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Trust and Privacy on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Groups was a great invention and, I think, remains the best way to source on LinkedIn. A member can belong to up to 50 groups, send messages within the group for free and post jobs for free.

The groups are undergoing a major redesign where the News are now blended with Discussions. You also see a moving row of posts with images and can vote on the posts you like. At the moment of this writing – July 9,2010 – some groups are keeping the old user interface and some have moved to the new user interface.

Another major change is that now you can’t include a group membership in your people search if you are not a paying member. The pay for searches that include groups is quite high.

It’s useful to narrow down on group members! Do you have to upgrade now? Here are some points to review, before you do.

1. You can search members within a group and get up to 500 results even if you are a basic member:

2. You can narrow down your advanced people search to only members of the groups you belong to. In the results, you will see which groups those are. You will be able to send a message to each person in the results list:

3. You can use X-Ray. This is how you can find people belonging to a group on Google:
SAP “Twitter for Sourcing and Recruiting ” site:linkedin.com
(replace “SAP” for your own keywords).

It’s interesting to see what is the next feature to become paid on LinkedIn. What are your guesses?

This is a very important point for a sourcer or anybody who uses search engines.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing will never show more that 1,000 results per search.

Many of us know that, but with that comes the fact that an announced approximate numbers above 1,000 cannot be trusted.

Any “number of results” displayed by each of these search engines is just a wild guess, and the approximation that can be off by orders of magnitude . The engines are not trying to fool us and don’t claim the numbers have close relevance to the reality either.

Numbers of results, especially if there’s more than 1,000, change as you go through the pages of results, based on the search engine trying to make a better guess (try it).

It’s unfortunate, but we can never rely on the numbers that are over 1,000 for any conclusions. As an example, you cannot tell which of two search strings bring more results, or which of the two search engines found more results based on the numbers (if they are large). The only reliable numbers that we see are less than 1,000, and only with the “omitted results included”.

Note, that I am not even talking here about results that are relevant but have not been found.

Why wouldn’t the search engines display the correct numbers of results? The answer is simple. It is just not possible with the huge amount of info to go through, large – but still limited – storage and reasonable time frame to respond to our queries.

If you search, for example, on Google, you will find some interesting articles dedicated to the matter and also more than a thousand articles making mistakes on the number of results assumption.

Of course, this made our “how many resumes are there on the internet?” contest pretty difficult. 🙂

Do you know of all the ways to use Twitter? Let’s do a simple search and we will find out that…

• Twitter is a powerful tool for learning & sharing. …
• Twitter is a great tool for small business – especially restaurants…
• Twitter is a really great tool for finding business
• Twitter is a great tool for communicating with current and new users of your website
• Twitter is a fantastic aggregation tool for the wealth of content out there
• Twitter Is A Powerful Tool For Hypnotists
• Twitter is a great tool for marketers.
• Twitter is a fantastic tool for your IM business
• Twitter is a simple tool for communication and improving your social network, and for influencing people
• Twitter Is A Great Tool For Bloggers
• Twitter is a great tool for communicating. If a user is trying to get ‘paid’ results from it and not being successful, maybe they need to rethink …
• Twitter is a great tool for government transparency. I’m well aware politicians are regular human beings…
• Twitter is a fantastic tool for many things. You can use it to talk to your friends from work.
• Twitter is a fairly clunky tool for the delivery of customer service, …
• Twitter is a great tool for brand awareness and their interest is to use this to extend brand reach
• Twitter is a powerful tool for spammers because a single infected Twitter account could broadcast to tens of thousands of people
• Twitter is a great tool for direct marketing. The more followers you have, the more people who will be exposed to you product/message
• Twitter is a great tool for nonprofits. At the Genesis Network, we have been experimenting with new ways to utilize Twitter more effectively. …
• Twitter is a great tool for increasing your social media awareness on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, etc.
• Twitter is a great tool for social bookmarking. …
• Twitter is simply a niche tool for communications junkies.
• Twitter is a good tool for getting your site indexed and ranked.
• Twitter is a revolutionary tool for businesses who are trying to create a community
• Twitter is a great tool for Museums to build communities around their brands online
• Twitter is a great tool for improving your writing by helping build buzz about yourself and forcing you to edit your work. 
• Twitter is a wonderful tool for self promotion.
• Twitter is a great tool for companies that want to engage in conversation with their current and potential customers.
• Twitter is a valuable tool for job-seekers. Most recruiters are on Twitter right now, so it’s important to start developing an online …
• Twitter is a priceless effective business tool for marketers, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, event planners, …
• Twitter is a great tool for research
• Twitter is a great tool for activists to network with other activists.
• Twitter is a great tool for following far away events (live) such as riots, revolutions & red carpet events.

