HiringSolved: a Global People Aggregator

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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.

Tracking Profile Changes

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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.

Follow the Leads

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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.

 

 

We Broke the Internet #sosueu

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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):

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!  

How to Find Lists

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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.

Powerful Sourcing with LinkedIn’s New Features: Webinar

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Coming up on Friday August 23, 2013:

Repeating! We had a full house on Friday. New date:  September 5, 2013. Please note: this is webinar would benefit people with some prior LinkedIn experience.

Powerful Sourcing with LinkedIn
Space is limited.

With the recent “retirement” of LinkedIn Signal and fewer functions seen in the menus, the perception is that the available sourcing features are shrinking. Nothing could be further away from reality! LinkedIn’s new features added in 2013, especially the Contacts, provide creative new ways to search for and connect with professionals, no matter what industry and locations you are targeting.

In this information-packed webinar I will explain:

  • What has changed in LinkedIn’s functionality and how it affects us
  • What can serve as the Signal replacement
  • How to control the new people search dialog and overcome its limitations
  • How to utilize the new Contacts to source, cross-reference, and verify contact information

…and more.

About 75% of the webinar will cover new material compared to any LinkedIn training you may have taken, if more than ~3 months ago.

Additionally, I will provide a tip sheet with a list of top LinkedIn URLs and hints to keep around while you are sourcing for professionals.

While most of the material will be applicable to everyone’s practice, no matter what type of account you might have, I will also go over the most interesting functionality of the Talent Pipeline (often overlooked by busy RPS/LinkedIn Recruiter users).

Who should attend:
Recruiters, Talent Acquisition, Staffing, Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Management, Social Media users, People Sourcers, and everyone who wants to utilize the top business network in all possible ways and to understand the scope and the impact of the numerous recent changes.

What you will learn:
If you “have already searched on LinkedIn”, chances are that after the webinar you will be able to find other target professionals and information, that others may have missed as well, will find more information about people who are already in your target lists, and your performance will skyrocket!

Date: Thursday, September 5, 2013
Time: 9 AM PDT/ noon PM EST/ 5 PM London (UTC)
Duration: 90 minutes
Included: The Slides, a Video-recording, and one month of Support.
Included: A Tip Sheet of “Top” LinkedIn Shortcuts.
Registration: http://sourcingcertification.com/powerful-sourcing-with-linkedin

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

Find Almost Anybody’s Email Address with #LinkedIn

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Many of you have read through the post Find (Almost) Anybody’s Email Address by Rob Ousbey and use his technique. Rob has developed a Google Doc email permutator bit.ly/name2email to create a list of potential correct email addresses of a person. Rob suggests that after populating the list with the possible email addresses we use http://rapportive.com to verify which one is correct. Great work! The technique has become quite popular; the above link has enjoyed impressive 25K+ uses.

For those who may need more than an occasional email guesswork: Here is how to do the same verification faster and, in some cases, more reliably, using #LinkedIn. The technique below is a variation of my 2010 post on this blog, that worked beautifully for almost four years, but is no longer working for those of us who got the new LinkedIn Contacts.

The technique below is good for some other sourcing hacks besides the address guessing; we’ll touch upon this later.

Have a name and a company name?

Step 1. Use the famous  bit.ly/name2email tool to generate a list of possible email addresses.

Step 2. Use this file: Outlook-Export-Format. Paste the list of emails from the Step 1 into the “email” column.

Example. Suppose we want to find the correct address for Siobhan Neilland who works at Amazon. The Outlook-formatted file, which is the result of the steps 1 and 2, will look like this:

Step 3. On the Contacts Settings Page on LinkedIn select the “Outlook contacts import” option to import the saved file.

This is it!

Here is what you will see in this particular example in the Contacts’ MS Outlook-imported section, found among the “Sources”. The person number two on the list is the one.

So here is the result: we have identified the email of the person in question. If you look at her profile, you will see this email listed now “for us personally” in the “Contact Info” section of the profile. (Finding her correct email wasn’t such a hard task in this specific case, since she also lists the email address publicly on the profile.)

