Reasons for Sourcing Certifications

The Boolean Strings Group and Network have become by far the largest community of sourcers online. Together with two other groups I moderate, Twitter, Google-Plus, and Facebook for Sourcing and Recruiting and Social Media Recruiting Group we have 30K+ members interested in sourcing technologies.  This blog is also part of my contribution to the sourcing community; it has had 140K+ visitors and is enjoying ~400 daily visitors on average.

Members of our large community, my blog followers, and recruiters who have taken my classes have been asking me about Sourcing Certifications over the last two years. Apparently there’s evidence that existing certifications do not necessarily mean good performance.

What has triggered the upcoming introduction of certifications now, is that I’ve been getting more sourcing requests than I can possibly accommodate. We might expand the research branch of our business in the future. At this time I would like to be able to recommend others for extra sourcing projects, as well as for any jobs that require sourcing skills.

To add to that, I believe that a sourcers’ value and importance is still misunderstood and under-estimated at many companies out there. Hopefully the Certifications would both help individuals get higher rates for their work and promote the sourcing function and its importance.

Five Concepts

To start with, I will be offering Sourcing Certifications to individual Sourcers, Researchers, and Recruiters. We will be offering certifications to corporate teams later this year.

I’d like the new certifications to reflect true Internet sourcing skills and performance. Here are, in brief, 5 main concepts I believe in. (I could easily write a blog post on each!).

1) A modern Sourcer needs to excel at all available resources (not just Google or just Social Networks) and be able to identify and combine the right resources for a given project.

2) Modern Recruiters need to be Sourcers as well. They must be familiar with the basics of Internet research, no matter whether they work with sourcers or not.

3) Sourcers need to have conceptual understanding of the technologies behind tools and information.

4) Sourcers must practice skills they have learned.

5) Sourcers need to be able to stay up-to-date and modify their tools as necessary.

The Certification Program will consist of webinars, hands-on practice, and tests. I will list Certified Sourcers on my site and recommend their work to others. The details will be announced shortly.

It seems that changes to online search happen so quickly now that the only permanent skill we need to have is the ability to be on top of the news.

Google search is changing as we speak. Pretty much all of the available online “cheat-sheets” or guides to search are outdated. Even Google’s own help pages say  “Some of this content may be outdated”, making it very confusing:

Here are some news that you may have missed. Nothing in the list below makes us happier when we search on Google; thus, the post title “Google-Minus”. I have included some advice, along with the listed changes, on how to keep control over your search results.

• Google search now shows personalized results -“Search plus Your World” – by default. As a researcher, you need to set your preferences to not using personal results. Log out of your gmail account as well.
• Instant search is the default. It slows us down; disable it in your preferences if you haven’t.
• New Google’s Privacy policy just went into effect on March 1,2012. This is nothing too scary but it means that Google unifies data collected about you across all of its services. As a result, your search might be affected by your use of any Google service, such as Calendar or youtube. Go onto your dashboard to control the data that is being collected.
• Google increasingly uses synonyms to “improve” your search experience. To control it and use keywords exactly as you have typed, use the quotation marks around the word(s) or the Verbatim option.
• The Advanced Search Dialog is harder to find, but it is still there for those who want to be guided. Unfortunately for “beginners”, it has just stopped showing the Boolean search string as you type keywords.
• The number of search results displayed is just as unreliable as it has been (why do they show the number? I have no idea). In some cases Google search now never shows the final number even if it’s smaller than 1,000.
• Google shows dynamic pages in its search results and often ranks them high. (I hope it will take care of the issue and fix this eventually.) Here is more detail in a past post: Excluding Junk Results From Search. To avoid this, you can use this search engine: No Junk Results.

That’s it for now. 🙂 (Google-plus, of course, provides a fantastic way to control search results for others, but that is not the current topic.)

There are signs of special characters being somewhat counted for when they are the first symbol in a search; I will report in detail in a future post.

Recruiters and Sourcers:

Do your potential candidates reply to your introductory messages? I’d like to share our experience on what works and what doesn’t.

