Some sourcers are a bit of “perfectionists“; they aim to craft the perfect searches. While (I admit!) I could enhance that side of my personality, I would like to offer some thoughts that may help you struggle less and feel more at ease while sourcing.

In our group and network discussions you may come across something like: “this Google search string brings non-resumes” or “your search didn’t bring some relevant LinkedIn profiles” as a criticism, or suggestion for improvement.

But is our goal to:

• create a search that would bring no false positives?
• create a search that would bring all of the right results?
• create “the” Boolean string that would do all the sourcing?

Of course not. The goal is to find most relevant results in a short time frame – and take action, such as get in touch with those relevant people and discuss business. So, I suggest to relax the rules:

• a few wrong results is OK if they don’t slow me down or take more screen space than is convenient;
• in most cases I will not find some relevant results;
• long and complex Boolean strings (or LinkedIn searches, or resume databases searches) are hard to use. What’s even more important, differently constructed searches may pick different results.

Search Engine Optimization is a tricky area. But it’s less tricky on LinkedIn than on Google and Bing. Here is a top hint on how to make your company profile be one of the first listed in a keyword search. Let’s look at what LinkedIn writes on their blog about their new company search algorithm:

“When searching for a company, we not only look across the words used to describe that company but also the words that the company’s employees use to describe themselves on their LinkedIn profiles.”

(That’s an interesting way to program the search. This means, by the way, that if one of your employees mentions, say, yoga or snowboarding, your company is likely to be shown in a search for these keywords as well. )

So, the bottom line is: ask your employees to add your target keywords to their profiles and see your company go up in the search results list.

As an example, below you see a screenshot listing UK companies that are found in the “SAP recruitment” search. If you belong to one of these companies, you can now try to get higher up in the list using the hint.

Keep in mind that LinkedIn doesn’t recognize variations of a word, so, say, sourcer, sourcers,and sourcing would be separate words to optimize for.

Please let me know how this works for you!

[The webinar is over. Please check the Downloads section for available training materials, or let me know if you’d want to arrange training on related topics.]

A joint UK / USA production !

Join us for some of the latest sourcing techniques in this 90 minute webinar that looks across LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

This online training session is hosted by Irina Shamaeva, Master Sourcer and SourcCon winner, expert on Internet search and sourcing tools and Martin Lee, veteran recruiter and sourcing techniques strategist.

We’ll discuss tips and tricks that enable you as a recruiter to find job seekers and passive candidates that others do not, and find the right people faster than your competition.

One month email support – with both of us! – and slide share is included.

Wednesday 11th May at 9.00 a.m PST, noon EST, 5 p.m. London time.

Price is $79 per participant  (once you register, you will be forwarded to the page).

We will bring you dozens of little-knows tips to take home and apply in your practice, along the lines of these topics:

• LinkedIn: Utilizing Signal, Company Search, Mass Messaging, Unlocking Hidden Info
• Facebook: Advanced Search, Messaging and Video-Messaging
• Twitter: Exploring Your Competition
• X-Raying LinkedIn Using Invisible Tags on Google and Yahoo/Bing
• People  Search Engines
• Excel in Sourcing

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
[this webinar is over] Space is limited.

Title: ADVANCED SOURCING TECHNIQUES – POWERFUL, CREATIVE AND LITTLE KNOWN TRICKS AND TIPS
Date: Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Time: 5:00 PM GMT (noon EST; 9 AM PST). 90 minutes long.

It’s always a challenge to include a range of years of experience in a particular area when searching on the open web. With the  new LinkedIn Skills section – that shows up in public profiles by default – we now have a unique way to do that.

Check it out. The following string uses Google’s Numrange function, Google’s asterisk “*” that stands for a word or a few words, and the X-ray operator site:

Posting a paid job on LinkedIn could be well worth the money spent. A good reason for that is the job’s visibility, and not just on LinkedIn. Post a job, and Google picks it up in a matter of seconds. Set up a Google alert and you will see that. Jobs are also listed on your company page, making it more complete.

However, my current recommendation is to skip the extra pay for the “Unlock Matches”, where LinkedIn promises to automatically find candidates for you. As attractive as it may sound, the technology is just not there yet. I could write an article explaining why I think so, but I’d say our experience is what proves it best. (Of course, I might be wrong. If you are a recruiter with a positive experience finding candidates by auto-matching by any system – as opposed to a vendor of semantic search systems for candidates, – could you please leave a comment? I’d be very interested to hear from you.)

I suggest though that you take a closer look at the profiles LinkedIn picks when you post a job. Mouse over a profile and you will see plenty of info to locate the candidate yourself.

(By the way, if you do post a job for your company, I suggest asking a colleague who is new to LinkedIn.)

What has your experience been?

Here is our Super-Sourcing Quiz, also posted on the Ning network. You are all welcome to post your answers in reply to the post. The person who does best will be featured on the network. All members who correctly respond to the complete set of questions will get a guest pass to one of my webinars.

Ready?

1. If you search on Google using several keywords, and a page that comes up doesn’t have a keyword you had used in the search string, how can that happen? Please list a few possibilities.

2. The same on Twitter. If you search on Twitter using several keywords, and a tweet that comes up doesn’t have a keyword you had used in the search string, how can that happen?

3. The same for company search on LinkedIn. You search in the company search dialog using a keyword, click on a company that come up in the search, and the description doesn’t have this word; how can this happen?

