I recently wrote about the change LinkedIn made that no longer allows people with a free LinkedIn account to view the full names of 3rd degree and group connections.
While you can go through the trouble of using a search engine such as Bing to view any public LinkedIn profile, there are a few ways that you can find and view the full names of 3rd degree and group connections from within LinkedIn even if you only have a free account. Continue reading
I had an associate with a free LinkedIn account contact me late last week complaining about how he could no longer see the full names of his LinkedIn search results for 3rd degree connections – his results only showed the first initial of the last name. Furthermore, he claimed that LinkedIn had started charging for the ability to see the full names of 3rd degree connections in search results.
My first reaction was extreme confusion.
I hadn’t heard or seen anything to support his experience or claims. Had I missed a major announcement or blog post? Not one of the few thousand+ recruiters that I follow on Twitter had tweeted about it, at least not that I saw, but it’s safe to assume that if this person’s claims were accurate, news would spread like wildfire.
Interestingly, I just ran a search on Twitter (@4:00 EST 10/3/2010) for [LinkedIn last names] and only found 1 tweet that could be possibly referencing it. Certainly odd if this massive change from LinkedIn really was taking root. Continue reading
Have you ever wondered where you rank in the search results when other people search for you or people like you in LinkedIn?
Have you ever searched for yourself on LinkedIn?
Do you know here you rank in the results?
From my research and observations, most of what the LinkedIn experts and gurus advise with regard to LinkedIn profile optimization may be wrong. In fact, some of the things people are doing on LinkedIn in an attempt to positively affect their search ranking may have a dramatically opposite effect!
Let me show you what I’ve found.
When I search for myself, this is what I get:
I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but something told me I should be #1. Instead, I am the last on the list of results sorted by relevance, after people who aren’t even in my network.
None of the profiles, including my own, mention my name more than once.
Then I decided I would try searching for my name in the keywords field to see what would happen. The results are the same – I am dead last, and the top 2 results are people who have only 1 connection. The third result isn’t even spelled the exact way I searched for it, and it’s still ranked higher than me.
Does this happen to everyone who searches for themselves? Does LinkedIn always rank you last in your own search?
What happens when you search for yourself by first and last name in LinkedIn? Is your experience any different?
To get to the bottom of this mystery, I thought I’d try checking into LinkedIn’s searchable customer support center. I’m not sure how many other people have really delved into all that is available there.
Surprisingly, it turns out they have an answer to the question of why my profile doesn’t rank at the top of LinkedIn search results. I suggest you read very carefully. Continue reading
If you have ever been curious about LinkedIn’s demographics, as well as LinkedIn’s visitor statistics broken down by country, city, and state, you’ve come to the right place! A while ago I stumbled across a very interesting and powerful website called Quantcast, which is used by 9 of the top 10 media agencies because they quite accurately quantify Internet audiences.
While some sites are not directly measured and only have estimated data at this time (such as Facebook and Twitter), LinkedIn is fully “quantified.” In other words, Quantcast directly measures LinkedIn’s visitors – which gives us some very interesting insights.
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 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
Sourcers and recruiters are often tasked with finding candidates that have experience in a specific industry. I’m sure that such a thing seems easy to the hiring managers and clients making the request, but it’s actually not an easily accomplished feat to perform exhaustively.
Sure, finding some people who work in a specific industry is easy – simply target one or a few major companies/competitors and you’re off to the races, right?
Not so fast, unless you’re happy only finding some people and you’re not really concerned with finding the best.
Most industries are comprised of many companies, and some have several hundred to over 1000! How can anyone say for sure that if they targeted 10 or fewer companies in an industry that they were exposing themselves to the best talent available?
Some people (and companies) think that the best talent can only come from a short list of companies they’ve identified, which seems both absurd and short-sighted in my opinion. The most talented “game changers” don’t always come from a blue chip Fortune 500 company.
