Announcing a new Sourcing Webinar:

SourcePedia (Sourcing Reference): Tuesday July 1st

Which search engines index the Internet globally? Where could I find the list of current Boolean operators for sourcing in a one-page document? What are the differences between the Google and the Bing search syntax? Where can I look up the corporate email formats for a given company? Which email collection and verification tools are out there? Where do I find a good list of diversity-related associations? What are the sites that list certified and licensed professionals? How do I look up a company’s competitors? What are the names of all the locations that LinkedIn uses in each country (e.g. Australia or Canada)? What is the up-to-date tool to look up the hidden names?…

This 90-minute webinar is packed with up-to-date references, resources, and tip sheets, that anyone would find to be handy in the practice of searching for target professionals online. It will answer all the questions above and many more.The materials are all yours to keep and to enjoy in daily sourcing practice. Besides, one month of support is provided to help you to master the reference materials further.Who should attend: if you search for professionals online as part of your job, this webinar is for you!Seating is limited; register early.

Included: The slides for the webinar, a complete recording of the webinar, and one month of support

Register at http://sourcingcertification.com/sourcepedia

It’s been a while since I ran the last sourcing contest. Here is a new one. Try your sourcing and research skills!

The first person to email me the correct answer will be eligible to take the Sourcing Certification Exam in July or August 2014 (their choice; the fee waved) and, as usual, will be featured on the Boolean Network.

Read on.

A good friend of mine is a tour guide in Moscow, Russia. She loves to take photos. Yesterday she sent me a photo of a cool-looking car, brought along by American travelers, whom she was helping to get around during their visit.

I was curious about the visitors.

It turns out that one of the people riding in that car is a woman with an interesting professional background. In the past she used to be a flight test pilot in USAF and spent hundreds of hours in the air. She has other accomplishments too – including several college-level degrees.

The Contest Question: In what year did she get her PhD and what was the title of her PhD thesis?

Deadline: July 2, 2014 (closed if not solved by then).

Tip: you do not need to locate my friend and ask her for any information to find the answer. Google will do the job.

When I receive the correct answer, I will update the post.

Best of luck!

—————–

Update:

Hey All – nice work! I have received the correct answer – which is found by first Googling the car license plate – from several people. You can find more information about the car in this video and an interesting report on the same site about the tour. The rest is also done by Googling. 🙂

The first person to send me the correct answer was Vidhya Lingappan of Roland & Associates, a company in India that has many excellent researchers, some of whom I have met “virtually”.

Roland himself has achieved the Advanced People Sourcing Certification and is listed among experts on our site.

Congratulations! Vidhya solved it together with a coworker, Siva, so it was a “team” effort.

More to come!

X-Raying Twitter for member bios has just become really easy. We don’t have to struggle excluding the non-bios via something like

…-inurl:lists -inurl:members -inurl:hashtag -inurl:status -inurl:statuses…

That is because Twitter has recently added a new separate view with “Tweets and replies”. A URL for the “Tweets and replies” ends in /with_replies, while preserving all of the bio information.

Therefore, we now have two ways to X-Ray for bios only:

site:twitter.com inurl:with_replies [add keywords]

(easy!) – or, if you like to get to the original profile URLs for some reason, you can search for

site:twitter.com “Tweets and replies” -inurl:with_replies [add keywords]

When X-Raying Twitter bios, you can use Google search syntax to find people with certain ranges numbers of followers or following, or find those who joined within a certain Month/Year range:

• site:twitter.com “Tweets and replies” javascript engineer “200..1000 following”
• site:twitter.com “Tweets and replies” marketing manager “200..1000 followers”
• site:twitter.com Recruiter “Tweets and replies” 20..100 K followers
• site:twitter.com technical Recruiter “Tweets and replies” “joined * 2007”

Of course, we have little control over the keywords appearing in the bios vs. in the tweets that were present on the bio page when it was indexed. That is true about the location names as well. We could search for “San Francisco” or “Atlanta GA” and hope that we find these words as locations and not in tweets, but we would need to check.

Why can X-Raying be useful? My former favorite Twitter bio search Tweepz, created by the same people who are behind the Exalead search, stopped tweeting last November and the site shows some signs of decline. On the other hand, Google’s advanced syntax and proximity search expressed via the asterisk * may help to do some creative searches.

