Which Boolean Strings will bring up company organizational charts? This question comes up once in a while from recruiters who come to my lectures and on forums.

Here’s a brief beginner guide on how to find where to find org charts. The post also has explanations applicable to finding sites to search for any information of interest.

 

First and foremost, for 99.99% of the companies out there there are no posted full org charts available for easy viewing online by strangers, for obvious reasons: it is proprietary data. Some companies post partial org charts of their management.

For most companies the org charts cannot be found, even with “strong” search strings, because they are not there. While it may sound trivial, so many people try hard to find what’s not out there -and feel that they don’t know how to search properly!

(1) Let’s imagine that there is a site allowing search for org charts, at least for some org charts. The site(s) might show up in Google search if we use the keywords “org chart” and perhaps also the word “search”, since otherwise we’d mostly find tools to create org charts, which is not of interest at the moment.

The search org chart search brings up a good first result: Cogmap Org Chart Wiki. The site doesn’t try to make money; instead, it offers information exchange. It has 17K charts with almost 300K people. The site was created back in 2006.

The second result, Where to find corporate organization charts, sounds great, but notice that the page was created in 2005, so the info may be a bit outdated (and it is, but is worth exploring).

(Take a look at other results and see what you can find.)

(2) Since we liked Cogmap, a thing to do is also to look for similar sites:  related:cogmap.com This brings up another site that is certainly on target and is useful: The organizational charts of the largest corporations 

(This search also does bring up “false positives” but we can always ignore them.)

(3) We can also search the posts on the Boolean Strings group, the Internet Sourcing Community. Search for charts and you will find Source people on wikiorgcharts – Check it out! The post points to the site Wikiorgcharts which is, like Cogmap, a crowd-sourcing site and has over a million entries and was created in 2011.

(4) If we look for sites that would have org chart(s) for a particular organization, we might assume that in many cases the words org chart will make it to the title or the URL of those pages. intitle:”org chart”  brings up quite a few sites, mostly universities and government sites. (You can exclude some words if you like, such as download, how, software, etc., to remove false positives.)

From the first few minutes of searching we would find lots of those for sites ending in .gov; .edu; .org; and .mil

Here are a few samples of org charts in .gov and .edu sites

• Organization Chart | Department of Energy
• Organizational Chart: About Us: Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research
• Federal Aviation Org Charts and Contact Info
• Texas Department of State Health Services
• LSU Organizational Chart
• A collection of org charts for the University of California

Note that some org charts are posted as images, so you can’t Google any names within them; an example is here: NYCHA Organizational Chart (jpg image)

(For those of you who are advanced sourcers: can you figure out what org chart is used for the image above?)

If you have a basic or a low-paid account on LinkedIn, you can’t see the full names of people who are your third level connections. You can’t see the names of people outside your network. In LinkedIn Recruiter, which is the solution for corporations, you can see all names.

I didn’t realize up till I was at the #sourceIn event yesterday at the LinkedIn HQ in Mountain View, that agencies with the top solution wouldn’t see the names either. Now, LinkedIn has decided to open up the names to agencies as well. GREAT! It should be available soon. (They also have some really cool features coming up in the Talent Pipeline.)

However, if you don’t have that advanced type of account or don’t want to wait until the new feature is implemented for agencies, here is what you can do.

 

(1) Go to the profile in question.

(2) Share it, using the share function, with someone you know who’s OK with it, or with me. (We need to be connected for that; I am gladly accepting all invitations.)

(3) Look for the message you had just sent, in your “Sent Items” under Inbox.

(4) In your message, see the link to the profile with the name that you couldn’t see? Click on it.

There’s no need to have a paid account for it to work. It works in exactly 100% of all cases.

ADDITIONAL INFO. Added on 9/17/2012

Some people can no longer see the “share” link as on the screenshot above. Here is a workaround.

1. Look at the profile in question and copy its LinkedIn ID (a large number in the URL)
2. Start sharing a profile that you can share (such as your connection, or share my profile)
3. Paste this ID into your sharing dialog (in case of my profile the number to replace is 1769200)

This works just like before. Of course it’s a bit more mouse and key clicks but it works.

Also you get to see a link to the person’s public profile if it exists and that one will give you even more info in some cases.

Or, just use this link. Here is the exact link that should work (paste the LinkedIn ID where it says so):

http://www.linkedin.com/forwardProfileMsg?displayCreate=&profileID=PASTEIDHERE&network=I

Remember this look-and-feel of Google search above?

As Google search engine progresses and offers new features and some new syntax, the older search dialogs are not easily accessed anymore. If you discover such a search screen you’ll see older “look and feel” and even “©2011 Google” at the bottom of the page. However, these search dialogs are still around, work beautifully, and, in some cases, provide extra search facets that are gone from the “official”, supported searches with the new look-and-feel.

