The number of  “search facets” on LinkedIn’s advanced people search dialog goes up with the level of the account. But even “LinkedIn Recruiter” subscribers – those who have the maximum search power within LinkedIn – can’t search for some profile data.

For data that can only be viewed by LinkedIn members, like files attached to profiles or a Twitter ID, we are all out of luck and can’t search for it, period. However, some of the non-searchable data is on the open web… and this provides the answer to the question #1 on the Sourcing Quiz:

Any profile data that:

• cannot be searched inside LinkedIn
• is available on the open web

can be searched using Google.

Here’s an example of a very useful search, locating profiles with a link to a resume (also suggested in a reply to the quiz):

site:www.linkedin.com “location * san francisco bay area” java sql “websites * * * resume”

Here are a few more examples.

We can search for people who have worked at their current job for 2-10 years:

site:www.linkedin.com java developer “location * san francisco bay area”  “present 2..10 years” ,

people who have worked at two (or more) given companies:

site:www.linkedin.com “at google” “at facebook”  marketing director  “location * san francisco bay area” -inurl:dir,

people who stopped working in 2011:

site:www.linkedin.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub “product manager” “2011 * years OR months” -present “location * san francisco bay area” -inurl:dir

There are some useful searches on Bing as well.

There’s more. Using Google’s asterisk in searching for phrases is one other area that we can explore (next time).

Of course, these searches will only find LinkedIn members with public profiles that show more than just the basic data.

Announcing a Sourcing Contest/Quiz. (It’s not easy!)

Please post your answers as replies to this post.

Replying only to some questions, and replying several times is allowed. Repeating someone’s correct answer is fine but will score lower, unless you add some nice explanations or examples. (So the sooner you get some answers in, the more advantage you have!) Repeating an incorrect answer will give you disadvantage. You do not have to answer all questions to win; correct, well explained answers is what we’ll be looking for.
The winner will be announced next week.
The prize is either a 1 hour sourcing training with me, or two guest passes to future sourcing webinars (the winner’s choice). The winner will be featured on the Network.

Ready?

1. What profile information can you search for by X-raying LinkedIn on Google and cannot using LinkedIn people search (at any level of LinkedIn people search –including the advanced search on LinkedIn Recruiter)? Please give an example.
2. What search string would create different results on Yahoo and Bing (would do something useful in the yahoo.com search box and would not on bing.com)?
3. What % of posts on “open” groups on LinkedIn can be indexed by search engines?
4. What can you search for, using a Google custom search engine, that you cannot using the Google search? [Bonus: is there a way to search on Bing using a Google’s CSE?] 5. What are the differences between search results you get by X-raying Google-plus (site: site:plus.google.com <keywords>) and searching within Google-plus (on https://plus.google.com/ )?
6. If you searched on Google and it shows (about) 13,000 results found, what (if anything) can you conclude from that?
7. How is search on Google for “*@accenture.com” (plus some keywords) different from searching for “*\accenture.com” ? You can replace “Accenture” for a company name of your liking. Please explain and give an example.
8. How would you X-ray LinkedIn (on either Google or Bing) to find profiles of sales managers with MBA selling software, located near Chicago, who have a phone number mentioned in their profile?
9. Is it possible that a public LinkedIn profile would show more info than a profile viewed by a LinkedIn member who is logged in?
10. Take a look at the Google help page . What special character that used to be in Google’s cheat sheet is not listed anymore and why?
11. If you have someone’s profile on LinkedIn, what are some ways to find the person’s email address?

[the slides, the handouts for this webinar, and a video recording are available (for a limited time) for $79; one-month support is included]

The class is for those who search for people (candidates, business connections) on the Internet.

Who would benefit: sourcers, recruiters, human resources professionals, hiring managers, sales, marketing, and business development professionals;  all those who would like to experience less frustration and more satisfaction and fun while looking people up on the web.

Learn – or review – the basics of the Boolean search on the Internet:
• How to pick the right keywords and phrases
• How to add the most useful search engine operators and special characters
• What to do if you get no results, the wrong results, or too many results
• How to get the right results quickly and painlessly.

The webinar comes with the slides, the updated annotated “25 Boolean Strings”, and one month of support over email, to encourage the participants to apply the skills in their daily work.

The webinar materials can serve as a basic reference guide for Boolean searches.

Outline:
o The Basics of the Boolean Syntax
o Creating and Modifying Search Strings
o Sourcing Methodology
o Q&A

Searching for Google-plus profiles is no problem at all, whether you are already on Google-Plus or not. Here’s a direct link to a sample search:

Search for people on Google-Plus

– and please compare this with

Search for Google Profiles

See the difference? I have changed just one symbol in the search URL. The latter search returns both Google profiles and Google-plus profiles.

Unlike Google-profiles most Google-plus-profiles have a link to “send an email”. It’s a sourcer’s paradise!

The search for people returns up to 1,000 results. (I think they could do better here.)

