At the moment we do not know of a 100% method to find the names on out-of-network profiles, – those that are displayed in the search results as “LinkedIn Member”.

With the varying ways and tools to find those hidden names, that come and go, discussed in forums, there’s always someone who comments that it’s “just a matter of Googling!” Pretty often it is. But, to cover the subject in detail and to set the expectations right, let’s review five cases where Googling will not be as helpful as you would hope.

1. The profile may be hidden from Google, marked as “private” by the member.

2. The profile may have changed since Google looked at it last time. Searching may then go wrong, because Google searches in its own cache, not on LinkedIn.

3. Hidden “LinkedIn Member” previews may show the words that are so common, that searching would produce way too many results to look through. Try, for example, to find this profile by X-Raying:

SIDE NOTE: For the cases with common keywords like the above, here is some help:

a) Do you remember what you searched for in the first place? Add that to Googling.

b) There’s a way to possibly discover more keywords by looking into “finding references”.

That would be extra legwork and could be a hit-or-miss, but if you are desperate, this may dig out more keywords to add to your X-Raying.

4. Google doesn’t include some public profiles in its index. There’s a post from 2012 from Shane Bowen illustrating it.

5. Even if Google does include a profile in its index, it would not necessarily locate the profile by the keywords or phrases that you specify. This would probably not happen too often in X-raying for hidden names, since taglines, industries, and locations would probably make it to Google’s words for indexing. But in general, not every phrase on an indexed web page would work to find that page. (I have seen some Google searching cases when a page if found by dropping the quotation marks around a phrase that is present on the page but not by the prase in “” – have you?)  That phenomena is responsible for finding fewer LinkedIn profiles by using common phrases such as “people you know” vs. using the template

site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -inurl:pub.dir …

OK, that is enough “bad news” for now…

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In the previous post Excluding Non-Resumes: Be Positive I explained how to “think positively” and get non-resumes out of the way when searching for resumes. There’s a different type of “wrong” results that cannot be removed by this strategy. These come from sites that make a special effort to be shown in the search results.

Paid sites that offer resume search certainly know about our

intitle:resume OR inurl:resume …

intitle:CV OR inurl:CV …

templates to find online resumes. They use this page structure (words cv or resume in page titles and URLs) to appear in search results. Two kinds of  “wrong” pages from those sites may show up in Google search:

1) Lists of resumes.

If you search for several keywords and find a list of resumes with previews, usually there’s no one resume in the list with all the keywords present – so the page is completely irrelevant. Here is an example:

2) “Blind” resumes with some important information, such as the name and contact, removed.

Here is an example:

There used to be many more “wrong” results across many searches (not just for resumes). Google is improving its filtering out “spam” sites and there’s not as many as before. Still, some show up in the results.

Blocking the “wrong” sites can be done by “being positive” and including information in search strings, that those sites won’t have, for example, contact email addresses from popular free domains, posted on real resumes:

“gmail.com” OR “yahoo.com” OR “hotmail.com” (etc.)

In this case though “being positive” may not be the easiest approach, since there are too many variations of contact information that people use on resumes.

The most straightforward way to avoid these “wrong” results is to directly exclude these wrong sites. You may start adding to your search string something like

-site:devbistro.com -site:hireitpeople.com -site:postjobsfree.com (etc.)

I would also exclude site:indeed.com; while they have good resumes, I think they are better searched separately with Indeed’s own excellent advanced resume search.

Google used to have a preference setting to list sites to be excluded from all searches but it was dropped some time ago.

Another option to block sites is by installing the Chrome Extension Personal Blocklist. Google will search as usual; this extension will just hide the results from these sites for you in your browser.

Google Custom Search Engines provide yet another option: all sites from a specified list can be excluded from the results. An additional advantage of using CSE’s is that Google will not bug you with Captchas.

If you are interested in a good coverage of Boolean Search basics and hints, check out the live repeat of my “Boolean Strings Basics” webinar along with 2 other popular webinars scheduled in the next few weeks.

This post is about the best practices in Boolean searching and specifically about (not) using the Boolean operator NOT (which is expressed by the minus – in Google) much and when unnecessary. The post is about online resumes, but the idea is applicable to any searching.

There’s a common practice among recruiters to exclude whole sets of the “wrong” words when searching for online resumes – the longer the exclusion list, the better. Sourcers use prepackaged strings like -job -jobs -apply -submit -eoe -template -example -sample -wizard (etc.) As an example of this popular approach, check out the discussion from a few years ago on out network:

Filtering for Only Resumes in a Google String

This “template exclusion” approach can produce decent results, but I think there are better ways to search. I’ll provide two reasons for why I don’t find it to be productive, then will suggest two ways to do better – which I practice in sourcing.

1. If you compare the search results for strings with very long (prepackaged) exclusion lists, you may find that more exclusions often do not make a big difference. Sometimes they even provide for more results – while this “should” work in the opposite way!

