Category Archives: Search Process

The Best Boolean and Semantic Search Tool

While many people are hungry for specific Boolean search strings to copy and paste and for search tools that make searching for people “easier” and even “do the thinking for you,” there simply is nothing that can come remotely close to what you can do when you think properly and ask the right questions.

Yoda Think Before You Search

That’s right – the most powerful thing you can incorporate into your people search efforts isn’t Boolean logic, a search “hack,” Chrome extension, search aggregator, semantic search solution or anything you can buy – it’s your brain. Your level of understanding of and appreciation for the unique challenges posed by human capital data in any form (social media profiles, resumes, etc.) directly correlates to your ability to extract value from any data source. The same is true of the thought processes you apply before and during your search efforts.

A little over a year ago, I presented for the 3rd time at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect event in London, and I spoke about how to leverage LinkedIn’s massive stockpile of human capital data for sourcing and recruiting. LinkedIn recorded the session and uploaded the video to YouTube, and I recently noticed the video had over 65,000 views. Now, while that is puny in comparison to the nearly 1B views Adele’s Hello video has racked up, I was surprised to see so many views given the niche content.

Although the source of human capital data that I focus on in the video happens to be LinkedIn, practically everything I talk about is equally applicable to any source you can use to find people to recruit.

So, if you use any source of human capital data to find and recruit people (e.g., your ATS/CRM, resume databases, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, Github, etc.) and you really want to understand how to best approach your talent sourcing efforts, I recommend watching this video when you have the time.

Enjoy, and feel free to let me know your thoughts!

 

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:

 

Here is where you can find all of the best of my Boolean Black belt content all in one place - free sourcing and recruiting how-to guides, tools, presentations, and videos - be sure to bookmark it, and if you're feeling  friendly, tweet it, share it on LinkedIn and/or +1 it on Google Plus.  Many thanks!

 

Additionally, I thought I might as well put all of my best work all in one blog post as well – over 110 of my articles in one place for easy referencing!

My blog is a pursuit of passion and not of profit – if you’ve ever found anything I’ve written helpful to you, all I ask is that you tweet this out, share it on LinkedIn, like it on Facebook, or give this a +1 on Google.

Many thanks for your readership and support – please pay it forward to someone who can benefit.

Big Data, Analytics and Moneyball Recruiting

Big Data, Data Science and Moneyball Recruiting

The Moneyball Recruiting Opportunity: Analytics and Big Data

Human Capital Data is Sexy – and Sourcing is the Sexiest job in HR/Recruiting! 

Is Sourcing Dead? No! Here’s the Future of Sourcing

The End of Sourcing 1.0 and the Evolution of Sourcing 2.0

How to Find Email Addresses

How to Use Gmail and Rapportive to Find Almost Anyone’s Email Address

Social Discovery

2 Very Cool and Free Social Discovery Tools: Falcon and TalentBin

Talent Communities

The Often Overlooked Problem with Talent Communities

Lean / Just-In-Time Recruiting / Talent Pipelines

What is Lean, Just-In-Time Recruiting?

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 1

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 2

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 3

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 4

The Passive Candidate Pipeline Problem

Semantic Search

What is Semantic Search and How Can it Be Used for Sourcing and Recruiting?

Sourcing and Search: Man vs. Machine/Artificial Intelligence – My SourceCon Keynote

Why Sourcers Won’t Be Replaced By Watson/Machine Learning Algorithms Any Time Soon

Diversity Sourcing

How to Perform Diversity Sourcing on LinkedIn – Including Specific Boolean Search Strings

How to Use Facebook’s Graph Search for Diversity Sourcing

Social Recruiting

How to Find People to Recruit on Twitter using Followerwonk & Google + Bing X-Ray Search

Google Plus Search Guide: How to Search and Find People on Google Plus

Facebook’s Graph Search Makes it Ridiculously Easy to Find Anyone

How to Effectively Source Talent on Social Networks – It Requires Non-Standard Search Terms!

How a Recruiter Made 3 Hires on Twitter in Six Weeks!

Twitter 101 for Sourcers and Recruiters

Anti-Social Recruiting

How Social Recruiting has NOT Changed Recruiting

Social Recruiting – Beyond the Hype

What Social Recruiting is NOT

Sourcing Social Media Requires Outside the Box Thinking

Social Networking Sites vs. Job Boards

LinkedIn Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing and Searching LinkedIn: Beyond the Basics – SourceCon Dallas 2012

LinkedIn’s Dark Matter – Profiles You Cannot Find

How to Get a Higher LinkedIn InMail Response Rate

The Most Effective Way to X-Ray Search LinkedIn

LinkedIn Catfish: Fake Profiles, Real People, or Just Fake Photos?

LinkedIn Search: Drive it Like you Stole It – 8 Minute Video of My LinkedIn Presentation in Toronto

How to Search LinkedIn and Control Years of Experience

How to Quickly and Effectively Grow Your LinkedIn Network

How to View the Full Profiles of our 3rd Degree Connections on LinkedIn for Free

How to Find and Identify Active Job Seekers on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Profile Search Engine Optimization

Free LinkedIn Profile Optimization and Job Seeker Advice

Do Recruiters Ruin LinkedIn?

The 50 Largest LinkedIn Groups

How to See Full Names of 3rd Degree LinkedIn Connections for Free

How I Search LinkedIn to Find People

LinkedIn’s Undocumented Search Operator

Does LinkedIn Offer Recruiters any Competitive Advantage?

Have You Analyzed the Value of Your LinkedIn Network?

Where Do YOU Rank In LinkedIn Search Results?

What is the Total Number of LinkedIn Members?

Beware When Searching LinkedIn By Company Name

LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge

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

What’s the Best Way to Search LinkedIn for People in Specific Industries?

