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.

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.

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.

“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.

Jeremy Roberts, 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.

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 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!

Before you look into the new LinkedIn Contacts you might think that it’s designed for LinkedIn members to bring in their friends and connections from other networks and invite them to connect.

But, while the LinkedIn Contacts have amazing functionality (seriously), this is not what they are for.

Surprised? Take a look at the screenshot below. The grayed out “in” buttons show that the LinkedIn account holder is not connected on LinkedIn with these people, whose info was imported from the Gmail account.

You’d think there should be an easy way to invite some of them to connect. But it’s not the case. On the screenshot you can see two people selected, and (as with any number of people selected from the list) the available options are:

1. Tag. You can then find them by the tag.
2. Message. Don’t be fooled by this option offered for people with whom you are not yet connected. If you try it out you will get an alert that you cannot message them.
3. Merge (Huh? Merge two different people into one?)
4. Hide 
5. Remove

You can invite these newly imported Gail contacts from here, but only one-by-one, every time confirming the message you would be sending them.

Now, the “old” LinkedIn functionality that would allow “Import, then review, then invite a selected group of people” is still there… or so it seems:

In reality, unfortunately, most of this “import-(and review)-and-invite” functionality is broken now. My guess is that it is the result of poor and hasty software coding, integrating this existing import and the new Contacts. Here are some bug reports based on my testing  (does it behave in the same way in your account?):

Importing a file with contacts either crashes or just ends with no visible results. An expected result would be to see those people listed in the file in the “imported” Source among the Contacts, but they are nowhere to be found.

Importing (to invite) your Gmail contacts, if in luck, results in showing the found profiles on LinkedIn, which you can then select and click “invite”. But the invitations are not sent out; just check your “sent invites” folder and there will be no trace of them.

 (Has LinkedIn not hired anyone to manage its Quality Assurance, still? It’s been around for 10+ years now.) 

Anyway, I didn’t mean to say that the new LinkedIn Contacts lack in functionality. If the Contacts are not for connecting with your friends on LinkedIn, that’s no big deal! It’s not that, and it’s much bigger and greater than “just” a merged address book. In fact, the new Contacts can be used as no less than (well, almost) a CRM, all for free. We’ll explore this in the future posts.

Entelo is one of the top, established Dream Software players, aggregating profiles from all over the social web and allowing us to search across the database of the aggregated profiles. As the rest of the current players, TalentBin, Dice Open Web (formerly theSocialCV), Gild, RemarkableHire, and Swooptalent, to name a few, Entelo is solving the challenging task of combining the data for the same person into one profile.

Entelo has just released the Entelo Button, a Chrome add-on to look up the Entelo data from all of its many supported sites. Why is this cool? Because it allows any Entelo user to dig into social platforms and search on those platforms, still keeping track of the rest of the data that Entelo may have about the person. Here’s what this looks like:

Here’s more on that (if you don’t know Dutch, use the Google translator to read through the post).

For the “dream” systems that aggregate profiles, it’s never easy to decide how to rank the search results and what to show first. If you are an Entelo user, you can now search or browse the social web, having the Entelo-collected data available at a mouse-click. This can be easier to navigate in terms of avoiding the ranking challenges altogether. Here’s just one quick example: you can stay on LinkedIn and explore the profiles that “People Also Viewed” while keeping an eye on the Button. Of course, you will have much better luck with the Button if you stay within the crowd of people who have presence in the Entelo database, which is mostly “techies” in the US.

While the Button seems similar to other Chrome “Social Lookup” add-ons, I think, comparing the Entelo button with Falcon.io or with Rapportive would be a bit of an apples vs. oranges comparison. For starters, you need to be a paid account holder to use the Entelo button, while the other two add-ons are free.

There are other serious differences. Rapportive (the company has been acquired by LinkedIn) is similar to Entelo in that it keeps its database of contacts. It aggregates the social profiles based on a 100% solid way to identify people: the person’s email address. Compared to Entelo’s add-on, Rapportive has covered a much larger territory; but all it shows is links to public profiles. Entelo shows some skills in addition to profile links, but, most importantly, it gives us a quick way back into the Entelo system, to add notes and maintain lists in a CRM-like way.

Falcon.io does a different thing altogether; it looks up the relevant social profiles “on the fly”, when you mouse over a name on one of its supported sites. This means that it is able to look up anyone, not just the people whose info has been collected. Great stuff! I have heard some complaints about their functionality recently. I hope they are doing well. (If I were a venture capitalist, I would throw money at them!)

