Category Archives: Sourcing

How to Effectively Mitigate Unconscious Bias in Sourcing

With 78% of talent professionals and hiring managers saying that diversity is the top trend impacting how they hire, it is critical to take measures to remove as much bias from the hiring process as possible.

While there is no shortage of opinion that AI can be applied to reduce or remove human bias in hiring, there is a simple way of significantly mitigating unconscious bias at the top of the funnel without using AI and avoiding the risk of algorithmic bias: blind review and selection.

Blind Review and Selection

Whether you use “blind,” “anonymous,” “masked” or “obfuscated” to describe the technique, the goal and the end result are the same:  prevent sourcers, recruiters and hiring managers from being unconsciously biased when reviewing and selecting applicants, resumes or profiles when considering people for employment.

If you cannot see a person’s name, you are mitigating unconscious bias as you are prevented from having any easy insight into a person’s gender, race or ethnicity.

If you cannot see where a person went to school (school name or country), you are prevented from exercising any unconscious bias you might have towards or against specific schools, and you also help mitigate unconscious bias with regard to race and/or ethnicity.

If you do not show when someone graduated from school, and if you impose a limit to the maximum number of years of experience to be visible (e.g., 10 where the job does not require more than 10), you prevent people from being unconsciously biased against people who have more than the required years of experience, and this can effectively combat ageism.

Solutions Pushing the Envelope

The good news is that there are already some solutions on the market today that offer blind results review and selection.

Eightfold.ai is a company I had the distinct honor of consulting with back in the fall of 2016. At the time I advised the team of what I believed to be a significant opportunity for their solution to help with diversity and inclusion. Since then, they have made many advancements in this space, including blind review and selection.

With Eightfold.ai, you can configure their solution to mask several profile elements that can mitigate unconscious gender, race, ethnicity, and age bias – and this includes people from within your ATS/CRM:

  • Name
  • Social Media/Picture
  • Communication history
  • Specific location
  • Name of school
  • Date of graduation
  • More than 8 years of experience

Here is an example of a masked profile in their system:

In case you were wondering, that person is a woman and she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from a top university in India. But with the masked profile, it could just as easily be a man who graduated from Stanford, so there is no way a person could use the name and school/country to consciously or unconsciously discriminate against her.

So does this work?

The Eightfold team informed me that they recently completed a pilot with a multi-national company in which it was clear that for a specific set of roles, hiring managers preferred one gender over the other by 50% when selecting candidates for phone screen prior to rolling out the masked screening process. After the rollout of masked screening, there was virtually no difference in the selection rate between gender.

Entelo was an early mover in facilitating external diversity sourcing, and they have recently announced their “unbiased sourcing mode” where users are able to anonymize and hide many elements of profiles that are commonly associated with unconscious bias, including employment gaps and substituting gender-specific pronouns throughout the profiles.

Spire is another solution with blind review and selection capabilities, allowing you to match your applicants and other candidates to jobs without seeing names, pictures, universities, date of graduation or years of experience greater than required.

Another solution I am aware of that offers similar functionality is SeekOut. If you are aware of others, please let me know, and I would be happy to share them.

A Call to All HR Technology Solution Providers

I believe configurable blind review and selection should become a standard and required feature of any HR technology solution that involves reviewing applicants or resumes/profiles when considering people for employment, including internal mobility.

Without it, users are fully prone to the effects of unconscious bias when it comes to reviewing and selecting (or not!) applicants and potential candidates.

While blind review and selection don’t address unconscious bias that can creep into the interview and offer stages, it can practically eliminate it from the top of the talent funnel, leading to more diverse applicants and candidates getting into the hiring process in the first place.

If you caught my mention of algorithmic bias in the beginning of this post, stay tuned as I will be writing about the risks associated with using AI in sourcing and recruiting soon.

Social Engineering: The Human Element of Sourcing & Recruiting Candidates

Why is the “Boolean Black Belt” writing and presenting about social engineering?

Well, it’s actually quite simple. It all started over 20 years ago when I began working for a small, privately held IT staffing firm in Northern VA. In pursuit of becoming the top performing recruiter, I not only had to get very good at quickly finding the right people, I also had to get very good at getting those people to respond to my outreach efforts, to be open to speaking candidly with me, and ultimately to convert to candidates. As we all know, unless you are responsible for sourcing names only, finding people is only half the battle – although a critical half, as you can’t convert someone into a hire that you haven’t found in the first place. ;)

While the vast majority of the content I’ve written about since 2008 has been about finding people online and in databases, that’s only one of my three “superpowers” – things that I believe I developed exceptional strength in that enabled me to become a top performer in my firm. The other two include my time/performance management approach and what I have now learned to be social engineering.

Social engineering is, according to Chris Hadnagy, creator of the Social Engineering Framework, “The art, or better yet, science, or skillfully maneuvering human beings to take action in some aspect of their lives.”

I saw Chris speak at the 2011 SourceCon in NY, although he didn’t really dive deep into the concepts of the book he had published at the end of 2010 – Social Engineering, The Art of Human Hacking, and it wasn’t until Jeremy Roberts wrote about Chris’s book in early 2015 that I actually got around to purchasing and reading the book.

