Category Archives: LinkedIn

How to Find and Identify Active Job Seekers on LinkedIn

I’ve received a few inquiries over the past month regarding how to find active job seekers on LinkedIn.

This isn’t something I do, nor have I ever tried to do it, so I didn’t have any read-made search suggestions for these folks.

I don’t recruit people because they are looking to make a move – I recruit people based on their skills, experience and critical intangibles. I could care less if they are looking or if the thought of leaving their current employer is the furthest thing from their mind.

In my opinion and experience, everyone is a candidate and anyone can be recruited if you have a great match between their skills, experience and interests and the opportunity you’re looking to fill.

Having said all that, if you want to search LinkedIn to identify people who are highly likely to be actively seeking employment, you have a few options. Continue reading →

LinkedIn’s Undocumented Search Operator

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Earlier this year, I wrote an article on how to use LinkedIn’s advanced search operators as search agents in which I briefly mentioned and demonstrated an undocumented LinkedIn search operator at the very end of the post.

Did you catch it?

If not, you’re in luck.

Although it’s not an Earth-shattering discovery by any means, it is a discovery nonetheless, and because I keep encountering people who don’t know about this LinkedIn search operator, I thought it would be a good idea to dedicate a short post to the topic to ensure ensure everyone is aware of it. Continue reading →

Update Your LinkedIn X-Ray Searches for Location Names

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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

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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 →

LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – Can You Find Everyone?

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So far, I’ve launched 2 LinkedIn sourcing challenges – Ruby and X-Ray Location False Positives.

The former had very strong participation as it was a little on the easier side (for some!). The latter had fewer participants, perhaps because it was more technical – but those who did participate did so heavily.

For my 3rd Linkedin Sourcing Challenge, I think I have one that is universally appealing because it requires no technical or advanced sourcing experience to participate, nor to win the challenge!

Continue reading →

How to Find The Total Number of LinkedIn Members

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On March 22nd, LinkedIn announced that they had officially crossed the 100 Million member mark.

However, they might have actually crossed the 100 Million member milestone back in January.

How would I know?

I started seriously exploring LinkedIn Ads ever since they announced that they emerged from beta on 1/26/2011, and I noticed that once you configure an ad, LinkedIn displays the total estimated audience based on your targeting, including geography, company, job title, group, gender and age.

When I first looked into LinkedIn Ads, I noticed that the total target audience was somewhere over 99,000,000 when I did not make any targeting selections. I figured this was representative of the total estimated number of LinkedIn profiles worldwide.

Because the figure was so close to 100,000,000, I made a mental note to come back and check in to see if and when the estimated audience crossed the 100M mark.

Back on January 30th, I took a screenshot of a targeted audience of 101,382,559. Continue reading →

LinkedIn’s Dark Matter – Undiscovered Profiles

45 Replies

Sourcing has a fundamental problem: All searches return results.

Yes, that is actually a problem.

Why? Because everyone’s a winner.

Type in a few keywords and BAM! – you get some good looking results. Hey, this sourcing stuff isn’t so hard!

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times – sourcing is easy. In fact, it’s ridiculously easy to find some people.

So if you and your company are happy with finding some people and not necessarily the best people available to be found, then you can stop reading now and go back to finding some people.

For everyone who’s still reading this, try answering these questions:

Can you ever be sure you’re finding everyone there is to be found?
How do you know you’ve found the best people available?
How do you know you’ve found all of the best people?
Are there people on LinkedIn, in your ATS, in job board resume databases that are never found?
How can you be aware of social media profiles and resumes that your searches can’t return in results – but are there?

Sourcing is easy, but it’s not easy to get to the point where you are sure you have found all of the best available results, nor is it easy to specifically target and find people others cannot and do not.

Most people use relatively basic, straight forward/direct keyword and title searches. There’s nothing wrong with that – they clearly “work” – anyone running those kinds of searches will find results.

However, they will also find exactly what everyone else finds when searching for the same types of people, which yields zero competitive advantage.

The fact that all searches produce results is a problem because it lulls people into thinking that sourcing is easy, and at least on the subconscious level – it leads people to believe that the results that are returned from searches represent all available matching and relevant results.

However, it is a fact that no single search can find all of the people you’re looking for, and there are many social media profiles and resumes that are never found.

Let me introduce you to the concept of Dark Matter. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

51 Replies

I was extremely pleased to receive many responses/solutions to the Ruby LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge I posted recently, including some from well-known online sourcing heavyweights, as well as a number from other talented folks who came out of the Internet ether from several continents to show off their skills and take a crack at solving the challenge.

