Find lists and directories of people with contact info by selecting refinements

List Locator

Irina’s Email Addresses Search

LinkedIn provides advanced capabilities to search for candidates. We also know how to X-ray LinkedIn. One problem is, though, that the majority of LinkedIn users have profiles that are barely filled out. Quite often all they have is a list of titles and companies. While these people may be fantastic potential candidates, they haven’t put the right keywords in their profiles for us to find them. If this is the case, one of the ways to still locate these people is to look by LinkedIn group memberships.

Here’s an example. Suppose I am looking for candidates with secret clearances of some sort. The potential candidate may have no clearance-related words in the profile, but may, as an example, belong to the LinkedIn group “Cleared Connections”. If person’s profile also shows employers that are likely to hire cleared people, we can reasonably expect that the person has a clearance as well.

To find those candidates, one option is to join the group “Cleared Connections”, use the LinkedIn advanced people dialog and look for candidates just within this group. (Did you know that you can restrict your choice of people search results by one or more of your group memberships?)

Or, you could do a Google X-ray search (add your keywords to narrow it down)

inurl:in OR inurl:pub site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory “Cleared Connections” <your keywords>

Or, try

LinkedIn People Finder

Enter keywords (such as a company name, or a skill for a job opening), then select one of the refinements: recruiters, HR, etc.

Recruiters and HR People on Twitter

Did you know you can email a custom search engine to a colleague? Google provides us with a piece of HTML source code to include on a site, which you can also just save as an HTML file. You can then email it to someone as an attachment. If you have a team of sourcers, it’s a nice way to share searching techniques.

Did you notice these new features on Google?

1. Search within a Date Range and Sort by Date.

While this was available to “geeks” before, Google has made this really simple now. Pick a date range from the search results page using the “show options” link.

Important! If you pick a date range (say, search posts within the last year), Google allows you to sort by date.  If you have over 1,000 results, this allows you to see the 1,000 most recent results as opposed to the  “most relevant” as decided by Google.

You can also use the cool graphical UI for “timeline” available under the “show options”.

2. Search Nearby.

Looking for resumes? You can search for your usual “intitle:resume OR inurl:resume” and then just select the target geographical area and not worry about area codes, zip codes and all that!

Let’s not get too excited though: the Nearby search on Google will only pick up some results; a lot of those will be from local universities. If you would like fuller coverage you may want to use all those area codes, zip codes and city names just as you used to.

3.  “Images from the page”. Please note, this is different than the image search. This will help you decide which pages to view; there are other creative uses that I will write about later.

4. Page previews is another cool option.

5. Pages Not Yet Visited (as if Google had heard a question from the audience at the recent #trusource event in London!)

6. Option to Search in Discussions

Remember reading about clever Boolean strings that bring up forum posts? No need to try very hard now since Google provides that. The options are: 1) Forums 2) Q&A. You can also sort by date and choose between short, medium and long posts.

7. Updates (real time search) Google introduced it about 2 months ago. The recent addition to your real time results now include facebook and myspace, in addition to twitter.

Please note: you can’s access some of these features from the Advanced dialog and can’t have Google alerts send you based on these selections. You need to be on the results page to access the features. If you are technically inclined, try noticing the URLs of your search results and you can then create prepackaged strings for reuse.

Happy Googling!

Follow me on Twitter

The field is set!