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.

It’s a well hidden sourcing secret – I have not heard anyone mention it – but Boolean Search on Facebook is possible.

Boolean search is NOT available through the Graph search. Most people think it’s not possible at all, unless you pay for some expensive tools. But it’s possible and, though it’s somewhat limited, there are certainly good practical uses for it.

As an example, did you know that you can search for Facebook members who:

Live in “San Francisco, California” OR “Mountain View, California” OR “San Jose, California” OR “Seattle, Washington”

AND

Attended “UC Berkeley” OR “The University of Chicago” OR “Caltech” OR “Massachusetts Institute of Technology”

AND 

Work at Google OR Yahoo OR Microsoft OR Amazon.com OR Facebook OR Twitter

– all in one shot? Take a look at the screenshot; this is what it looks like:

In addition to using Boolean OR’s in the current city,  employer, and school  fields, you can also add Boolean OR’s for hometown, high school, and grad school and combine with the above.

A use case I can imagine is, for example, a search similar to the above example. You would need to add several more locations, that would cover the San Francisco Bay Area. Optionally, you can list some top schools for Computer Science. You can list some top companies that employ software engineers… and then find the local engineers in the results.

As a different application, a Boolean OR in the home town field may be useful for searching for bi-lingual people.

This search is available for some Facebook members on the right side of this page – under “Search for Friends”. For some other members it shows up on the left side in “Friend Browser” – “Find friends from different parts of your life”.

The trick to switch to Boolean is to uncheck the checkbox with the selection, for example, for the employer. This would let you to add another employer to the OR statement. You can add OR statements for the other fields in the same manner.

Back in December 2013 I posted the tip People You May Not Know about uncovering the hidden names and the full profiles on LinkedIn. It works in 100% cases and is based on saving the profile in question in your contacts.

The Contacts provides a goldmine of sourcing functionality; I have written about other creative ways to use them on this blog ever since they were introduced.

Thanks to my friend and a Sourcing trainer Johnny Campbell of SocialTalent for pointing out the “edit source” link, that now shows up on a “saved-to-contacts” profile, in one of our chats.

Long story short, let me share a quicker way to how to uncover the name and the full profile.

Uncovering Hidden Names, Viewing Full Profiles Profiles – Steps:

Step 1. Step One is the same as before. Save the profile:

– or (for an out-of-network) –

Step 2. In one of the two tabs below,”relationship” and “contact info”, that you will now see, select the “contact info” and click on the Edit contact source link.

Step 3. This takes you to this screen. the Merge Editor. (It doesn’t make any sense, since it has little to do with “editing source”; but never mind. Ignore what it says.) Now, press the Done editing button:

That’s it. DONE. You arrive at the full profile page:

My best guess is that this shortcut to full profiles is very temporary since “editing the source of contact” for some reason takes users to “merging contacts”.

To be fair, the “merge editor” may make sense if you already have the profile in question saved in the contacts from another source; that is a rare case.

P. S. In a later post I will also share a way to save and uncover hidden profiles using the tagging function.

The Contest, sponsored by:

– People Sourcing Certification and the People Aggregator HiringSolved – is over!

We had over 30 submissions from the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Hungary, Russia, China, and India, with the majority of the participants coming from the US.

Here is some selected feedback from those who took part and submitted answers:

• This was great fun, Irina! I really enjoyed it. Thank you!
• I loved this contest
• Very trick indeed
• It was mind boggling
• I guess I need to practice more or learn more – thanks goodness it’s Friday 😀
• These are fun 🙂 you should do more!

First Prize: Both levels of the Sourcing Certification Program Materials AND three months of full access to HiringSolved.

We have two winners, who both gave 100% correct answers. They are:

Vince Szymczak (Hungary)

Andrea Mitchell (UK)

Second Prize: The Winner’s choice of either Level 1 or Level 2 of the Program Materials AND one month of full access to HiringSolved. The winner is:

Maxim Ivanov (Russia)

If you didn’t know, Maxim runs an excellent blog on sourcing that you can read using Google Translate. Specifically, take a look at his recent post on interesting blogs for recruitersand the previous list, both with comments worth reviewing.

We’ll be in touch about the prizes.

These skilled sourcers are runners-up and came very close: Alex Edmonds and Roland Lancelot Pavamani.

Congratulations, all! Very well done.

Wondering about the answers? I am not going to post them; feel free to start discussions on our group and the Network. Here are some hints though, that should be enough to solve the trickiest questions:

1) What is the maximum number of results Google search can provide? (The specific quiz question was prompted by this blog post).
2) Search by Image on Google can be combined with the site: operator (X-raying). Regarding looking for a LinkedIn profile with the given profile image (Q1): the image in the contest had a piece of the URL shown, that was important as well; attention to details is important!
3) The Alumni page on LinkedIn would accept a keyword as the school name.
4) Files have properties.

