Category Archives: How-To’s

How to Search Across Multiple Countries on LinkedIn

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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 →

Searching Social Media Requires Outside-the-Box Thinking

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Non-Standard Descriptors and the Role They Play in Social Media

Article by Valerie Scarsellato, Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation
Co-written by Glen Cathey

Sourcing has always been a significant component in the recruiting lifecycle. However, in recent years, sourcing has taken a giant step into the forefront and has become recognized as the solid foundation at which successful recruiting rests upon in order to identify and secure top-level talent, no matter what industry you may be supporting.

One of the newest tools available for sourcers and recruiters to leverage to find candidates is Social Media (SM). These days, it seems as if nearly everyone from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to inventors in various fields, to the grandmother of your best friend has a Myspace or Facebook page or a LinkedIn or Twitter profile.

Twitter happens to be my personal preference in the SM realm. It also happens to be the fastest growing Social Media application at 1200% in the past year!

Although some people are still discovering and testing the waters of the Twitterverse, a diverse and large population (over 14M visitors in March – surpassing LinkedIn!) spanning nearly all industry segments has already fully jumped on to the real-time messaging bandwagon in order to share information or blurt out a piece of nonsense rolling around in their head.

Understand Social Media Users

With the significant levels of attention and traffic being driven by Social Media, it’s critical for sourcers and recruiters to understand how to best utilize SM for talent identification. Technology is ever-evolving and those of us in sourcing/recruiting/talent acquisition roles (even we have many titles!) are constantly having to play catch-up with those that create each new SM application.

After attending one of Glen’s focused and information-packed FREE webinars, I had an epiphany. It’s true – we need to build the right search strings in order to filter through and find the right people we are targeting. In order to do that effectively, I realized that we as sourcers need to understand the psychology of the people we’re searching for and be aware of how they think of and refer to themselves in order to return highly relevant results when searching Social Media. Continue reading →

How to Search Twitter for Sourcing and Recruiting

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It appears that many people in the sourcing, recruiting, and staffing industry are all a-twitter about Twitter these days. My professional opinion is that Twitter is best utilized for personal and corporate branding, as well as socializing job opportunities – in other words, PASSIVE sourcing and recruiting techniques.

However, even if you’re a Twitter-hater, you cannot deny the buzz and the traffic that Twitter has been generating (1200% YOY growth). Also – did you know that Twitter just surpassed LinkedIn in terms of unique U.S. visitors in March? As such, it would be foolish for sourcers and recruiters to avoid trying to figure out how to best leverage the 14 million+ Twitter users to identify potential candidates.

Using Twitter for Active Candidate Identification

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering if you should and how you can leverage Twitter in your ACTIVE talent identification efforts, you’ve come to the right place.

While Twitter is an intrinsically shallow source of human capital data (140 character Tweets and 160 character bios), unlike Facebook – it is quite searchable. In this post I am going to review and compare 6 effective methods of searching Twitter for ACTIVE candidate identification: Twitter’s Advanced Search, Power Twitter, TweetDeck, Twellow, TweetGrid, and X-Ray searching Twitter – including 5 video walk-throughs of how to maximize your searching efforts with each application. Continue reading →

How to X-Ray Search Facebook for Candidate Sourcing

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I recently wrote a post on how to search for candidates on Facebook where I featured all of Facebook’s “built-in” search capabilities. Shortly after publishing the article, I received a question from one of my regular readers asking why I did not include searching Facebook using the site: query modifier (as Google calls it), also known as X-Ray search.

It was a solid question, and the answer is that I purposefully did not include it in my “searching for candidates on Facebook” post, as I wanted to focus on the highest ROI search methods.  I’ve taken cracks at Facebook with the X-Ray search technique, and I’ve never been very pleased with the results. Facebook’s site architecture certainly doesn’t make it easy to X-Ray like LinkedIn and Twitter.

However, while Facebook isn’t very “X-Rayable,” you CAN get SOME relevant results from searching Facebook with the site: query modifier. What you’ll see below is a series of videos (my first!) of me driving through my attempts to X-Ray into Facebook. Continue reading →

How to Find Resumes on the Internet with Google

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Want to learn how to find resumes on the Internet using Google?  You’ve come to the right place!

Whether you are new to searching the Internet for resumes or you are a veteran Interent sourcer, I’ve included some tips, tricks, and observations for the novice and expert alike.

Targeting Resumes

When using Google to search specifically for resumes, it’s a good idea to begin by searching for the word “resume” in the title and/or the url of web pages.

For example: (intitle:resume OR inurl:resume)

Here is a sample result to illustrate how this works – we can see the word “Resume” in the blue TITLE line, as well as in the green URL line. The first line of any search result is the title of the webpage, and the url is the specific web page’s address.

Targeting the word “resume” in the title and/or url is very handy, because for many people, it’s simply common sense/instinct to either title the web page containing their resume with the word “resume,” and/or save their resume using the word “resume” in the name of the file.

Eliminating False Positive Results

Continue reading →