I wish Twitter would put some labels by the bio and by the location for easier X-Raying. I hope it will! Now, while it’s not easy to “isolate” the bio, it is possible to X-Ray for tweets of a given person – or any person. The elements status and statuses in the URLs let us do that:

• site:twitter.com/jimstroud/status sourcing
• site:twitter.com/jimstroud/statuses sourcing
• site:twitter.com inurl:statuses “custom search engine”

It is possible to X-Ray for Lists as well. Here is an example:

• inurl:lists site:twitter.com groundwater conference

If you are an expert in advanced Boolean searches on Google, you’d be surprised, but in this context you can search for lists that include a given twitter handle by using that special character in the search string, @, that never helps to find email addresses on Google. Take a look:

• inurl:lists site:twitter.com @animal

Finally, Twitter can also be X-Rayed for popular hashtags:

• site:twitter.com/hashtag accept bitcoin.

This concludes a brief investigation of the now-easy twitter X-Raying.

Of course, Twitter itself has Advanced Search and Twitter List search – those and the real time search Topsy (acquired by Apple last year) provide nice search capabilities. But some of the above searches they can’t do.

Searching for Software Engineers seems to be on many Sourcers’ minds. Finding “someone” qualified can be easy. They may be on LinkedIn, or Github, or Stackoverflow, or Google-Plus, or with resumes online,  and often on all of these sites at the same time. But if that coding guru is easily found, you are competing with “everybody else” for her attention. You might be even competing with recruiters from your own company (yikes) (as a friend who recently joined a software giant with a big brand name tells me).

The task then becomes, find Software Engineers that are hard to find!

( once specifically created a list of highly qualified Developers found on Github who didn’t have LinkedIn profiles and reached out to them;  they were very responsive, even offering references if they were not open to opportunities.)

There are endless ways to be creative, looking for people that would not be found on LinkedIn and other “mainstream” channels. One way you may want to try is to source Software Engineers within the Source Code in the programming languages they use. Let’s explore how to use Google’s filetype: operator for that.

Google’s official file types list includes:

• Basic source code (.bas)
• C/C++ source code (.c, .cc, .cpp, .cxx, .h, .hpp)
• C# source code (.cs)
• Java source code (.java)
• Perl source code (.pl)
• Python source code (.py)

But in fact, Google will recognize many more file types for software source code files. As long as a file contains code in a programming language, that is text, that someone typed in, Google should be able to “understand” it. Here’s a list with more source code file extentions, and even more can be found here.

If the author decides to leave a contact email in the code, that contact can be found. Of course, these searches, targeting programming languages and email addresses, will have to be very wide. But we know how to cross-reference lists of emails (Rapportive, Google-Plus, Outlook Social Connector, LinkedIn Contacts are just some ways to do that) and quickly narrow the lists down to the right locations and to other target parameters.

In addition to using the fitelype: operator, we may want to specifically X-Ray some sites with open source software code, such as Bitbucket, Google code, and Sourceforge, to name a few.

Combining all of the above, here are some sample searches to play with (perhaps, add some specific keywords that you expect to find as well):

• site:code.google.com filetype:js “by * * gmail.com”
• site:code.google.com filetype:js “by * * com”
• site:code.google.com filetype:py “by * * com”
• filetype:js “node.js” “gmail.com”
• filetype:js “by * google.com”
• filetype:cpp 3D “gmail.com”

These searches may find top coders that may be hard to find on the most common channels. Sometimes, they will discover developers that can be found, say, on LinkedIn, but with a different email address that the developer is likelier to check, which can also open doors to initial communication. Maybe you can even tell them that you have looked at some source code; I suppose that would make you stand out from the crowd in the eyes of a developer. Of course, an additional (intrinsic) advantage is that you would have the contact email address, which is not the case with LinkedIn searches.

As a quick example, this search within JavaScript source code files instantly finds about 50 email addresses, including those pointing to this profile and this profile on LinkedIn, that others are unlikely to find due to the lack of keywords (at the time of this post).

My webinar on the topic of finding “techies” has been popular; check it out if you might be interested in a 90-minutes recording with many more tips and a month of support.

The Facebook Graph Search is now available to all English-speaking users of Facebook. The rest of the users can experience the Graph Search by changing the language to English in the settings.