Finally, one more question can be solved either by Googling or by reviewing the Boolean Mini-Book.

This week the People Sourcing Certification Program is running the Winter Sale, offering one or two extra webinars to those who purchase the People Sourcing Certification Materials (both level materials offer the best value – that is 18 hours of training!). Check it out!

In conjunction with it, we are announcing the Sourcing Contest – #SourcingSolved.

Below is a preview for those of you who are impatient and want to start thinking about the answers.

The Contest Winners will get the People Sourcing Certification Materials as the prize and, additionally, will get access to the People Aggregator HiringSolved.

First Prize: Both levels of the Sourcing Certification Program Materials AND three months of full access to HiringSolved.

Second Prize: The Winner’s choice of either Level 1 or Level 2 of the Program Materials AND one month of full access to HiringSolved.

Want to try the Challenge? You will need to answer several sourcing questions in a quiz-like style:

The Contest

Please note: I will not be able to answer any questions about the contest until it’s over.

Have fun!

[LinkedIn bug. InMail doesn’t include your contact details when asked.]

InMails are included in paid LinkedIn accounts, both personal and the LIR (LinkedIn Recruiter). I’ve recently run into InMails working not in the way we’d expect. I sincerely hope that LinkedIn will fix this soon and will update you when they do.

I have included two screenshot of composing InMails below. Please notice the highlighted “include my contact info” option. This is what sending an InMail from a premium account dialog looks like:

This is what sending an InMail in LIR looks like:

Now, here’s what the recipient sees in their email client. (The “subject” and the “inmail text” are created when composing the InMail and contain the specific message to the recipient.)

My contact information, that I had asked to include using the checkbox, when composing the InMail, is not here. It is, unfortunately, a bug.

(I would prefer for my LinkedIn information, such as my location and the tagline, to also be included in the InMail when it arrives in the recipient’s email; it’s not.)

Bottom line: Include your contact info in the body of your InMails. (They will be visible if the recipient looks at your InMail on LinkedIn site, when logged-in, but most people would read these in their email client.) Include your professional info (title, company, location)  as well; otherwise the recipient may know too little about you to warm up to look you up – or to respond. Including this information will raise your InMail rate.

If you are using LinkedIn Recruiter (LIR), read on; I have something else to share.

If you are using the Talent Pipeline (which I love by the way!), you can message (and mass-message) people, for whom you have uploaded their email addresses, without using your InMail credits:

In this case, my fellow LIR users, your contact info will show in the message. Your message, when it arrives in the recipient’s email, will include a signature like this:

(If you want the recipient to know anything else about who you are, you will need to type it into the message.) The message sent this way comes from a LinkedIn-based return address that looks similar to this:

What’s remarkable, however, is that there’s NO way for the recipient to “unsubscribe” from further messages. So let’s make sure we use this type of messaging carefully, until LinkedIn fixes this second problem.

Due to numerous requests, I am repeating the Productivity Tools and Techniques for Sourcing webinar on Thursday January 23rd, 2014. Seating is limited.

Join me to get the full coverage of the most important techniques – and over 50 (fifty) tools – for maximizing your Sourcing and Recruiting productivity in 2014. I will show several use case scenarios of combining some easy-to-use tools to achieve significant jump in productivity, finding the right professionals many times faster. I will then present a modern encyclopedia of tools, from simple browser add-ons to powerful people aggregator systems. (I have listed selected tools on the just-updated Tools page here on the blog).

The tools covered in-depth in the webinar include:

• Business productivity Browser Add-Ons: Fastest Chrome, Search Selection, Image Search, and more
• People Finders: Zoominfo, Connect.data, and more
• Parsing Tools: Outwit Hub, Doc, Broadlook Contact Capture, and more
• People Finders: Zoominfo, Connect.data, and more
• Social Cross-Reference tools: 360Social, Connectifier, and more
• Custom Search Engines (hints for building and a library of CSE’s for Sourcers)
• People Aggregators, including: Hiringsolved, SwoopTalent, Dice Open Web, and Talentbin

What You Will Get:

• A wealth of tips and tools to speed up your work; start using them as soon as the webinar is over!
• Descriptions of selected productivity tools, as well as ways to classify and assess existing and future tools.

Who should attend?
Recruiters, Sourcers, Talent Acquisition Managers, Internet Researchers, Business development managers, and Sales Managers.

Note: This is not a beginner class; those who have some sourcing/searching experience will benefit most.

Date: Thursday, January 23rd, 2014
Time: 9 AM PST / 12 PM EST / 5 PM London (UTC)
Duration: 90 minutes
Included: The slides and a video recording of the webinar, a bonus Tip Sheet covering 50+ productivity tools, and one month of support.

Review and sign up at  http://bit.ly/sourcing2014

Can’t make the date and time? No problem. The video-recording, the slides, the Tip Sheet, and support will be provided for all who sign up.

Looking forward to “seeing” you there.