However, even if a sourcer/recruiter wanted to identify people who worked at any one of a large number of companies in a particular industry, they are stuck to only searching for a few companies at a time because most search engines/interfaces have limits to the length of the search string that can be run. This can make for an extremely tedious and laborious search process, which explains why most sourcers and recruiters only search for a handful of companies or make use of built-in industry search functionality. Continue reading
If you ever have a need to perform diversity sourcing, I’m going to show you a trick on LinkedIn that goes beyond the obvious and “everyone’s doing it” methods of searching for fraternities, sororities, specific universities, and of course groups, societies and associations.
Let’s say you were in need of identifying people with specific skills and experience that are also women (software engineers, CFO’s, etc.), and you’ve already tried the standard methods of identifying them. One tactic some people and organizations utlize is searching for common first names for women. However, with most search engines, you’re limited in the size of the search string you can run (sometimes as few as 100 characters!), so you can’t search for many names with a single search. Plus, limiting yourself to only the most common first names is, well…limiting.
While I’ve written about the fact that LinkedIn’s search fields appear bottomless (I have yet to find a limit to the number of characters/terms that can be entered and searched for), I don’t know of many people who try and take advantage of LinkedIn’s limitless search fields.
See where I might be going here? Continue reading
LinkedIn now shows some new search functionality to the masses who use LinkedIn for free. Perhaps of greater interest, some previously free search options are now premium filters.
I first noticed the changes to LinkedIn’s advanced search page on Saturday, June 19th. Did they appear earlier and I just didn’t notice them? Perhaps I missed a press release?
For those of us without a premium LinkedIn account, the advanced people search interface used to look something like this:
Now it looks like this: Continue reading
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 ago, Gary Cozin sent me a link to an article recommending to “forget complex Boolean strings” when searching LinkedIn using Internet search engines.
I read the article and appreciated the advice to go with the easier, simpler, more elegant search solutions, as well as the suggestion to try “Public profile powered by.” I had never thought of taking that approach – but more on that later. Continue reading
Imagine that you were just assigned a position to recruit for and that you needed to present 2 fully screened, highly qualified and well matched candidates within 5 business days.
Your manager/client is requesting candidates with:
Furthermore, let’s say that you don’t have any qualified candidates in your pipeline, so you are essentially starting from scratch.
Under those conditions and assumptions, if you were limited to only 1 method/specific source for identifying candidates to contact, engage and recruit, which would you choose, and why? Continue reading
The game is afoot.
It appears that something’s happening behind the scenes at LinkedIn. Have you noticed anything odd when running a typical LinkedIn X-Ray search on Google and Yahoo?
I have. For example – try running this search:
You’ll get results that look like this: Continue reading
In the original LinkedIn Current Title Search: Internal vs. X-Ray post, I found that there was a large disparity in results between identical internal and external (Google X-Ray) current title searches on LinkedIn.
At the end of the post I asked if anyone had any ideas as to where the missing 288 profiles were, why they weren’t returned using the basic Google X-Ray current title search technique, and how can you find them?
I received a few interesting and insightful responses – I will review them in this post as well as provide my own insight as to the difference in results experienced when running an internal LinkedIn search and a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn using the same search criteria.
I’ll also show you some interesting LinkedIn search phenomena. Continue reading
I’ve complied a list of the top 25 most connected recruiters on LinkedIn.
To generate this list, I searched LinkedIn for anyone in the world who had one of the following terms in their current title: recruiter OR recruiting OR recruitment OR sourcer OR sourcing OR talent, and I sorted the results by connections. It looks as if you will need at least 20,000 1st degree/direct connections to even crack the top 10!
If you click on each result, you will be taken to their public profile. You might want to connect with them if you haven’t already. :-) Continue reading
So you know how to X-Ray LinkedIn, and perhaps you even know how to target current titles with an X-Ray string. However, did you know that you’re not finding all of the available matches within LinkedIn using this technique?
Did that get your attention? Would you like to know approximately how many people you might be missing when you run a current title X-Ray search of LinkedIn?
Unless you have a premium Linkedin account, you will likely have to resort to using an Internet search engine to X-Ray into LinkedIn to find and view profiles of people who are not in your network, and being able to search by current title can be extremely useful at times to reduce the number of false positive results.