There are, however, some advantages to using the “pre-Graph” search on Facebook. You will guess correctly that if you use Facebook in English, by changing the language to any other language you will get that type of search in the search bar. But in fact, you don’t have to be changing the preferences to access the pre-Graph search. This link, for example:

https://www.facebook.com/search/results.php?q=security%20certification

will work no matter what language you use and will search for the given keywords (that you can change, of course) across all the object types: people, places, groups, etc. To search within groups, add &type=groups to the URL or select “Groups” from the choices on the left.

Here’s another example: search for python language among pages:

https://www.facebook.com/search/results.php?q=python%20language&type=pages

I recently wrote about the Boolean OR search on Facebook. Well, these searches are Boolean AND searches for the keywords: python AND language; security AND certification.

Compared to the Graph search, when used to search for groups, pages, etc. by name, the pre-Graph search has some advantages.

1. It doesn’t “jump to conclusions”. (What I am referring to is the annoying behavior of the Graph search when it lands on the wrong result page, before you’ve been able to tell what you are searching for.)

2. Interesting! This search has a capacity that is somewhat like Google’s auto-stemming (and even synonym searching in some cases). You can stop at a partial (key)word, and Facebook will be bringing in variations of the word. As an example, a search for security certif will find pages with certified and certifications.

As another example, a search for pages with international, recruit – will find recruiters, recruitment, etc.:

 (The graph search, too, sometimes interprets partial words, but in a different manner; I’ll leave that for another post.)

As we are exploring pre-Graph searching, let me point out that the Facebook Graph search has the “see more results” link for those who want to search by keywords:

Compare the screenshot above for the pre-Graph search with the screen shot below for “more results for python language“; the display differs but the results seem to be the same:

3. Finally, the pre-Graph search continues to work in a logged-out state. (The Graph search and its “see more results” stop working if you log out.) That’s something to appreciate if you are sourcing and don’t want to depend on your friend’s “likes”:

To conclude, the pre-graph search is NOT as dead as Facebook says and can be put to some good use. Bookmark it.

P.S. To learn lots more about Facebook Graph and non-Graph search, Twitter search syntax and X-Raying, Social Lookup Tools (and more) applied to Sourcing, and get one month of support in your sourcing practice, check out Facebook and Twitter for Sourcing – Fri May 21 at 9 AM (repeat of the May 9 webinar).

Looking for more ways to source without LinkedIn? This hands-on sourcing webinar will go over dozens of tips and tools for sourcing on the two social networking giants, Facebook and Twitter.

(This webinar is complementary to the prerecorded webinars “Sourcing without LinkedIn” and “Sourcing with Google-Plus” in the Training Library.)

Who should attend: Sourcers, Recruiters, Talent Acquisition Specialists, all those who search for professionals online; everyone who wants to learn new sourcing tips and get up-to-date on top sourcing methods.

What is Covered

Specifically, I’ll cover: little-known ways to perform Boolean search on Facebook; Facebook Graph search “hacking”; recruiting tools and add-ons to Facebook; factors affecting professional data visibility on Facebook; new ways to X-Ray Twitter and to search within Twitter lists, available due to the just-happened profile redesign; advanced Boolean search syntax on Twitter; tools to search the Big Data in the “Twitter Fire hose” in real time; Social Look-up tools and browser extensions; and social cross-referencing between Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the Social Web. I’ll also compare various sourcing techniques on Facebook and Twitter in terms of their ROI.

Space is limited; sign up now!

Date: Wednesday, 2014 — note – this is a repeat of the May 9 webinar, scheduled gain due to many requests!
Time: 9 AM PDT/ noon EDT
Length: 90 minutes
Included: slides, video-recording, one month of support.
Price: $99

Schedule conflict or the “wrong” time zone? No worries; the slides, the video-recording, and one month support are provided to all who sign up.

Stackoverflow is part of StackExchange, a “Q and A” platform. At this time it has 2.5 MLN users.

The site Stack Overflow Careers 2.0 offers the users to share their professional information if they are open to new possibilities. Search for these profiles is paid for employers and recruiters. However, you can X-Ray the site (for free).

Here’s what a profile on the “career” site looks like. Once you have found a profile, there shouldn’t be any problem finding additional professional information (if you need it), based on the shared links to social sites, the profile image, the name, and the location.

(Note that these bio/profile pages are separate. and different in structure, from the profiles of Stackoverflow users.)

