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.

This seems to be a frequently asked question: how to search for people in Europe using LinkedIn? I have decided to share my suggestions on the blog.

To search for people in Europe (or anywhere across a large territory), you can do a radius search around a (sort-of) a center point in Europe and cover many countries at once.

I have not looked into the “right” location and the “right” radius for Europe in any precise detail, but this doesn’t matter a whole lot if you find an approximate position and an approximate radius. So, here’s how to construct such a search. I have used the word “engineer” for keyword, as an example. Note the changed “distance” in the URL; I have changed it from “10” to”600″ and am using the postal code for Berlin here:

Search in (most of) Europe

This will not exactly cover “everything” and will have some false positives as you expand the radius, but this should be good enough to cover a large territory across countries.

This can be repeated for *several* circles on the map, for better precision, as the above map shows. The postal code of the center circle on the map is 38820, Germany.

Alternatively, you could pick all the two-letter European codes from the list of all the county codes and then X-ray LinkedIn on Google, but you may miss some results that have not been picked by Google and possibly members in small countries that do not have the 2-letter abbreviations.

Either way you would get the majority of the members you are trying to locate much faster than searching within each country in turn.

Below are the five trends in Sourcing-2013, which I feel are important, that I’d like to discuss. (I presented them as a slide in a presentation at the Sourcing Summit NZ; I will write a separate post about the event, which was great in many ways!).

I’ll start with some background explanations.

With the points ONE and TWO below I try to respond to two opposite views on Sourcing (slightly exaggerated, for clarity):

1) “With the Internet already having enough data to pre-qualify some good candidates for pretty much any job, sourcing can be done by computers…

(…or – as a variation – sourcing can be easily done by our Admin Assistant when he’s free, since everybody has access to the same data).

The only real work lies in recruiting those people.”

I don’t believe this is true at all, that we are able to source by cutting down on qualified sourcers’ effort. No semantic search, fuzzy logic, or mile-long Boolean strings will be enough for correctly automatically finding the right target professionals – any time soon. Also, the data is too “Big” to easily make sense of it.

2) This is the opposite view: “Sourcing tools and pre-processing search results for easier consumption are not at all necessary for most searches. Those are for geeks. We do fine – and fast – without.”

This is not true either! It’s best to call on the phone only the right people. Without access to and mastery of some modern sourcing tools – or access to a skilled Sourcer (a “geek”?) – your team will surely be falling behind.

Regarding points THREE and FOUR below: many People Sourcers remain convinced that going to several best sources in turn (say, first, to an ATS, second, to LinkedIn, and third, a niche job board) is all there is. What I am trying to point out is that assembling, cross-referencing data from separate sources (either on the fly or ahead of time) is not the same. Cross-referencing results in significant raise in productivity; namely, both in discovery of “hidden” results – and acquiring extra professional info on people whom you already know of.

Point FIVE belongs to the intersection of sourcing, recruiting, and marketing. I believe that anyone who sources professionals should be closely involved in and measure this activity.

So, here are the five trends:

• ONE: Human Involvement in Search is a Must
• TWO: Specialized sourcing skills evolve
• THREE: Cross-referencing techniques (Take note of LinkedIn Pipeline, a few  lightweight free tools listed here on the blog, and the “finding friends” functions on the major networks)
• FOUR:“Dream Software” (Tools, building databases of aggregated profiles)
• FIVE: Additionally: branding, marketing, analytics. 

Hey Sourcing Community!

We are giving away TWO free seats (one Level 1 seat, and one Level 2 seat) for the People Sourcing Certification Program (http://sourcingcertification.com/).

Two lucky winners will be randomly selected from the top 10 people who score the most points.

Here is how you can earn points:

• 1 Point – Share/+1 the Program event on Google Plus – http://bit.ly/GPlus-CPSP
• 1 Point – Share/Like the Program event on Facebook – http://bit.ly/Facebook-CPSP
• 1 Point – Share the Program event on LinkedIn (as a status update and on relevant groups) – http://bit.ly/LinkedIn-CPSP – 1 point for each share.
• 1 Point – Tweet about the Certification Program on Twitter; use hashtag #CPSP and #CPSP2013  and include a link to http://sourcingcertification.com. Example:

I would love to be included in the next round of People Sourcing Certification Program sourcingcertification.com #CPSP2013

(Multiple tweets are allowed!)

