Tag Archives: Bing X-Ray Search

Update Your LinkedIn X-Ray Searches for Location Names

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across something on LinkedIn that I am surprised I never noticed before – I’m not even certain if/when LinkedIn made the change.

Finally sitting down to write about it, I highly doubted that I could be the only person to have discovered this interesting little find, so I did some quick research and found that Gary Cozin and Cathy Ou recently noticed it as well.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the fact that LinkedIn has alternate location names for certain postal codes.

While some locations only have one location phrase, I’ve found many have two and some have as many as nine! If you use Internet search engines to “X-Ray” LinkedIn for public profiles and you only use one location phrase, you may be unknowingly excluding people you actually want to find! Continue reading

LinkedIn Search: Controlling Years of Experience & Compensation

When searching any source for potential candidates, the ability to search by years of experience can be especially helpful in that years of experience can be correlated to current/desired compensation.

If you are recruiting for a position that pays a maximum of $85,000 annually, being able to first source people who are highly likely to be qualified for the role and willing to accept that compensation is certainly more efficient than sourcing and talking to a number of people who don’t have enough experience or for whom that compensation is unacceptable.

If you know that people with 5 to 7 years of overall professional experience in a certain role with specific skills in a given industry are generally in the $70,000 to $90,000 range for annual compensation, you would simply be working smart to try and first narrow your search results down to people who have that range of years of experience if that is what the position you are recruiting for pays.

As I’ve written and spoken about many times – appropriately deep and searchable human capital data can afford sourcers and recruiters the advantage of more control over critical candidate qualification variables than any other form of candidate identification, including referrals and job postings (social or otherwise), which offer very little-to-no control over any candidate variables (years of experience, education, specific responsibilities, industry experience, etc.).

With the ability to control candidate qualification variables such as years of experience and/or likely desired compensation, sourcers and recruiters can work more efficiently with less waste, more quickly identifying and contacting prospective candidates who have a high probability of not only being qualified, but also “recruitable,” and one of the critical aspects of a “recruitable” candidate is the probability of accepting an offer at a specific compensation level.

So let’s take a quick look at how you might be able to exert some degree of control over years of experience and thus current/desired candidate compensation when searching LinkedIn for talent using LinkedIn’s filters as well as using Google and Bing to X-Ray search into LinkedIn for those of you who do not have a premium LinkedIn account. Continue reading

Bing Beats Google for the Best Way to X-Ray Search LinkedIn

Bing vs Google11/13/11 Note: I’ve provided some updated LinkedIn X-Ray search string syntax examples at the end of this post.

I recently received a message via LinkedIn from Gary Cozin, an accomplished, well known player and knowledge sharer in sourcing circles, asking me a question:

“You know when we xray Google for LI profiles we can insert “current * financial advisor” in our string to bring back ‘current’ job titles we want. Do you know how would that be done in Bing?

Now, I have been a long-time user of Google for X-Ray searching LinkedIn. However, Google’s recently made some changes to the way LinkedIn X-Ray search results are returned that has made sourcers and recruiters add additional terms to X-Ray strings to an already lengthy search string to return only profiles (e.g., -inurl:dir, -inurl:jobs…).

Not long after Google made those changes, Shally Steckerl posted an article detailing a novel approach to X-Ray searching LinkedIn using the phrase “Public profile powered by,” which seemed to allow searchers to not have to resort to the cumbersome (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs, etc. search syntax.

While that approach definitely works, Irina Shamaeva and I have found it doesn’t seem to find and return all available results. Even so, there is no denying that it is a much simpler (and shorter!) method for finding LinkedIn profiles via Internet search engines. Why unnecessarily over-complicate search strings?

So, with Google’s recent changes coupled with their annoyingly overzealous blocking of more complex searches (in some cases you don’t even get a chance to use a CAPTCHA to prove you’re human!), I was happy and curious to see if there was in fact a way to accomplish what Gary was looking to do using a search engine other than Google. Continue reading