… 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.

Did you know that LinkedIn has over 42K members who list MBA as part of their last name? It also has over 20K people listing CPA as part of the last name, over 30K PHR‘s, 22K+ SPHR‘s, thousands of PhD‘s (or Ph.D‘s), etc.

For this search to be of any use, you will, of course, need to add your target keywords, companies, or locations, to narrow it down.

While you will be missing some SPHR’s using a search like this, here’s what is very special about these  searches.

1) You will see all the search results, no matter what type of LinkedIn account you might have. This is actually true for any type of LinkedIn people search, so it’s not that special. Somehow there’s a perception that paid LinkedIn accounts or special paid accounts like LinkedIn Recruiter find more search results. They don’t.

2) Here’s what is really special. You will see all the last names, no matter whether these people are your third level connections, or inside or outside your network, or outside everyone’s networks.

You will, in fact, see more than just the last names. Compare this search result, that is outside of the network…

…and its profile viewed from a basic account…

…with the very same profile in the search results, from the very same account, if you use the PhD keyword:

… and here’s what it looks like now:

Of course, Google (that has no account on LinkedIn) can see the same information in the public profile:

But the info that we could see in the unnamed, out-of-network profile in the LinkedIn search results is only: the location, the job title, and the industry – and in many cases it’s just too little for X-Raying on Google. (In the good old days LinkedIn used to show more for out-of-network results.)

Conclusion: use a degree or a certification abbreviation in the last name field, and not only uncover the last names, but also public profiles’ links and much more information for every search result, no matter what your account is.

Since all (free and paid) LinkedIn personal accounts hide the out-of-network names in search results, this gives everyone the power of LinkedIn Recruiter from the convenience of a personal account for this special type of search.

I’d be glad to connect on LinkedIn.

Also, I am repeating the twice-sold-out webinar Boolean Search on LinkedIn on December 11th.

For my US-based colleagues, have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

Our Boolean Strings – The Internet Sourcing Community on the Ning Network has grown to 5,300+ members  and the LinkedIn “Boolean” Group has grown to 17,600+ members, freely sharing sourcing knowledge and tips with each other and providing questions and answers for each other, as well as creating whole libraries with sample searches. This is by far the largest Sourcer’s online community world-wide. Check out the group demographics if you are curious.

I’d like to say thank you to several people who have helped to create the content and keep the community alive and well and to point to some additional sourcing-related blogs and groups some of them run that have excellent content.

Shane Bowen has been actively involved in co-moderating the LinkedIn group and providing content and answers that are well thought-through and often make me check out new things and approaches and refresh my “stale” knowledge on those aspects of search syntax and social media sites’ behavior that I haven’t accessed for a while. Shane is passionate about Sourcing. If you haven’t checked out the new Shane‘s and Jennifer‘s new blog Sourcing Hacks, do so now! You may want to put some bookmarks on pages with tools like the one to view full LinkedIn Profiles.

 David Galley runs bi-weekly Sourcing Chats that regularly get an active crowd of 25 to 65 professionals interested in people sourcing. David and other experts who join provide fantastic tips on tools and things new and less explored in the Internet research jungle. David makes sure that everyone who types in a question gets attention. If you haven’t attended, this is a must.

We often have serious contributors to online content and fun attend the chats, such as my friend @animal.

(If you are in an inconvenient time zone for the chat, check out the chat log; it stays up for about one day. Also feel free to launch your own chat; just post it as an event and invite others.)

While I am self-taught on most things (sourcing and otherwise), David is one of the few people who often teaches me by taking a discussed solution a few steps deeper and carefully investigating possible approaches. David has been big help in co-running Q&A sourcing sessions at the Certification Program where he’s a team member. I am looking forward to close collaboration with David in the near and distant future.

The group and the network population has long known Gary Cozin who has been patiently helping “beginners” with creating Boolean strings since the group has started.  Thanks, Gary!

Thanks to regular contributors:

Balazs Paroczay; I recommend checking out the blog Balazs and His Magic Sourcing World and especially the presentation Cracking Open Facebook.

