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): 🙂

5555555555555555555555555555555555555555+

June 14, 2013

For those of you who have been interested in the People Sourcing Certification Program, but haven’t taken the class yet, here is an update.

(If you are interested in listening to a shorter prerecorded webinar, take a look at the Training Library. If you would only like to read my posts on sourcing for now, please step back to the previous post; there’s more to come.)

The current class is in session. We got lots of positive feedback and praise from the previous classes*. Our attendance keeps growing and has included those who come for the second round and those who have been referred by happy past attendees.

In this round we have people from ten countries, including several large teams of corporate and of agency recruiters; these are the largest teams attending ever.

For this round we made big improvements to the Program, introducing providing much more granular modules and a better structure, as well as covering more content. (Getting everything up-to-date, along with restructuring, wasn’t easy, especially since LinkedIn and Google+ decided to redesign themselves just before the Program! That was lots of work  preparing the most important and all up-to-date people sourcing content).

The “classroom” implementation of the program for the attendees is also an improvement; we hope you’ll join us next time to experience it firsthand.

The updated People Sourcing Certification Program materials now include 9 (nine!) video-recorded modules with 9 slide sets for each level: the Level One (“the” level for most, teaching plenty of skills to use on a daily basis) and for the Level Two (the level for advanced sourcers), plus several “tip sheets” for each level.

We will hold the next round in early October. In the meantime the packaged Program materials have just been updated on the site.

You can start raising your sourcing skills and expanding your toolbox by obtaining the Program Materials now and upgrade to the full program in October if you decide to do so. The materials come with two months of support from your Sourcing Teachers.

If your plan is to get certified, the earlier you get hold of the materials, the higher value you will get from the training.

As always, with any questions, please email our Customer Support Manager George Glikman at [email protected]

———————

*some quotes from the previous attendees:

“This is an amazing program…   I have learned a ton and I am so thankful! I already think about sourcing differently and know this will definitely enable me to be even more effective and more productive in my recruiting role! Wow! “

” I have learned so much from this program and am so excited to implement so many of these techniques and strategies! This is so incredible and I cannot thank all of you at BrainGrain who have taken an interest in putting together such a program to help other recruiter’s like myself to be more effective in our careers! Although this exam has been difficult, I can already tell and am so excited about what I have learned! This whole sourcing concept makes so much more sense to me now.”

” I liked learning about all of the cool tools. Sourcing is really just a way of finding solutions to complex problems and new and unique tools are a great way to get around things”

“I really enjoyed the individual help offered to me.”

“Given my crazy work schedule and personal life (young kids) I especially enjoyed being able to listen to the webcasts on my own time and feel like I wasn’t missing anything.”

” I thought the program was excellent.  Very informative and extremely useful.  There were lots of great ideas and information / tools that were completely new to me, that I look forward to regularly using in my work.  The support from George and David has been excellent as has all of Irina’s tips and extra sheets that she sends out during the course. “

“I really loved the program!  I found it to be informative, and it really increased and built upon my existing sourcing skills. “

 

The new LinkedIn Contacts feature is buggy but it’s opening up incredible people sourcing possibilities.

The terminology “contacts” and “connections” may be somewhat confusing. The all-new LinkedIn Contacts system allows LinkedIn members to merge the information about their contacts on several systems: 1) LinkedIn itself, 2) Gmail, 3) Yahoo mail, 4) Outlook, and several more sources.

Here’s why this is cool:

1. You could create a Gmail account just for adding lists of people, therefore effectively merging any lists (being, for example, lists of a professional association members you’d locate on the web, or lists of people you find in Jigsaw or Zoominfo) with the member data on LinkedIn, no matter what your personal network is like. The merge is done using email addresses as the unique identifiers.

2. For people whom you add from a different account, such as Google/Gmail, LinkedIn creates a LinkedIn-alike “profile”, if it can’t merge the imported data with its own. Therefore it creates uniformity of the presentation of professional profiles for people, no matter inside or outside of LinkedIn, for you, as in this screenshot below. 

