How to Get People to Respond to Recruiting Emails & Messages

When it comes to sourcing and recruiting, it’s gotten easier to find people but it’s gotten more difficult to get people to respond to emails, InMails, social messages and voicemails. The poor quality and lack of sophistication of most recruiter messaging, along with rampant spamming, certainly hasn’t helped. Unfortunately and yet somewhat thankfully, the bar of what people expect to … Read More

14 Tips on How to Use Twitter for Social Recruiting

  Twitter’s been around for nearly 8 years and has always been popular in recruiting circles, but there are still plenty of recruiters  who don’t use Twitter to its full potential or are simply new to using Twitter for recruiting. For example, just the other day I noticed in one of my Hootsuite streams a recruiter with 3 followers tweet … Read More

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? A year ago, Peter Kazanjy of TalentBin published an extensive … Read More

How to Find Military Veterans for Sourcing & Recruiting

In a similar vein to my recent diversity sourcing article, I wanted to create a resource for people looking to effectively search for and identify military veterans for recruiting. While this posts focuses on the U.S. armed forces, I encourage folks from other countries to create and distribute similar searches to identify their own military veterans. If you’re interested in … Read More

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:     Additionally, I thought … Read More

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: Google+’s … Read More

How to Find, Hire, Train & Build a Sourcing Team: SourceCon 2013

  I recently presented at the largest-ever SourceCon event held at the mesmerizing Georgia Aquarium where you can network with industry peers while watching whale sharks, manta rays and Beluga whales swim by. My session focused on building out a sourcing function with an emphasis on building a sourcing team from scratch with people who have no prior experience in … Read More

What’s the most effective way to X-Ray search LinkedIn?

  I’ve recently come across some blog posts and some Boolean Strings discussions on LinkedIn that inspired me to go back and tinker with searching LinkedIn via Google and Bing. For example, I continue to see people talk about: Whether or not you should use “pub” and/or “in” (e.g. site:linkedin.com/in | site:linkedin.com/pub) Whether or not you should use -dir Using country … Read More

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 … Read More

How to See Full Names of 3rd Degree Connections on LinkedIn

For a while, there was an interesting little method for revealing the full name of 3rd degree and group connections on LinkedIn. However, LinkedIn has changed the “get introduced” functionality and UI for most people and effectively eliminated that method (albeit unintentionally, IMO). Oh well – it was easy and fun while it lasted. Fortunately, I’ve recently become aware of … Read More

How to Find Bilingual Professionals via Boolean Search

Have you ever had to find bilingual candidates or search for people who speak a specific language? If so, you’re in luck – this week’s post focuses on a few ways of how do just that. If not, no worries – the thought processes and search strategies I use in this post are helpful no matter what it is you’re … Read More

How to Convert Quotation Marks in Word for Boolean Searches

Have you ever used Microsoft Word to build and save Boolean search strings to be able to copy and paste entire searches into LinkedIn, Monster, Dice, or your ATS ? I did for quite some time, until I ran into a problem. Many years ago, I noticed that several sites, including Monster, Dice, and LinkedIn were not “obeying” my request … Read More

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

Have you ever wanted or needed to search for top students of people who have achieved high grade point averages in high school or college? While GPA is relatively unimportant to many employers – to others, a high GPA is indicative of a person’s ability to achieve results in an unstructured environment (no one is there making you go to class … Read More

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

11/13/11 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 … Read More

How to Automatically Build Boolean OR Strings

Writing Boolean search strings is typically a quick and simple affair, as most search engines and databases won’t let you construct anything longer than a few hundred characters. However, if you’re not constrained to a fixed limit on search terms (such as Google’s 32 words) or characters, it’s no longer a simple matter of “this OR that.” I wrote an … Read More

Searching LinkedIn with Google and Yahoo for Free

When it comes to searching LinkedIn using Internet search engines such as Google or Yahoo, there are many different ways to construct your search string (“X-Ray” or otherwise) and get results. Ultimately, the goal of any good sourcer or recruiter is to find all of the best available potential candidates that a particular source has to offer. A short while … Read More

How I Learned What I Know About Candidate Sourcing

When it comes to my theories and best practices for leveraging information systems for quickly finding highly qualified candidates, I am often asked, “So, how did you figure all of this stuff out?” It’s a fantastic question, and I am happy to be asked it, but my answer doesn’t seem to satisfy anyone.  The short answer is literally that “I just figured it out.” … Read More

How to Bulk-Accept LinkedIn Invitations to Connect

LinkedIn 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 … Read More

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 … Read More