A straightforward string to X-Ray the bio’s is site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs (add some keywords), for example:

site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs Objective-C PHP MySQL

We can see (interpret) these pages in the same way as resumes on job boards: recent are for active candidates, past are for “passive”.

To find the most recent profiles you can search for

site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs profile “updated * yesterday”

site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs profile updated ..6 days ago

Naturally, when you view the profile showing “3 days ago” in the preview it may be, say, 6 days since it was updated. This gap in dates gives us some idea on how often Google visits the pages.

View the dates when the profiles was last updated by using something like

site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs profile updated on * * *

Now, who can find the profile that has not been updated the longest? 🙂

If you are interested in many more practical ways and examples of sites to search for Software Engineers, feel free to check out the materials for the latest webinar, exactly on that topic.

To continue the exploration of X-Raying LinkedIn for profiles, I’d like to cover two main reasons for false positives, which are not the results you might be looking for. They appear in the search results along with true “positives”, the results that do match.

The below exploration applies to any X-Ray searching, no matter for hidden names discovery or for a broader purpose of sourcing.

Compare these two searches:

LinkedIn search for “CEO at SugarCRM”: 1 (one) result

X-Ray Google search: site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir “CEO at SugarCRM”: several hundred results – most of which are false positives, if the reason to search was to find the person.

The first results are variation URLs for the profile of the same person; then, you will see many profiles of professionals other than the CEO of SugarCRM:

The extra results are not what we looked for, but are there for a reason.

Let’s review what the following X-Ray search does; this does look like a search someone might run looking for candidates:

site:www.linkedin.com/in OR site:www.linkedin.com/pub -inurl:pub.dir “front-end developer at” “at Google OR Facebook OR Microsoft” “Python” “Javascript”

We are looking for people who have or had a job title “front-end developer”, worked at Google, Facebook, or Microsoft, and have keywords Python and Javascript on the profile. Seems reasonable? Now, look what happens. Here is one the results for the search.

This profile does have the two keywords in the skills section; however the person never was a Front-end developer and never worked at any of the target companies. The profile is in the search results because of the information in the “also viewed” section.

It’s a “false positive” – but a kind of a false positive that is pretty impossible to exclude by the Boolean NOT (minus) type of exclusion.

As an example, suppose I want to exclude the above result and for that I exclude the person titles (as below)

site:www.linkedin.com/in OR site:www.linkedin.com/pub -inurl:pub.dir “front-end developer at” “at Google OR Facebook OR Microsoft” “Python” “Javascript” -CEO -co-Founder

The problem with that, that if this CEO, co-founder person is present in some other profiles  in the “also viewed” section – those other profiles will be removed as well – but they may be a match.

The second major reason for false positives, in addition to the “also viewed”  is “find a different”, which affects search in similar ways.

You can see that X-Ray searching for LinkedIn profiles by job titles and by company names is hard-to-impossible to control to narrow down to mostly relevant results; Boolean exclusion can help but it can also hurt. Some things we can do though, to make X-Raying more useful and targeted.

We can do X-ray searches for people at specific locations; members of specific groups; those who attended specific schools We can add keywords and phrases,; that would help a lot. But we can’t be sure that each profile found would have a desired job title or a given employer that we had searched for. The search results will need to be reviewed.

Conclusion: X-Raying is messy and is not for the faint of heart!

While many people are trying to guess how the search results are sorted on LinkedIn now – there are, apparently, several factors that are taken to account, in an attempt to make the search order more “semantic” and more satisfactory for the person who is doing the search – let me share a very interesting, easy-to-interpret, sort order in some searches, that you may not have seen before.

This is available only in LIR (LinkedIn Recruiter) and these are the results of a search with no keywords and no facets specified. By the way, you can also see today’s total number of profiles when doing this search; it was 279,790,775 when I ran it a few minutes ago. For the screenshot, I have left the first eight names and taglines and removed the detailed previews. (For the record, all 8 profiles are public.)

If you have a LIR subscription, here’s how to reproduce the search: start with a keyword, then select 1st, 2nd, and 3rd connections using checkboxes, then remove the keyword, and you will see “everyone”.

Now, for this search the order of the profiles is very specific and depends exactly on one value. The list of people is shown in the order of…

Guess what it is!

The same search order remains in place if you narrow the search down to a country, to an industry, and to a few more select-a-value type of search facets.

Why is this search order relevant? That I don’t know. But the results are quite interesting to review.