My first (fun!) experience with SourceCon was attending the conference in San Diego back in 2010, after I won the SourceCon challenge in 2009. The final challenge, won by Katharine @TheSourceress was an amazing explosion of creativity. Those were the days, my friend! 

I am coming back to SourceCon as a speaker at the upcoming SourceCon-2013 in Atlanta, GA. If you are also coming to the conference, let’s connect!

My talk will be focused on the “Dream Software” that has evolved quite a bit since the original post back in 2011 .  You can find the back-then descriptions of TalentBin (post on TB in 2011) and theSocialCV (post in 2011) as the pioneers in this type of tools.

Before I continue, let me clarify that:

• I am not affiliated with any of the tool providers, job boards, or with LinkedIn
• Views are my own

I have recently spoken with the founders of Talenbin, Entelo, Gild, and RemarkableHire – all of them representing “Dream Software” tools! Last week I spoke with the CEO of Dice Holdings Scot Melland about the new Dice’s Open Web product, that apparently continues theSocialCV development under the new name and the Dice’s brand.

The original outline for the upcoming SourceCon talk is below. I also plan to write several posts here on the blog, highlighting the Dream Software products’ functionality, as well as the general tendencies and challenges. If you use any of these products, I’d love to hear from you, here in the comments, or reach me out directly.

The Dream Software ( a New Generation of Sourcing Software Tools)

http://falcon.io/ is called “Rapportive for the web.” but it may be a bit misleading. Many of us have used Rapportive and love it. I often go to Rapportive before getting with someone on the phone, as a good way to “Google” the person when I know the email address. (Of course, its “official” integration with LinkedIn is priceless.)

Falcon is not a substitute for Rapportive at all, but rather an extra addition to our toolboxes. The word about Falcon is already spreading out fast among People Sourcers. I hope to make it even more popular with this post.

Falcon.io works like no other tool I know of.

Falcon.io has the look of Rapportive, but the way it works is very different. While Rapportive crawls the data and accumulates information, with an email address as its identifier, Falcon looks up the data dynamically, starting from an existing profile that you mouse over. It implements a variety of algorithms in order  to find extra  online data for members on each of the five networks it currently “serves”, including Twitter and Github.

There are advantages to both ways of looking up profiles. An email address identifies the right person 100% of the time; but crawling takes time, so Rapportive has some outdated data and some data may not have been crawled yet. On the other hand, Falcon tries to glue together profiles of the same person, which cannot be done perfectly, but it can do this for anyone, here and now. I’d say that Falcon “prompts” in a useful fashion. Strong sourcers can probably reproduce some of the Falcon’s  looking up logic but this would need to be done for individual profiles each time. In a way, Falcon does a light version of what TalentBin and other “Dream Software” may be doing in the background, but without storing the data.

There are endless ways in which Falcon can be useful. As an example, on Twitter it can look up people whom Twitter suggests for you to follow; people who are posting interesting things, or are using a #hashtag, say, for a conference; people from lists; or those who are being RT’ed or mentioned by others.

Don’t miss the tool! Let’s support and follow its author Gwendall Esnault. Well done!

 

 

I am excited about the first upcoming session of the People Sourcing Certification Program in 2013! We begin on January 29th.  Enrolled already are: Apple, Dell, PwC, Capgemini, All-State Insurance, Verizon… US, UK, Canada, Australia, India… Our international team is growing and we are on our way to become the world-wide standard for training and measuring the skills in our profession. Two more sessions are coming up in 2013.

I thought I’d share some cool graphics with our followers.

These are the countries that participated in the Program in 2012:

These are some companies that took my training in 2012 (it’s a partial list):

We are looking forward to continued success of our Program and our profession in 2013!

Join us for a Webinar on January 22

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/581053314

This webinar will cover name generation as well as searching for hidden profiles of target professionals.

Who should attend: Recruiters, Recruitment Managers, Teams, Sourcers, Staffing Managers, Talent Hunters, Inside Sales Managers, Business Development, Executive Search Firms, Searchers, Researchers, and Hiring Managers. Some familiarity with Google searching and MS Excel would be helpful.

“There comes a point when I don’t know where else to go and look for resumes other than LinkedIn and Monster, where most of the profiles are same.” wrote a recruiter in an email to me. While most recruiters do know other places to look for target candidates, everyone can benefit from reviewing “the big picture” about those sites and learning productive ways to navigate them.

In this webinar I will concentrate on finding and extracting human capital data from industry-specific sites vs. general networks.

