, here is a new Custom Search Engine to try:

http://bit.ly/HealthCareCSE

(I built it using the semantic mechanism available in Google’s Custom Search Engines, by only showing search results with a meta-tag, an object from Schema.org called “Physician”.)

Here are some usage examples:

• registered nurse houston texas
• internist geriatrician toronto
• speech language pathologist florida
• orthopedic surgeon knees london

Let me know if you find it useful!

Check out the upcoming Webinar on Sourcing Productivity Tools – Tuesday, February 9th at 9 AM PST/noon EST, with an optional Practice session on Wednesday.

Those of us who save Google searches usually keep them in a text file vs. an MS Word file, to avoid issues caused by auto-formatting. (By the way, if you haven’t noticed, Google is processing “curly quotation marks” all right now, in the same way as straight quotation marks; but if a minus is converted to a dash, your strings will be “misunderstood”).

Whether you have been saving your strings or not – did you know that Google saves your complete search history? Even if you delete the browsing history, your searches remain saved – here:

history.google.com

Here, you can look at your searches for a given period of time, see which links you clicked on search result pages, and review some statistics, such as the number of searches and most often accessed websites:

(The above screenshot shows my saved history for the past year.)

The search history links “remember” your searches along with any parameters, such as searching “verbatim” or image search. (This is an advantage over saving strings as text since in a text file the search parameters are lost).

Further, you can search within your past searches. For example, you can narrow it down to only searches that include “LinkedIn”. (Note that searching within search strings is not Boolean, it just looks for an AND combination of keywords.)

You can also export your search history. The export comes in the JSON format, that you can convert to Excel CSV format by using one of online conversion tools, such as this one – JSON to CSV.

Once you have your search history in CSV, you can also look at some search metrics. For example, you can find your personal statistics on using Boolean syntax, such as X-Raying; the frequency of using specific keywords; your typical search strings length in words; etc.

When you look at your search history – what stands out? Feel free to share some stats, interesting search strings kept in your history, or your ideas about useful metrics, in the comments.

For more advanced Googling tips, sign up for the upcoming webinar – “Advanced Google-Based Sourcing” – January 27, 2016.

The first edition of the e-Book “300 Best Boolean Strings” is ready and starting to ship!!! (“Shipping” electronically, of course.) The format is PDF where you can click on links to reproduce searches.

Writing it took much more work than I had expected. Verifying the exact syntax rules down to every detail, selecting the material, re-running all the search strings, and formatting was a lot of effort. I wouldn’t have done it without extensive help from my business partner Master Sourcer David Galley. Thanks to my wonderful son Peter (who doesn’t have an online profile yet) for drawing the cover image. I am grateful to Billy McDiarmid, Alicia Priselac, Vince Szymczak, and Kelly Dingee for reviewing the draft and detailed (positive!) feedback.

If you are interested, you can preview the e-book content:

One-page Google Operators Tip Sheet

The full e-Book is now available.

You can also get a recording and materials from my e-Book-based 90-minute Webinar.

Thanks everyone for participating in the year-end Boolean Sourcing contest! The prize is the 300 Best Boolean Strings e-Book  that is being released two weeks from now.

Sourcing is a global discipline! We had truly international participation this time, with contestants coming from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Russia, Switzerland, Romania, Hungary, Philippines, and Saudi Arabia. Wow!

And the three Boolean Contest Winners are:

• James Galvin, Singapore, @jgalvin 
• Guillaume Alexandre,  Switzerland, @mr_sourcing 
• Greg Wasowski,  United Kingdom, @gregwasowski 

Honorable mentions go to:

• Roland Lancelot Pavamani, India, @roljobs
• Jan Bernhart,  Netherlands, @janbernhart

– who also did very well.

CONGRATULATIONS! Well done.

Here is to a successful year of Sourcing!