Category Archives: LinkedIn

Google Search: The Asterisk Wildcard and Punctuation

Google_Search_Masters by by renatotarga via creative commons_BW_invert

Think you know all there is to know about Google search?

I was recently asked a question regarding the use of the asterisk when searching on Google, specifically in conjunction with certain punctuation.

This person was under the impression that if you used the equal sign on either side of an asterisk when searching Google, it would function as a multiple word wildcard operator. For example, searching for [linux=*=administrator] should return results of linux system administrator, linux systems administrator, linux network administrator, linux server administrator, etc.

The short answer is that Google ignores most punctuation, and that there is no need to combine the asterisk with any other punctuation or symbols for it to perform as a single or multiple word wildcard.

The long answer is much more interesting. I decided to perform some experiments with Google’s wildcard asterisk and I uncovered a few oddities and unsolved mysteries. I’m curious if you might be able to shed some light on them. But first, I will show you exactly how you can make good use of Google’s asterisk when searching for resumes on the Internet, as well as when X-Ray searching LinkedIn and Twitter.  Continue reading

How to Bulk-Accept LinkedIn Invitations to Connect

LinkedIn_Bulk_Invitation_Accept_0LinkedIn has been making changes to their interface and one thing I noticed back in March is that I could no longer select multiple invitations to connect and accept them all at once from the main inbox page.

It took a little bit of exploring the new inbox interface and functionality before I figured out how to be able to bulk accept LinkedIn invites like I had grown accustomed to. Then the other day I was on Twitter and I had made a comment about bulk accepting LinkedIn invites and received a number of responses from people asking how to do it.

I had assumed everyone knew how to select and accept multiple invitations to connect – but you know what they say about assumptions…

So – I’m here to show you 2 different ways of bulk accepting invitations to connect on LinkedIn. Continue reading

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook July 2009 Traffic Data

Twitter_Facebook_LinkedIn_Traffic_Data_July_2009I’m always interested in the traffic for the “Big Three” social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), and I discovered today that  www.compete.com just released July’s data. 

And here it is!

Facebook

While Facebook’s been on a tear of growth as it passed the 250M member mark, Facebook only added 117,142 unique U.S. visitors in July 2009 . That seems like a large number – but with how large Facebook has grown to,  that’s only 0.1%, which is the lowest growth rate Facebook’s posted in the last 12 months.

Could we see a drop in August?

We cannot overlook, however, that Facebook saw 2,103,776,022 visits July. Yes, 2.1 Billion – which is nearly an 11% increase from the 1,898,910,472 visits logged to Facebook from the U.S. in June. So while monthly unique visitors has stagnated, those who are visiting are visiting more.  Continue reading

LinkedIn by the Numbers – Searching by Title and Clearance

LinkedIn_Why_Join_LinkedIn2 from www.linkedin.comEver wonder how many executives are on LinkedIn?

How about accountants, software engineers, “Big 4” employees, or people with TS/SCI clearances? 

Well I did. So I decided to run a number of searches for common titles in information technology, finance and accounting, recruiting and human resources, business development, social media, and administrative support and publish the results for the world to see.  I also searched for “Big 4” employees, people that mention specific security clearances, and executives of all types to see how many results would be returned, and I broke the results down by global/U.S. totals.

Method

Unless otherwise noted, I searched specifically for current titles while using LinkedIn’s advanced search interface. When I created the searches below, I was not trying to be totally exhaustive – I chose to target a sample of some of the most common titles.  Continue reading

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook June 2009 Traffic Data

I routinely check www.compete.com for the latest traffic data for my favorite social media sites and was pleasantly surprised to find June’s data has been released. I will review the June traffic data for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (aka, the “Big Three”).