1. Advanced Patent Search
2. Advanced Scholar Search,
3. ~ which also points to the Legal Opinions Search
4. Advanced Book Search
5. Advanced Product Search
6. Advanced Video Search (different from the new Video Search) – Also, some advanced searches have been recently upgraded, but are not easily found from the home page:
7. Advanced News Search (available at the bottom of the news search)
8. Advanced Image Search (available under the settings icon if you do an Image Search)
9. This one is Copyright 2009! Advanced Group Search

Here are some sample test questions for the People Sourcing Certification Program:

Level One

• How many people currently working at Microsoft have the word Ninja in their current title on LinkedIn?
• There’s a “Racquetball League” site that lists a person who works (or used to work?) at ToysRUs. What is his job title?
• How many members of the site http://www.meritalk.com are women?
• Does Google accept the operator NOT (capitalized)?
• What is the last name of the Zone II Director of the National Pharmaceutical Association?

Level Two

• There are several people with the current title including the word Ninja, working at Microsoft, on LinkedIn. One of them works in software development, is involved with Bing, lives in Seattle, and has one duplicate profile on LinkedIn. What is his last name? When did he join Microsoft (year)?
• Does any type of Google search (including its special searches) have these operators?

1. inpublisher: 
2. near:
3. infile:
4. ininventor:

• How many people on this list have LinkedIn profiles? http://email-format.com/d/accenture.com/
• What is the name of the person whose connections are shown here: http://thebalazs.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/xray22.jpg?

You can register for the upcoming round of the Certifications today at our new site (just launched!): http://sourcingcertification.com/pricing-and-registration/

(This is just a partial list.) If you work for one of these companies, please know that one or more of your co-workers or managers are attending the Info Session for the People Sourcing Certification Program coming up in September 2012. Contact your colleagues and perhaps you can arrange a whole team attend the Program and get your sourcing function to a new level.

It is wonderful that the Certification Program is raising the awareness of importance and global interest in People Sourcing.

We would be very happy to accommodate teams of people and address team’s specific sourcing requests. Please get in touch with me to discuss.

It’s quite international also! The countries represented tomorrow are, so far: the US, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Israel, Japan, and Australia.

If you have any questions about the Program and how to sign up, please contact the Program Customer Support Manager George Glikman or 510-384-8262.

I have just returned from the Sourcing Summit – 2012 (see the report: Sourcing in Australia).

The photo below is from a session in Brisbane. The search string on Google that we were exploring is

site:http://adia.com.au/suppliers “contact * * phone * * * * * email * *”

 

This is a demonstration of sourcing techniques that make things wonderfully fast. Suppose we are looking for people who are likely to be members of this Association. If we run the search above; then scroll through the three pages of results, forcing them to the screen via Fastest Chrome or Fastest Fox; then use the Contact Capture (find it on the Tools tab on my blog if you don’t have it), the result will be obtained in approximately 15 seconds and will look like this. I have also attached it as an excel file to a copy of this post on the Ning network.

Further on, we can cross-reference the list of people on Facebook:

 …on LinkedIn…

 

…and pretty quickly decide whom to call, based on the wealth of the collected information.

 

I have just come back home to the San Francisco Bay Area from the Sourcing Summit in Australia. The event was flawlessly and skillfully organized by Phillip Tusing.

My top impression from the Australian sourcing conference – compared with many impressions from interacting with people from about 70 countries on Boolean Strings – the Internet Sourcing Community and 14 countries so far in the Certification Program – that Australia is the top country to recognize the importance of the Sourcer’s role. Our colleagues in this country are exceptionally far along on implementing the sourcing function everywhere, respecting their sourcers, and paying them well. We had people attending from every major corporation, including global companies Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Apple, Cisco, Accenture, Deloitte, Ernst and Young … you name it, plus local companies, agencies large and small, and “pure” researchers.

The very interactive three days have also made me realize that the best practices of implementing the sourcing teams are still being figured out, along with everyone’s desire to find the best sourcing metrics. (It’s not the number of submitted names or submitted resumes, is it?)

 

The audience was engaged, friendly, curious, and enthusiastic, although somewhat quiet. (This seems to be a general disposition of Australians as far as I can tell.) I have made many new friends and enjoyed the event very much. I have also enjoyed meeting a New Zealander Paul Jacobs with whom we both agree on the idea that sourcing is fun and creative way to be.

I think Phillip should take this type of event around the world, including Seattle and London; I’ve checked with a few people and there are already interested collaborators internationally!

You can read more about the conference on the wonderful bloggers sites: by Dan Nuroo and by Jared Woods.

Finally, here’s a piece from the Deep Web that I was able to get hold of, using some advanced sourcing techniques:

The grand purpose of this post is to become a substitute for Boolean search cheat sheets, without the need to come back or print it out.

