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.

 

 

If we know someone’s name, company, and email format(s) used at the company, chances are that we could construct that business email address. Here are some ways to figure out the email format(s) specific companies are using.

1. Collections of Formats

Online collections of corporate email formats have been shared across our groups. I will list some of them here; please feel free to suggest other sites in the comments. Of course this information needs to be verified.

• Email Format
• Emails4Corporations
• Executivebomb.com
• Emailnamefinder
• Ceoemail.com

There is a collection of email formats, phone numbers, and more for the Fortune 1000 companies that I ran across, that can be found by Googling. Here is the file; I am not sure how precise the info is but this may be a good start.

2. Googling for Examples

When I search for a company email pattern, I pretty much never look them up in the sources like the above. I find it easier to do a few Google searches like this:

“email OR contact me at * bankofamerica.com”
“email OR contact me at * autodesk.com”

Here is a variation of this “Googling” method, using X-Raying LinkedIn. I am omitting “me“, compared to the searches above, since I expect to mostly see emails for people (vs. “info” “sales” “support” etc.) on LinkedIn profiles:

linkedin.com “people you know” “email * * apple.com”
linkedin.com “people you know” “email * * sap.com”

Please note that Google is still behaves pretty badly with Captcahs. If you do advanced searching using X-raying and asterisks, you may want to switch to a custom search engine I have created for this purpose. It is available here on the blog, or use its public URL.

3. Guessing and Verifying

Check the post from 2013:

Find Almost Anybody’s Email Address with #LinkedIn

4. Use This Custom Search Engine – Reveal Email Formats

This Custom Engine is based on a well-known site Zoominfo, that contains contact information, found on the Internet. To use the search engine, enter a company domain name, as an example, chevron.com, into the search box, and see what happens.

You can use its public link or just search below:

Reveal Email Formats

Here are some cool examples of its usage (Scroll down on each of these pages to see the results):

Emails for GE.com
Emails for Dell.com
Emails for Pfizer.com

 

 

Another “back door” to LinkedIn has just been shut, breaking the “PYMK” (people you may know)-based link, breaking the bookmarklet shared on Sourcecon.com, a tool posted on Sourcing Hacks, and the hint in the “Hidden Names Discovery” post.

There’s a workaround.

Step 1. Save the profile to your contacts:

Step 2. Take a look at the newest person in your contacts.

Note that if you click on the name in the contacts you will see the full profile. The information hidden in the original view is shown.

That’s it! Let’s see how long this will last. 🙂

Interestingly, if you Google a phrase from a person’s profile, when the person is out of your network, the profile will show in full even in a logged-in view. (Try it.) But if the person you have found on Google is your 3rd level connection, it’s best to view his profile in an incognito window.

As a Dice subscriber, I couldn’t miss the note from Dice CEO Shravan Goli “Dice’s Open Web is coming out of Beta”.

Dice’s Open Web technology is one of the pioneers among people aggregators, the new generation sourcing tools, initially developed as theSocialCV. (See more tools in the people aggregator category listed on the Tools page.) Dice certainly showed innovative ways of thinking, being the first job board to acquire a profile aggregation tool and to integrate with it.

I have run a few experimental searches and here is what it was like.

1) The traditional Dice resumes are now showing the “Open web” part, that is associated with the majority of them.

While, if we have a full resume with the contact information, it’s not a problem to find several profiles, the new Dice UI saves some of that sourcing legwork and shows links to social profiles and a preview of the professional info right in the resume view:

Clearly, this is useful.

2) If you have a Dice account with Open Web access and are logged in, you can take advantage of the Chrome add-on while you browse the Social web outside of Dice. Several other people aggregators (Entelo, Talentbin, and Gild, to name a few) have similar add-ons.

Here’s what it looks like. From this example you may notice that the Dice Open Web repository has some profiles in its collection as well that are not in the IT field in its narrow definition.

Of course, seeing info in the pop-up window is a hit-or-miss, depending whether Dice has the given profile among the aggregated data, but it is useful info when it’s there.

3) Then, of course, there’s search within the aggregated profile database itself. The search UI is now integrated between the resumes and the Open web.

If you try the Open web for the first time, you may see some “false positives” in the results. Don’t let this discourage you; that is to be expected of any people aggregator.   The expectations for searching in an aggregated profiles database (Dice’s or any other) should be different from searching in a resume database. The volume is larger, but it’s a more challenging task to glue pieces of distributed profiles together and to allow to search among them, compared to working with a resume DB. (With Google searches you can find even more, but it’s even harder to control the search!) If some good results are found with little effort, we are in luck.

I have noticed that the location search has greatly improved in Dice Open Web, compared to the last time I used it. It’s certainly critical in the geographical areas like my own; around Berkeley anything over 10 miles is a tough commute.

 

Bottom line, Dice is a promise of an integrated recruiting environment, where searching in the resume database and on the open web coexist and are nicely integrated.

Starting in 2014 the Open Web add-on is becoming paid; if fact, if you call them today, that would already be the case. That is perfectly reasonable since the Open Web adds searching power. Best of luck to Dice on educating its existing users on the advantages of the Open web and acquiring new users in the New Year.

 

 

Join me for a webinar on December 19, 2013. Seating is limited.

This newly designed class covers all of the basic concepts, technologies, and tips for those who search for professionals on the Internet. It will provide you with as many essential Google Boolean Strings, LinkedIn hacks, sourcing productivity tools, and all things related, as can be squeezed into a 90-minute webinar.

The webinar is based on, and can serve as an introduction, to the materials in the People Sourcing Certification Program. Those webinar attendees, who sign up for the upcoming round of the Program, will get the cost of this intro webinar returned to them.

Who should attend?

– Those who have never taken classes in sourcing but do search for professionals, or manage those who do

– Those who source as part of their jobs and want to be efficient in sourcing without necessarily becoming experts or doing anything “too technical”

– Those who want to get an up-do-date tour of the modern sourcing tools and methods

– Teams and managers who have been considering signing up for the People Sourcing Certification Program

What You Will Get:

Attendees will be able to acquire hands-on tips to boost their productivity, to get a sense of what modern Sourcing is about, and to practice the material during the month of follow-up support.

For those who already have a foundation in sourcing technologies, the webinar can serve as a refresher and as an update on things and tools that may have shifted since you last looked or last took a class – and things change incredibly often now!

Attention Managers: The webinar is a nice Holiday gift to your team members who are curious about sourcing and are ready to use new sourcing tools and hacks in their practice.

(Please note: if you have already signed up for the upcoming Certification Program in 2014, the webinar is free for you to attend.)

Date: Thursday, December 19, 2013

Time: 9 AM PST/noon EST/5 PM London

Duration: 90 minutes

Price: $99 – includes the slides, the video-recording, and one month of support.

Cant’s make the date and time? No worries; we will provide you with the complete materials and the month of support if you sign up.

(Please note: if you have already signed up for the upcoming Certification Program in 2014, the webinar is free for you to attend.)