• It seems to us that email as a way to initially reach “passive candidates” is quickly dying, if not dead already. In rare cases – and only when when it’s personalized – do we get replies.
• The phone works, of course! But I’d recommend calling only close-to-perfect candidates as the initial contact.
• As I predicted back in September of 2009 “social” messaging has become the most productive way to reach “passive” candidates.

I love LinkedIn for providing us with InMails and messages. We get replies to them 10x more often than with “plain” emailing. (Inmails and messages are ways to reach others on LinkedIn, that are very similar, with only one difference.)

When I source, quite often I would find a potential candidate elsewhere – on a forum, on a blog, etc. – and message on LinkedIn. (Why not just search on LinkedIn, you ask? That’s a different subject that is quite interesting.)

There are other platforms work well for messaging.

Here are a few tips on writing messages, based on our experience, that create good response rate. The number one, obvious, tip is to only send messages to qualified people.

We use three approaches to messaging, with variations.

• Ask for help finding the right person for a hard-to-fill position (include the position title, location, a very short description)
• Ask for a good time and a number to call to discuss an opportunity ((include an even shorter description)
• Provide a link to a job description and make a statement that the person is an excellent match; ask to confirm.

In all cases our messages are very brief, they have either no links or just one link to one of our jobs. Messages do contain enough info to reach us months later if the person felt like.

We usually try to check back again in a week or so and often get replies on the second try.

Any other suggestions from my readers?

Many thanks to Hung Lee, the @Wise_Man_Say, for triggering this heated discussion on the Boolean Strings group:

Do you have the time to search for each type of document and on every document storage site? Here are two Custom Search Engines to help with that:

• http://bit.ly/formatfinder
• https://bitly.com/documentfinder

The first search engine http://bit.ly/formatfinder searches for documents of several most popular formats: PDF, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Text. I’ll be adding more later. Those who are fluent in Boolean search know that files of these formats that are uploaded to the open web can be found using the operator filetype: on Google and on Bing.

Did you know, however, that many files of a certain format cannot be found through the filetype: operator? There are document storage sites such as scribd and slideshare that have thousands of those documents, but URLs for those do not have the extensions like .PDF or .docx

Here is the second search engine that searches across 12 most popular document storage sites: https://bitly.com/documentfinder

I haven’t seen CSE’s that do this. You can search across all the sites for resumes quickly and free of charge; besides, there are some resume to be found without using Boolean operators.

Enjoy!

Join us for a Webinar on February 2nd

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/779143194

(Repeating for those who couldn’t make it last time.)
The webinar is for all recruiters and sourcers who are open to increasing their productivity and are interested in finding out more about specific sourcing techniques, Boolean strings, and search engines that they have started using or have heard of.

I will:
– address sourcing questions most frequently asked on the Boolean Strings group and network
– provide an update on searching syntax and techniques that have happened because of recent Google changes
– hold a Q&A session where you could clarify issues around your current sourcing tools, methodologies, and searches for professionals online.

Outline.
1. Boolean Strings FAQ:
What are search strings to target people with given years of experience?
How do I find the names & contact info for attendees of a particular professional conference?
What are the search strings to look for job openings?

Where can I go online to learn more about Boolean Strings?
What are the best beginner training sessions and must have tools?

Should we use the operator AND?
Does the order of the words matter in a search string?
Where and how does the NEAR operator work?

How can I find the email protocol for a given company?
How do I verify an email address?

How can I find the Hidden person’s name on LinkedIn?
How do I X-ray LinkedIn to find people in a certain location?
How do I contact a person whose LinkedIn profile I have found?
Is there a way to invite a 3rd level connection on LinkedIn?
How do I send a message to a group member on LinkedIn without visiting the group?

2. Update on searching: recent changes in Google search.

3. Interactive Q and A session. Bring your questions.

I will provide an up-to-date basic comparison chart for search engines along with a list of examples (previously referenced as “the top 25 Boolean Strings” to all attendees.

Price: $79 includes unlimited Q&A on the material over email for one month. Payment page: http://bit.ly/sourcingwebinars
Title: Boolean Strings: Questions and Answers
Date: Thursday, February 2, 2012
Time: 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM PST

We are about to announce the details of the Sourcing Challenge sponsored by @TheSocialCV

The challenge comes along with a free one week long trial available for all members of the Boolean Strings Network members, from 9AM January 31 till February 6. You will find the sign-up link on the site, along with some video-information on the product. (I wrote a review of the product back in November: TheSocialCV.)