The following is just a bit simplified, to point out the main concepts.

Google understands very limited language. It can include any words in English, but there are no sentences (carrying out a description of an action or a statement) or any English grammar. In some cases Google will search for synonyms of the keywords we use.

RULE #1. If you want several words to be included one after another, use the quotation marks. Here is an example. If you want to stop Google from including synonyms, use the quotation marks around the word.

RULE #2. To use one keyword OR another, use OR (capitalized); to exclude a word from your search use the minus: –jobs. That’s usually not a problem even for those who are new to Google’s syntax.

Google knows about many web pages. But all it knows about a page is pretty much this:

• title
• URL
• words
• images
• links to other pages

Google has no idea about resumes, LinkedIn profiles, or any such complexities.

Therefore, to speak to it beyond typing keywords, we can point it to specific titles, URLs, etc. Google gives us these operators to use:

Operators:

• site: look only for URLs that belong to the site
• inurl: look only for URLs that have a given keyword
• intitle: look only for titles that have a given keyword

There’s also a useful operator filetype: that in fact also looks at URLs and finds files of a certain type, like PDF or Excel.

To navigate Google’s search we need to think “backwards”. Let’s think what we are going to find when the search is successful.

Here is an example: if you look at resumes on indeed.com they all have the URL beginning (http://www.indeed.com/r/) in common:

So, to search for them from Google you can use site:http://www.indeed.com/r or site:http://www.indeed.com inurl:r (add your keywords)

Here is another example; this will search for members of the Boolean Strings Network: site:booleanstrings.ning.com intitle:”Page”

RULE #3. Use operators (site:, intitle:, inurl:) to point Google to the target page structure.

That’s it, folks!

Q: What do many people do when they start to think about their career? A: They update their LinkedIn profile.

Up till recently tracking, which members update their profiles, was only possible for your first level connections, as an example, by subscribing to Bullhorn Reach.
It is now possible to watch for all the skills and title changes by using the LinkedIn Signal. This is available to all members and is free to use.

Here is a screenshot that clearly shows that you can include anyone on LinkedIn:

You can see the results that come at all “levels of connection” from the person who searches:

As always in any LinkedIn search, we get a bonus of seeing the distribution of the search results along several facets. As an example, look which companies have employees with the keyword “java” and the largest numbers of updated profiles in the last two weeks.

You can also “Save” the search, creating an alert for yourself that will track profile changes, based on your keywords and filters.

Do you know of other great uses of the Signal?

I love LinkedIn! It has been bringing us more matching candidates and business connections than everything else combined out there. For my own recruiting business LinkedIn accounts for 100% placed candidates in the last twelve months and a large chunk of sourcing information that I submit to others when sourcing.

Yet taking the full advantage of LinkedIn is not straightforward! There are numerous obstacles and misleading marketing messages, blogs, and tutorials. Some LinkedIn members feel frustrated with its usage and some others pay big bucks for the top accounts, while not getting the true value.

Here is a brief list of some road blocks preventing our success, that could be overcome by learning what’s true and what’s a myth, how to overcome limitations, and how get the interaction going with your business prospects.

• LinkedIn changes in subtle and often unannounced ways, making its users confused; it helps to keep on top of changes
• Many use LinkedIn’s people search dialog in a straightforward fashion; however, LinkedIn can be searched in multiple creative ways and provide useful Business Intelligence data
• LinkedIn sets limits, both on free/ low-paid accounts and on LinkedIn Recruiter, in messaging and data visibility; there are ways to overcome the limits
• LinkedIn Recruiter seems to create a job board in place of LinkedIn; but it’s a myth and it limits your power, unless you use it properly
• LinkedIn has deficiencies that are worth knowing about, so that you can navigate all of its functionality
• LinkedIn makes us mouse and keyboard a lot; there are ways to increase productivity with shortcuts
• LinkedIn is usually not enough as a sole source of data; it should be used for cross-referencing, to prequalify business connections, and only call the right people
• LinkedIn is Google-able but, due to changing algorithms, this can be confusing and often showing false positives and no desired results; it would help to get up-to-date on X-Raying LinkedIn
• LinkedIn’s InMails seem to not get replies for many; there are proven ways to phrase your messages to get a high response rate
• LinkedIn doesn’t have contact info handy, but it can be used for finding and verifying ways to reach prospects

Would you have anything else to add to this list? What were the latest changes you have noticed? Please leave a comment. I am glad to connect as well.

Interested in straightening out your LinkedIn experience and figuring out ways to take the full advantage of it, with the feeling that you know all of its ins and outs? Sign up for my webinar on August 2nd People Sourcing Essentials for LinkedIn (seating is limited).