As I was reading the first half of the book, I had many epiphanous moments when I realized that many of the things I had been doing in my candidate messaging and when on the phone with potential candidates beginning nearly 20 years prior and continuing over the years training my teams to perform had names (elicitation, framing, preloading, etc.) and psychological reasons why they worked (e.g., empathy, scarcity, social proof, obligation & reciprocity, etc.). This inspired me to present on the topic at sourcing and recruiting conferences, as it makes it 10X easier to explain and transfer to people when you can attribute names to specific techniques and explain the “why” behind why you should do it and why it works.

This deck from SourceCon 2018 in Vegas, where the whole theme was social engineering and we had a keynote by Jessica Clark (who I sourced and Shannon Pritchett successfully recruited), and is the latest iteration of my social engineering content that I have also presented at LinkedIn Talent Connect, SOSUEU, Bullhorn Engage and the Northwest Recruiters Association (NWRA). It provides a high-level overview of many social engineering strategies and tactics that I have personally used in a “white hat” manner when seeking to influence potential candidates to respond to outreach efforts, be open to speaking candidly with me, provide high quality referrals, and convert to being a qualified, interested and available (QIA) candidates.

As you will see in the deck, social engineering is essentially the human element of sourcing and recruiting candidates. Enjoy!

Video: My thoughts on Sourcing & the Future of Recruiting

 

At LinkedIn’s 2014 Talent Connect event in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to be interviewed on the topic of up-skilling recruiting teams.

Watch this short video to hear my thoughts on the ideal sourcing/recruiting team alignment, critical skills for any recruiting team, and the future of recruiting (hint –  it has something to do with data).

Important Facebook Graph Search Developments

 

It is difficult to ignore the potential of Facebook when it comes to sourcing and recruiting given that it has 1.38B monthly active users and 890M daily active users.

When Graph Search was introduced back in 2013, it was an amazingly powerful people sourcing tool.  However, recent changes have somewhat reduced its efficacy. While some people might think that Facebook’s Graph Search is effectively dead, it is still very much alive. In fact, Graph Search is now live on mobile (more on that in a bit).

Although it’s not what it used to be, Graph Search still allows you to write some very effective natural language queries to retrieve Facebook profiles, as you can search by title, company, location, languages, etc., and Graph Search is still a ridiculously powerful gender diversity sourcing tool (where legal, of course).

Here’s a search for female software engineers who work for Google, live near New York and speak French.

Facebook Graph Search 2015 Diversity Google Software Engineers Near New York who speak French

That’s some good stuff right there!

While people searches like that will satisfy the average user, hardcore sourcers might lament the loss of the ability to create the more advanced and inclusive queries they used to in the past, and the extensive search refinements associated with Graph Search on the right rail are now gone, with trending posts now taking up that screen real estate.

Once you try to go much beyond searches like the one above, Facebook will humbly apologize for not being able to find any results for your search. Continue reading

How to Find Active & Passive Software Engineers on Stack Overflow

 

Stack Overflow CareersDo you source and/or recruit software engineers?

Would you like to know how to find software engineers on Stack Overflow who are actually interested in hearing about new career opportunities?

For free?

If you answered YES!, YES! and YES! – you’re in in luck, because I am going to show you how to find active and passive job seekers on Stack Overflow for free. Continue reading

Sourcing vs. Recruiting – What’s the Difference?

 

While you may not  know that Balazs Paroczay recently posted a rebuttal of my proposed definition of sourcing, I strongly suggest you read his argument, as I appreciate his perspective as well as the fact that he disagrees with me on the definition of sourcing and I’d like to hear your opinion.

I believe disagreement is important and valuable, because it fuels critical thinking and forward progress.

Before I get to Balazs’s post, I’d like to get your take on a recent disagreement I had with Recruiting Animal. Continue reading

Excellent New Twitter Talent Sourcing and Recruiting Tool

 

Tactics CloudDo you leverage Twitter in your sourcing and recruiting efforts?

If NO – I strongly recommend you read my 14 Tips on How to Use Twitter for Social Recruiting and see the two comments from Matt Chiasson.

If YES – would you be interested in a better way to search for and find people in your target talent pool on Twitter?

Look no further!

I received a notification from the Google+ Social Recruiting community last week that Hung Lee believes he found something that “pretty much destroys FollowerWonk as a Twitter sourcing tool.

“Destroy” is a strong word, but I would say Tactics Cloud gives FollowerWonk a thorough beating and I will be using Tactics Cloud as my primary tool when searching for people on Twitter. Continue reading

What is Sourcing? I Propose a New Universal Definition.

 

Definition of Sourcing on TwitterWhat better time than at the beginning of a new year to take a critical look back at where we’ve come from, to reflect on our current state and to look forward to a next step in the evolution of sourcing?

It believe it would certainly be helpful and beneficial to have a universally agreed upon definition of exactly what sourcing is. If you’ve attended any sourcing and/or recruiting conferences, it doesn’t take long to notice people using “sourcing” to describe different types of activities. When anyone talks about the sourcing function at their company, it immediately begs the question of exactly what the sourcers are tasked with. Do they find people and pass them on to recruiters to contact, or do they also engage the people they find? The same goes for hiring sourcers – one of the first questions is always whether or not they will be responsible for engaging potential candidates. 