• 1 Point – Follow our Company page on LinkedIn
• 1 Point – Like our Facebook page
• 1 Point – +1 our Google Plus page 

Extra Points

1) We will award one bonus point for everyone who registers for the May 21st Free Info Session about the upcoming Program (http://bit.ly/CPSP-MayInfoSession), and lists YOUR name in the “Who referred you?” field. This is a great way to outpace the competition. Refer 100 people to attend the Info event and you get 100 points!

2) Answer this “Level 1” Question for 10 points – in what year did the Google home page look like this?

3) Answer this “Level 2” Question for 15 points – where was this picture taken (hint – North America)?

The deadline for all entries is Noon PDT on Monday, May 27th.

To register an entry, please email your scores and answers to the above questions to [email protected] , subject “CPSP Contest” prior to the deadline.

Any questions, please contact George at [email protected]

Good luck to all!

This is a guest post from Aaron Lintz. He shares some innovative ways of using LinkedIn Recruiter to support efficient sourcing for his team of recruiters. No matter whether you are a LinkedIn Recruiter user or not, this is a worthwhile reading as a lesson in strategic thinking, creativity, and working around the system limits. Thanks to Aaron for sharing! – Irina

We are often tasked with “diamond hunting” projects, where searches are based on specific skills, experience, and qualifications.  While these people are hard to find, the clear-cut nature allows the Sourcer to think in black or white terms (either a diamond or coal).

Lately I have been supporting my client’s National Sales and Service recruitment team to identify bottlenecks in processes and solve them.  Our recruiters are challenged with filling these common positions in every metro market throughout the United States.  Conversations with recruiters revealed that they were repeating the same search process with each new opening.

Instead of building relationships, they are repeating the same searches.  There are limited opportunities to work pro-actively, build future prospects, or gather data that can be aggregated and converted into business intelligence.  With LinkedIn Recruiter at my disposal, I discovered a few novel ways to make our workflow more efficient and I wanted to share some of my findings.

My solution was to identify large numbers of talented people grouped into Silos using shared LinkedIn Recruiter “Projects.”  This system is designed for speed and convenience, taking into account the inherent limitations of LinkedIn Recruiter.  (Bear with me here since I know most of you are thinking this will get ugly.)

Here are the steps I have been taking to build the pools of profiles for our recruiters. I name the pools of candidates after the 3 major groups of people that we are targeting: Sales, Service, and Operations.

Step #1. Excluding people who are “hands-off”

There is no Fool Proof way to filter out current employees (non-compete, etc.).  My LinkedIn representative suggested keyword match.  Instead I set about identifying and tagging all “Current EEs” by company name, keyword, abbreviations, misspellings, and subsidiaries.

These people are removed from results with the facet People without Tags.

Step #2. The same logic is used to remove people who were sent an Inmail in last 3 months; I search for People without messages

Step #3. I search more broadly with notes using a specific term and finally with the job specific keywords and other criteria facets.

Step #4. Run saved searches and save the results in LinkedIn Recruiter Projects.

When these filters are layered on top of my saved LinkedIn Searches, I am finding hundreds and hundreds of people across the U.S.

All proud of myself I set about adding these people to my silo until I reached 2,000 people and received this annoying message.

Silos don’t work unless all the grain is one place…what now?

Overcoming the Project Limits

The solution is in the old “Advanced Interface” that lets you free form type in the facets in Projects, where the normal interface only lets you select one option from the drop down menu.  I now create numerical projects as they grow…

Sales Silo 1

Sales Silo 2…

Now that I can overcome the 2k limit by using the common naming convention “Sales Silo” and I can search across an unlimited number of like projects.  LinkedIn will not list duplicates; instead they just show that profile as linked to two or more projects.

So what can I do with my large lists of pre-identified people? 

