Google’s Custom Search Engines (CSEs) can be useful in many ways. They provide a way to hide advanced search operators from your colleagues who are less technically inclined; they don’t bug advanced researchers with annoying Captchas; and they provide some interesting possibilities beyond those of “regular” Google.

Unfortunately, currently the “official” limit of the number of the search results in a CSE is 100 , with the maximum of 20 results per page. Given that CSE’s have their own ways to pick the results from Google’s index (if you have played creating and testing CSE’s you’d know what I am talking about), these numbers seem too limiting for any serious research.

Hooray! I have discovered a “hack”, that allows to get up to 1,000 search results, up to 100 per page in CSEs, that I am about to share. The way to do this is to use an old web interface that has been abandoned (and is not documented any longer, which makes it slightly challenging figuring out how to customize its look and feel). I do hope it stays on!

Let me get straight to the point. A standard public link to a CSE looks like this:

https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=009462381166450434430:awjijlwzhjs

The highlighted piece takes us to a CSE, hosted by Google; the long string after cx= is the unique CSE ID. The above is a public link to a CSE that I created, Document Finder (Storage) that looks for documents stored in a number of sites such as scibd, slideshare, etc.

Try this search, for example

employee directory

– and get 100 results, which is the maximum.

Now, if you use a different URL template, the CSE takes you to a different User Interface – and it’s there that you get many more results – up to 1,000!

The alternative URL looks like this:

http://www.google.com/custom?cx=009462381166450434430%3Aawjijlwzhjs&num=100…

The trick I discovered is to use this different Google-based URL, with the word “custom”. Now, try this:

employee directory

Currently, this search provides 1,000 results. That is quite unusual even for the regular Google these days! Here is what it looks like (there are some very interesting results this search provides by the way):

If you’d like to get existing CSEs to work this way: use the above format. Additionally, add &num=100 to set the number of results per page to 100; &filter=0 to see “all” results. You can even search by a date range or verbatim.

Check out my collection of Custom Search Engines here on the blog. I will adjust the links shortly there as well.

 

 

 

 

Once in a while I run into a post outlining a sourcing tip that I didn’t know about, or hear a new tip in conversations. Today I’d like to point to some of those tips and thank my colleagues for sharing them.

1) The Facebook #Sourcing Tutorial by Balazs Paroczay . It’s not “just” a tip but a whole methodology of constructing Facebook Graph searches. Once you go through the initial digesting of the technique, you would be able to create searches like “People who like Python programming language have worked at Apple and have worked at Google and live near San Francisco, California” in no time. This technique allows to create searches even beyond those that Facebook can express in English, such as this: Registered Nurses who work at Kaiser.

2) How to Find Almost Any GitHub User’s Email Address by Matthew Ferree – nice practical tip, applicable to everyone’s daily sourcing for Software Engineers. Matthew explains how to discover the email address of a Gihub member if it’s not visible on the public profile.

3)  Targeting events to source candidates by Billy McDiarmid – this is an unexpected discovery of geographical locations being “hidden” in the meetup.com member profiles. Billy has posted some guesses there, that can be taken into further exploration. (Anyone?)

4) How to find a Person’s Exact ZIP Code Using LinkedIn Recruiter by Randy Bailey – with the limitations LinkedIn places on us in terms of location searching, this is a nice way to learn where exactly the person lives, without jumping through hoops.

5) How to look for Chrome Extensions by Shane McCusker. I have long been annoyed when getting stuck while looking up a Chrome extension that I knew existed but now shown in the official extension search. Here’s one of several cool tips Shane shared with us at the last SOSUEU conference: simply X-Ray (example) and you will find more.

On the photo above: Oscar Mager, Jim Stroud, Shane McCuscer, Balazs Paroczay, and I sharing some sourcing tips at the dinner after the Sourcing Summit Europe this year. (For a wonderful collection of the conference photos I suggest checking out Oscar’s Album #SOSUEU 2014.)