(In the following example I am using lots of “skill” keywords just to make the number of results small, for better illustration.)

Compare:

 intitle:resume OR inurl:resume Hadoop Linux Windows Apache Java Hibernate “engineer” -job -jobs -apply -submit -eoe -template -example -sample -samples -template -wizard -required -wanted -free -send

with a shorter string:

intitle:resume OR inurl:resume Hadoop Linux Windows Apache Java Hibernate “engineer” -job -jobs -apply -submit -eoe -template -example -sample -samples

The shorter string produces fewer results (as of now). Without trying to solve the mystery, let’s take a look at an even shorter string:

intitle:resume OR inurl:resume Hadoop Linux Windows Apache Java Hibernate “engineer” -job -template

Clearly the above three search strings produce little “junk” and are quite comparable in terms of mostly generating relevant results – which is all we need.

Conclusion: The long string of exclusions is often an overkill. Searching with shorter strings are also “less mysterious”. 🙂

2. The words, that these search templates exclude, do appear on some resumes. If you exclude the word “job” by adding -job to the search string, you may exclude some resumes from the search results. Some of those may be from sites that have many resumes and mention jobs as well (say, on every page); that may not be such a big loss. But some “individually” posted resumes do include the word “job” as well, such as the resumes with these phrases:

“At Amazon, my primary job is to architect and develop systems for deploying”

 “Job ended due to group being shut down by the investor, and reorganized as Vindigo”

 “I also developed a batch job automation system used to process client data”

There are cases when other words from the “exclude” template – such as sample, apply, etc., – would appear on resumes. (Would you know how to find some examples of those? :))

Here’s the moral, or, perhaps, two morals of the story:

[1] “Be Less Negative”. It’s best, I think, not to use long templates for exclusion, but rather to exclude only words that really “stand in the way”. It’s best to leave templates alone and to identify words to exclude by glancing over the search results for a specific search, and exclude one word (or a phrase) at a time, then search again.

Generally, it’s best to exclude as little as possible. If only a couple results are not resumes, that’s not a big deal and it’s time to stop and review the results vs. trying to figure out what else to exclude to craft a “perfect” search string.

[2] Even better, “Be Positive”. If you name things present on resumes that you are searching for (those that would usually be absent in job descriptions and in resume samples), you will be effectively narrowing the search down to the desired results – and rarely needing to exclude anything.

Just as a matter of showing how this may work, compare these searches:

intitle:resume OR inurl:resume Hadoop Linux Windows Apache Java Hibernate “engineer” (the original search)

intitle:resume OR inurl:resume Hadoop Linux Windows Apache Java Hibernate “engineer” “responsible for”

intitle:resume OR inurl:resume Hadoop Linux Windows Apache Java Hibernate “engineer” ext:PDF

Words that are on resumes but not on job descriptions and not on sample resumes  could, of course, depend on the target skill set. Anyone wants to suggest some examples in addition to the above?

If you are interested in a good coverage of Boolean Search basics and hints, check out the live repeat of my “Boolean Strings Basics” webinar along with 2 other popular webinars scheduled in the next few weeks.

Join me for a new webinar: “How To Find and Attract Technical Talent”. 

You can register at the bottom of this page.

Who should attend: Technical Recruiters of all levels and everyone interested in recruiting technical talent.

Why you should attend: If you are searching for technical talent in 2014, you are aware how challenging it is. Technical skills are in demand. Top talented Engineers are not likely to return your calls or respond to InMails on LinkedIn.

Want to take your sourcing skills in IT Recruiting to the next level? Join me for a new webinar, covering every major tool and every way to locate technical talent online (including finding potential candidates that others won’t) and ways to attract attention of potential candidates.

Terminology and Roles. To help to navigate through searches and to be prepared to write attractive messages, we’ll discuss how to make sense of the terminology, such as programming languages, “front-end”, “back-end”, “full stack”, “open source”, Hadoop, etc. We’ll go over the specifics of different roles such as Developer, Data Scientist, Build Engineer, DBA, Network Admin, QA Engineer, etc. We’ll cover useful points for communicating with hiring managers regarding informative and appealing job descriptions.

Sourcing Methods. We’ll go over searching and sourcing methods and tips on LinkedIn, Github, Stackoverflow, Google-Plus, angel.co, and combining various sources; building custom search engines and alerts, using possible terminology variations and synonyms. We’ll also briefly go over several people aggregators such as Hiringsolved, Swoop Talent, Dice Open Web, Gild, and Entelo.

Effective Messages. Finally, I will provide insights on contacting “techies” and getting their attention and positive response, based on my own communication with Recruiters being a Software Engineer, then Manager, placed by Recruiters in my “previous” life (some years ago).

I am looking forward to sharing technical tips and insights with you!

Date/Time: Wednesday April 2 at 10 AM PDT/ 1 PM EDT

Registration/Cost: $99 (after you submit a payment you will receive a link to log in to the webinar within 24 hours, and before the webinar for sure).