Twitter

Twitter experienced explosive growth from February 2009 to April 2009, going from 7.9M to 19.4M unique U.S. visitors before leveling off around 19.5M visitors between April and May. However, after that brief cooling period, Twitter has experienced another spurt of growth, adding approximately 3.2M unique U.S. visitors (16.57%) to hit an all time high of 23M unique U.S. visitors in June. Okay, 22,997,148 to be exact. Continue reading

How to Use LinkedIn in Your Job Search

Eariler this month Harry Urschel brought a post of his to my attention where he showed job seekers that you don’t have to have a huge LinkedIn network to use LinkedIn effectively to find a job. I wholeheartedly concur. Not only do you not have to have a large network of connections on LinkedIn, there are MANY ways to leverage LinkedIn to find a job.

Recruiters use LinkedIn to search for, find, and contact potential candidates on a daily basis – in fact, there are over 1,000,000 sourcers, recruiters, and human resources professionals on Linkedin in the United States alone! While I typically write posts for sourcers and recruiters to show them how they can more effectively leverage social networking sites like LinkedIn to find candidates, in this post, I am going to show job seekers how they can use the exact same techniques and strategies to find jobs, perform company research, and how to find and contact recruiters and hiring managers – even if you only have 5 connections!

First we’ll start with the basics. I’m going to save the best for last. Continue reading

LinkedIn Search: What it COULD and SHOULD be

Did you know that LinkedIn currently has the ability to deliver incredibly powerful search functionality to its users – WELL beyond what we all have access to now?  What am I talking about?

I’m excited to tell you, but quite honestly, I actually can’t believe it’s taken me this long to put 2 and 2 together. Have you ever really watched the video clip below that you can find on  LinkedIn’s Learning Center as well as on YouTube?

If you ignore the information regarding the new features and pay close attention to the video, you can hear Esteban talk about how LinkedIn is always on the lookout for talented Lucene Open Source engineers and watch him search for them. Lucene is an open source text search engine that I’ve written about in multiple posts for its advanced search functionality, including extended Boolean.

LinkedIn uses Lucene as their Text Search Engine

When I first watched the video, I never gave the Lucene stuff a second thought because LinkedIn doesn’t actually offer any of Lucene’s truly advanced search functionality – LinkedIn doesn’t even support root-word/wildcard searching, let alone extended Boolean search. I figured if they were already using Lucene for their text search engine they would offer all of Lucene’s search functionality, which they don’t.

Then I watched the video again the other day (not exactly sure why) and I it made me curious. Had they already implemented Lucene, or were they looking to do so? I did some research to see if I could confirm a link between LinkedIn with Lucene (pun intended).  Although TechCrunch reported that LinkedIn upgraded its people search, they failed to mention the technology behind the upgrade. I was then able to dig up an article that verified that LinkedIn had implemented Lucene as their text search engine.

So What Can LinkedIn Do With Lucene?

I’m glad you asked – be prepared to be amazed!  Continue reading

How to Search Across Multiple Countries on LinkedIn

I’ve recently received a few requests from my European readers (thank you!) to write about how to use LinkedIn to simultaneously search multiple countries to identify candidates. In this post I will do exactly that – show you how you can search for candidates across multiple countries in one search. Although I will be using European countries in the examples, the same techniques can be successfully applied to any combination of countries.

LinkedIn’s Interface

If it was obvious how to search for people from multiple countries using LinkedIn’s search interface, I likely would not have received requests for help. I’ve personally never run into the need to source from a variety of countries, so I enjoyed taking on the challenge of figuring this out. Continue reading

Is LinkedIn Becoming a Job Board?

Is LinkedIn a social networking site, a job board, or a little of both?

Most people consider LinkedIn to be a social networking site, or more specifically a professional network service. LinkedIn describes itself as an “interconnected network of experienced professionals.” However, when I take a step back and take an objective view of LinkedIn, I see a great deal of “job board” functionality with some social networking features.

Before you cry “blasphemy!,” let’s do some research and look at the facts. 

What Exactly is a “Job Board?”

I tried doing some research to find a definition of exactly what a “job board” is, and found that Wikipedia considers Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, Dice, etc. to be employment websites. According to Wikipedia, an “employment website” is “…a web site dealing specifically with employment or careers. Many employment websites are designed to allow employers to post job requirements for a position to be filled and are commonly known as job boards.”