Are you ready?

Please read very carefully!

CHALLENGE

• Find a Software Developer, who has written code for mobile devices, living in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the largest number of social profiles
• Find a bilingual medical professional who has a certification, anywhere in the US, with the largest number of social profiles
• Find a PhD research scientist anywhere in Europe, teaching at a major university, with the largest number of social profiles

Bonus (used in case of a tie): Find as many as possible current employees of companies making search engines, who do not reveal any professional info on their twitter profiles.

You should use TheSocialCV.com; all who sign up will get logins at 9MA Jan 31st. It’s also allowed to use other sources. Please send your entries (responses to the questions above) to [email protected] by Feb 6th. You can send additions and corrections if you like. Please explain your solutions.

Our Esteemed Panel of Judges, consisting of:

• William Fischer
• Balazs Paroczay
• Martin Lee
• Irina Shamaeva

will be reviewing all submissions and will announce the lucky winner shortly after Feb 6, 2012.

Have fun and good luck to all! 🙂

Here is a custom search engine that looks for LinkedIn profiles. Enter a name or a keywords and see the results:

LinkedIn Profiles

Now, let’s search, for example, for

physician cardiology diagnostics MD “Greater Atlanta Area”

Let’s exclude the word “recruiter” from the above search:

physician cardiology diagnostics MD “Greater Atlanta Area” -recruiter

We got fewer results.

Contest warm-up: Did we just exclude recruiters’ profiles or did we also lose any relevant (non-recruiter) profiles in the search results?

CONTEST. Please give an example where excluding a keyword that we don’t want to see on a profile (like we just did) leads to excluding relevant results. Please either use the LinkedIn custom search engine  or a search for LinkedIn profiles using your own Boolean search strings, either on Google or on Bing. Please explain how this happens. (Or, instead, explain why this can’t happen if you believe that it can’t.) Of course, it could be a search for any type of professional in any geographical area.

The first person who sends the correct answer to [email protected] gets a guest pass to the 2-part webinar http://booleanstrings.ning.com/events/extract-candidates-from-linkedin-webinar or a pass to a future webinar.

It is amazing how “gossip” and false rumors spread online!

This post

Google Search Showing Results For Punctuation Marks

points to this post

Google Search, Punctuation Marks and Other Symbols

and viola – big news is made. Did any of the people who re-tweeted it try it out?

Here is a very simple example that shows it doesn’t work.

As the only tweeter user points out in response to my tweet, GrammarGirl (Mignon Fogarty):

Sad clarification on the “Search Google for punctuation” story. You still can’t search for STRINGS that contain punctuation.

It would take TONs of work for Google to start searching for any special characters. By the way, the very first post didn’t say it worked. It said some changes are visible.

Even if you do not really care whether Google searches for commas – it is quite interesting how everyone repeats after each other without checking, and that includes major publications.

Lessons to be learned! 🙂

Yesterday morning I got an email from one of my webinar attendees who is a Sales and Marketing Manager. “I search LinkedIn a lot for lead generation confirmation.”, he writes,  “I would like to select a name and search directly in LinkedIn only. Can you help direct me on the set up?”

Here is how to set this up.

Download Chrome if you don’t have it. Chrome is a great, fast browser.

1. Copy this: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009462381166450434430%3A-woy8fnynf8&num=100&q=%s

2. In the Chrome search engine options, find this row at the bottom of the page:

add a “new search engine name” and a “keyword” of your choice into the first two fields; paste the copied string from above into the “URL” field.

Make this “search engine” the default. (You can go back to the previous default at any time.)

This is it!

Now, if you:

• type a person’s name in the address bar, or
• highlight the-first-and-last-name on the current page and right-mouse click,

you will be able to get to their LinkedIn profile, looked up using the custom search engine LinkedIn Profiles. Of course, this will only work if the person has a public profile.

This can also be used to instantly search for any words appearing on LinkedIn profiles, such as a name plus a keyword, or a title, or target company name(s), etc.

Let me know if it works out for you.