Martin Lee; check out Martin‘s group on LinkedIn Cool (free) tools for recruiting

Sarang Brahme who is a recognized sourcing leader and a passionate enthusiast  of sourcing knowledge promotion and education in India. Check out his blog Magic Sourcing. I look forward to seeing Sarang again as a fellow presenter at the upcoming SourceCon

Erin Page who has also launched a new blog Boolean Journal

Geraldine Bruce who is a big sourcing knowledge and corporate sourcing strategy supporter in South Africa. I suggest following Geraldine on twitter at @gerrybruce

Gordon Lokenberg recently made a swift appearance winning the first prize in the International Contest among a large crowd of strong competitors and whose contribution we would welcome. Here’s Gordon’s blog. We have found that we think alike in many ways during our recent chat.

Of course there’s many more people to whom I’d like to thank that I would like to include and will do so in subsequent posts.

If we are not connected on social networks, I am glad to connect and stay in touch. You can find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter,  and on Google-Plus.

If you log out of LinkedIn and look at its home page, you will find some invaluable information, including a list of 100 countries that have their own URL’s. The exception is the US profiles that have the www beginning along with many smaller countries. For your convenience and at the request from my listeners today, here is a list of the codes.

You will find a wealth of material in our latest presentation “LinkedIn [Sourcing] Solved”.

I am always happy to do sourcing! With the increased volume of Internet Research/People Sourcing/Name Generation projects we have started using a simple Checklist for clients that I would like to share.

Here are the questions:

1. Filled out by:
2. Date:
3. Job/Role Description (attach)
4. Notes (what is key; what makes it hard; where you have looked)
5. Preferred Delivery (Resumes: y/n; LinkedIn Profiles: y/n; Other Social Profiles: y/n; Excel contact lists: y/n; other)
6. Target Location(s)
7. Additional Locations (optional)
8. Ideal Profile(s) (optional) (attach) [this is THE BEST piece of information!]
9. Salary Range (optional)
10. Synonym Titles (optional)
11. Must have skills/keywords (optional)
12. Avoid skills/keywords (optional)
13. Years of experience (optional)
14. Target companies (optional)
15. Avoid Companies (optional)
16. Preferred Schools (optional)
17. Conferences (optional)
18. Certifications (optional)
19. Associations (optional)

It can be accesses here: Sourcing Checklist

Here is what I feel is different in the sourcing services we can provide:

• I can optionally include explanations and interactive sessions to show how I have found the results as part of the project – so that you’ll be training your team as well as obtaining research results
• We offer a variety of output formats and types of information, checking with you mid-way, with the goal of raising your ROI
• Well, we are also pretty good at finding people 🙂

The type of a relationship with companies that I have found most rewarding and mutually beneficial is being part-time “on call” as a resource for teams of corporate recruiters. I’d be glad to talk with you if you would like to explore this in better detail. I’d also be curious to compare notes with those who do part-time “most urgent, most difficult” sourcing projects for corporations.

NEW DATE! Join us for a Webinar on November 15

[The webinar on Nov 6 was full. Repeating on Nov 15th.]

Attendees have signed up from: Nike, Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Verizon Wireless, Motorola, Oracle, Staples, The Home Depot, The Footlocker, Experis, E&Y, IBM, Accenture, Gartner, Tata Consulting, Wells Fargo, United Health, Kforce, Randstad, Adecco, and Futurestep, to name a just few companies, and from the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Romania, Hungary, Check Republic, Nigeria, Philippines, India, and Australia.

Instant Feedback :” Within 15 mins I had a method to search via Google and have found many potential candidates for a difficult role that I have been working on.” – Clive

Boolean Search on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has an amazing number of ways to search across the human capital data it has accumulated. When someone says, “I have already searched on LinkedIn; can you please look elsewhere?” – chances are, there are alternative ways to go back and find more matching results.

This webinar is for those who use LinkedIn to search for people and want to expand their toolkit and understand the advantages and the limitations of a variety of ways of searching LinkedIn for talent.

Who should attend: Recruiters, People Sourcers, Resourcers, People Searchers, Researchers, Talent Miners, Recruitment Agencies, and Corporate Recruiting Teams. Some familiarity with X-raying, i.e. using the operator site: on Google (or Yahoo) is necessary.

The webinar will include an overview of search techniques, from searching on Google or with a basic account to LinkedIn Talent Finder to LinkedIn Recruiter. (As always, I am not affiliated with any vendors.)

