UPDATE: the webinar was sold out and will be repeated once more on September 10.

The webinar got rave reviews from the participants, naming it a “fire hose” of information; “informative and intriguing”. Other feedback: “Great information for users of all experience levels.”; “learnt really good little tips I never paid attention to”; “it was great.  Learnt so much”. (& more)

 

Attend this new webinar to get completely up-to-date on the ever-changing Sourcing functionality of LinkedIn. Learn creative ways to uncover potential candidates, whom others won’t find.Seating is limited, so be sure to register today.Powerful Sourcing with LinkedIn

With the “retirement” of many LinkedIn features, the perception is that the available Sourcing options are shrinking. Nothing could be further from reality! LinkedIn has also added many new features that provide new ways to search for and connect with professionals, no matter what industry or location you are targeting.In this information-packed webinar, you will learn:

• What has changed in LinkedIn’s functionality and its search algorithms, and how it affects us
• How to control the people search dialog and overcome its limitations
• How to utilize the LinkedIn Contacts to source, cross-reference, and verify contact information, (all from a free Basic account!)
• …and more.

While most of the material will be applicable to everyone’s practice, no matter what type of account you might have, there is also coverage of the most interesting functionality of the Talent Pipeline (often overlooked by busy LinkedIn Recruiter users). We’ll also cover Sourcing features that are only available from personal accounts and are not available in Recruiter.Additionally, you get a tip sheet with a list of top LinkedIn URLs and hints to keep around while you are sourcing for professionals.Who should attendRecruiters, Talent Acquisition, Staffing, Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Management, Social Media specialists and everyone who wants to utilize the top business network in all possible ways and to understand the scope and the impact of the numerous recent changes.What you will learnIf you “have already searched on LinkedIn”, chances are that after the webinar you will be able to find other target professionals and information, that others may have missed, will find more information about people who are already in your target lists, and your performance will skyrocket!.Date: Wednesday, September 10, 2014Time: 9AM PDT / 12PM EDT — (Check Your Local Time for this Webinar)Can’t make it? That’s okay! Anyone who registers will receive the complete recording, slides, bonus tip sheet, and one full month of support – whether you attend live or not.Duration: 90 minutesIncluded: The slides for the webinar, a complete recording of the webinar, and one month of Unlimited Support.Included: A Tip Sheet of “Top” LinkedIn Shortcuts.

–> SOURCING CONTEST (is now closed)

Name three (distinctly) different searches that you can perform from a personal (basic) account and cannot perform in LinkedIn Recruiter (#LIR) – and attend the webinar Powerful Sourcing with LinkedIn  as a guest.

Please email me the answers.

Good luck! 🙂

“…one of the most overlooked techniques for companies to employ.”

INTRO

I’ve long wanted to write a post about “Talent Maps”, which I see as a tool, as well as a strategic part of Recruiting and Sourcing. This post was triggered by several recent interactions with colleagues.

Apparently, in the UK, as well as in Australia and New Zealand, Recruiters are fans of “Talent Maps” (also dubbed as “Market Maps”). Unsurprisingly, definitions vary. However, Talent Maps don’t seem to be a popular way to Source and Research here in the US or in Canada. I wonder why! It’s known here and there, but there’s not much discussion on that; and, simple Googling would mostly take you away from North America.

Should companies in the US include “Talent Mapping” as a best practice? Would there be a market for those services, to cut recruiting costs? I am especially interested to hear from those who have heard about Talent Maps but haven’t implemented in practice.

TALENT MAPS – ONLINE

Here is a definition from a UK-based site:

Market Mapping/ Talent Mapping: this involves delivery of a robust map of your competitors within defined target organisations, further broken down into segmented groups or teams[…] identifying target pools of candidates according to your set criteria, for example by title, seniority or location […]

Here’s from an Australian site:

Talent Mapping is the targeted identification and engagement of people with skills to fill both existing, newly created and future roles in your organization. […]

As you can already see from the definitions, Talent Mapping is not “just” Sourcing or “Pipelining” for a role. It is also Competitive Intelligence Research, and reveals the big picture, along with identifying target professionals.

TALENT MAPS – AT CONFERENCES

I’d like to share some observations “from the field”.

Based on our interactions with several attending Recruiters and Managers at the recent Sourcing Summit, Talent Maps sound like a common practice for both corporate recruiters and agency recruiters (those who get repeated business). There are also firms specifically producing Talent Maps on demand.

“Talent Maps”, as an Australian colleague told us, are often stored in excel files, listing professionals with contact info, roles, companies, locations, some social links, some news info, and some sort of a status for each. However (as opposed to an output for a Sourcing Project for a role), Maps include “everyone” (not just some target professionals), for a given specific background. Updates with a “may be ready to make a move” status are made on a regular basis; those often simply come from networking (calls, emails).

These Maps serve as pipelines for repeated recruitment requests – but with the additional quality that they cover pretty much everyone for an industry/location/seniority/job title combination. Because of that, Maps also serve as a source of Competitive Intelligence. They provide: full identification of competitors; their locations (i.e. where the talent is/isn’t); “mapping” for the titles for similar job roles across competitors; and industry news summaries, as to what the competition is doing (hiring/firing/restructuring, etc.)