We can also X-ray Google-Plus, but apparently Google has not indexed all Google profiles yet (ha!), so people search returns better results. Advanced search operators do work in the dialog. There’s one very subtle difference in the search results display: instead of “Google+” – which is the page title – they show “Google Profile“.

Note: You will not be able to find me on Google Plus (yet).

To learn more about LinkedIn from this post, simply start at the home page. Log out of LinkedIn and you will then see some extra links of interest at the bottom of the page.

I already wrote about the LinkedIn titles in a recent post. The Title Directory provided on the LinkedIn home page doesn’t have the search function, but you can navigate using searches like this.

Another welcome addition is the LinkedIn Updates page. Before this page surfaced on the open web, all we could do is notice the 1st level connections’ updates and recommendations given to and given by the 1st level connections – that is, while we are logged in.

Are you a recruiter? Guess who is likely to update their LinkedIn profile! To view more updated profiles, you can either go through the pages listing updated profiles, using the LinkedIn navigation, or search on Google and (important!) view cached pages.

The Groups Directory shows the open groups (I think; it seems just a little buggy). We couldn’t previously search for open groups. Yet another positive change is that all discussions for the open groups are now on the surface web. To explore that, look at an open group URL while you are still logged out.

Want to do some SEO for your site or for your job posts? Create an open group and share the URLs in the discussions. You can automate that by submitting a news RSS feed to the group.

It seems to me that before the IPO LinkedIn was moving more data into the deep web (and charging for it), and now it’s doing the opposite, bringing some data to the surface web. Hope they will continue doing this! It’s good for us and, I am sure, it does an extra marketing job for LinkedIn.

It’s time to update your X-ray “cheat sheets” if you keep them.

BeKnown is good news! There are lots of posts out there with facts and screen shots, so I skip that.

Here some initial thoughts.

1) It’s fantastic to see potential competition to LinkedIn; Moster has been one of the few big players capable of that. LinkedIn’s quality has been hurt by not having competitors. Maybe LinkedIn will now do some fixing bugs, cleaning up user interface, and keeping features up and prices down as a result. Maybe we’ll even see last names shows in full for 3rd level connections again, what do you think?

2) There’s a large crowd of people that are, like my daughter Jane, on Facebook all the time and rarely or never  on LinkedIn. Looking at the statistics, many of those folks seem likely to get engaged in BeKnown. They will be building profiles from scratch. But LinkedIn already has millions of profiles. Will people will have to choose LI or BK, or will there be a way to mix/sync them?

3) Privacy comes across as the largest perceived threat to BeKnown. Monster’s architects have done quite a bit to protect privacy but users may keep privacy concerns up even if you try to talk them out of that.

4) BeKnown carries an attractive, powerful referral functionality, where friends refer friends to jobs. We haven’t yet seen a referral system in software at this scale. It’s interesting how it will evolve.

5) BeKnown allows companies to show a different side of themselves: their working environment, culture, and hiring, as opposed to marketing that was usually fan pages’ purpose.

It’s not yet clear what “sharing” functionality is going to be like. Can I post a job and share outside of BeKnown? It also remains to see what the surface/open web component is going to be like.

Good luck to BeKnown. I have joined and hope you will, too.

Hi All:

Here’s my business partner’s Julia Tverskaya‘s entry for the SourceCon challenge. Julia and I have been Partners at Brain Gain Recruiting for 6+ years- and I couldn’t have asked for a better partner. Julia is also (like me) a former Software Development Manager and (unlike me) a Chess Master.

Please check it out and vote for her:

CSE Challenge — Julia Tverskaya

This search engine automatically triggers search for resumes of Software Engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area. There’s no need to enter complex Boolean. Try entering keywords like C++ or Java and see the list of matching resumes!

The search engine has two refinements, one for senior and one for junior people.

Hope you like it. If you do, please don’t forget to vote!

This is recent: LinkedIn has exposed more of its data to search engines than before, thus allowing us to do some people search using X-ray (i.e. the operator site:). I am talking about a large set of data below the URL “linkedin.com/title” (please note: “title” here is simply part of the URL – not an operator or a keyword).

To see what I’m pointing to, first, log out of your LinkedIn account. Next, try a search like this, for example:

site:linkedin.com/title “mac developer” (or add your own keywords instead of “mac developer”).

You will see pages and pages of results that are lists of people with URLs like this

www.linkedin.com/title/team-lead/at-softvision, i.e.

www.linkedin.com/title/<title keywords>/at-<company-name>

And, of course, people who are your third level connections or are outside your network will be shown with their full names and info included.

This give us an opportunity to explore titles and explore lists of people at a certain company.

Here’s an example: site:linkedin.com/title inurl:at-ibm

Here’s another example: site:linkedin.com/title/software-developer

Cool, isn’t it?

Here’s a new Custom Search Engine for you! 🙂

Hidden Resumes