There’s a lot more…

Here’s a LinkedIn  tip. If you copy a people search URL from a premium member and use it for a basic member, it will work just fine. Of course, you will need to decide whether you are up for using it or not.

Let me illustrate it. Compare the two sides of the screenshot below . They were both created using the URL http://bit.ly/dB7cqY (paste it in your browser).

On the left  side you see a piece of a premium holder search screen with some choices picked; on  right side you see a screen shot ot a basic user account with the exactly same premium (though visually disabled) options selected.

(Someone could probably create a table of substrings that need to be used in the URLs  per each premium field, per each of its  options. It looks pretty strightforward;  you need to add something  like

…keepFacets=keepFacets&page_num=1&facet_P=1&facet_SE=0+5&facet_F=5…

Twitter for Sourcing, Recruiting & Marketing – Thursday, June 24 – 1:00 PM ET

How do you find someone’s email address? Using the symbol @ in searches on Google is useless since it’s ignored along with most of the special characters. We know ways to figure out a company email pattern via clever Google searches using the asterisk * (ask Gary Cozin ).

Unfortunately, our methods may not work in some cases. Besides, some companies, even large ones, don’t have a consistent pattern.

Here’s how to see which one of your guesses about someone’s email address is correct – in case the person is a LinkedIn member.

1. Enter ALL of your guesses into a text or a CSV file.

2. Upload it to LinkedIn as “Imported contacts”. (Don’t invite anybody! This may not be a good idea.)

3. Check out your “Imported contacts”.  See which email was the right one?

(By the way I am happy to connect on LinkedIn; see my profile.)

žWhy we must use the Internet to source candidates:

• To use its vast resources and get ahead of the competition
• To find candidates that we would not find otherwise
• To communicate with potential candidates in a network context
• To cross-reference  prospects so that we are on the phone with the right people

Here is a cool blog post contest. Post a blog (anywhere) with an estimate of the number of resumes on the Internet and win a ticket to #TRUsource in Atlanta.

Please email Geoff Webb at [email protected] with a reference to your post; please also share on the Boolean Strings network.

Also, to help get this off the ground, I am offering my Google-Based sourcing DVD to a randomly selected person out of the first five people who post.

Please feel free to post your answers here as comments on the Boolean Strings Network.

I looked around this morning and here are some interesting numbers I was able to pick:

* With more than 35 million resumes dispersed over 40000 Web-based locations, recruiters and hiring managers are spending more than 65% of their time …

* Some experts say that there are now over 16 million resumes floating around the Internet. Monster.com, the largest online job board, has more than 20 …

* With Over 52 Million Resumes Floating Over The Internet Everyday,. How Will You Find Just One?…

* There are an estimated 100+ million resumes posted on the Internet. TalentHook allows you…

* There are over three million resumes on the larger internet sites. Thus, it is important to breakthrough the “clutter”…

* The Toolkit also includes our Search the Web feature, which provides access to over 7 million resumes posted on the internet.

* With an estimated 100 million resumes posted on the internet, rest assure that your next great hire can be found online. So stop paying huge recruiting …

* There are nearly 15 million resumes on the Internet today. Most are located on fee-based job boards, many of which cost thousands of dollars to purchase. …

* Is my resume really getting seen in a pile of 40 million other resumes on the internet? I have excellent skills and qualifications, but will anyone find me …

Have fun with the contest!

Irina