While Yahoo.com is considered to be one of the top sites that people access for web search, right behind Google and Bing, it has long lost its own search engine due to its business decisions, and has been “powered by Bing” since 2010. Since that switch, Yahoo has not provided any additional or different search results, compared to Bing.

What “powered by Bing” means in practice, is that:

1. Yahoo.com accepts your search terms
2. sends them to Bing
3. gets the search results from Bing
4. and displays the results.

Yahoo may “decide” to show the search results differently than Bing. Here’s an example where yahoo previews the info differently; in this case, it provides better previews and the photos of LinkedIn members.

While, in theory, the results should be the same, it looks as though, today, in many cases yahoo.com decides to provide its own search order. Take a look at the search below, that has exactly 5 results, and the search order is very different on Yahoo vs. Bing. I have added color lines to point to the same results on both pages. (What is going on here?)

Unfortunately, bing.com doesn’t have a good advanced search dialog available (vs. Google’s that has been of help to “beginners”). I used to recommend yahoo’s advanced search dialog to students, and it’s still out there but, please note, it seems broken, and is not linked to any more from the yahoo site.

Some other tests I’ve run seem to indicate that some of the advanced search syntax may not be processed in the way we expect it to on yahoo.com, which could simply point to yahoo.com not making maintaining advanced capabilities a priority.

The moral of the story is: If you have a habit of searching on yahoo, you may want to stop and verify your search results against searching on the “source” i.e. the bing site.

(Google search users, don’t forget that Bing has a somewhat different search syntax. Don’t forget your parentheses around the OR statements and a few other things.)

This year has been a year of many conferences for me, most of them being dedicated to sourcing: speaking at SourceCon in Atlanta in February 2013, at Sourcing Summit New Zealand in May, at Sourcing Summit Europe in Amsterdam in September (see a post about it), and just now I returned from SourceCon Seattle October 2-3, which I attended as the prize for winning the sourcecon challenge in February.

This last Sourcecon gave me a brand new impression, very similar to – and eloquently described – by Lance in his post Sourcing: Beyond Cool Tools to Talent Acquisition Evolution, reposted on sourcecon.com as well. It sounds like sourcing is going “mainstream”. It seemed like more attendees were there looking to be educated and to compare notes with peers (vs. general networking or business development or representing vendors) as the main goal than ever before. It felt good to be among people who are curious and enthusiastic about sourcing. I met three sourcing specialists from large companies (insurance, retail, and consulting), and two more from agencies, all of whom were on the verge of hiring their brand-new sourcing teams, having management buy-in. It’s great news that our profession is getting wide recognition!

What remains surprising for me is that apparently, as Jeremy Roberts indicated in his closing session, in ~70% companies dedicated Sourcers are supposed to pre-screen and warm up candidates before recruiters take over. Is sourcing the new recruiting then?? (Here’s a relevant post shared by my friend Jonathan Campbell on our group: What do YOU think the job of a Sourcer is?, with 20 comments.)

The Sourcecon’s platinum sponsor Hiringsolved, briefly described in a previous post, was a hit and, as I’ve heard, they had acquired some new customers at the show. The jungle of available tools is so complicated that some companies now have special managers dedicated to selecting proper tools for sourcing.

I enjoyed productivity tools’ galleries for “controlling chaos” presented by Julia Stone and by Eric Jaquith (I hope he’ll share his slides publicly as well).

I must say that on the technical side of the sourcing tools presentations SourceCon could do a better job going forward. The presentations should lead the newcomers in our world in the right and up-to-date direction.

The slide below is from one of the presentations.

Readers who use advanced search on Google will notice several questionable things in the slide, inconsistent with how Google syntax works and with Google help documentation, easily available on its home page.

Another presentation recommended to use a metasearch engine to complement search on Google, one that searches “both Yahoo and Bing”. This advice is obviously outdated. In cases like this, the satisfaction level of the audience does not reflect on the quality.

It seems like general strategic presentations were appreciated by the attendees.

On the photo above: contestants for the After Dark Grand Master Challenge.

This character was one of the many funny and wild creations of Julia Stone and Lisa Offutt that were supposed to be discovered on the way. I hope to get hold of the great videos created by them as well. Just one of the many disruptions offered along the way were little auctions, where each participant could give another one dark glasses or latex gloves to wear, or to send them on a 5 minutes break. (My performance at the challenge confirms that I source better when it’s quiet.)

Some of my other photos from the conference can be found on Google-plus.

HiringSolved is a new kid on the block among the gaining popularity people aggregators, the “dream software” tools, as I called them in excitement at the time when the first two of them were introduced, which was only two years ago.