Outline
X-raying for Profiles

• The Basics
• Public Profiles Configuration
• “The Best” Strings
• Removing Unwanted Results

Searching for Profiles

• LinkedIn Basic vs. LinkedIn Talent Finder vs. LinkedIn Recruiter vs. X-raying
• Searching with the Talent Pipeline

Profile Visibility
* LinkedIn Basic vs. LinkedIn Talent Finder vs. LinkedIn Recruiter vs. X-raying
* How to Target, on LinkedIn and by X-raying:

• Geography
• Years of Experience
• Degrees, Schools, and Graduation Years
• Skills
• Competitors

Indirect Search: Finding members on LinkedIn by:

• Similarity
• Matches for Jobs
• Viewers of Profiles
• Posted content
• X-Raying for Groups

Advanced X-Raying Secrets

The webinar comes with one month of support, the slides, and a video-recording for ALL who sign up (i.e. you do not have to attend “live” if you have a scheduling conflict).

Price: $79
NEW Date: Thursday, November 15
Time: 9 AM PST/noon EST/5 PM London
Duration: 90 minutes

After regirstering your name and email, please wait to be redirected to the payment link or go straight to to http://bit.ly/90min-webinar to complete the registration.

Space is limited.

Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/405574546

Webinar Special: get the People Sourcing Program Certification Materials (either Level One or Level Two or both) and attend the Boolean Search on LinkedIn webinar as a guest. (Questions? Please email George Glikman).

Resourcing in the UK. Part 3: Regions and Titles on LinkedIn

Here is the third of a series of hands-on examples – based on some specific searches in the UK – on how to use some People Sourcing concepts. (See the posts One/Twitter and Two/Google.) The same techniques can be applied to searches elsewhere.

I’d like to discuss geographical regions as they are phrased on LinkedIn, and lists of job titles across the UK.

While you are reading this post it’s best to log out of LinkedIn.

A Google search like this

site:uk.linkedin.com/title/assistant

(where you can replace assistant with any other keyword) shows a list of links with short lists of people whose profiles contain the word assistant.

(I am sorry if it may have sounded too complex; it’s not).

You may notice that some of these lists include people from a variety of locations, and those have a “generic” piece of URL in-gb-0-United-Kingdom.

Since we are interested in locations at the moment, let’s exclude those “generic” links, and let’s use the keyword senior that would hopefully pick all of the locations. I.e. hopefully there’s someone who has the word senior in their job title for any region.

site:uk.linkedin.com/title/senior -inurl:0

See the locations showing up in the results now?

To collect the titles fast, we may want to use Fastest Chrome (or Fastest Fox) and display all of the results in one page…

…then simply select-all on the page with the search results and paste into MS Excel as text, and see all locations, along with their internal LinkedIn codes…

…and finalize the table of codes and locations using simple sorting and replacing functions in Excel. Here’s the result, below. These are all the locations in the UK as seen by LinkedIn.

The task for the reader is to create a table with an alphabetized list of all possible titles including the word senior.

Here is the third of a series of hands-on sourcing examples – based on some specific searches in the UK – on how to use some People Sourcing concepts. The same techniques can be applied to searches elsewhere.

I’d like to discuss geographical regions as they are phrased on LinkedIn, and lists of job titles across the UK.

While you are reading this post it’s best to log out of LinkedIn.

A Google search like this

site:uk.linkedin.com/title/assistant

(where you can replace assistant with any other keyword) shows a list of links with short lists of people whose profiles contain the word assistant.

(I am sorry if it may have sounded too complex; it’s not).

You may notice that some of these lists include people from a variety of locations, and those have a “generic” piece of URL in-gb-0-United-Kingdom.

Since we are interested in locations at the moment, let’s exclude those “generic” links, and let’s use the keyword senior that would hopefully pick all of the locations. I.e. hopefully there’s someone who has the word senior in their job title for any region.

site:uk.linkedin.com/title/senior -inurl:0

See the locations showing up in the results now?

To collect the titles fast, we may want to use Fastest Chrome (or Fastest Fox) and display all of the results in one page…

…then simply select-all on the page with the search results and paste into MS Excel as text, and see all locations, along with their internal LinkedIn codes…

…and finalize the table of codes and locations using simple sorting and replacing functions in Excel. Here’s the result, below. These are all the locations in the UK as seen by LinkedIn.

The task for the reader is to create a table with an alphabetized list of all possible titles including the word senior.