Outline
* Navigate the 10 major people search engines
* Identify data-rich sites in the target:
– industry (forums, associations; certifications)
– geography (local chapters, meet-ups)
– time (recent conferences)
* Extract lists of professionals from the sites:
– by X-raying
– by deep web search
* Locate social profiles on professional niche sites
* Find contact information:
– email address templates
– email addresses for leads
– phone numbers
* Pre-qualify people for calling and make the call warm

Think you have found everybody there is? Join us, try these techniques and you will be surprised! In the end, you may notice that many if these additional leads do have LinkedIn profiles, but would be hard to find by searching LinkedIn alone.

Date: Tue, Jan 22nd
Time: 10 AM PST/1 PM EST
Duration: 90 min
Price: $79.
After you have registered your name, please wait 10 sec or go straight to http://bit.ly/nam–gen for payment.

Can’t make the time? No problem. Everyone who signs up you will get the recording, the slides, and one month of support.

 

Some professional sites with software developer population that charge recruiters arm and leg to access the user data, like stackoverflow, are quite hard to search. It’s possible, but it’s not easy. Github is a place where excellent developers hang out, that provides its own clean ways to search for its content – and its users:

If you are not a fan of search operators, you can simply do this:

Start searching for users…

Select a programming language…

Add a couple of clever keywords… (not necessarily these, but this example may give you some keyword ideas) and see results like this:

I never said that we should be emailing people as soon as we get hold of lists like this. More research and pre-qualification is always a good idea. But that’s quite a bit of sourced data in one quick shot!

X-raying on Google is also possible but the results are a little harder to browse. Try this:

site:github.com “joined on” “San Francisco” “gmail.com”

X-raying on Bing, however, will not find a single thing:

site:github.com “joined on” “San Francisco” “gmail.com”;

guess, why.

I will be explaining this type of people sourcing techniques in-depth at the upcoming webinar on how to source on professional sites, coming up on Tuesday, January 22nd. As usual, the slides, a video-recording, and one month of unlimited support will be provided for all who sign up.

LinkedIn says it has reached 200 million profiles. It is a great number!

I do love LinkedIn and I care about its growth. People Sourcers know for a fact that LinkedIn is an incredibly rich source, the best world-wide, even if the claimed number of profiles was larger than the number of real live professionals on LinkedIn.

 

 

LinkedIn critics say that many LinkedIn members  “do not use the site actively”. That’s OK with me though. I can try reaching members through a message or an InMail, even if they do not hang out at the site.

Here is where the growing problem is though. LinkedIn is being increasingly polluted with fake profiles and the   content they generate. LinkedIn doesn’t weed them out well and doesn’t give its users enough power to weed them out.

Issue #1. Junk names, no real person’s info. Here are some names of LinkedIn members, as listed on the site alphabetically:

 more:

and more:

and more:

(etc.) These “profiles” perhaps wouldn’t be right to claim among the 200 MLN. But they are not a problem for someone who does people search; these profiles usually wouldn’t even show up in the search results.

There are also LinkedIn members with first and last names being “company”, “business”, “software”, etc.; I am sure you’ve all seen them.

*** Here’s a little sourcing challenge for my fellow sourcers: find a keyword that cannot be a name (such as “company”) with the largest number of results in people search, used as either the first or the last name on LinkedIn, and post in the comments here.  Example: Last Name = company ***

Issue #2. Fake profiles – personal spammers. Some of the fake profiles, are, unfortunately, active, “log into the site”, and actively add junk content. Those are becoming a real issue.

Here is an example of some invitations I have received recently:

 

I assure you that these are not real people. The images are generic; the profiles contain very similar info in broken English, claiming an advanced degree from one of the top schools (ha!)  and a link to a junk site. The profile images are reused  for similar profiles.

An extra connection with a fake profile is somewhat unpleasant to have. It increases the amount of spam messages for anyone who accepts these connection requests.

Dear LinkedIn: can you please look up some profiles like these, tag and remove them automatically?

Issue #3. Fake profiles – group spammers. Now, these are a real pain. Profiles like this one:

actively join groups and mass-comment on every post before the group moderator knows it. LinkedIn Customer Support says (quoting from a reply to me):

We do have some proprietary algorithms that track spam-like activities on the site, but we largely leave the group content decisions up to the individual group management. 

The problem is that many of these “users” are apparently software-generated. Moderating a larger open group is either becoming a huge time consuming effort, or – as it’s done in most groups- junk is accepted and the group is a wasteland.

The group moderator is only a person. There’s little we can do against armies of non-existent  “members” that are created by software and generate junk messages through software. Here’s a typical example. There’s a lot of pointers to the same job-related sites – of questionable value – spread over the groups, like this:

Dear LinkedIn: please block at least some of the junk content. You can do it!