Am I the only person who thinks this is a bit absurd, if not just unhelpful and annoying?

The fact that there is no universally agreed upon definition of what sourcing is when it comes to talent acquisition has always bothered me. Don’t you think it’s well past time to move the ball forward and make the attempt to develop a single definition of “sourcing?”

Historically, sourcing was typically used to refer to talent identification only – name generation, org charting, finding resumes and social profiles, etc. However, I have noticed over the past few years that more people and companies are starting to use sourcing to describe both the identification and the engagement of talent, which aligns with what I’ve always believed sourcing to be.

Let’s take a look at other people’s opinions on what sourcing is and leverage what sourcing is considered to involve when it comes to procurement to see if we can achieve some parity before I share with you my proposed definition of sourcing. Continue reading

How to Find the Best Software Engineers on Stack Overflow

 

Looking to source and recruit software engineers?

One of the best places to find software engineers is Stack Overflow, where nearly 2,000,000 programmers from all over the world ask and answer programming-related questions.

How would you like to know which software engineers might be the most talented and skilled?

Stack Overflow Main

A year ago, Peter Kazanjy of TalentBin published an extensive piece on how to source talent on Stack Overflow on the SourceCon website. If you haven’t already read his post, I highly recommend you do so before proceeding further.

I am going to go one step beyond Peter’s article and show you how to find software engineering talent by Stack Overflow reputation and badges, which are earned from peers and activity, offering a degree of independent verification of a software engineer’s knowledge, experience and ability. Continue reading

My Future of Sourcing Keynote at Talent42

Talent42 audience viewI recently attended and thoroughly enjoyed the Talent42 conference in SeattleJohn Vlastelica and Carmen Hudson have done a fantastic job, and I was also honored to be asked to present the closing keynote on the current and future state of sourcing.

Aside from the stacked speaker lineup, valuable content, sourcing roundtables led by a good portion of who’s who in the sourcing community, and power + wireless for all (other conference organizers please take note!), what I especially enjoyed about Talent42 is the fact that it is the only technical recruiting-only conference.  My entire career has been focused primarily on the technical recruiting, so it was nice to spend a couple of days in the company of people who share a similar recruiting background and appreciate the unique challenges associated with sourcing and recruiting IT professionals.

As my keynote presentation had a lot of animations, off-slide commentary and embedded videos, I took the time to modify the slide deck so that it could be largely understood that without the benefit of hearing me speak to the content (I wish more presenters would do the same!!!), and I have uploaded it to Slideshare, complete with informative, funny, and controversial YouTube videos.

In this presentation I address what I feel is the current state of talent sourcing as well as what I believe the future of talent sourcing will be, sooner than later.  Additionally, I demonstrate Facebook’s Graph Search and offer insight into functionality from several “Big Data” talent sourcing tools, including Dice Open Web, TalentBin, Entelo, and Gild.

100+ Free Sourcing & Recruiting Tools, Guides, and Resources

 

It’s been a LONG time coming, but I finally got around to updating my free sourcing & recruiting tools, guides and resources page where I now keep a current list of the best of my work all in one place for easy bookmarking and reference.

You can find it here on my main page:

 

Here is where you can find all of the best of my Boolean Black belt content all in one place - free sourcing and recruiting how-to guides, tools, presentations, and videos - be sure to bookmark it, and if you're feeling  friendly, tweet it, share it on LinkedIn and/or +1 it on Google Plus.  Many thanks!

 

Additionally, I thought I might as well put all of my best work all in one blog post as well – over 110 of my articles in one place for easy referencing!

My blog is a pursuit of passion and not of profit – if you’ve ever found anything I’ve written helpful to you, all I ask is that you tweet this out, share it on LinkedIn, like it on Facebook, or give this a +1 on Google.

Many thanks for your readership and support – please pay it forward to someone who can benefit.

Big Data, Analytics and Moneyball Recruiting

Big Data, Data Science and Moneyball Recruiting

The Moneyball Recruiting Opportunity: Analytics and Big Data

Human Capital Data is Sexy – and Sourcing is the Sexiest job in HR/Recruiting! 

Is Sourcing Dead? No! Here’s the Future of Sourcing

The End of Sourcing 1.0 and the Evolution of Sourcing 2.0

How to Find Email Addresses

How to Use Gmail and Rapportive to Find Almost Anyone’s Email Address

Social Discovery

2 Very Cool and Free Social Discovery Tools: Falcon and TalentBin

Talent Communities

The Often Overlooked Problem with Talent Communities

Lean / Just-In-Time Recruiting / Talent Pipelines

What is Lean, Just-In-Time Recruiting?

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 1

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 2

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 3

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 4

The Passive Candidate Pipeline Problem

Semantic Search

What is Semantic Search and How Can it Be Used for Sourcing and Recruiting?