Included: Attendance (optional); Slides, Video-recording, and One month of support on the subject.

In the following post I am going to explain how to easily and quickly test all of the guesses for a person’s email address all at once using MS Outlook.

MS Outlook has an add-on called Social Connector. I have Outlook 2013 and the Social Connector is built in; for this latest version you need to turn it on. For earlier Outlook versions you need to add it which is easily done.

You can then connect Outlook with your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts and (depending on the version) with other social sites. I was able to add XING to my Outlook.

Here’s How to Find Almost Anyone’s Email Address.

The example below is for a “sample” person with the common name David Smith who works at Microsoft.

I am starting off by generating a list of guesses for the email address (or, perhaps, several email addresses) for the person. As a sample list of guesses I am trying variations of the email using @microsoft.com and several free email provider extensions such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and aol.

Note: These email guesses I am using are not “optimal” for a case like this; you are on your own to set a list of guesses. Ideas and templates are welcome; please share. What I am going to explain is how to test the guesses out all at once.

Step 1. Create a list of guesses for the email address and save in a csv file: 

Step 2. Import into Outlook pointing to these values in the file to be imported as email addresses:

Step 3. Here is what the list look like after importing. You can see the email addresses that have been identified on each of the networks!

The identified LinkedIn profiles stand out, having a little blue “in” on the pictures.

Your being connected with the people with the given addresses doesn’t affect the identification; it always works; or let’s say, it works the same for everyone.

Have you read the post up to here? 🙂 Here are a couple of notes on relevant previous blog posts that you may have thought of.

1) Correct, you know how to find email addresses using Rapportive. It’s explained in the great post Find (Almost) Anybody’s Email Address | Distilled along with an excel table that helps to generate a list of guesses for the email addresses at  bit.ly/name2email.

The above way is different. It’s better in some cases – and faster- because:

– it looks the email addresses up vs. looking up in the acquired data (as Rapportive does). This is more up-to-date, which can make a difference in better identification of the email address.

– it shows the whole list at once; you can have a list as long as you wish. If the list is long, you just scroll the list, there’s no need to mouse over every address. This is much faster.

If someone is not on LinkedIn and not on Facebook, but is identified by Rapportive, the referenced post would work better; if you are really after an email address, try both!

2) Great! You have read my most popular to-date post  Find Almost Anybody’s Email Address with #LinkedIn.

Compared to that, this method is also somewhat different in that:

– it doesn’t require waiting;

– it will also find people who are on other social sites, most importantly, Facebook.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy!

LinkedIn used to have a “skills” page. That page was useful for all since it was showing relevant skills after you’ve entered a skill. The “relevant skills” are (were) crowd-sourced: those were the other skills that the majority of members with a given skill have. The skills page was a good way to figure out a variety of keywords to use, while it lasted. This is what it used to look like:

Sourcing without LinkedIn

While LinkedIn is at the core of today’s sourcing, some of us log into LinkedIn first thing in the morning, stay there all day, and leave the wealth of other sites and ways for searching for professionals untouched or used little.

Unless the professionals you are looking to find have to have informative profiles filled with keywords to qualify, you would find 10 times more information on various web sites outside of LinkedIn. You would be able to find contact information for whole lists of professionals at a time.

Join me at the upcoming webinar where we will go over every major method to find professionals outside of LinkedIn. Seating is limited.

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

Takeaways: 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 the sites:
  • Using x-raying
  • Using 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

Included:

• Slides
• Video recorded lecture
• One month support

Date: March 6, 2014
Time: 9 AM PST/noon EST/5 PM London
Duration: 90 min
Price: $99 – After you provide a payment you will receive the login information and instructions on how to access the material after the webinar.

Can’t make the time and date? No worries. The materials and support will be provided for all who sign up.

Lippl is a new tool not to be missed.

It’s an easy-to-use Chrome extension that allows you to view anyone’s public LinkedIn profile. It is useful when viewing profiles “far away” in your network: 3rd level if you are a basic members and out-of-network if you are either a basic or a premium member.

Press the Open button to see the public profile – for any member whose profile you are viewing:

Alternatively, use the “Copy” button and paste the copied URL in the same window to see the full profile.

The only case when this doesn’t work is when the member does not have a public profile, which is rare.

Note that, in the cases where the person shows less information on the public profile (some people restrict what can be seen) you will see more by copying the URL and looking at it while logged in.

Lippl works with any account, basic or premium.

Why is this so great? Well, unfortunately, the last “hack” for viewing hidden names and full profiles no longer works with basic accounts. (That was stopped fast! Perhaps they are reading my blog or something.) Lippl works and provides the full profiles.

If you want to see the full profile of the 3rd level connection, this can still be done by the using the old trick of  “sharing” the profile with a connection (“share” with me, I do not mind) and viewing the sent item in the Sent Folder. That one still works in 100% cases.