First, please block at least some non-existent users who are actively inviting and posting. I am sure the user jerseywebsite will not complain.

Second, please give group moderators tools to mass-block mass-spam. The existing moderation tools are not adequate. I’d like to be able to auto-flag messages that have “jerseys” and “make money from home” in my groups. I’d also like to be able to flag the same link posted more than once by the same person.

I imagine that some group moderators would second that.

… and yet it is a powerful sourcing tool, and it is free to use. (For the basic account it is also free, but you need to know your ways around to view the results. I will explain below.)

I am talking about the LinkedIn Signal. Even if you have the topmost account and all the power of people searching available to you, the Signal is an excellent addition with complementary ways to source. Namely, the Signal can show recently updated (within the last few hours or a couple of weeks, your choice) profiles of all the target professionals, no matter where they are in your  network.

Note that LinkedIn Signal has a bit of a buggy appearance and it it helps to figure out what is really going on; more on that later.

Here is an example. I am looking for JavaScript engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area. (I truly am at the moment.)

So here’s what I can do:

• Go to  http://www.linkedin.com/signal
• Enter the word Javascript into the keyword section
• Select the San Francsico Bay Area as the location
• Select the Update Type: Profiles

No matter what type of LinkedIn account we may have, the results are the same for all of us.

Note that Javascript as a keyword would point to profiles that have changed in ways that are described using the word Javascript; most often this would be an added skill. If you use, say, the word Google as a keyword, you will see profile changes mostly around changing a job title at the company Google, or joining the company Google.

There are two problems you might encounter:

Problem #1. If you have a basic account, you might click on a result and see this:

LinkedIn Signal points you to “highlighted skills below” but it doesn’t show anything highlighted!

Problem #2. LinkedIn truly finds “3rd level connections and everyone else“, as promised; however, it shows people outside of your network as the 3rd level connections, which is confusing:

In a case like this, where the person is outside of your network, the links “like” and “comment” would not work, leading to “an unexpected problem” (love the expression!):

If you click on the person’s name you will not be able to see anything either.

Solution. Here’s how to overcome both problems. Mouse over the name and use the link “View profile” in the bubble:

That works beautifully for both the 3rd level connections and outside-of-network people (erroneously marked as 3rd level). You will be able to see the complete profiles. Yay!

Join the 1% of the recruiters who do use LinkedIn Signal and take advantage of this great predictor of who might be warming up for the next opportunity.

 

 

Let’s start 2013 with a discussion of some basic, yet little known, aspects of the two main search engines syntax rules. I believe these are very important to know in order to have fewer of those either “What am I doing wrong?” or “Why is Google search not working?” questions (coming up, depending on the personality). I had to clarify a thing or two myself quite recently and would like to share these clarifications with you.

1. The Boolean Logical Operator AND

This logical operator is implied on Google and on Bing, so searching for certified accountant listed in the search string is just the same as searching for both of these words. However, writing

accountant AND certified

in the search string will not do the same thing on Google and Bing.

Namely, Bing will ignore the word AND and will search for both terms. Google with include the word and as yet another keyword, no matter how you write it: AND, and, or ANd.

If you do not capitalize and, Bing will not include it as a keyword. To force Bing to use the word and  as a keyword, you would need to put quotation marks around it: “and”.

2. The Operator Precedence and Parentheses

When I reuse a search string that I run on Google, I often forget to put the parenthesis around OR statements, but I quickly get a reminder in the form of the search results being very different from what I expect to see.

We’ve all long been aware that what can be written on Google in either of the two ways:

1. certified OR CPA accountant
2. (certified OR CPA) accountant

and on Bing the same search has to be written as

(certified OR CPA) accountant

On Bing, the operator precedence (i.e. the default order of the operators) is different from Google’s. Writing

certified OR CPA accountant

on Bing means the same as

certified OR (CPA AND accountant)

(That one doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as a search, of course).

On Bing, you can use parentheses to change the default order of operators. Here’s relevant Bing documentation (by the way, not available in its search help, but spelled out in its developer guides): Operator Precedence.

While Bing offers great flexibility in changing the default order of the operators, there is no way to change the order of operators on Google. I have to admit that I was not entirely clear about it up till recently and have clarified this for myself while exploring the Order of Operations on Google post by Erin Page, for which I am grateful.

You will not be able to execute the last search above on Google, no matter what syntax you try. In fact, parentheses are, very simply, ignored on Google. If you see a counter-example, that’s a Google’s bug. Let me know; I have found a way to report those to the Google team through the wonderful Daniel Russel of the SearchResearch blog. Dan has also helped me to figure out some things in this post.