Common Features of Job Boards

According to INTERNET Inc, “job boards are usually free for job seekers though there are some exceptions mostly in the realm of upper management and executive jobs. Job ads can usually be found by browsing or through search on keywords, job type and location. Employers usually pay a fee to post job ads… Most job boards also offer employers resume database access for searching out candidates that match specific criteria. Additional services offered by job boards to employers often include: job agents that alert recruiters by e-mail to newly published job seeker resumes that meet specific criteria, …and brand building advertising with e-mail campaigns, banners, buttons and company profiles.”

What LinkedIn Says About LinkedIn

I did some digging and found LinkedIn’s press site. Under the heading of “What is LinkedIn?,” you can read that “When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments.” Continue reading

FREE LinkedIn Search: Internal vs. X-Ray

While there is a growing number of recruiting professionals and organizations who pay for premium access to LinkedIn, there is still a large number of people who leverage LinkedIn with a free or “Personal” account.

If you’re on the fence about paying for increased access to LinkedIn, you’re reading the right post. I’m going to compare searching LinkedIn from the “inside” with a free “Personal” account using LinkedIn’s new people search interface with searching LinkedIn from the “outside” using Google and the x-ray technique.

If you are not familiar with the x-ray search technique, it will be covered in depth with examples later in this post.

I’ll also offer at least 3 different ways to create and automate LinkedIn searches outside of the LinkedIn search interface.

Free LinkedIn Search – From the “Inside”

There are actually a number of different ways and places to search for people on Linkedin. The more powerful methods involve #1 LinkedIn’s advanced search interface and  #2 “Hand-coding” search strings using LinkedIn’s advanced search operators.

Controlling Candidate Variables

Both of those methods allow you to control critical candidate variables such as current and/or past employer, current and/or past title, industry, and location via zip code radius search. During or after you configure your search, you also have the option to sort results by relevance, relationship, relationship + recommendations, and keyword match/count. Continue reading

LinkedIn: Private vs. Out of Network Results

LinkedIn: Private vs. Out of Network Results

I recently wrote about how to leverage LinkedIn’s Advanced Search Operators and I commented on LinkedIn’s relatively new search interface. Aside from search options, one other somewhat new aspect of searching inside LinkedIn using their search interface is that you can now return some results that are outside of your network. These typically appear as results without a name, and instead say “private”

NON-PUBLIC PROFILES

When you find a private profile, in some cases, the user has actually decided to not publish their LinkedIn profile publicly to the web. If this is the case, you simply cannot find them via Google via the site:command.

Here is an example – using LinkedIn’s search interface, I ran a simple single word search – Java.  Here is an example of a result that is outside of my network:

As you can see – this person is not in my network, and the result shows no name, just a headline title. When I click on the title, this is what I see:

Taking unique information from this profile, let’s try and use the site: command on Google to x-ray LinkedIn and see if we can find this person.

site:linkedIn.com “greater atlanta area” java “bank of america” suntrust Continue reading

LinkedIn’s Advanced Search Operators

IMPORTANT NOTE

Although LinkedIn’s advanced operators ceased to work properly for a period of a few months earlier this year, I am very happy to report that they are working again. Once more you will be able to harness LinkedIn’s search fields by hand coding your search strings and bypassing the search interface/fields.

LinkedIn’s Advanced Search Operators

LinkedIn has made some great changes to their advanced search interface recently, giving users the ability to take more control over the precision of their searches. I was specifically excited to see more options for location searching (10 mile – 100 mile radius), and the ability to search for current and/or past employers.

I was exploring LinkedIn’s site the other day and came across a chart buried at the bottom of the LinkedIn Learning Center page, and I was intrigued by the possibility of “hand coding” searches by entering LinkedIn’s advanced search operators directly into the “people search” search bar.