Save this search Silo and share the project with my team.  They simply change the zip code, and can message a good number of pre-qualified people in seconds.  Redundancy Eliminated!  Recruiters spend more time recruiting, and sourcers spend their time focused on the most complex and hard to fill positions.

These Silos eliminate redundancy in our sourcing efforts with centralized sourcing of potential candidates using LinkedIn Recruiter. 

#Step 5.

As the silos fill-up, I am able to perform my searches filtered by People without Projects

This reduces the number of new results to a manageable volume, while ensuring my searches are yielding results.  For instance, as larger competitors are skimmed into my silo, I find regional players, new LinkedIn Groups, and identify less common keywords.

Conclusion

LinkedIn could make this a much more simple process with a few changes to their ecosystem, but this formula is repeatable, sustainable, and the data gleaned has proven effective in other aspects of our talent management strategy.

Join us for a Webinar on May 8:

Sourcing with NO Boolean

In the context of searching for professional backgrounds “Boolean” usually means Google’s language with the use of advanced search operators.
In my teaching experience, the “Boolean” seems to be a cause for frustration and a blocking factor, generating “the wrong” search results and preventing some of our colleagues from conquering extra territories on the Internet.

For those who dislike search operators I have some good news to share. The Internet has SO much information now, that a good (and useful) chunk of it can be uncovered without writing “Boolean” expressions.

Who should attend

Recruiters (including junior Recruiters and old-school Recruiters), Sourcers (including junior Sourcers and Phone Sourcers), Recruitment Managers who want to posses cool hands-on sourcing techniques, and all those who search for professionals and dislike writing elaborate, unreadable, and long Boolean Strings.

Benefits

As an outcome of this webinar you will learn how to:
• locate and venture out to previously unexplored sites
• find additional, “hidden”, professionals with the target background
• find extra information about professionals
– all this by using straightforward searches in English, as opposed to Boolean. You’ll also get a sense of the guesswork Google does, trying to show us the search results it thinks we may want to see, which happens more frequently as the time goes, and learn some simple ways to keep control of the search.
You will be able to put these new skills to work the minute the webinar ends. You will not need to keep tip sheets for these types of searches.

• Date: Wednesday, May 8, 2013
• Time: 9 AM PDT/noon EDT
• Duration: 90 minutes
• Included: the slides, a video-recording, and one month of support

Can’t make the date and time? No problem. The video-recording, the slides, and support will be provided for all who sign up. Register to attend or to receive the materials.

I am not a fan of the airline travel, but some events are so interesting, it’s hard to resist going! The next few months are going to be the seriously “eventful” for me, packed with both in person and online events. Here are some events that are coming up.

April 30, 2013, Tuesday (virtual)  People Sourcing Certification Program – Free Info Session  Register for the Info Session at  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/267432626 whether you are coming “live” or not, to get the latest information.

May 7, 2013, Tuesday, 9 AM PDT/noon EDT. Webinar (virtual). Easy Sourcing with NO Boolean. Slides, recording, one month of support are provided. Seating is limited.

May 13, 2013 Monday Bill Boorman’s with Aki Kakko and Craig Fisher #TruSanFrancisco Unconference hosted by friends at SmartRecruiters in San Francisco. Sourcing Lab. Bring your questions.

May 14-15, 2013 Tuesday-Wednesday ERE’s Recruiting Innovation Summit in San Francisco. Moderating a Panel “Sourcing Tools of the Future” with Pete Kazanjy, Jon Bischke, and the new Dice.com CEO Shravan Goli.

May 23, 2013 Speaker, Stirrer, and Sourcing Scientist at the Sourcing Summit NZ Auckland, New Zealand

June 4, 2013 Level One of the People Sourcing Certification Program starts! Virtual, five weeks long. Seating is limited. (It’s filling up! Don’t miss it. Discounts for teams are provided.)

June 11, 2013 Level Two the People Sourcing Certification Program starts! Virtual, five weeks long. Seating is limited.

TBD Dice.com-sponsored webinar on searching for IT candidates.

August 28-30, 2013 Speaker at RCSA Conference near Sydney, Australia

September 12-13, 2013  Sourcing Summit Europe, Amsterdam

October 2-3, 2013 SourceCon, Seattle