This is not a member profile, but the profile of a contact I have added, who is not present on LinkedIn, or at least is not registered on LinkedIn with the given email address:
3. Here’s the coolest part. You can now search across groups of people who have been merged as external lists, on their names, titles, companies, and locations. This is a capability that has been implemented in the (cool but expensive) Talent Pipeline a while ago.

Here is what this search may look like. The colored “in” icons point to my connections, the grayed out “in” icons point to people with whom I am not connected. The search results will show all the matching LinkedIn profiles, even for people outside of my network, as long as there was an email address match while merging.

The search is done across all of the Google-added people, but the search facets are applied to the LinkedIn data.

 

Here is an example of how this may be used.

Step 1. Clear out your gmail-merged contacts if you have any.

Step 2. Locate a list of people (say, get a list of members of a professional association). Names and email addresses is enough information to start with. Actually, even the names are not that necessary.

Step 3. Upload the list to a gmail account.

Step 4. Merge/connect the gmail account using the new Contacts

Now you can search across this list of people in terms of their LinkedIn data: where they live, which companies they currently work for, and which job titles they have. To search, you would need to use “Google contacts” as the “Source”, as in the screenshot above. The search itself is quite different from before.

WOW. This is incredible – and available for free, with any LinkedIn account.

If you try this out, get ready to be patient. There are numerous bugs. All the numbers shown are wrong, and there’s lots more to complain about.

The less powerful but also quite wonderful upload-to-invite functionality that has served us for years is mostly broken now.

But this stuff is better.

 

 

The new LinkedIn Contacts functionality is simply amazing! It opens up never-before possible people sourcing explorations, and is available (albeit still very buggy) for all personal accounts, whether paid or basic.

The syncing with other accounts possibility is quite like the Talent Pipeline in some ways. (More about it later).

For starters, you can search for sub-strings and even for special characters in all of the fields: name, title, company, and location. (Is a new Software Architect join the LinkedIn team?). Look how powerful this search is:

Time to switch if you haven’t. 🙂

Irina (LinkedIn profile)

Shane Bowen‘s tool for figuring out hidden names is great, as everything on his blog! I recommend to follow the blog.

By now we have shared a number of other quick ways to figure out the hidden names with each other. You can still export a third level connection’s profile into PDF format and click the link, found in the exported file, to see the last name.

Alternatively: I have created a link that is a shortcut to figuring out anyone’s name. As many other tools, this “back door” is based on the functionality found in the “people you may know“, “PYMK”. You can see the feature on the LinkedIn site here.

(Altogether, people you may know is an interesting concept and a great sourcing tool as well, on a number of social networks. PYMK in the context of online social networks was invented at LinkedIn. It first showed up on the site in 2006.)

To access the simple shortcut, click on the link below and then replace my LinkedIn ID number with the person’s ID number. The member’s ID can clearly be seen as a large number that is part of the URL when you look at their profile, even if the name is not shown, as it happens in personal results for out-of-network members.

Here’s the shortcut:

http://bit.ly/pymk

If you use it, you will see my ID (1769200), which you can replace by the user’s-in-question ID and see his or her full name.

If you click on the name then, you will see the complete profile with all of the info there is.

I must say that I find it to be rather poor user experience, that a profile would be found by keywords that are the hidden in the search results due to the member’s being away from you in the network. Further, LinkedIn invites those of us with lesser accounts to send the member an Inmail, while we can see very little info about them. We need to use tools that are available to us with caution and professionally.

(To add to the subject of the name discovery, note that if you use the last name or part of it to search, you are in luck! You will see the full profiles for everyone in the search results, no matter what. This allows us to search for people who have added a certification or a degree to the last name, and see the complete info right away.)

I remain a passionate supporter of LinkedIn, and have talked with their team about user experience improvements on a regular basis over the past year or so. I see major improvements in handling large personal networks.

It’s not the “only” site for sourcing, of course, but there is still nothing anywhere close to LinkedIn as a site for People Sourcers. More posts about it to come.