Here is the chart I found:

You can see that you can “hand code” searches using the above advanced operators and control most of the search fields/parameters that are found on the advanced search page interface, such as current company, past company, title, current title, past title, zip code radius, company, school, industry, interested in, and when people joined LinkedIn:

Location Searching

When I first experimented with the syntax for using the advanced operators for zip code radius searching, I ran into some problems and I contacted LinkedIn’s technical support for advice on how to make them work properly.

After 5 email exchanges (including links and screenshots and VERY direct/specific questions) that were comical to say the least (ignoring my question and simply telling me to use the advanced search interface, as well as not being aware of the advanced operators until I sent a screenshot), the technical support rep from LinkedIn finally concluded this: “The operators you are speaking of in our advanced people search are now provided for you in the drop down fields. These fields are provided to help narrow the search and make the process easier to understand. With the new search function inputting country: zip: and radius: is no longer acceptable.”

After not accepting this answer and continuing to tweak syntax, I am very happy to announce that you actually CAN accomplish zip code radius search using LinkedIn’s advanced operators. You’ll notice on the chart of operators that the zip: and radius: operators have dependencies – zip: is dependent on country:, and radius: is dependent on country: and zip:. For example, if you were searching for people in a 25 mile radius of Washington, DC, you could create a search like this:

country:”united states” zip:20001 radius:25

When using LinkedIn’s advanced operators, you enter them directly into the “Search People” bar at the top right of LinkedIn:

When you hit “Search,” you’ll get nearly 650,000 results of people on LinkedIn who live within 25 miles from the zip code of 20001.

If you don’t enter a radius: value, the search will still work – you’ll get a little over 922,000 results. Not sure exactly what LinkedIn is doing there, because a 35 mile radius produces about 777,000 results, and a 50 mile radius produces about 877,000 results. Testing other zip codes did not produce consistent results for me to try and guess the “hidden” radius value if you don’t enter one.

Also – it appears you can only choose the radius values of 10, 25, 35, 50, 75, and 100 miles when using the radius: operator.  If you try and use a different number, like 30, LinkedIn will produce results using the closest “valid” radius value.  In this case, when picking 30, I was trying to trick LinkedIn – it chose 25 instead of 35.

Combining Multiple Advanced Operators

Let’s look for people who currently work for Lockheed Martin, have a current title of manager, and live within 25 miles of 20001:

ccompany:lockheed ctitle:manager country:”united states” zip:20001 radius:25

Here is a snippet of the search results:

Let’s try another search. This time, we’ll look for people who have had the title of “auditor” at some point in their career (current and/or past), identify themselves as working in the accounting industry, have worked for Deloitte in the past, and live within 35 miles of 60605 in Chicago:

title:auditor industry:accounting pcompany:deloitte country:”united states” zip:60605 radius:35

As expected, the search works well. Here is a snippet of one of the results:

Combining Boolean Operators with LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators

You can combine “regular” search terms and Boolean operators along with LinkedIn’s advanced operators.  For example, let’s shoot for an Exchange admin/engineer with an MCSE, and a current title of engineer in a 25 mile radius of 94131 in San Francisco:

Exchange ctitle:engineer (admin OR administrator OR administration OR administer OR administered OR maintenance OR maintained) (server OR servers) (mail OR email OR messaging) (MCSE OR “Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer”) country:”united states” zip:94131 radius:25

Here is a snippet from one of the results:

Using LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators in “OR” Statements

Be careful when attempting to use some of LinkedIn’s advanced operators in OR statements. For example, here are two different ways of trying to search for people with a current title of 1 or more specific titles:

Exchange (ctitle:engineer OR ctitle:admin OR ctitle:administrator)

That syntax does not run – here is the message you get:

Taking a different approach: Exchange ctitle:(engineer OR admin OR administrator)

That synatx runs, but we can see from the results page that LinkedIn “sees” it differently that what the exact syntax would dictate:

LinkedIn appears to prefer enclosing the OR statements in quotation marks, like this:

exchange ctitle:”engineer OR admin OR administrator”

However, when you examine individual profiles, you will notice LinkedIn highlights past titles even though I specifically searched for the title terms using the current title operator of ctitle:. So using LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators in conjuction with OR operators isn’t an exact science, to say the least.