It’s your turn now! What sourcing tips have you learned from others? Please share.

 

Are you interested in joining the ranks of Certified Sourcing Professionals in 2014? Our final Sourcing Certification Exam period this year is coming up during the week of December 8, 2014.

How do you decide whether you are ready to take the Exam?

In brief: to pass the Exam requires good knowledge of Googling and Sourcing on Social Sites; familiarity with some productivity tools; and the ability to combine that knowledge and skills in solving practical hands-on sourcing challenges. These are the baseline skills necessary for every Recruiter, to make sure they quickly find and try to engage the right potential candidates – and find some hard-to-find top talent as well.

Those already enrolled in the Program on a subscription basis have access to all the necessary material and practice tests in the Sourcing Guidebook and pick the Exam date when they feel ready. However, taking the Exam and getting Certified is now also offered separately from being enrolled in the study through the Guidebook.

Join me (Irina) at one of the two Sourcing Certification EXAM Demo Sessions: Friday November  or Tuesday December 2. At the sessions,  I will provide a brief overview of the Sourcing techniques you need to successfully pass the Exam; will show a number of sample questions similar to those at the Exam – and the ways to solve them (those are fun!); and will answer your questions about the Certification Program and the Exam. Sign up here:

1. Sourcing Certification EXAM Demo Session – Friday November 21
2. Sourcing Certification EXAM Demo Session – Tuesday December 2

>>> Here is the best part: at each of the two Demo sessions we will be giving away 5 (five) guest passes to take the Exam during the upcoming Exam week in December.

Seating at the Demo sessions is Limited. Register now to reserve your seat for one of the two sessions.

If you have any general questions about the Sourcing Certification Program and the Exams, or if you would like to register a team, please browse through the Sourcing Certification Site or contact our Customer Support Manager George Glikman.

 

 

As a follow-up to a previous post Sourcing Developers in [software] Source Code, I’d like to go over some alternatives to “plain” X-Raying for searching open source code.

Google used to have advanced search that “understood” regular expressions for https://code.google.com/ but it was shut down in 2012. At this time the most advanced search you can do there is to search the Google-hosted code using “labels” that shows 100 results at a time; as an example,: search for python. The Chromium project source code still has the advanced search ability; but it has only so many developers involved.

The good news is that there are multiple sites that offer open source code search across hosting platforms. You can select the programming language on all of those code search engines. As we have seen in the previous post (and in the screenshot above), code authors may leave “signatures” in the code that allow us to locate them.

• Open HUB (formerly Ohloh, formerly Koders.com) searches impressive 20,000,000,000+ lines of code – unfortunately, rather slowly and with rather limited search syntax. You can also search for its own 60K+ registered members and you can look at the most popular contributors to each of the supported 40+ programming languages.

• On Krugle, search is much faster. Here is an example: search for samsung.com-based email addresses of Developers who write in C++:

 

• SearchCode is another code search engine that has indexed a significant amount of code. It displays the sources it searches on the front page, and you can pick and choose from them. Here is a search similar to the above: C++ code with @samsung.com email addresses. The site is run by a single (super-) Developer – Ben Boyter.

(I must admit that I am not certain about the usage of the special character @ for searching here. The results do have email addresses – and that’s what I am after. I will leave it for the reader to figure out how special characters are processed.)

Searching for contact info in the Source code is a rather unusual way to locate Developers. While we can’t know the location for the email owners, cross-referencing is quick and will identify people at certain locations, for whom we’d already know the programming language and possibly the employer (depending on how we search). As an example, a similar Krugle search for Google.com-based emails AND the C++ programming language reveals the LinkedIn profiles of 6 solid Software Developers in the San Francisco Bay Area, 5 of whom currently work for Google – and we can now email them directly.

The same set of email addresses (@google.com with C++ skills) reveals a good number of Google-Plus profiles:

I have yet to figure out how to quickly narrow these down to a specific location (for the companies that have multiple offices, such as Google). When I do, I will let you know!

