View Full Names on LinkedIn for Free with LIPPL

  I am pleased to share a cool and very practical free Chrome extension that allows you to quickly and easily view the public profiles of LinkedIn members beyond your 2nd degree network, thus showing you their full name. Victor Soroka first shared Lippl with me back in January. I had the honor of meeting him while at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect … Read More

LinkedIn Represents Over 60% of U.S. Non Farm Employment

In certain sourcing and recruiting circles, it’s in vogue to say that you shouldn’t rely heavily on LinkedIn for your talent acquisition needs. In fact, some people will go so far as to say that LinkedIn is “overfished” for talent and that recruiters are lazy if they use LinkedIn as their primary source of potential candidates. Whenever I hear that … 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

Keep Calm & Message On: LinkedIn Group Messaging Still Free

  There were a number of tweets, blog posts and online discussions late last week that stirred up a great deal of confusion over whether or not you would soon still be able to send free messages to fellow group group members on LinkedIn. I’ve got the straight dope from LinkedIn and will demonstrate with multiple screenshots what is still … Read More

What is Sourcing? I Propose a New Universal Definition.

  What better time than at the beginning of a new year to take a critical look back at where we’ve come from, to reflect on our current state and to look forward to a next step in the evolution of sourcing? It believe it would certainly be helpful and beneficial to have a universally agreed upon definition of exactly … Read More

Boolean Strings, Semantic and Natural Language Search – Oh My!

An entertaining blog post by Matt Charney was recently brought to my attention in which he tells the world to shut up and stop talking about Boolean strings – he argues that Boolean search is a dying art and that “investing time or energy into becoming a master at Boolean is a lot like learning the fine art of calligraphy … Read More

Free LinkedIn Sourcing Webinar Wednesday November 20 @ 2PM ET

  When you search LinkedIn, are you finding top talent, or simply those people who are easiest to find? Would you know the difference? While some people firmly believe that LinkedIn is “over fished,” I can confidently tell you that nothing is further from the truth. In fact, what if I told you that you routinely find only a fraction … Read More

Some Very Interesting Google / LinkedIn X-Ray Search Results

  While I was writing last week’s post in which I explored using Google to X-Ray search within specific LinkedIn groups, I decided to perform some general X-Ray search syntax testing to challenge some assumptions, as well as to compare X-Ray results to LinkedIn Recruiter results. I notice quite a few folks seem to use the “people you know” phrase … Read More

Using Google to Search for People in Specific LinkedIn Groups

In this post, I am going to share with you the journey I took and the discoveries I made while investigating the answer to a Boolean search request for help I recently came across online about using -dir in a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn. Some of you may enjoy and appreciate seeing my methodology, others will likely learn a thing or … Read More

LinkedIn Certification, Talent Connect and Boolean NOT Update

LinkedIn Recruiter Certification In case you missed it, LinkedIn has launched a recruiter certification program! If you think you’re ready to get certified, between now and December 31, 2013, LinkedIn will waive the exam fee for the first 500 customers that register for the LinkedIn Certified Professional—Recruiter certification exam. Click/see the coupon code below: Before you attempt to take the certification assessment, you … Read More

Is Boolean Search Boring and Less Effective than Semantic Search?

  Do you think Boolean search is boring, tiresome and ineffective, and that semantic search delivers faster results that count? I was struck by the image Marc Drees used in his #SOSUEU: the day after post, which you can see above. I would have loved to sit on that panel discussion and contribute my experience and thoughts on the subject – I was actually … Read More

Building Talent Pipelines and Just-In-Time Recruiting – Part 4

  Welcome to the 4th and final post of the “Building Talent Pipelines and Just-In-Time Recruiting” series. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to read parts 1, 2, and 3 before reading this post. In Ben Franklin’s the Way to Wealth, he talks about the issues associated with carrying unnecessary inventory, “You call them goods; but, if you do not take care, they … Read More

Building Talent Pipelines and Just-In-Time Recruiting – Part 3

  In Part 1 and Part 2 in this series, I explored many of the intrinsic limitations and hidden costs of building traditional talent pipelines – sourcing, screening, and “keeping warm” candidates for which you do not have a current need. To recap, traditional candidate pipelining: Is a “push” based strategy that is not based on an actual customer (client or candidate) need Often … Read More

Building Talent Pipelines and Just-In-Time Recruiting – Part 2

  In Part 1 of this series, I explored and challenged the practice of traditional candidate pipelining. Some people may have interpreted my thoughts on the subject to mean that I don’t believe in any form of proactively building candidate pipelines. That would be incorrect. Anyone that really knows me knows that I am not a black/white, either/or kind of guy. What … Read More

Building Talent Pipelines and Just-In-Time Recruiting – Part 1

  Back in 2009 I wrote a 4-part series examining the logic and practices behind proactively building talent pipelines and how I believe that traditional talent pipelining can be significantly improved through leveraging Lean production principles to achieve Just-In-Time recruiting. I haven’t written much on the topic of applying Lean principles to the recruiting life cycle in quite a while, and … Read More

50 Google Search Tips & Tricks

  If you haven’t already, you should definitely check out Google’s Inside Search site, where you can explore a cool interactive graphic explaining how Google search works. What I found especially cool is that Google decided to put all of their search tips and tricks in one place – 50 of them to be exact. While many of you are probably familiar … 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

Using Extended Boolean to Achieve Semantic Search in Sourcing

When it comes to sourcing and recruiting, semantic search is perhaps the most powerful way to quickly find people who have experience you’re looking for. Now, I am not talking about black box semantic search (e.g., Google, Monster’s 6Sense, etc.). I’m referring to user-defined semantic search, where you tell a search engine exactly what you want with your query, and … Read More

LinkedIn Traffic Statistics and User Demographics 2013

Would you like to know more about LinkedIn’s user demographics, mobile traffic, and LinkedIn’s visitor statistics broken down by country, city, and state? How about real-time LinkedIn unique visitors and page views per second? If so, you’ve come to the right place!

Social Recruiting w/Facebook – One or Two Facebook Profiles?

Do you use Facebook to source and recruit potential candidates? If yes, do you have one or two profiles? If no, why not? (two words: Graph Search!) One of the most common social recruiting questions I get is whether or not sourcers and recruiters using Facebook to search for and engage potential candidates should have 1 or 2 profiles (one … Read More