As a “side effect” in this case we have found one more real person who is using another one of the generated email addresses (see the screenshot above).

Apparently, the rest of the email addresses do not point to any LinkedIn members.

Now… if you are looking to verify the correct email addresses of several people, you can do this in only one “step 2/step 3” action for all of them, just by pasting the emails in question to the end of the outlook export file’s “email”column. The file will get extra rows but will continue working just fine. You can accomplish all of the guesswork about many people in one shot.

Further Applications of the “Hack”

Here is a variation of quickly solving another sourcing task, using the import function as described above.

You could use the technique in the steps 2-3 for a different sourcing task: verifying that for a given list of employees at a specific company everyone has email addresses following a specific pattern. In this scenario you may start with auto-creating a list of Emails instead of the email permutator.

There’s another thing or two that can be done with this… later.

If the target professional population you are working with is typically registered on LinkedIn, then this method of locating their correct email address may find more up-to-date results than Rapportive. This is because Rapportive crawls social profiles and is “behind” compared with straight checking with LinkedIn, as I have explained in this post. In any event it’s quick and is worth trying.

For those people who are not on LinkedIn but are on another network such as Google+, Rapportive may work better; the two approaches can be combined, of course.

Please keep an eye on this blog for other methods to be described, soon.

Do Not Merge #LinkedIn Profiles

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The New Contacts offer to merge profiles for the same person. While it may seem attractive, make sure that you do this with your eyes open, because it cannot be undone and some data may be lost. Here is a quick explanation on what happens.

Below are two profiles of the same person; no questions about it.

Profile #1:

Profile #2:

LinkedIn allows to merge the two profiles into one entry in your Contacts:

And here’s the result of the merge:

You can see that all the contact emails, Skype ID, birthday, and other info has conveniently been merged and now is available in one place. However, what is gone now is all of the data regarding one of the two LinkedIn profiles. In this case the newer LinkedIn profile data (and its public LinkedIn profile URL) was totally gone from the Contacts. In cases like this be careful about merging!

LinkedIn’s Contacts take available merging to a rather absurd level as well. Just make sure you do not press the wrong button because this cannot be undone. Below is an example of 70 people merged into one by mistake. I can imagine why this may be useful; if you have any suggestions, I’m interested to hear.

@SourceCon Lists Four Certifications. There’s a Clear Winner

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I firmly believe the CPSP programs to be superior to AIRS.” says one of the many comments on this SourceCon post, comparing the options for Talent Sourcers’ certifications.

, a friend and the new SourceCon editor, in his yesterday’s post  Should a Talent Sourcer Be Certified? writes:

“In many industries, there is one certification that stands out as THE certification for the profession (PMP for project management, CFP for financial planning, SPHR and PHR for HR). Sourcing is still a relatively new function and there are numerous organizations in the race to establish themselves as the go-to sourcing and recruiting certification.”

Jeremy has invited readers to cover existing certifications and share experiences.

That was amazing to me to see that in the “race”, as Jeremy calls it, our People Sourcing Certification Program is a clear winner, based on the numerous comments on Jeremy’s post. From the comments so far the Program is already valued much higher than the “industry standard” (up till now) AIRS. Take a look at the 11 (so far) comments. It feels overwhelming to me. Something to celebrate!

Several of our certification graduates wrote some wonderful feedback in the comments on the post and gave us praise. We certainly appreciate it since we have been around less than 2 years and would love to spread the word! We find it satisfying and important to teach the program and are looking forward to the next round in October 2013.

Comments on the post include those from our happy graduates from PepsiCo, Capgemini, and Home Depot, among other companies.

You can read them at the post. The overwhelming majority of the people chose our program as “the one” to attend. I would like to quote just one comment here.