Bottom line, it’s good to have all of these add-ons!

What has been special (for me) about Entelo, among the dream software companies, and is also true about its new Button: they have excellent, well designed, easy to navigate User Interface. I like it quite a bit. Recruiters are very deprived of clear User Interface in the software we use, and this is one of the nicest exceptions. Kudos to Entelo Engineers and its Founder, also a friend of mine, Jon Bischke. Best of luck to them expanding their product in the current, very competitive, market.

Oh, and as always, I am not affiliated with any vendors.

Hi Everyone,

If you feel like hanging out by the computer a little longer, here’s a little 3-part summer fun Sourcing Challenge for you.

 I have used my “Contacts” on LinkedIn for the screenshots below.

CONTEST: For each of the screenshots, please explain: A) what sort order was selected. B) why the search has brought up these results.

(1)

(2)

(3) 

Submissions: Please send your guesses to [email protected] with the subject #sourcing

Deadline: EOB PDT July 9, 2013.

Prize: either a webinar of your choice from our Training Library or one hour 1-on-1 sourcing with Irina Shamaeva

Please answer the exact questions above and submit the answers by emailing only. Other ways of submissions or not answering these exact questions may disqualify participants.

Good luck! 🙂

I’d like to share a tip on how to narrow your search down to the profiles of professionals in a given country. My examples will be LinkedIn-X-ray-based, but these are applicable to other types of searches.

Some Americans may not even know that, but outside of the US Google offer to narrow the searches down to the pages in the local country only. If the main language in the  country is not English, there’s yet another option to look only for pages in that language. These options are available under the “web” underlined link if you select search tools.

We can take advantage of this, traveling “virtually” by switching to a given local, country-specific Google search page, such as http://www.google.com.au/ or http://www.google.co.uk/ or http://www.google.hu/ (etc).

In particular, switching to a country-based Google is a perfect tool to X-ray LinkedIn profiles local to the country.

Take a look at the following.

Here’s another example:

To continue searching in this cool way, we’ll have to be OK searching in a foreign language. Actually, not really, since the Google translate is there to help. Take a look at this Hungarian-Google search and notice the option above the page to translate it into English:

Of course,

1. searching in Hungary (the selected option) and translating to English
2. searching for pages in Hungarian (the other option) and translating to English
3. searching for pages in English

…are three very different options. Let’s not get lost! At this point the goal was to search in Hungary.

Here’s a nice tip sheet with the local Google search URLs.

I will end with a note for my fellow Americans: if you ask to switch to searching in English, then the “local” country and language options will be gone, as if you are back in the US. Stay with the foreign-language search and use the Google translation to keep your options open.

Fellow colleagues who work on perfecting your command of the search syntax on Google. Here’s something I’d like to make more visible.

Google does not support the AND operator.

It is not listed in its help.

It would not make a difference if you include it in your search with any sort of capitalization: and, AND, or ANd.

Here’s an example search slightly modified from a recent post on the Boolean group:

“turbocharger” AND “mechanic” OR “repair” “resume” indeed.com/r

Compare the results with this:

“turbocharger” and “mechanic” OR “repair” “resume” indeed.com/r

and this:

“turbocharger” AnD “mechanic” OR “repair” “resume” indeed.com/r

Do you see the difference in the search results?

The results are, in fact, exactly the same. The word 6AND is, in fact, included as a k*eyword. (Well, maybe it is not included in every case since it is so common; every time it’s up to Google to decide. I mean it, since Google tries to make sense of what we might be searching for.).

Of course, Google does support the Boolean logic. It will combine all the terms you put on a search string together. But AND only takes the space and makes changes to the search results that we do not have in mind. Don’t use it.

On Bing (and on LinkedIn) there is the AND operator (the word AND needs to be capitalized). It doesn’t need to be there, though; all the items are combined by default.  It’s not necessary to include it.

There’s No NOT Either

There are some other differences in the search syntax. On Bing there’s the operator NOT (capitalized). On Google, we have to write the minus in front of a word or a phrase to exclude it.

On Google, the parentheses don’t matter. On Bing, OR statements need to be included in parentheses to be executed first.

A common mistake is to copy and paste search strings between the search engines without watching for the syntax differences.

That’s it for now. And this is what our kitten R2D2 has to add (he has just jumped on my keyboard): 🙂

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