Sourcing and Search: Man vs. Machine/Artificial Intelligence – My SourceCon Keynote

Why Sourcers Won’t Be Replaced By Watson/Machine Learning Algorithms Any Time Soon

Diversity Sourcing

How to Perform Diversity Sourcing on LinkedIn – Including Specific Boolean Search Strings

How to Use Facebook’s Graph Search for Diversity Sourcing

Social Recruiting

How to Find People to Recruit on Twitter using Followerwonk & Google + Bing X-Ray Search

Google Plus Search Guide: How to Search and Find People on Google Plus

Facebook’s Graph Search Makes it Ridiculously Easy to Find Anyone

How to Effectively Source Talent on Social Networks – It Requires Non-Standard Search Terms!

How a Recruiter Made 3 Hires on Twitter in Six Weeks!

Twitter 101 for Sourcers and Recruiters

Anti-Social Recruiting

How Social Recruiting has NOT Changed Recruiting

Social Recruiting – Beyond the Hype

What Social Recruiting is NOT

Sourcing Social Media Requires Outside the Box Thinking

Social Networking Sites vs. Job Boards

LinkedIn Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing and Searching LinkedIn: Beyond the Basics – SourceCon Dallas 2012

LinkedIn’s Dark Matter – Profiles You Cannot Find

How to Get a Higher LinkedIn InMail Response Rate

The Most Effective Way to X-Ray Search LinkedIn

LinkedIn Catfish: Fake Profiles, Real People, or Just Fake Photos?

LinkedIn Search: Drive it Like you Stole It – 8 Minute Video of My LinkedIn Presentation in Toronto

How to Search LinkedIn and Control Years of Experience

How to Quickly and Effectively Grow Your LinkedIn Network

How to View the Full Profiles of our 3rd Degree Connections on LinkedIn for Free

How to Find and Identify Active Job Seekers on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Profile Search Engine Optimization

Free LinkedIn Profile Optimization and Job Seeker Advice

Do Recruiters Ruin LinkedIn?

The 50 Largest LinkedIn Groups

How to See Full Names of 3rd Degree LinkedIn Connections for Free

How I Search LinkedIn to Find People

LinkedIn’s Undocumented Search Operator

Does LinkedIn Offer Recruiters any Competitive Advantage?

Have You Analyzed the Value of Your LinkedIn Network?

Where Do YOU Rank In LinkedIn Search Results?

What is the Total Number of LinkedIn Members?

Beware When Searching LinkedIn By Company Name

LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge

How to Search for Top Students and GPA’s on LinkedIn

What’s the Best Way to Search LinkedIn for People in Specific Industries?

18 LinkedIn Apps, Tools and Resources

LinkedIn Search: What it Could be and Should be

How to Search Across Multiple Countries on LinkedIn

Private and Out of Network Search Results on LinkedIn

How to “Unlock” and view “Private” LinkedIn Profiles

Searching LinkedIn for Free – The Differences Between Internal and X-Ray Searching

Sourcing and Boolean Search

Basic Boolean Search Operators and Query Modifiers Explained

How to Find Resumes On the Internet with Google

Challenging Google Resume Search Assumptions

Don’t be a Sourcing Snob

The Top 15 Talent Sourcing Mistakes

Why Boolean Search is Such a Big Deal in Recruiting

How to Become a World Class Sourcer

Enough with the Exotic Sourcing Already – What’s Practical and What Works

Sourcing is So Much More than Tips, Tricks, Hacks, and Google

How to Find, Hire, Train, and Build a Sourcing Team – SourceCon 2013

How to Use Excel to Automatically Build Boolean Search Strings

The Current and Future State of Sourcing

Why So Many People Stink at Searching

Is your ATS a Black Hole or a Diamond Mine?

How to Find Bilingual Professionals with Boolean Search Strings

How to Best Use Resume Search Aggregators

How to Convert Quotation Marks in Microsoft Word for Boolean Search

Boolean Search, Referral Recruiting and Source of Hire

The Critical Factors Behind Sourcing ROI

What is a “Boolean Black Belt?”

Beyond Basic Boolean Search: Proximity and Weighting

Why Sourcing is Superior to Posting Jobs for Talent

The Future of Sourcing and Talent Identification

Sourcing is an Investigative and Iterative Process

Beyond Boolean Search: Human Capital Information Retrieval

Do you Speak Boolean?

Is Recruiting Top Talent Really Your Company’s Top Priority?

Sourcing is NOT an Entry Level Function

Boolean Search Beyond Google

The Internet Has Free Resumes. So What?

How to Search Spoke, Zoominfo and Jigsaw for Free

Job Boards vs. Social Networking Sites

What to Do if Google Thinks You’re Not Human: the Captcha

What if you only had One Source to Find Candidates?

Passive Recruiting is a Myth – It Doesn’t Exist

Sourcing: Separate Role or Integrated Function?

The #1 Mistake in Corporate Recruiting

How I Learned What I Know About Sourcing

Resumes Are Like Wine – They Get Better with Age!

Why Do So Many ATS Vendors Offer Such Poor Search Functionality?

Do Candidates Really Want a Relationship with their recruiter?

Recruiting: Art or Science?

What to Consider When Creating or Selecting Effective Sourcing Training – SourceCon NYC

The Sourcer’s Fallacy

Sourcing Challenge – Monster vs. Google – Round 1

Sourcing Challenge – Monster vs. Google – Round 2

Do You Have the Proper Perspective in Recruiting?