[Kerryn Wilson] Having completed the AIRS Certified Internet Recruiter (CIR) and a partial AIRS Advanced
Certified Internet Recruiter (ACIR), as well as the two People Sourcing
Certifications – CPSP-1 and CPSP-2, I firmly believe the CPSP programs to be
superior to AIRS. Why? CPSP is a better value product. It has a user friendly, interactive online delivery
structure, comprehensive and leading edge program content, challenging practice
tasks which are assessed with feedback provided, comprehensive examinations,
and most importantly unlimited online support to participants throughout the
4-5 week programs from the team of experts who conduct CPSP – notably Irina Shamaeva,
Dave Galley and George Glikman who all do an outstanding job to deliver a great
product and participant experience. If
you have Sourcers / Talent Researchers that you want to professionally develop
— I highly recommend the CPSP programs.

If you are interested in a comparison, we have several points that have been a high priority and that make our program the program of choice:

  1. Practice is Key. We include four weeks of guided hands-on practice, which is done by providing practice tasks, regular teacher “office hours”, and unlimited online support for practice. In fact, our exams also serve as practice as well as for assessing the graduates’s people sourcing skills.
  2. Combine All Tools. We teach search engines, combined with LinkedIn and Social Networks, and Tools. To be productive, one needs to use all of them in combination.
  3. Keep Up-To Date. Not only we teach up-to-date material, we explain concepts and ideas along with providing Tip Sheets and how-to step-by-step guides. This allows our graduates to remain just as productive when they switch the target searches and stay on top of any news as things change.

CPSP is now THE industry standard in the training and certification of people sourcing professionals.

Interested in getting your sourcing skills to the new level? Take a look at our Program materials available all year round (including two months of support) and, if you feel up for it,  join us for the next round in October 2013. Seating is limited, so register early to ensure your  space.

Thanks again to Jeremy for the post!

Irina Shamaeva, People Sourcing Certification Program Founder and Teacher

The Signal Is Gone… Now What?

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The LinkedIn Signal is gone. Alas, there’s not much that can replace Signal!

There are also some limits affecting 3rd party vendors on providing any services that rely on LinkedIn profile data.

Here is what I know about.

Finding Profile Updates

(1) This link http://www.linkedin.com/in/updates does seem to list every updated profile. But this cannot be possibly used by sourcers without having some help in navigating the data. I don’t think this has ever been “officially” documented, but the link has been there a long time, even before Signal was there. It also has a “More Profile Updates…” link at the bottom where you can go and explore more (go page by page).

LinkedIn updates this page at http://www.linkedin.com/in/updates every 10-15 minutes or so. Obviously from this page we have no way of figuring out what exactly has been updated and don’t have any way of searching. This link can be used though for software programming to create a “custom” out-of-LI Signal-like functionality. This page is being used by several software vendors; the ones I know of are paid and update their data by “watching” the link.

(2) This link (which is different from above) http://www.linkedin.com/updates shows “your own” updates. It has different tabs for different things and what it shows depends on your network. There’s no search here either. I suppose there can be a script written that would parse this and create something to search within. But that’s much less data than Signal used to provide.

(3) We can search for LinkedIn profiles on Google and restrict the search to, say, what Google has found in the last month, plus add “interesting” keywords. This can be simplified with custom search engines.

Overall though, we shouldn’t rely too much on vendors that promise to “replace” the Signal. LinkedIn is very protective of its data!

Third-Party Vendor Options and Restrictions

For those who are curious what we can expect from third-party applications that access LinkedIn data in volumes:

As far as I can tell, there are three technical ways to do this, which I have outlined below. I am happy to hear some clarifications or more precise info if you have it.

1) The “official” way to get the data is to access it via the LinkedIn API (i.e. get the data programmatically). Anyone can get the data from several profiles a day. If you need volumes, there has to be an agreement in place with LinkedIn. I have just heard though that LinkedIn is cutting out some companies with existing agreements in place. Companies that have tried to get to the data without an agreement in had to shut down the service (Pealk is one example).

2) Use Google’s index of LinkedIn; this way you get immediately slowed down by Google, that doesn’t “like” programmatic access of its index.

3) Collect data from LI by going to its links directly (crawling). If you do that you will be visiting the linkedin.com site quite a bit; they will likely notice.
Neither of the 3 options is “safe” if this goes on a large scale, in terms of LI claiming the data ownership.

Let’s keep in touch for further updates!