To provide for a more complete description, the Talent Map data can include other fields, such as: salaries; moves and promotions; and some reporting structure. In addition to some table data, a Map can include data in different formats, such as graphical representations, geographical maps, or org charts. (Of course, creating organizational charts for is different from Talent Mapping – that would include profiling “everyone” for a company vs. “everyone” for a role.)

TALENT MAPS – HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE

My recent Sourcing Project was finding “everyone” in a specific executive role in the Construction industry and a specific sub-industry at a private company There were probably only about twenty-five people who fit the bill altogether. That was certainly a request to create a Map! An associate helped me to touch base with each person, to get a sense of their potential interest for a move; that we also included in the output for the client.

TALENT MAPS – INPUT FROM AN EXPERT

My good friend Martin Lee, who is now VP, Head of Sourcing & Research at EMEA & APAC at Kelly Services, used to supervise Talent Maps’ creation at his past company. He says: “I think it is one of the most overlooked techniques for companies to employ.”

Martin explains, “[Mapping] is done in two stages, Identification and Approach. Research companies charge for one or both but the Approach is the most revealing and best done by telephone so to do it properly requires cultural and multiple language capability”.

TALENT MAPS – TOOLS

In her talk at the Sourcing Summit Australia, Lauren Stanton, a Talent Sourcing Manager at EY, shared commonly used “mind mapping” tools that can be used to create visual representations, complementary to the Excel data of Talent Maps. Those included: MindMeister; XMind; MindManager; and Coggle.

That’s it for now.

If you are recruiting:

–        Do you currently include Talent Maps creation as part of what you do?

–        If you don’t, would a Talent Map service be valuable?

Your input and comments are welcome.

 

 

 

 

Are you interested in getting certified?

Our – substantially reworked and improved in 2014 – Sourcing Certification Program now offers to take the Exam and Getting Certified independently of signing up for subscription to the interactive materials, as we have called them, “The SourceBook“.

You would definitely be well prepared if you subscribe to the material. But if you feel ready and confident, you can give the Exam a try and become Certified. The Exams are offered monthly, at the end of each month. The next round is coming up at the end of August 2014, and we already have quite a few folks signed up for it.

For those who are curious, here are a few sample Exam questions. Please note: no answers will be provided to these; of course, you are welcome to compare the notes in the comments. The questions are not too difficult, but you’d need t do a bit of research for each one. The Exam has 60 questions to answer.

Q1) For the person whose work phone number is 413-794-3248, what is her work email address?

Q2) Find a page on the High Country Fusion Company website, listing the company’s Australia staff. One of the people listed on the page does not have a LinkedIn account. What is the last name of that person?

Q3) One of the Engineering staff listed in this Directory has a work phone number publicly shared on his LinkedIn profile. What is that number?

Q4)  The site http://doleta.gov  has an Excel file (the xlsx type) that contains a long list of professionals with the names, company names, titles, emails, phone numbers, and addresses. How many records does the list have?

Q5) Complete the search string by replacing the ??? by a word, to create a Google search for profiles of members of Florida Direct Marketing Association:

site:fdma.org/???

Q6) Which of the following search strings on Google will find not only the pages with the word Programmer, but also some pages with of its synonyms?

1. Programmer
2. ~Programmer
3. Programmer OR Developer OR Engineer
4. Any one of the above will work

That’s it for now! Additionally, you can test your Sourcing knowledge on the site and get a response from an auto-checker.

The informational materials on the Sourcebook, including an outline and a sample video – can be found on the Certification site.

By all means we should be reaching for the “low hanging fruit” first. To find the target potential candidates we should first go to the ATS, search on Job Boards and on LinkedIn. It would be silly to ignore the easy available sources and do something “exotic” instead.

However, everyone else is also going to the same search dialog on LinkedIn and typing in similar, if not the same, keywords, based on the role. As a result, for the popular roles, the same LinkedIn members get similar-sounding InMails. This leads to: 1) their annoyance and 2) our drop in productivity.

Yet some professionals do have profiles on LinkedIn, could be perfect matches for the roles, and are rarely found.

Here’s how to

Find Hard-to-Find Professionals That Others Don’t

The below Sourcing Scenario is based on using MS Outlook Social Connector that I wrote about earlier, describing how to find almost anyone’s email in that post.

I’ll use an example just discussed at the Sourcing Summit in New Zealand. As you will see, some of the professionals identified this way would not be found by the above LinkedIn search – even using a very long Boolean OR statement.

Step 1. (Step away from LinkedIn for a bit.) Search for JavaScript Developers on Github in NZ:

 Step 2. Collect the email addresses using an email extractor of your choice; then go to the Outlook Social Connector:

Step 3. Review the profiles.

As you can see, this way you may find skilled professionals, whom others are not likely to find. This is a road less taken – but it’s not hard to take at all.

The MS Outlook Connector is not the only way to perform this kind of “Lazy” Sourcing (where I described the general concept) but it is certainly an excellent sourcing and a general productivity tool. I recommend using it.