I received over 20 responses for the #HIREConf Sourcing Challenge in one day. Most participants sent me the right answer; well done! I now have a correct answer for each of the two great prizes. So that search is over.

Here’s an additional Advanced Advanced Challenge, for which I am adding two prizes of the same kind: a Special Guest Pass to HIREConf and a webinar from the Training Library. If you have not participated in the first challenge, you have a chance to jump in right now!

#HIREConf Advanced Sourcing Challenge – Open to Everyone

Please read carefully.

Suggest ONE SEARCH STRING on ONE SITE, that would instantly identify the person who fits the first two requirements. THE SEARCH STRING MUST BE NO LONGER THAN 20 CHARACTERS.

(By a SITE above I mean a website that allows searching, which could be Google, Github, Google+, LinkedIn, or some other site.)

As a reminder, here are the first two requirements. That person:

1) Works at an office on the 8th floor, at an address within the same zipcode as the hotel where HIREConf is held;

2) Has a Github profile, created in 2014; has somewhere between 60 and 70 followers there, but is not following anyone.

Of course, if you already know the answer to the previous challenge, that may put you at an advantage. (Or not.)

Email me the URL for that search.

Have even more fun!

 

(Wherever you live, if you enjoy solving fun Sourcing Challenges, don’t miss the one below.)

If you are a Recruiter in the San Francisco Bay Area:

If you can make it, I’d be glad to meet live at the upcoming HIREconf, a full day conference with training and talks focused on Sourcing and Recruiting in highly competitive markets. It’s coming up on November 4, 2014. I will be giving a live 3+ hour interactive Sourcing Workshop, covering lots of Sourcing tips and techniques for the modern Recruiter.

The HIREConf price is affordable and is incredibly low, given the amount of great content that is going to be revealed. If the price is a problem, however, our Boolean Strings members get a discount. I also have 5 free tickets given to me by the organizers; be one of the first 5 people to email George and he will give you that secret registration link. (Actually, if you are a really good Sourcer, you won’t even need to email George.)

Local Sourcing Certification Program past attendees and supporters: it’s also your chance to meet David Galley and George Glikman, who are on the Program Team, and my business partner Julia Tverskaya of the Brain Gain Recruiting fame; they will be attending. They are all very cool people!

I would like to offer 1 (one) Master Sourcer Guest Ticket to HIREConf to the person who is the first to solve a Sourcing Challenge, identified shortly.

To make it interesting for those who live outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, I will also offer 1 (one) webinar from our Training Library to the first person who submits the right answer.

We’ll have one local and one non-local winner.

#HIREConf Sourcing Challenge – Open to Everyone

  

Find a person who:

1) Works at an office on the 8th floor, at an address within the same zipcode as the hotel where HIREConf is held

2) Has a Github profile, created in 2014; has somewhere between 60 and 70 followers there, but is not following anyone

3) His company was established in 2012, and has something to do with JavaScript… well, OK, one can learn JavaScript there.

Send me an email with the subject #HIREConf Sourcing Challenge and let me know what his last name is. Please follow these directions exactly to qualify!

• As soon as I receive the winning answer for attending HIREConf, I will update this post. — Solved!
• As soon as I receive the winning answer for getting a Sourcing webinar (non-Bay Area people) I will update this post. — Solved!

Have fun!

>>> note: I posted a new (advanced) challenge.

 

The most popular Recruiting/Sourcing webinar of 2014, Sourcing without LinkedIn, is coming to a computer near you on Wednesday October 29.

Pretty much all of us extensively use LinkedIn as the top site for Sourcing, and rightly so. I use it quite a bit myself! However:

• “Everyone is searching for the same person”
• It’s expensive
• It takes away functionality without notice
• (most importantly!) At least 80% of qualified professionals cannot be found on LinkedIn by searching

The webinar will go over the most efficient Sourcing techniques that use the vast Internet outside of LinkedIn.