Are You a Clueless Recruiter?

Job Boards and Candidate Quality – Challenging Popular Assumptions

When it Comes to Sourcing – All Sources Are Not Created Equal

Boolean Search String Experiments

Boolean Search String Experiment #1

Boolean Search String Experiment #1 Follow Up

Boolean Search String Experiment #2

 

Google Plus Search Guide: How to Search & Find People on G+

 

Do you want to know how to search for people on Google+ by title/skill, company, AND location?

If so, you’ve come to the right place – I’m going to show you 3 different ways to find people on Google+, and only one of them allows you to reliably search for and find people based on where they live:

  1. Google+’s built-in search functionality
  2. FindPeopleonPlus
  3. Using Google to X-Ray search Google+ (the most effective way!)

Back in 2011 I wrote a post about how to search Google+ to find people in specific locations. At the time, Google+ wasn’t a ghost town, but it wasn’t exactly well populated.

Nearly 2 years later, that’s no longer the case – Google+ now has over 500M profiles, 235M+ of them actively using Google+ features, and 135M+ people are active in the Google+ stream, solidly positioning Google+ in the upper tier of the “Big 4” social recruiting sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter).

In fact, Google+ is now actually the #2 most actively used service online:

 

 

Google+ Native Search Functionality

While the massive change in users and activity has been great, one thing that unfortunately hasn’t changed is that Google+ still doesn’t have any built-in functionality to reliably search for people by specific location, which is critical to any sourcing and recruiting effort.

While Google+ has recently released a new “Find People” functionality, it doesn’t allow you to find people by where they are located.

What you can do, however, is search for people who work at specific companies using the “Find coworkers” search functionality and entering in any company.

Searching Google+ via Find Coworkers

 

Google+ Find Coworkers

 

For example, searching for “coworkers” at Rio Tinto (world leader in mining and processing):

 

 

Here are some of the results – all currently employed at the target company:

 

 

What you can’t do with this search functionality is search by people who work at specific companies in specific locations. which is critical to most sourcing and recruiting efforts.

However, if you’re new to Google+, you should be impressed by your ability to find anyone.

In this respect, Google+ is similar to Facebook’s Graph Search and unlike LinkedIn, as you don’t have to be connected to people or have them in Circles to find them and view their profiles, which is fantastic for sourcers and recruiters.

Searching Google+ via the Google+ Search Bar

Moving on to Google+’s search bar, you can try to find people in a specific location by simply typing in a city along with the rest of your query. For example, take a look at the results for a simple search such as “software engineer” “new york” “google”

 

 

Pretty decent results, right?

Don’t be fooled by appearances.

You can see from just that screenshot that not all of those people work at Google (although many do), and if you explore the results individually, you’ll find that they all mention “New York” somewhere (as they should, based on my search criteria) – but they don’t all live in New York.

For example, taking a closer look at one of the results:

 

 

You can see she attended school in New York, but her location isn’t revealed on her Google+ profile as it is for others.

Cross referencing her on LinkedIn shows she lives in California.

 

 

I’m not slamming Google+’s search bar – it does a decent job, but it doesn’t offer sourcers and recruiters the search precision they need.

Just to show you that Google+ isn’t only useful for sourcing and recruiting software engineers in the U.S., for my readers in Oz, here’s a simple search for people at Rio Tinto in Perth:

 

 

FindPeopleonPlus

Some of you may be aware of FindPeopleonPlus, which you can use to find people by employer, occupation, and location.

For example, here is a search for software engineers who work at Google and live in New York:

 

 

Looks great, right?

Unfortunately, according to their own website, FindPeopleonPlus has only indexed 45M users, which is now obviously a small portion of the total population of Google+ users.

The above search found 109 people, which isn’t too shabby. However, I’ll show you how to use Google to X-Ray search Google+ to find more people in a moment.

FindPeopleonPlus does have some great functionality – you can search for/sort people by gender (diversity sourcing!), education (specific university), employer, occupation, state, and city.

Interestingly, it appears they are busy building a “Career Platform” – I’m assuming this won’t be free because what they’ve already built can easily be used by recruiters to find candidates.

 

 

Hopefully they will speed up their performance – I noticed my searches lagged significantly. But maybe I’m just spoiled.

Oh, and I just had to share these two nuggets of gold I found when exploring FindPeopleonPlus for this post:

 

 

Matt’s got a sense of humor. Maybe Kelly can add the ability to search Google+ for people by employer, occupation and location like FindPeopleonPlus can.

Am I the only one that is confused and disappointed by the fact that the Google team hasn’t thought to offer a greater degree of search capability? Even Facebook’s Graph Search offers the ability to search by location, current and past employer, current title, etc.

I thought Google = search?

How to Find People on Google+ by Location: X-Ray Search

To this day, using Google to search Google+ remains the best way to reliably find people on Google+ by location.

Over time, Google+ has made multiple changes to Google+ profiles, so while my original (circa 2011!) Google+ X-Ray search still works, there are a few small adjustments I’ve made based on profile changes that allow even greater control over search results (thanks Google+ team!).

Back in 2011, when it came to listing locations on Google+ profiles, they were displayed in the “Places Lived” section.