What is different about Hiringsolved?

– They are concentrating on profile aggregation. I see this as a positive quality. People aggregation is not an easy task; doing it well requires some dedication. All the other vendors in this space are expanding their software to do many more functions.

– They are covering “the globe”, going internationally and across industries. At this point the majority of the people aggregator vendors either cover only or mostly software engineering in the US. For example, this profile on HiringSolved is not likely to be found in the competitor systems.

– The searches are really fast! In fact, on their trial link shown on their home page, the results pop up instantly.

– They are big on providing “actionable items”: they include contact email and phone numbers where it is possible to locate them. I am sure recruiters will like that.

The new system sounds promising. I hope they will stay on track, covering larger volumes and sources of information, keeping the data clean, and refining the algorithms. I have just heard that they are bringing on a browser add-on tool as well (here’s a screenshot that you should take a look at right now).

The company is sponsoring the upcoming SourceCon conference in Seattle, so if you are attending, I recommending checking it out while there. I will be there as the winner of the SourceCon Atlanta February 2013 challenge; at that conference I spoke exactly on the topic of people aggregators. (I am happy to get together if you are attending this time!)

For recruiters and sourcers internationally, especially for those who are sourcing outside of software engineering or outside of the US, I recommend trying it out and following HiringSolved.

Following up on the post Monitoring companies for staff who leave by James Mayes and What Will Replace Linkedin Signal? by Viveka von Rosen, I’d like to point to ways to track LinkedIn profile changes, using the only outside-of-LinkedIn site that openly and “officially” tracks and indexes LinkedIn profiles, Google.

Sure enough, LinkedIn has profiles, Google has pages, and telling Google how to look for specific information on profiles involves some cryptic Boolean syntax. But we have done it, and some things can be done quite easily.

The approach explained in an example below can be expanded and modified to track quite a few things.

Let’s take a look at this search:

site:www.linkedin.com “2..200 people have recommended” “registered nurse” Texas

(add your own keyword variations to the part in bold).

This is a search for people with anywhere from 2 to 200 recommendations. The added keywords narrow it down. (I do not mean that the above is “the” way to search for RN’s in TX,  but it is a very good place to start.)

Now, in the Google search dialog, let’s select the “search tools”, narrow it down to the past month, and sort by date:

When we sort by date, we see the results, that have recently been indexed by Google and got new information around the search terms. In our case, we find the profiles of the people who have, most likely, requested and added recommendations to their LinkedIn profiles. These professionals may be open to new opportunities.

Setting a Google alert with that search above is likely to inform us of the profiles where the number of the recommendations has shifted.

This doesn’t provide a perfect way to track profile changes for a number of reasons. Though Google is very fast, it may take it some time to come to a profile for re-indexing. Though the majority of LinkedIn members keep public profiles, which is the default, some people may manually adjust what is visible. If we wanted to view perfect results with the RN’s in Texas and nobody else (which I usually don’t worry too much about; nothing is wrong having false positives as long as it is easy to ignore them), we may want to make a few changes to the search. Some people may get recommendations without having any plans to move. However, this is an excellent way to find or be notified about these changes and it can be fruitful to go over the results.

This search can be modified to see if a specific company has few or has many employees that are getting new recommendations, perhaps thinking of moving. This can be used as a CI (Competitive Intelligence) tool.

Try this, for example:

site:www.linkedin.com “2..200 people have recommended” “at zynga”

Now, here is your turn to design some other Google alerts tracking profile changes.

If you would like to learn to source like a pro and master multiple tricks like the one above, sign up for the last round of the People Sourcing Certification Program, coming up shortly to the Internet near you.

What is better, Boolean search or Semantic search? There are different opinions on that. Let me suggest an alternative approach to searching altogether, that can certainly be combined with Boolean and with Semantic and will help you to discover new leads.

Let’s review an example. Suppose we are looking for Wastewater Project Managers in Canada.

1. The “Boolean” approach may be to create searches like this:

“waste water” OR “waste water” OR “water treatment” “project manager” OR PMP OR “project management professional” Canada OR Toronto (etc.)

Here is a Google search X-raying LinkedIn:

site:ca.linkedin.com “people you know” “waste water” OR “water treatment” “project manager” OR PMP OR “project management professional”

Then, we’d remove false positives by excluding the words we don’t want to see:

-sales -director -recruiter (etc.)

It works fine!

2. A Semantic approach?

We’d need to use a system that would know that “waste water” and “water treatment” are terms that mean similar things and would create these variations for us (without us necessarily seeing these synonyms).

Systems like that are being built. Take a look at the #sosueu presentation by Jakub Zavrel.