Kudos to those who successfully found people on LinkedIn who have experience with Ruby but do not make explicit mention of it on their profile!

I sincerely hope everyone appreciated seeing the various approaches and methods people utilized to solve the first LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – that was my primary motivator in posting it.

One thing I noticed from some of the responses is that for a few people, the challenge seemed too easy.

So – if you’re up for another LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge, take a crack at this one – it’s at least a degree more difficult than the last. :-) Continue reading →

LinkedIn Makes Obvious Moves to Affect X-Ray Searching

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If you happen to do quite a bit of LinkedIn X-Ray searching, you might be noticing that some people are taking control of how they appear in public search results.

Or maybe you aren’t noticing it, because you can’t.

Confused?

Read on to learn more.

LinkedIn Profile Changes

I’m not exactly sure when this change was introduced (anyone?), but I recently noticed that LinkedIn is taking very obvious efforts to bring the editing/control of the public profile to the attention of users.

They’re obvious to me at least. :-)

When you look over to the right side of your profile, you will notice “Change Public Profile Settings:”

When you click that, you get this huge blue call-out:

Continue reading →

LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – Ruby

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During my SourceCon NYC session, I gave an example of a sourcing challenge that can verify one’s “capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge. It is the ability to analyze novel problems, identify patterns and relationships that underpin these problems and the extrapolation of these using logic.”

This capacity is otherwise know as fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning .

The LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge

If you and/or your team are up for a test of your fluid reasoning and sourcing capability, try solving this challenge:

Find a LinkedIn profile of someone who has Ruby on Rails experience, but does not mention Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Rails, or RoR in their profile, and show with a link or other evidence exactly how you are certain they have Ruby experience.

There is no single correct answer – there are many different approaches to solving this challenge.

I’m going to recognize Jeremy Langhans once again for being able to solve that challenge in about 15 minutes before I even finished my presentation, using only his iPhone. To this date, no one else has even tried to take a crack at it.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. I hope at least a few people are up to the challenge! Continue reading →

Update Your Bing X-Ray Searches of LinkedIn to Target Profiles

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Beginning early last week, I’ve had a few people reach out to me and ask about some changes LinkedIn is apparently making to the public profile listings.

In the past, I’ve written about how Bing is easier and more effective at searching LinkedIn profiles than Google.

One of my suggestions for targeting profiles an avoiding directory and job results was to search for the word “powered,” because public profiles on LinkedIn have the phrase “Public profile powered by,” and the word “powered” seemed to be unique only to profiles.

LinkedIn is Tinkering

While you can still search LinkedIn via Bing using +powered and find results, the only reason it seems to work is due to the fact that Bing has taken “snapshots” of the old LinkedIn profiles the last time Bing’s crawlers have visited them. The original (non-cached) search results don’t mention “powered.”

I’ve found that many (all?) public LinkedIn profiles no longer mention the phrase “Public profile powered by,” so adding +powered to your LinkedIn X-Ray searches via Bing will prevent some public LinkedIn profiles from being returned in your searches – and you won’t even know it.

But now you do. Continue reading →

How to Use LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators as Search Agents

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In January 2009, I wrote a feature about LinkedIn’s advanced operators. Two years later, I am still surprised that remarkably few people leverage the ability to bypass LinkedIn’s advanced search interface and “hand-code” search strings.

Before I demonstrate how you can use LinkedIn’s advanced operators as search agents, here is a quick refresher detailing the all of the advanced search operators:

You can use these operators in conjunction with standard keyword search terms in the people search box.

In this quick example, I am targeting profiles with a current title of engineer and a current company of Google: Continue reading →

18 LinkedIn Apps, Tools, and Resources

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I tweeted the other day about LinkedIn’s Resume Builder and I got a number of surprising responses from people I would have assumed would already know that LinkedIn had a resume builder.

LinkedIn has been cranking out new features and tools, and I realize that it’s too easy for me to assume that everyone else knows what I know, so I’m compiling all of the interesting offerings LinkedIn has released in 1 place for easy consumption.

While you may be familiar with some of them, I can almost guarantee you aren’t familiar with ALL of them.

I’ll start with LinkedIn Labs offerings and then cover Outlook, Jobs Insider, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google toolbars, LinkedIn mobile solutions, the Lotus Notes widget, sharing bookmarklets, emails signatures, the Mac search widget, and LinkedIn Ads.

Resume Builder

I’ve been waiting for this for a LONG time, and I wasn’t surprised to see LinkedIn create a resume builder that allows people to turn their LinkedIn profiles into Word and PDF resumes.