“Places Lived” doesn’t exist anymore – it’s now just “Places,” and the word “lived” is no longer there to search for exactly as I did in the past.

However, location information from Google+ profiles is now often also displayed in the summary info at the top of a person’s profile, and it can be listed as “Lived in ________” or “Lives in _________” – you can search for either or both.

X-Ray Searching Google+ for “Lived in”

Here is an example of a Google X-Ray search of Google+ to find software engineers who work at Google in New York, using “lived in _______:”

site:plus.google.com “lived * new york” “software engineer” “works * google”

 

 

Here’s where it’s picking up the “Lived in,” which pulls from their list of locations on their profile.

 

 

Don’t be confused by or concerned with the past-tense “lived in.” For these folks, the first location listed is typically where they currently live…

 

…they just haven’t checked the “Current” box by the location when they edited their profile:

 

 

When checking some of the Google+ results to see if the the people did in fact live in the location I specified, I cross referenced them on LinkedIn.

Interestingly, when I cross referenced one of the results from my New York search on LinkedIn, their LinkedIn profile stated that they currently lived in Bulgaria instead of New York, which was initially disappointing, at least until I performed a Facebook Graph Search for her, where I was able to confirm she does in fact live in New York.

 

Google+ cross reference location on Facebook Graph Search

 

Hopefully I am not the only who finds this interesting, although not all that surprising when you think about it – Facebook can be more accurate than LinkedIn.

X-Ray Searching Google+ for “Lives in”

Here is the exact same search as above, which is a Google X-Ray search of Google+ to find software engineers who work at Google in New York – except in this case, I am using “lives in _______:”

site:plus.google.com “lives * new york” “software engineer” “works * google”

 

 

You’ll notice some dupes in the results for hits on the same person from multiple places on their profile, such as the “About” and “Videos” sections.

If you wanted to clean those up, you could run something like this:

site:plus.google.com “lives * new york” “software engineer” “works * google” -inurl:(about|photos|videos) – you’ll get 118 clean results from the original 135.

One thing you can do using Google to X-Ray search Google+ for profiles that you can’t do on FindPeopleonPlus is Boolean search with no limitations.

For the Boolean bashers (I know you’re out there!), basic Boolean logic allows the ability to search for multiple titles, skills, and or companies in a single search string. Although FindPeopleonPlus does support basic Boolean logic for keywords, they don’t allow the use of Boolean logic to simultaneously search for any of a number of employers or occupations/titles.

With a search interface similar to FindPeopleonPlus’s, you’re limited to one company, title, etc. at a time per search. Yes – it still “works,” but it feels like wearing mittens vs. fingerless gloves when you know how to get exactly what you want and you can’t get exactly what you want in a single search like you can with Google.

For example, we can search for any of 3 titles at once using Google to X-Ray search Google+:

site:plus.google.com “lives * new york” (programmer | developer | “software engineer”) “works * google” -inurl:(posts|about|photos|videos|plusones)

That Google search returns 137 results in New York.

With FindPeopleonPlus, you get 3 results in the entire world.

Going one step further with Google+ site: search, you can search for both “lived in” and “lives in” in the same string to get 152 results:

site:plus.google.com (“lives * new york” | “lived * new york”) (programmer | developer | “software engineer”) “works * google” -inurl:(posts|about|photos|videos|plusones)

Of course, you don’t have to target companies in your search strings.

In fact, you can also search for people that don’t even mention their employer in the “work” section (although they do mention it somewhere else):

site:plus.google.com (“lives * new york” | “lived * new york”) (programmer | developer | “software engineer”) -“works * “ -inurl:(posts|about|photos|videos|plusones)

Like this person:

 

Google+ search result profile with no current employer. Kind of. :)

 

There are many other interesting things you can do with Google+ X-Ray searches – I just wanted to provide you with a few “starter” searches to get you going.

Google+ Got Your Attention Now?

There’s no doubt that LinkedIn is “where it’s at” with regard to deep and highly searchable human capital data, and I don’t think LinkedIn is becoming “saturated” as many people seem to be suggesting recently – most sourcers/recruiters only find and review 20-30% of what’s available to be found on LinkedIn, leaving at least 50M (if not 100M+!) profiles unfound/unviewed. No, I am not exaggerating for effect.

Even with sourcers and recruiters only scratching the surface of LinkedIn, Google+ cannot be ignored.

Google+ now has more profiles than LinkedIn and is the most active social network in the world second only to Facebook. Yes, I know – Google+ haters/doubters like to argue about what “active” really means…who cares?!?! Most Google+ naysayers haven’t spent 5 minutes on Google+.

Get on Google+ and do some searches and I think you’ll be impressed with what you can quickly and easily find. Explore Google+ a little bit (actually USE it for a few weeks) and I think you’ll be surprised by the functionality and the many benefits and advantages if can afford sourcers and recruiters.

Check out the kind of information you’re missing if you’re not searching Google+:

 

 

Yes, that’s an email address I blurred out. It’s there for anyone to find – it’s not listed because I know them or have them in a Circle – because I don’t.