Here’s an additional, alternative, approach that can be quite fruitful. (I wonder if this can be patented?)

3. Follow the Leads.

Step 1. Find a professional that fits the ideal target profile. That would be the “lead”.

Step 2. Take a closer look at the profile. Notice the location and perhaps some other details, such as licenses, memberships, etc. This extra info will help.

Step 3. Follow the Lead, using the name and potentially the extra info found on his or her profile.

Example: The area code at that person’s location is 250. Add potential contact info keywords (the area code 250 and the license abbreviation P.Eng.) to the name:

Step 4. Examine the results. These are sites where the “lead” is listed along with the contact info. The first search result is list of professionals like the “lead”:

It has a nice list with professionals that are very much like the “lead”. (By the way, do you think they would be easy to find on LinkedIn? Try it out.)

The second search result is a great find as well:

That’s in, in a nutshell. Now we have many more leads to follow. We can go back to step 2 and look for them in the same fashion or go to step 1 and start from a different profile.

Note that no brainstorming on every possible synonym is involved in this process, yet it’s quite productive. It is also free of any expenses. All we need is a free account on LinkedIn and an ability to do very simple searches using Google.

(Of course, success would vary, depending on the target profiles.)

Cool?

Follow the Leads.

I just came back from Sourcing Summit Europe, organized by Phillip Tusing and hosted by Randstad at their HQ in Amsterdam. This was a fantastic event, filled with excellent content and the spirit of camaraderie between sourcers from 15 countries.

On the photo above: I had a great time chatting with Balazs‘ team of young sourcers from Randstad.

There’s lots of posts and pictures about the event on the web. Here are some (use Google Translate where appropriate):

• “We broke the Internet”: Sourcing Summit Europe sets record (the title was so good that I decided to steal it for this post)
• Boolean Black Magic is a Poor Man’s Semantic Search (this is a copy of Jakub Zavrel‘s presentation; I must say that I warmed up to exploring semantic search again, after a few years of feeling sceptical about it)
• The secrets of sourcing: think vs. do – HRmash Blog
• #SOSUEU: the day after

Check out the social media buzz at http://tagboard.com/SoSuEu. (There was about 2,500 mentions in two days, so you would have to scroll for a while.)

I very much enjoyed hanging out with fellow sourcers, finally met live some colleagues whom I knew only “online”, and made new connections as well. Take a look at some photo memories from my album on Google+

I’d love to summarize the #sosuhack’s and highlights from the event… but there is just too many to pack into a post. Glance over the tweets and the posts for a taste and don’t miss the next Sourcing Summit!  

At the LinkedIn webinar we discussed how to work with lists of professionals with contact information. If you upload a whole list into your Contacts, you can:

• search within the list on all of the LinkedIn data in these profiles and
• reliably keep track of people from the list…

…since the professionals will be, in most cases, updating their profiles. Data entered by a person about herself is more reliable than any other data. Sure enough, part of the data will be wrong or obsolete, but that’s not a good reason to walk away from all of it!

Apparently it’s efficient to work with lists of professionals and narrow the lists down for any current search. (Compare with searching on the World Wide Web, aiming to locate the right professionals in one step, using complex searches. It can work wonders, but it also can be slow and difficult.)

But how do you find lists?

Well, you probably already have some on your hard drive or can export lists from your CRM system. Here are a couple more approaches.

1. Simply Search on Google. As always, we need to imagine what we are going to find when the list shows up in the search results. Sometimes very simple ideas will reveal interesting lists. There are endless ways to do that. Let me demonstrate two for now.

If I were to find a list of suppliers hosted by a site in Australia (where I just was at a very enjoyable RCSA Annual Conference) that has people listed who work at IBM and KPMG here’s what I could try:

The very first result is a good-sized list of people with contact info. (I will use it in the next post to demo the LI uploading technique).

Please note that I am not trying to find “everything” of some sort. (That is an impossible task for 99% of the searches, anyway!) The idea is to (hopefully) locate a list with a couple of global consulting firms’ company names along with the words list and supplier. If we wanted to look further, we could use other company names and perhaps also words like vendor instead of supplier or directory instead of list. The results that I may obtain in a few searches like this may get me enough information, and very quickly, to move to the next steps in my research.

2. Use a Custom Search Engine. Searching for files with certain types such as Excel has been a common technique. You can use the operator filetype: on Google. The following Custom Search Engine “Document Finder (Formats)” will do the same behind the scenes and will locate files of the given format when you choose the appropriate refinement:

Enter some keywords in the box above, search, then use refinements to look for a given file type only.