It’s as easy as picking a template, editing and arranging the information, and exporting and printing or sharing via email, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. Continue reading →

Does LinkedIn Offer Recruiters Any Competitive Advantage?

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When I spoke at the LinkedIn Talent Connect event last year, I dropped a big question on the 500+ audience:

“What’s your informational and competitive advantage when you all have access to the same people?”

Think about it.

If you have a LinkedIn Recruiter account (over 55% of the Fortune 100 do!), you have access to view any and all LinkedIn profiles.

So do your competitors that are hunting to identify and recruit the same talent.

Regardless of your LinkedIn account type (Free, Business, Business Plus, Executive, Pro, Talent Basic, Talent Finder, Talent Pro, or Recruiter), you still have access to viewing any and all public profiles, although you just might have to jump through some flaming hoops with a small network and a free account. :-)

So now I will ask you – if the majority of sourcers, recruiters and human resources professionals in the world use LinkedIn for sourcing and talent acquisition (there’s nearly a million!), what’s your competitive advantage over your rivals? Continue reading →

Do You Really Know the Size of Your LinkedIn Network?

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When people talk about the size of their LinkedIn network, many make reference to the “Total users you can contact through an Introduction” number, which is the total of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections.

However, many people don’t know that the number representing LinkedIn users three degrees away from you is just an estimate.

Yes, you read that right – it’s not the actual number of your 3rd degree connections on LinkedIn. Which means the total number is also an estimate. Continue reading →

The Big Deal about Bing for Sourcing and Recruiting

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I’ve been a Google search fan for many years – since 1998, and I’ve used it exclusively for all of my search needs, both personal and professional.

Until recently.

That’s because I’ve discovered that Bing has a number of advantages over Google when it comes to sourcing candidates, including:

Cleaner, shorter, simpler and effective LinkedIn X-Ray searching
Effective Twitter X-Ray searching
Never doubting your humanity and refusing to run your more advanced queries
Configurable proximity (although I just learned Google has a similar capability)
Converting searches into RSS feeds Continue reading →

LinkedIn Profile Search Engine Optimization / SEO

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I recently wrote about what happens when you search for yourself on LinkedIn.

Now I’d like to address what happens when people don’t search for you by name, but rather try to find people like you using “regular” keywords and titles.

When it comes to Internet search, the goal for most people and companies is to be on the first page of search results for your keywords, and ideally #1 if at all possible.

When you search LinkedIn with the titles you have on your profile and keywords you’ve mentioned in your metro area, do you show up in the first 10 results?

Have you ever wondered if there was anything you could do to positively affect your ranking in search results when someone searches LinkedIn looking for people like you? Have you seen heavily keyword-loaded LinkedIn profiles and wondered if it really does any good?

You could get lost in all of the YouTube videos and blog posts on the subject of LinkedIn profile optimization, but most of it is pure speculation.

Before I go into some detail as to what I think is going on with LinkedIn search ranking and what you might be able to do to positively affect your ranking, I’d like to show you a little experiment I’ve run and ask you to do something similar and see what happens.

You have searched or have had someone else search LinkedIn by the titles and keywords you used on your profile to see where you rank, haven’t you? Continue reading →

Free LinkedIn Profile Optimization and Job Seeker Advice

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I watched a YouTube video the other day in which someone was charging job seekers for LinkedIn profile optimization.

It bothered me.

While I appreciate capitalism and don’t fault people for recognizing and seizing an opportunity, I think that in today’s economy, job seekers deserve all of the help they can get, and the currently unemployed certainly don’t need another expense.

Seeing that YouTube video inspired me to create a series of six videos sharing my knowledge of LinkedIn Groups, Jobs, Companies, profile optimization and Internet research to help people make better use of LinkedIn in their current and future job search efforts. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Labs: NewIn, ChromeIn, Instant Search, and Signal

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I’m not sure how many people read LinkedIn’s blog, but from the looks of my heavily recruiting-laden online social network, not many recruiters in my network do. At least I don’t see people in my network chatting about what LinkedIn just decided to share with the world, which is surprising to me given how cool it is. Hopefully this post will correct that. :-)

LinkedIn’s most recent blog post introduced LinkedIn Labs to the world, as well as released 500 special Signal invitations to celebrate. They are first come, first serve, and as of the time of this post, there were still some left!

LinkedIn Labs

LinkedIn is making some of their internal projects and Hackday competition winners publicly available, including NewIn 2.0, ChromeIn, Instant Search, and Signal: Continue reading →

Boolean Black Belt-Sourcing/Recruiting

Sourcing, Recruiting, Data, AI, Analytics, LinkedIn, Google, and more