I have updated the material quite a bit, to reflect new tools and all the changes in search engines and networks. The webinar was sold out multiple times in the past.

Who will benefit:

Recruiters; Recruitment Managers and Teams; Sourcers; Staffing Managers; Talent Hunters; Inside Sales Managers; Business Development; Executive Search Firms; Searchers; Researchers; Hiring Managers.

You will learn how to:

• Navigate top 10 People Finders
• Identify data-rich sites in the target:
  • Industry (forums, associations; certifications)
  • Geography (local chapters, meet-ups)
  • Gatherings (recent conferences)
• Extract lists of professionals from websites based on:
  • Boolean search and X-raying
  • Deep Web search
• Locate social profiles on professional niche sites
• Find contact information:
  • Corporate email address formats
  • Email addresses
  • Phone numbers
• Pre-qualify people for calling and make the call warm

Review and register at http://sourcingcertification.com/sourcing-without-linkedin/. Seating is limited.

Date: Wednesday, October 29th, 2014
Time: 9AM PDT / 12PM EDT — (Check your local time for this Webinar)
Duration: 90 minutes
Included: The slides, a video recording, and one month of support on the material.
Everyone who registers will receive the complete recording, slides, and one full month of support, whether you attend live or not.

 

Back in 2009 I published a post on ERE.net “Call or Email or Use Social Media?” The post was about reaching out to potential candidates, or to business prospects, using Social Networks. While some of the technical details are, of course, outdated 5 years later, the idea remains – and you can do MUCH more now than back then.

I’d like to clearly identify the topic of this post. It is not about messaging your friends on Facebook and not about using “Social Messaging” apps on mobile devices. I’m going to go over messaging capabilities available for Social Network users, that may help to reach prospects – even if you do not know an email address or a phone number.

We know that some LinkedIn members send invitations to connect, carrying the messages to engage in business or apply for a job. I am not a fan of the approach; but if it’s your cup of tea, you might want to check a recent post How to Connect if the Reason is Not Listed.

(Other methods to reach out to prospects, that I prefer to avoid, are direct-messaging on Twitter and messaging on Facebook; I will skip them in this post.)

LINKEDIN

On LinkedIn, you can send messages to your 1st level connections and to fellow group members. These messages go to the recipients’ email address, registered on LinkedIn.

Since your business prospects are not likely to be your first level connections, your chance to use LinkedIn messaging remains with the groups. A member has a limit of 50 groups. Given the groups’ population numbers, if you max out on groups (and if your prospects do tend to join LinkedIn groups), you might be able to reach roughly 1% of LinkedIn members via groups. That would be ~6 MLN people. If you want to message any of  the remaining ~310 MLN members, who are outside of your groups, you would need to pay for InMails.

FACEBOOK

It’s VERY different on Facebook! You can email pretty much any Facebook member who has the default preferences. I imagine that would be 99% of Facebook users (probably more than that). That would be ~2 BLN people. Note that, just like on LinkedIn, the message will go to their email address, registered with Facebook.

GOOGLE-PLUS

It’s VERY different on Google-Plus as well. If you’d like to send a message to someone on Google-Plus, simply include the member in your circles, then use the “sharing” dialog and select that member (start typing their name to get a prompt). I am afraid I can’t provide a good estimate but it could be that’s another ~2 BLN people there as well, imagining that 99% members have the default settings. (I am not going to go into further detail on how Google+ accounts are tied with using Google, making Google-Plus population to seem very large. Even if you only look at active Google+ users, that would be a pretty large number as well: the number of active users monthly is about the same as as the whole LinkedIn Network has.)

If you want to learn more about “Social Emailing”, or if you prefer to call or email your prospects, but are not sure how to find the contact information, please come to my webinar on Name Generation on Tuesday 21 October 2014. We’ll go over Top 7 dangerously powerful Name Generation Techniques. We would expect that those who attend will use that power wisely and responsibly. The materials and one month of support are provided to all who sign up.