3. Including Keywords

It’s no secret that Google attempts to modify your keywords using both auto-stemming (manager ~ management) and synonyms (developer ~ programmer). It can also break words: search for onetwo and you may see one two in the results. To prevent modification, you can use the quotation marks around the word: “manager”, “onetwo”.

What is less known though, is that even the quotation marks do not guarantee that the word will show up on the resulting pages. In some cases Google decides to “improve” a query and remove some words that it thinks only harm the query. If you really, seriously want to see a word in the results, use the operator intext:

intext:manager

(This is also mentioned in an informative an fun post by John Tedesco How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques.)

As a conclusion,

live AND learn

Having lots of connections is beneficial for those of us who want:

• to find more people with visible information in searches
• to be found
• to get referrals.

(Obviously) accepting connection requests and inviting others are the two ways to grow your network.

Inviting others to connect on LinkedIn is a good idea exactly in two cases:

1)  They know you;

2)  They may not know you, but on their profiles they use one or more of the words “Open networker”, “LION”, “Toplinked”, “open to invitations”, “invite me”, etc., or they have their contact information posted on the profile, or they belong to one of the many open networkers’ groups.

Otherwise they may mark your invitation as IDK – “I don’t know you”. It’s not the end of the world and not grounds to be excluded from the network, but your invitation will be wasted. There’s a lifetime limit of invitations, and there’s some legwork to discover lists of  “open networkers”. So here are my two top tips on how to get connection requests from fellow members.

Tip #1. Become an open networker; use those words (above) on your profile. Accept invitations from everyone except your enemies.

Tip #2. Become someone with whom members will want to connect: Take the time to create and post interesting content. Be the first to share news on relevant groups. Engage in group discussions. Ask and answer questions. Share  interesting and relevant content.

It will not happen overnight but your invitation volume will increase. A larger network will send some messaging traffic your way, but we all know how to use the Delete button. The benefits are much higher than the increased need to filter emails.

Here’s what not to do:

Non-Tip #1. A LinkedIn invitation is not among the best practices as a way to send someone a job description. There are better ways to do that.

Non-tip #2. Posting a message on any LinkedIn group saying “Everyone, connect with me!” is SPAM.

Happy networking!

-Irina (LinkedIn Profile).

These are my current numbers:

Here’s my network graphical representation (not very practical but interesting to view):

As the time goes, the amount of information that is available for indexing by Google goes up. The Google search engine has to compromise to keep up with the volume and still show the results in split seconds – which it does very well, while still supporting that advanced Boolean search syntax that only a tiny % of us are using.

While searching on Google, specifically, while X-raying LinkedIn, we would do better if we adjust out expectations. Namely,

1. Not all profiles on LinkedIn, even those that have been around for a while, are indexed. Shane Bowen‘s post on SourcingHacks “What You Didn’t Find While X-Raying LinkedIn” demonstrates that.
2. If a profile (or any page for that matter) is indexed, which means that is can be found using Google search, it may not necessarily be found by searching for a specific phrase visible on that profile. In particular, the phrase “people you know” that Glen Cathey’s post on BooleanBlackBelt titled “What’s the most effective way to X-Ray search LinkedIn?”  suggests to use, as the best way to search, works in some cases but doesn’t work in other.

Here is an example that has only a handful results and makes it clear what may potentially happen. To create this example I just picked a couple of rare skills to search for.

The “People you know” search produces 10 results (right now, on my machine)

site:www.linkedin.com “people you know” “algorithm analysis” “operating systems design”

The advanced search with “URLs” produces 12 results, i.e. 20% more:

site:www.linkedin.com/in OR site:www.linkedin.com/pub -pub/dir “algorithm analysis” “operating systems design”

Using different common phrases – for this particular search –

site:www.linkedin.com “access” “full profile” “algorithm analysis” “operating systems design” 

picks one false positive if you don’t exclude “dir” but otherwise finds 12 results. Yet other simple phrases like “profile on LinkedIn” being added to the search result in zero profiles found.

Conclusion: It’s good to have the right expectations about searching. There may be different ways to find extra  target profiles by varying ways to search, depending on 1) what you are looking for and 2) what Google decides to index: pages and phrases on those pages. This is usually not a problem and you will find all you need with one common phrase, unless you are searching for a purple squirrel, in which case it helps to be aware Google’s (understandable) “compromises” in indexing. Or maybe try using a slightly more advanced syntax.

On a philosophical note, perhaps Sourcing is becoming more Art than Science.