Unlike LinkedIn, I’ve found that software engineers and other non-recruiting professionals do include email addresses and sometimes even phone numbers on their profiles that anyone can see – like the phone number of this UX Engineer at Microsoft:

 

Google+ mobile phone number

 

Of course, there are many advantages of using Google+ in your sourcing and recruiting efforts that are beyond the scope of this post.

As for me – I don’t care if you never use Google+ for sourcing and recruiting. It just means I have less competition.

:)

 

The End of Sourcing 1.0 is Near, Sourcing 2.0 Just Beginning

 

In case you haven’t read Dr. John Sullivan’s recent article entitled, “The end of sourcing is near…the remaining recruiting challenge is selling“, I highly recommend that you do so.

While I agree with some of the points that Dr. Sullivan raises, I disagree with others as I believe he has an oversimplified view of sourcing.

I argue that some basic and common sourcing functions and tactics will be coming to an end soon, and in fact, they have already ended in companies that are on the leading edge of sourcing.

However, as with many corporate functions, there will never be an end to sourcing itself – there will only be an evolution.

What follows is my sourcing manifesto.

Read further to explore:

  • Why sourcing exists in the first place
  • The underlying flaws of the “everyone is easy to find” argument
  • The limits of matching technology
  • Why big data requires people to make sense of it
  • My definition of sourcing
  • Strategic vs. tactical sourcing
  • The true value of sourcing
  • What can (and should!) be automated in sourcing
  • Sourcing 1.0 vs. 2.0

You should be advised that this is a lengthy article – if you’re looking for a quick read, you won’t find it here. Continue reading

Do you suffer from Obsessive Exotic Sourcing Syndrome?

 

 

Okay, that might have been a bit dramatic, but I do expect a strong negative reaction from some folks because I am going to address an issue that might be a tad sensitive to the sourcing community.

The issue I would like to address is the apparent obsession of many with exotic sourcing.

What is Exotic Sourcing?

If you check out the definition of “exotic,” you will find “strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously different or unusual.”

Exotic sourcing consists of sourcing methods and technologies that are, yes – you guessed it – “strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously different or unusual.”

If you’re looking for some examples, here are a few:

What’s the Problem?

I like experimenting with new search engines, deep web searches, and seeing if I can extract sourcing and recruiting value from new, non-recruiting websites sites just like many people do in the global sourcing community. Yes, I’ll admit I’ve poked around Pinterest and Instagram.

So what’s the problem? Continue reading

My SourceCon Presentation – LinkedIn: Beyond the Basics

 

I was honored to be asked to present at the Dallas 2012 SourceCon event – which turned out to be the largest SourceCon event ever!

When I was talking with Amybeth Hale back at the end of 2011 about what I’d like to present on, I asked if anyone had ever run a session solely dedicated to LinkedIn.

Now, I’ve been to every SourceCon save 2 (the first one and 2011/Santa Clara), I’ve spoken at 5 of them, and I couldn’t recall anyone delivering a LinkedIn presentation, and neither could Amybeth (for the ones I missed or sessions I did not attend).

That struck me as beyond odd, given how valuable a resource LinkedIn is for sourcing and recruiting.

What you see below is the deck from my “LinkedIn: Beyond the Basics” session, complete with YouTube videos.

 

 

How to View Full Profiles of Your 3rd Degree LinkedIn Network

 

Just a short while ago I posted a piece on how some people are no longer able to view full profiles of their 3rd degree LinkedIn connections when logged in and searching withing LinkedIn.

At the time of the article, I had not been affected, and I kept checking daily to see if and when I would be.

Alas, the time has come – I can no longer view full profiles of 3rd degree LinkedIn connections with my free account when I am searching within LinkedIn.

Well, I take that back.

Although I no longer enjoy automatically being treated to full profiles of 3rd degree connections while searching LinkedIn with my free account, here are 4 ways in which I can view a full profile of my 3rd degree connections:

#1 Use Google or Bing to search for the profile while not logged in

I can take the headline phrase or a unique combination of keywords from the 3rd degree profile I am trying to view and use Bing or Google to search for that phrase/term combo in another browser in which I am not logged into LinkedIn (or use Chrome incognito).

Here you can see Chrome on the left in which I am logged into LinkedIn, and IE on the right in which I am not logged into LinkedIn.

 

 

#2 Search for them by name

Even while still logged into LinkedIn, I can quickly X-ray for the person’s public profile, snag their full name, then search for them by name.

Because LinkedIn allows you to see full profiles of people you search for by name (they assume you know the person, otherwise why would you know their name? <unless you’re a sourcer>), you can see their full profile while logged in.

 

 

#3 Export to PDF

I can also view full profiles of 3rd degree LinkedIn connections if I click on the blue arrow below “See Expanded View” and select “Export to PDF.”

 

 

Once I open the PDF, I can see the full profile contained within.

 

 

Additionally, when I scroll to the last page of the PDF, I find a link with “Contact <first name> on LinkedIn.”

 

 

When I click on the link, I am taken to their profile on LinkedIn, which I can view in its entirety (note the content from the web profile below is the same as the PDF content above).

 

 

I tried using the same link format [http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=XXXXXXXX&authType=name&authToken=2Ol8&goback=] with different profile ID’s but that didn’t work for me.

