Many of us would agree that LinkedIn Groups are a great way to post jobs to your target audience. While Discussions allow to include a URL to an outside site or a blog, the Jobs section only allows to post a title and text. If you feel like including the original job post URL, so that candidates can apply on your site, do the following:

• Post a discussion item in the discussion section, with the “apply” link included
• Flag it as a Job:

Now this post is in the job section – and the group members have an easy way to go and apply on your site using the link that you have included:

Like it? Feel like posting the job to several groups? Share a link to your job post with those groups and then move the post to the Jobs section in each group. It’s also faster than posting  jobs individually.

Oh, and there’s one more advantage: others (such as helpful people who know of a referral, or members of your recruiting team) can now easily “share” your job post with LinkedIn members, post to updates and repost to other groups.

If you search for people on LinkedIn, it shows the distribution of the results along its search filters such as Industry, Current Company, etc. I like it a lot! I use the feature quite often to select either current or past companies to be from my target company list, to narrow down the search.

Here is something I have noticed and want to share with you. If you have a business account, it turns out that you do not see the distribution along some filters. Here are two screenshots to compare. I searched for “SAP MDM Consultant”  from a business account (for the first screenshot) and from a basic account (for the second screenshot):

If you have a basic (free) account, you see more:

– and you can, for example, based on that, decide which groups to join so that you can send messages to your candidates.

1. Boolean search strings should be very long and complex to work well.
2. There are top 5 (or 10 or 20) Boolean search strings that gurus know of. I would do great if I could find out what those strings are!
3. If I have access to Boolean strings templates all I have to do is add keywords, and the search is done.
4. To search for email addresses all you do is put *@company.com into Google, and you find them.
5. Boolean search will soon be completely replaced by semantic search.
6. Metasearch engines obviously search better than individual search engines – they look into multiple sources.
7. Sometimes the Yahoo search engine will find results that neither Google nor Bing can find.
8. If I only had money for LinkedIn Recruiter, I would be able to find anybody with the given skills on LinkedIn.
9. I need to choose between Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, depending on which network works best.
10. Internet Sourcing is incredibly hard. Until I am done studying all the materials and sites I can’t even begin sourcing.

Anybody wants to add more? 🙂

Dear All:

I am giving a LinkedIn for Sourcing and Recruiting webinar on Friday 9/24.

I am preparing a webinar on Bing.

If you have any requests or suggestions for future topics (advanced search, Boolean, Deep Web, Semantic, Tools, Twitter, etc.), please leave a comment or send me a note.

-Irina

P.S. I am available for custom webinars or face to face training for your company.

Google Custom Search Engines let us hide “unreadable” operators and reuse them. Search engines on Recruiting Blogs, CVFox, Big5Hire, Referyes are all custom search engines or are based on this technology.

Custom engines have their tricky side but it’s not too hard to create a basic one. On your control panel, use the sections “sites” and “refinements” to start with, and just with those two one can create wonders.

Custom engines let us do some things that are not possible to do in Google search itself. As an example, we can:

• use refinements (an example would be to search for doc files only or excel files only)
• expand the max number of words and symbols in a search string
• use special characters in a search; that one is tricky (thanks, Mike Notaro!)
• use URL patterns to define sites to search in; the patterns can contain special characters such as ? or @

Here are some engines I created a while ago. (When you try them out, notice refinements.) I hope to get back and design more. If you create one or discover some exciting features in the technology, please share!

• Email Addresses Search (in resumes or pages)
• Emails in URLs
• List Locator
• LinkedIn People Finder (International)
• LinkedIn People Finder (USA)
• Tweeple in Recruiting and HR
• Deep Web

Custom engines are not likely to decide that you are a bot. For those of us who struggle with Google’s “I’m human” dialog lately, it’s a big plus.

Bing has very limited documentation at the search site. There’s much more available if you just dig a little deeper. Here is the full operator documentation posted to the Boolean Strings Network, take a look.

Here are some examples of using the advanced syntax:

Looking for an Email Pattern

Searching for Resumes

Searching for LinkedIn Profiles (thanks for the hint on Glen Cathey’s blog today).

… and there’s so much more.

Let’s explore!

Comments with examples are very welcome.

Being a really slow typer I love to be helped. However, I don’t think that recently introduced instant search is likely to become a favorite tool. Here’s just a few reasons:

• I use Google operators, and if you do, too, you may notice that it’s slower with instant search than without. Just try typing intitle:resume OR inurl:resume with and without instant search (luckily, we can turn it on and off).
• With instant search on, I can only see 10 results on one page; I like to see 100.
• Words guessed by Google may be of more interest to Google (since it would show more ads to click on) than to me.

What do you think?

In our practice as recruiters once in a while we look at “confidential” resumes, with the name and the contact info stripped off. If we are curious to find out more about the person, we can try to check the person out on the web, perhaps starting with LinkedIn.

Here is a quick example. Let’s look at a resume from the job board Jobs for IT and ERP.

SAP
PROFILE
Senior Applications Architect … + years of SAP product experience.
…EXPERIENCE/PROJECT WORK
SAP Americas Mar  till Date
…
BearingPoint Jan  to Mar 
As a Senior consultant with this company, worked on a number of clients in the areas of SAP R/ and ECC .. …
IBM Corporation Aug  to Jan 
Initially joined their global services division after which worked for one of the internal divisions within IBM. Worked on a production support and new project development activities including for a large upgrade from . to .c initiative involving + users and  different geographies...

Searching for phrases in quotation marks may prove helpful:

site:linkedin.com “Initially joined their global services division after which worked for one of the internal divisions within IBM”

…it’s not always as easy as in this case, but using company names and titles it’s quite often possible to locate the person in question.

So, the info is out there and nothing is wrong in locating it. Of course, we must remain professional in ways we might use it. At the same time, we should not forward resumes of our candidates anywhere without their approval, even in a “confidential” format.

I Won the #SourceCon Contest and will be going to the SourceCon later this month at the Spy Museum in Washington DC! Read more at

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