18 LinkedIn Apps, Tools and Resources

LinkedIn Search: What it Could be and Should be

How to Search Across Multiple Countries on LinkedIn

Private and Out of Network Search Results on LinkedIn

How to “Unlock” and view “Private” LinkedIn Profiles

Searching LinkedIn for Free – The Differences Between Internal and X-Ray Searching

Sourcing and Boolean Search

Basic Boolean Search Operators and Query Modifiers Explained

How to Find Resumes On the Internet with Google

Challenging Google Resume Search Assumptions

Don’t be a Sourcing Snob

The Top 15 Talent Sourcing Mistakes

Why Boolean Search is Such a Big Deal in Recruiting

How to Become a World Class Sourcer

Enough with the Exotic Sourcing Already – What’s Practical and What Works

Sourcing is So Much More than Tips, Tricks, Hacks, and Google

How to Find, Hire, Train, and Build a Sourcing Team – SourceCon 2013

How to Use Excel to Automatically Build Boolean Search Strings

The Current and Future State of Sourcing

Why So Many People Stink at Searching

Is your ATS a Black Hole or a Diamond Mine?

How to Find Bilingual Professionals with Boolean Search Strings

How to Best Use Resume Search Aggregators

How to Convert Quotation Marks in Microsoft Word for Boolean Search

Boolean Search, Referral Recruiting and Source of Hire

The Critical Factors Behind Sourcing ROI

What is a “Boolean Black Belt?”

Beyond Basic Boolean Search: Proximity and Weighting

Why Sourcing is Superior to Posting Jobs for Talent

The Future of Sourcing and Talent Identification

Sourcing is an Investigative and Iterative Process

Beyond Boolean Search: Human Capital Information Retrieval

Do you Speak Boolean?

Is Recruiting Top Talent Really Your Company’s Top Priority?

Sourcing is NOT an Entry Level Function

Boolean Search Beyond Google

The Internet Has Free Resumes. So What?

How to Search Spoke, Zoominfo and Jigsaw for Free

Job Boards vs. Social Networking Sites

What to Do if Google Thinks You’re Not Human: the Captcha

What if you only had One Source to Find Candidates?

Passive Recruiting is a Myth – It Doesn’t Exist

Sourcing: Separate Role or Integrated Function?

The #1 Mistake in Corporate Recruiting

How I Learned What I Know About Sourcing

Resumes Are Like Wine – They Get Better with Age!

Why Do So Many ATS Vendors Offer Such Poor Search Functionality?

Do Candidates Really Want a Relationship with their recruiter?

Recruiting: Art or Science?

What to Consider When Creating or Selecting Effective Sourcing Training – SourceCon NYC

The Sourcer’s Fallacy

Sourcing Challenge – Monster vs. Google – Round 1

Sourcing Challenge – Monster vs. Google – Round 2

Do You Have the Proper Perspective in Recruiting?

Are You a Clueless Recruiter?

Job Boards and Candidate Quality – Challenging Popular Assumptions

When it Comes to Sourcing – All Sources Are Not Created Equal

Boolean Search String Experiments

Boolean Search String Experiment #1

Boolean Search String Experiment #1 Follow Up

Boolean Search String Experiment #2

 

Why So Many People Stink at Searching

The trouble with search today is that people put too much trust in search engines – online, resume, social, or otherwise.

I can certainly understand and appreciate why people and companies would want to try and create search engines and solutions that “do the work for you,” but unfortunately the “work” being referenced here is thinking.

I read an article by Clive Thompson in Wired magazine the other day titled, “Why Johnny Can’t Search,” and the author opens up with the common assumption that young people tend to be tech-savvy.

Interestingly, although Generation Z is also known as the “Internet Generation” and is comprised of “digital natives,” they apparently aren’t very good at online search.

The article cites a few studies, including one in which a group of college students were asked to use Google to look up the answers to a handful of questions. The researchers found that the students tended to rely on the top results.

Then the researchers changed the order of the results for some of the students in the experiment.  More often than not, they still went with the (falsely) top-ranked pages.

The professor who ran the experiment concluded that “students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.”

I believe that the vast majority of people put too much trust in the machine – whether it be Google, LinkedIn, Monster, or their ATS.

Trusting top search results certainly isn’t limited to Gen Z – I believe it is a much more widespread issue, which is only exacerbated by “intelligent” search engines and applications using semantic search and NLP that lull searchers into the false sense of security that the search engine “knows” what they’re looking for. Continue reading

LinkedIn Sourcing Tip: Searching by Company? Beware!

LinkedIn_Company_Search_Image_3aRecently, 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 Search Results Sorting: Relevance or Keyword?

Find_People_on_LinkedIn from www.linkedin.comWhen 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.”

LI_Search_Sort6

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

Google Search: The Asterisk Wildcard and Punctuation

Google_Search_Masters by by renatotarga via creative commons_BW_invert

Think you know all there is to know about Google search?

I was recently asked a question regarding the use of the asterisk when searching on Google, specifically in conjunction with certain punctuation.

This person was under the impression that if you used the equal sign on either side of an asterisk when searching Google, it would function as a multiple word wildcard operator. For example, searching for [linux=*=administrator] should return results of linux system administrator, linux systems administrator, linux network administrator, linux server administrator, etc.

The short answer is that Google ignores most punctuation, and that there is no need to combine the asterisk with any other punctuation or symbols for it to perform as a single or multiple word wildcard.

The long answer is much more interesting. I decided to perform some experiments with Google’s wildcard asterisk and I uncovered a few oddities and unsolved mysteries. I’m curious if you might be able to shed some light on them. But first, I will show you exactly how you can make good use of Google’s asterisk when searching for resumes on the Internet, as well as when X-Ray searching LinkedIn and Twitter.  Continue reading