4. How does Google rank tweets?

5. Is it possible for a public profile to show more information than a profile seen within LinkedIn?

6. Which posts from an open LinkedIn group can be found by Google/Bing? What about groups that are not open?

7. Can you search LinkedIn for profiles with resumes attached to them?

8. Is there a way to see a LinkedIn status update for someone outside your network?

9. What (if any) is the difference between the operator site: on Google and on Bing?

10. What are some ways to find an email address based on a LinkedIn profile?

We’ll run the quiz for a week. Have fun! 🙂

Thanks to Balazs Paroczay, one of the top sourcers on the Boolean Strings Group, we have learned that we can now search for LinkedIn group members from Google using the word “logo”.

Here’s a sample string Balazs has suggested. This will work with groups that used to be quite impossible to X-ray because of their non-unique group names. As an example, you can search for members of the group “Deloitte.” by searching for “Deloitte logo“. (Of course, we will only find people who display the group name on their profile and display that info on their public profile.)

Great!

So, how come Google searches for something that is not visible on the page?

If you are curious, here is an explanation. The word “logo” is there in the profile page’s HTML code under the “alt” tag. This tag, in fact, does show the information in some cases, namely, if the image is not available. This happens in special browsers for visually impaired and also in a general purpose text browser called Lynx. I have made the following screenshot using Lynx.

(That’s what Computer User Interfaces looked like about 20-25 years ago; imagine that!)

Watch for another post coming up: two more “invisible” tags for X-raying.

Really good hands-on sourcers rarely try to create “perfect” search strings so that they would only show relevant results or would cover all of the relevant results. While it’s a nice search exercise, the truth is that it is quite often not possible and is not our goal. What matters is not the search string, but the “top” results that makes sense to look into further, and the top potential prospects to call on the phone.

What helps the sourcing productivity – big time! – is using parsing, filtering, and sorting within the results we get from general web searches (sometimes with the use of parsing tools).

I have been hesitating giving a webinar on MS Excel since I am not sure of a “sexy” title for it (let me know if you can come up with one 🙂 ), but I believe that Excel remains a must-use tool for any sourcer or recruiter. As with Google’s advanced operators, we can do most of useful work in Excel with just a few of its capabilities.

Let me list some here.

1) The Data menu has the Sort and the “Remove duplicates” (a.k.a. Advanced) functions available.

2) If you choose “Filter” you are able to pick only cells that have certain substrings in them.

3) There are two magic characters in Excel:

• * means “any number of characters”
• ? means “one character”

Example #1: filter a column in Excel with email addresses and select those ending in .?? – you will be getting mostly “international” email addresses such as ending in .uk, .au, etc.

Example #2:

Use ? or * in replace-all function to clean up your cells.

In the example above (that comes from using Outwit Hub along with LinkedIn) replace *key= by <empty string>, then replace &* by <empty string> to get a clean column of IDs.

Hi All,

Have you ever participated in a sourcing contest? Want to try it? It’s a lot of fun! Here you go:

I have a former classmate who has moved to the UK and is a beginner sourcer. The guy is pretty shy and, though he has joined Twitter, LinkedIn, and has even tried to start blogging, he still needs some advice. The first person to invite him to join (any) LinkedIn group where he can learn about sourcing is our winner. Note, you need to email my friend and use his full first name, spelled correctly, otherwise he’s not likely to respond. A slight trace of his online presence can be seen below and on the front page of  the Boolean Network .

You will not need to use any tools or have advanced technical knowledge. I will post the contest results on the Ning network as well, and will also tweet about it.

The prize is attending my popular webinar about LinkedIn changes that I am repeating on Thursday 3/31 @ 1 PM EST or a credit towards a future webinar.

Have fun!
Cheers,
Irina

P.S. Here is a message from my friend:

Hi everybody! Are you going to participate in the sourcing contest today? You will be looking for me 🙂

D.N.

Update from the Shy Sourcer at 1:20 PM PST on Monday:

Two people have emailed me, I am delighted! Our winners are: Megan and Monali. Congratulations!

The competition was fierce! Several people sent me InMails, and invitations, commented on my blog, followed me on Twitter @shysourcer. Look how many channels sourcers have these days! I got a couple of emails where my name wasn’t spelled right as well. One person even found a real high school buddy of Irina’s who lives in San Francisco now.

The winners did it just right, with about 30 seconds between their emails.

Thank you all! I had lots of fun.

Can you still send a message to any group member on LinkedIn, no matter what the type of your account is and whether the person is your 2nd or 3rd level connection?

The answer is YES; so far you still can. Want to know how? Read on.

When we search for people, we used to see the “send message” link handy across the name of the fellow group member. This happens no more:

Of course, InMails is a great tool but it costs money while messaging is free.

When this change occurred, many of us could see that useful “send message” link when we click through to the profile. In most cases, now this doesn’t happen either:

But it’s not time to give up yet! You can still send a message. Here are two options.

1. Find the person in the group you both belong to and you will see the desired link to your right:

2. Figure out the person’s LinkedIn ID…

… and send a message using “sending a message link” with the ID inserted:

(Please note, this will only let you send messages to your fellow group members or your first level connections; inserting a random user ID in the URL above is not going to let you send a message.)

Hope this helps!

-Irina

My LinkedIn Profile – Happy to connect on LinkedIn 🙂