While I am usually not a big fan of title searching, a large percentage of LinkedIn profiles don’t have any text entered for each work experience entry. As such, title searching becomes a necessary evil as anyone who creates a LinkedIn profile doesn’t have to enter anything in the “position description” field, but they MUST enter a company and a title.
In this post I will show you the discrepancy between identical current title searches conducted using LinkedIn’s search interface and an X-Ray string – and it’s HUGE! At the end, I also throw in challenge for you. Are you up to it? Continue reading
You’re on LinkedIn – congratulations!
So, how big is your network?
Without going into a rant on quality vs. quantity (who says we can’t have BOTH?), let’s take a different angle on the size of your LinkedIn network…at your current company, where do you rank in terms of number of connections?
Do you know off the top of your head? Why not?
If you don’t know where you rank at your current company in terms of LinkedIn network connections, here’s how to find out: Continue reading
I’m very much an anti-hype, anti-bandwagon person.
I neither like to nor want to get caught in the undertow of the emotional rush associated with being excited about something that nearly everyone else seems to be excited about, where everyone celebrates the new and “cool factor” with little-to-no critical thought.
When that next bright and shiny object comes along, it’s all too easy to be blinded by it.
Rest assured I have not been blinded by #socialrecruiting. I’ve been using social media for a little while now (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogging), purposefully remaining calm and collected on the subject – choosing to explore the true potential rather than get caught up in the hype.
So whether you’re a social recruiting evangelist, hater or n00b (I’ve been all 3, not necessarily in that order), you’ll find some value in this post because I am going to strip away all of the hype surrounding social recruiting, demystify it, and cut straight to the heart of the real opportunities associated with using social media for sourcing and recruiting. Continue reading
Recently, I wrote about the intrinsic issues associated with searching LinkedIn for potential candidates with specific industry experience, and how using the “Industry” field can actually prevent you from finding the people you’re looking for.
A number of readers responded by suggesting a logical solution to the issue – searching by specific company name(s) instead of using LinkedIn’s “Industry” field.
It is a logical solution, but a potentially flawed one nonetheless.
I’m going to show you some reasons why, and if you read this post within the next 5 minutes, I’ll even throw in a LinkedIn company search anomaly as an added bonus. Continue reading
LinkedIn’s been busy.
I don’t know about you, but I have always wondered what LinkedIn was going to do with all of the deep/rich data they capture with every profile that is created on their site.
With the release of 4 new dynamic search refinements that are now available to users of LinkedIn’s Recruiter and Recruiter Professional Services, we gain some insight.
LinkedIn contacted me last week and gave me the honor of an exclusive sneak peek into what users of their 2 premium recruiter offerings will be able to take advantage of to quickly find more relevant candidate search results.
LinkedIn has definitely been busy, and they apparently appreciate the value of human capital data – maybe as much as I do. :-) Continue reading
When I deliver presentations on how to leverage LinkedIn to source candidates, I have the opportunity to get a sense of what most people seem to know about using LinkedIn. Recently I have been making it a point to ask how people tend to sort their search results when searching LinkedIn, and the overwhelming majority leave their results sorting at the default value, which is “relevance.”
I find this especially interesting, because most people do not seem to realize that when you sort your search results by “relevance” on LinkedIn, you are not getting results based solely on the search terms entered – you are getting results ordered by a combination of factors – including your “social graph.”
LinkedIn’s definition of “relevance” is decidedly different than practically every other searchable source of potential candidates – Monster, Google, Applicant Tracking Systems, Twitter, etc. – and what LinkedIn *thinks* is relevant to you may actually not be based on what you are specifically looking for. Continue reading
I’ve been making a habit of posting the U.S. traffic data for the “big 3” social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter – the ones that seem to matter most to sourcers and recruiters) on a monthly basis.
Last month, I predicted that all 3 of the sites would experience a decline in monthly unique U.S. visitors, and as it turns out, I was right only about 1 of them.
And I was quite surprised to see which one it was. Continue reading