P.S. Sourcers –  Any guesses where the above photo was taken? 🙂

 

In this newly developed webinar, “Sourcing Methodologies”,  I will cover several innovative sourcing and research concepts, that, once put to work, are going to make your Sourcing soar to the new heights! (See the registration link below.)

“X-Raying”, “Flipping” and “Peeling” are ways to source talent, that were named and conceptualized fifteen years ago. While they remain perfectly applicable and useful, today’s Internet has a gigantic volume and much more complex structure, compared to back then. The modern Sourcing Theory, that I will cover, takes full advantage of what today’s Internet offers. The material is as an outcome of creative (my and colleagues) hands-on Sourcing Practice across industries.

I have named some selected concepts below; sign up for the webinar for the full, detailed coverage, along with plenty of examples.

1. “Visualize Success”: imagine what you are going to find, then use that to find the target pages. While this sounds like a common sense approach, some of its “extreme” applications may surprise you.

2. “Follow the Leads”: identify your ideal candidate online, then find other promising profiles by looking up that professional’s traces online. Consistently following those traces (as described in a post sometime ago) works wonders, especially if your target professionals are members of committees, associations, or other professional “gatherings”.

3. “Sourcing without Searching” (described in the previous post as  “Lazy Sourcing”): obtain a set of data with known structure (such as emails, resumes, or lists of contacts) from the web, then, parse, sort, and filter. There are some true gems that can be found this way. Existing tools make it doable by anyone, not just by “geeks”.

4. “Cross-Referencing”: starting from incomplete initial data, build up professional profiles by locating and assembling the professional bio details. It’s now powered by Social Lookup tools (such as MS Outlook Social Connector) and by creative uses of existing functionality of Social Networks.

While you may already be using some elements of these concepts in your day-to-day sourcing, being aware of the theory behind it will facilitate consistent productivity – and enjoyment – of your work. Get on the phone with that potential candidate faster!

Who should attend: Recruiters, Sourcers, and everyone looking for professionals online.

The webinar will be especially useful for those who feel that their resources are getting exhausted, or that their sourcing is too labor-intensive, and are looking for new ways to source.

Date: Thursday July 24^th, 10 AM Pacific Time
Length: 90 minutes
Register: [NOTE – JULY 24: THE REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED. PLEASE CONTACT [email protected] WITH QUESTIONS]: (you will receive the login instructions within 24 hours after submitting a payment; you will get all the materials one day after the webinar)
Included: Slides, video-recording, and one month of support applying theory to practice

Seating is limited; sign up early.

Here’s a brief post on searching for contact information on LinkedIn. Posting visible contact info on the profiles is discouraged; but, as we know, many members do, particularly those who are Recruiters, Sales, and “Open Networkers”.

At the same time, LinkedIn quietly takes some measures for us to see less of that contact info.

As an example, a search for “gmail.com” in the UK population returns about 250 results, while an X-Ray for “gmail.com” returns “About 3,570 results” and shows about 700. Sure enough, there may be false positives in the X-Ray, but it’s easy to locate some profiles found in X-Ray that are not included in the above LinkedIn internal search. If you are still in doubt, here is a more narrow search; compare internal search vs. X-Ray for the London, UK Area.

Here is another interesting example, showing the same tendency. Search for “com” in the last name, narrow to a the Greater Chicago Area; compare Internal search (under 200 results; 3 more if you search in the first name field) vs. X-Ray (About 460 results).

The moral of the story is that X-Raying for gmail-based email addresses and, possibly, anything else that points to an email address included in the profiles, would bring much better results than internal search.

As a side note, there’s quite a bit of other interpretation going on in the LinkedIn internal search, which didn’t use to happen. Somehow the internal search often recognizes keywords that sound like last names and would interpret the search as if you put the keyword in the last name field. That means that profiles mentioning someone by name would not be found. More on that later…

Here’s a preview of some of the reference materials I will be sharing at the upcoming Webinar – “SourcePedia”, repeated live on Tuesday, July 15th, 2014. Seating is limited; sign up early to get your spot.

(1) All the LinkedIn names for the Geo-locations, world-wide. You would need these for X-Ray searches, such as this

site:www.linkedin.com/in OR site:www.linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir “location * Glasgow, United Kingdom”

Reference (that you can use): the list of ALL the US-based locations:

 

(2) A “Vocabulary” of 40K+ LinkedIn Skills. (worth attending for this one alone!)

Teaser: the Word Cloud for ALL the Skills:

(made with Wordle)

Plus, see covered:

• Global Search Engines: Syntax
• Google Boolean Syntax Charts and examples
• Comparison Search Engines Charts
• Postal and Telephone Code References
• Real Time Search Engines
• Social Sites Directory
• Registered, Certified, and Licensed Professionals – Resources
• Diversity Resources
• Productivity Browser Add-Ons  List
• Scraping, Parsing, Filtering, and Sorting Tools List
• Social Cross-Referencing Tools List
• …and more.

The idea is to provide a customizable set of references for everyone who searches for professionals on the web. The crowd that had attended the first delivery of the webinar expressed high satisfaction with the content. I hope to “see” many of you at upcoming webinar repeat next week.