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

 

 

Who likes extra mouse clicks? Who likes a zillion windows open at the same time?

It’s key for people sourcing productivity to see some previews  of the search results, to make quick mini-decisions about opening those extra windows. Seeing informative previews leads to staying focused, saving the sourcing costs, and enhancing the search experience.

(I’ve long wanted to design and build a general-purpose application or a browser extension that would allow non-techies to custom-build previews of the search results. Check with me for details if you are curious.)

While, unfortunately for us, Google has moved away the Instant Preview, to hide the preview under a mouse-click, Bing has just taken a nice step to let us know about people, by automatically previewing their LinkedIn profiles. In some cases Bing pulls up the Twitter, Facebook, and Klout icons/links as well; in some cases,  it pulls up the “also viewed” list of people from LinkedIn. Either way, it’s informative.

To experience Bing’s new feature, try typing a name and maybe a few keywords, if necessary.

Note: sign out of Facebook to avoid your search results being personalized.

  

My guess is that Bing will be adding more of the social links for more people as the (indexing) time goes.

As for the Experience and Education LinkedIn-based previews, Bing has had those for a while now; this. too, is quite useful for mouse-clicks-saving.

Thanks for reading. 🙂

Irina

The first ever Sourcing Tools Survey has been completed. We had 633 participants from 36 countries!

About 60% of participants were US-based. These countries had a strong representation: Australia, Canada, India, and the UK.

About 90% of those who participated were people in recruiting and sourcing: about ½ from agencies and ½ from corporations. We also had a number of sales, business development people, recruiting software manufacturers, and librarians (!) among the participants.

The job titles/levels ranged anywhere from Coordinators and Assistants all the way to Senior VPs and CEO’s.

All the major industries were covered, with the majority of the participants coming from IT, finances, and healthcare.

 

The survey had gathered information about familiarity, usage, and usefulness of a wide and representative range of sourcing tools, from “traditional” to new and cutting-edge.

(If you are looking to explore new tools, please check out the recently updated Tools page on my blog. It is not meant to be a “complete” list in any sense, but it lists some tools we think may be worth exploring.)

The survey has revealed some curious numbers and facts. One fact that stands out for me is that recruiters who have access to tools, quite often under-use or even ignore the functionality that is really powerful, but it “additional” or “optional” in their minds, or as the vendors have presented it. Examples are the Open Web for Dice users, the Talent Pipeline for LinkedIn Recruiter users, and the Signal for LinkedIn users.

As promised, I have shared the full report (without the personal info, of course) with all the participants. Thanks a lot to those of you who have contributed their answers!

Are you curious about the results? The Full Sourcing Tools Survey Results will be shared on a complementary basis with everyone who gets a prerecorded training from the Training Library or signs up for the People Sourcing Certification Program now until May 3, 2013.

 

Since searching all over the web with the raising complexity of sourcing is difficult, it seems to be desirable to ease the searching pains with auto-matching. Several vendors provide that, including Bright.com and LinkedIn.

I have recently talked with the folks from Bright.com and was amazed to learn that they are getting some serious active candidates’ traffic: around 3.5 MLN resumes submitted or refreshed within the last month. That’s quite a number! Apparently Bright.com is wildly successful in that. 

Nobody would question LinkedIn’s success as the TOP destination for People Sourcing.

Both Bright.com and LinkedIn provide matching profiles and resumes, respectively, for given job descriptions.

(I don’t mean to list all companies who try to do auto-matching; there are several out there, and I am not sure if I know of any winners currently. There’s one more company I’d like to mention, however: I just spoke with people from http://www.textkernel.nl/ who are opening a matching multilingual component in their suite of recruiting/sourcing building blocks. If you are in Europe you should check it out.)

Let’s take a look at some matching results to two positions that I am currently sourcing for.

As any recruiter knows, the most important part in a job description is the Job Title. We cannot interview someone who is currently a Chief Cook for a CFO position and vise versa.

So – how do the following auto-“matches” come about??

Bright:

LinkedIn:

I’d give these matches a score of Zero…

Has anyone used either matching system successfully? Not that I think matching can be accomplished in such broad areas as “all profiles” and “all jobs” and without some genius engineers and a few supercomputers…but these job titles as “matching” to the titles in the job descriptions?