Sorting and Modifying Your Results

After you execute your “hand coded” search using LinkedIn’s advanced operators, you have the option of sorting the results by the usual values and you can also modify your search as you can if you had constructed your search using LinkedIn’s advanced search interface.

Conclusion

If you like being able to “hand code” Boolean search strings, it’s nice to know that we can effectively take advantage of nearly all of LinkedIn’s major search options/parameters (such as current/past company, current/past title, zip code radius, industry, etc.) by combining LinkedIn’s advanced operators with Boolean strings to get precisely the results we are looking for.

Although you can save searches via LinkedIn’s “save this search” feature – if you are using LinkedIn with a free account, you are limited to saving 3 searches. An added benefit of being able to craft complete search strings using LinkedIn’s advanced operators is that you can create your strings in Notepad or Word and save them for future use as well as quickly modify them (copy and paste a search, then change paramaters without having to retype the entire string).

If you enjoyed this post, I recommend you read my follow up post on how to use LinkedIn’s Advanced Search Operators as search agents.

Searching Facebook for Candidates

I recently received a request from a reader to come up with some example Boolean Strings for finding software engineers on Facebook who are from Top 10 schools (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, etc) and live in the Silicon Valley.

***Quick disclaimer***
I am definitely not a Facebook sourcing guru – I don’t see it as a high yield source for proactive and highly precise sourcing as it is a relatively “shallow” source of information, it’s search interfaces are quite limited, and when x-raying into Facebook you can’t see much information. I’d invite anyone reading this that has suggestions and best practices to please add them.

Okay, now that I got that out of the way, searching inside Facebook for people that you don’t “know” (they aren’t your “friends” yet) has become more and more restricted over time. There are a few ways to search for people within Facebook – I will cover 3. Continue reading

Targeting PAST experience on LinkedIn – can it be done?

I recently had a recruiter ask me if there were any way to be able to search LinkedIn for people who have worked at a specific company in the past, but who are NOT currently working for that company.

I can see why some Sourcers and Recruiters would want to specifically target people who are not currently at a company, but have worked there in the past. I’ve done a bit of digging on this, and I have yet to find a way to reliably targeting past experience while ensuring that you only get results of people who are not currently working at the target company.  When searching within your network on LinkedIn, as you may know, the only controllable option you have is to be able to search for people who are currently at target companies. If you leave the “current companies only” option unchecked, you will get results with a mix of people who are currently employed at your target company as well as those who are no longer working there. Also – when searching inside your own network – you are limited to results of people to whom you are connected up to the 3rd degree.
 
Going beyond your own LinkedIn network, you can try using Google and other Internet search engines and employ the site: command to search into LinkedIn – but we have to be aware that this is not a method that affords you precise control over current or past experience.  However, I’m going to give Google, Exalead, and AltaVista a thorough LinkedIn Boolean workout. Continue reading

Resumes are not dead!

With the buzz I continue to see and hear surrounding Twitter, social networks, Internet sourcing (blogs, articles, etc.) and such, it’s easy to look at resumes as dull, outdated, or at least “uncool” when it comes to sourcing and recruiting. I fear there are many people who get blinded by the “shiny object” factor of each and every “next new thing” that will supposedly revolutionize staffing, leading them to overlook the significant and tangible advantages that resumes have over other sources of talent identification information.

The limitations inherent with using Twitter, blogs, Internet articles, LinkedIn profiles and similar sources for talent identification is that they are what I classify as “shallow” sources of candidate information. In most cases, they contain very little information regarding critical candidate variables such as skills and responsibilities, quantity and quality of experience, career history and accomplishments, education, precise location, etc. Many shallow sources of candidate information simply do not provide ANY information regarding some of these details. With little or no information to go on, it is extremely difficult to search for and identify candidates who have a high probability of at least meeting the minimum requirements for your opening, let alone exceeding them.   Continue reading