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 🙂

Life is not boring if you are a sourcer or a recruiter and use LinkedIn; most of us do. Here is a brief list of several major recent changes on LinkedIn that affect our work for sure. Please feel free to add to this in the comments.

1. Company search. We have many “facets” to search for available in the newly implemented dialog; that’s great. The search algorithm implementation is quite “interesting” though. If someone at a company has a keyword on their profile, the whole company will be included in search results. Expect to see member’s and company’s profiles that show up in your search that have little to do with your keyword.
2. Job posts on groups have been renamed to “career discussions” and are now hidden under a link that is not obvious for a group visitor. The Jobs Tab on Groups is now taken over by paid LinkedIn job posts and is searcheable. The “career discussions” remain without a search function.
3. Company Profiles have rich information available for adding in the products and services section; it now can even include video. That’s good news! (Still on my to-do list for Brain Gain Recruiting).
4. Public profile settings have been moved from “account settings” to very near “editing profile” function and are likely to be quickly discovered by anyone who edits their profile. Most members are likely to make it more shallow, I think.
5. Skills have become a part of everyone’s profile and that is good news. Search for skills is separate from people search (why?). “Skills” also made it to public profiles. Very small % of LinkedIn members have filled them out so far – and you should!
6. Messaging on Groups is still there but you have to dig deep to discover it: the search results of fellow group members now show only the “Send InMail” option. In general, if you don’t see an option previously available, don’t panic right away (I have to admit that I did recently myself); it may be hidden somewhere on the site. Of course, most of us see the tendecies and expect certain featues to be diminishing in the near future.  If you have doubts about sending messages try this link – it still works: send me a message; you can modify the link to send a message to any person who’s in the same group as you are.
7. Sharing is now possible not just on your status line, within groups and with connections; you can enter any email address to share a link with. Not bad! Just needs a little debugging.

LinkedIn Profile (happy to connect)

[Sorry – this offering has been discontinued; check the download page for available materials]

While I can’t possibly support hundreds of people who requested the “top 25 search strings”, here I am offering affordable support and advice. The list of strings alone may not be that helpful; it doesn’t contain instructions as to how to use it.

Here is a way for you to get to the next level in your Internet sourcing skills and Boolean search online. If you do use advanced search but don’t get “the right” results, here’s a chance to start getting them!

This is an excellent value for beginner-to-intermediate sourcers and recruiters.

For only $29 I am offering

The Sourcer Starter Set:

• Slides for the webinar “Boolean Strings and Beyond” (40+ slides)
• Slides for the webinar “Customizing the Top 25 Strings” (40+ slides); the updated list of Boolean strings is included (added short comments on the strings)
• One month of email support

Please note: you will have to practice daily to make good use of the “starter set”.

Let me get straight to the point. It seems like the Boolean operator AND – that is supposed to be implied – now does make a difference on Google.

Compare, for example,

digital AND games AND advertising Nyc | new-york “account manager ” intitle:resume OR inurl:resume -jobs

with

digital games AND advertising Nyc | new-york “account manager ” intitle:resume OR inurl:resume -jobs

(this is the search I happen to run at the moment; I don’t use AND’s in my practice but tried them per a student’s suggestion).

I am going to explore this. My preliminary advice to you is to stop using AND in your searches.

(For those not familiar with the terminology, X-ray means using the operator site: on Google or on Bing/Yahoo.)

Search for profiles on LinkedIn by using X-ray has been one of the favorite sourcing techniques. The reason why this has been possible is that LinkedIn allowed its members to have “public profiles” with quite a bit of info, visible to search engines.

You know why I think X-Raying LinkedIn may be a technique that is not going to survive? Well, just do a search like this and click on a few results:

X-Ray LinkedIn

This is how some public profiles now look.

My profile still shows quite a bit of info; perhaps, not for too long.

We have never seen that little information before. Of course, these people will no longer be found by search engines as soon as their new profiles are indexed.

This means that LinkedIn is pulling information into the deep web. (And that is just days after exposing the newly added “skills” on the profiles on the  surface web.) If you search LinkedIn profiles, I strongly suggest expanding your network so that you can see more profiles at least for a while longer.

Any other thoughts or observations?