Darn tokens.

#4 Share the profile

Some of you may be wondering why I’ve actually never written about the “Share” method in which you can send a profile to someone else and copy yourself to get a link to view the full profile.

While I know this is a popular method for many, it has never really been a viable method for me because my network is so large that when I try to type in a name or use the LinkedIn address book, the system either times out or I get tired of waiting for names to show up/load.

For the sake of this post I tried to be very patient and after a few attempts I was able to share a 3rd degree profile with someone, copy myself, and then view the full profile from the link in the message in my inbox.

However, it’s much faster and easier for me to simply use methods 1-3 above.

Of course, the LinkedIn team is likely already looking into closing these holes, but some of these methods have been published and in use for years, so you may be able to enjoy them for quite some time.

Sharing is Caring

If you found this post helpful, please share it with someone you think would benefit.

They’ll thank you.

 

How to Become a World Class Sourcer or Recruiter

So, you want to know how to become a world class sourcer or recruiter?

You’re in luck, because in this article, I explain precisely how to become one.

The good news is that all it takes is practice, and it doesn’t take 10,000 hours of practice either.

No one is born with a sourcing or recruiting gene, so no one is predispositioned for sourcing/recruiting greatness – it’s pretty much a level playing field without any significant barriers to entry.

The bad news (for some) is that it takes “deliberate practice,” which by design isn’t fun, is hard work, mentally challenging, and improves performance by design.

Read on, if you dare, to unlock the secret 8-factor deliberate practice formula for becoming a world class sourcer or recruiter. Continue reading

Searching Facebook for Sourcing and Recruiting

As Facebook approaches 1 billion users globally, it would be folly to ignore the vast amount of human capital data that Facebook has to offer.

However, as I have written and spoken about many times, the value of data is directly proportional to the ability to retrieve it.

And therein lies the rub of Facebook.

It’s just not very searchable, and the structure of Facebook source code doesn’t make it easy to reliably target the really good stuff that sourcers and recruiters would be especially interested in.

Aside from being highly unsearchable, Facebook doesn’t score highly on the depth of professional content either.

I am aware that many of you probably believe that very few people enter in any professional information into their Facebook profiles, but you might be surprised to learn that more people than you would assume actually do enter titles and the companies they work for.

Also, while the percentage of Facebook users entering in professional details might be relatively small (for the sake of argument, let’s say 10%), given the nearly 1 billion profiles, that would be almost 100,000,000 profiles with some amount of professional data.

I don’t know about you, but I can work with 100,000,000 profiles.

So, while Facebook isn’t very search-friendly, and not everyone enters professional information on their profiles, there are a few ways to search for and target people based on what they do and where they work.

Let’s get on with a walk through of some of the ways you can leverage the professional content that is present within Facebook. Continue reading

Top 15 Common Talent Sourcing Mistakes

Practically everything I have learned about sourcing and recruiting didn’t come from a mentor or any formal training.

Instead, I learned how to become a top performing recruiter “the hard way.”

What that really means is that when it came to finding top talent, I tried a lot of things that didn’t work, and because I refuse to make excuses, give up, or accept anything less than the best results, I kept experimenting until I discovered things that enabled me to find people that others can’t and don’t.

With over fifteen years of experience in sourcing and recruiting, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes along the way. I’ve also had the opportunity to assess, train and coach corporate and agency sourcers and recruiters, which has exposed me to many myths, misconceptions and mistakes when it comes to leveraging information systems for sourcing and recruiting.

Here are what I believe to be some of the most common productivity-robbing and results-reducing mistakes sourcers and recruiters make when looking for the right match.

In no particular order… Continue reading

How to Effectively Source Talent via Social Media & Networks

Sourcing talent via social media requires an entirely different mindset than sourcing with other forms of human capital data, such as resumes/CV’s, employee directories, conference attendee lists, etc.

Back in early 2009, one of only 2 guest posts ever co-written on my site was published on the topic of non-standard descriptors and the role they play in social media. Valerie Scarsellato was a Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation at the time when she put together the framework for the original article on sourcing via social media, and she has now moved into a Segment Marketing Specialist role at Intel and is loving it. For those of you who feel that employer marketing/branding/communications is a logical extension of sourcing, Valerie would wholeheartedly agree with you – check out this video in which she discussed her award winning _codehearted; work for Intel.

Now that nearly 2 years has passed since the Searching Social Media Requires Outside-the-box Thinking article was published, social media usage has continued to explode – monthly visitors to LinkedIn and Facebook have doubled, they’ve nearly quadrupled for Twitter , and we now have Google+, Pinterest and others springing on the scene, making the topic even more relevant today. As such, I wanted to rework the original piece and update it with a few more examples.

The primary challenge when leveraging social media for sourcing talent is that nonstandard terminology is prevalent – it’s generally acceptable to use slang and other verbiage that would otherwise never be found on a resume, even when it comes to describing one’s profession.

If you use the same query terms when sourcing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. as you would when searching for resumes, you will certainly find people. However, you will also exclude a decent portion of the available results, unknowingly relegating them to Dark Matter and otherwise undiscovered talent. This is because you can only retrieve what you explicitly search for. Continue reading