How to Convert Quotation Marks in Word for Boolean Searches

Have you ever used Microsoft Word to build and save Boolean search strings to be able to copy and paste entire searches into LinkedIn, Monster, Dice, or your ATS ?

I did for quite some time, until I ran into a problem.

Many years ago, I noticed that several sites, including Monster, Dice, and LinkedIn were not “obeying” my request for exact phrases in my searches.

If I searched for “project manager,” I would get results in which “project” and “manager” were highlighted as keyword hits even though they were mentioned separately and not together as a phrase.

One day I contacted Dice to ask what was going on with my inability to retrieve exact phrases using quotation marks and the support rep asked me what I was using to build my search strings. I told her I was using Microsoft Word to build and save my strings and that I would copy and paste them into Dice, to which she responded with, “There’s your problem.”

She summarily explained to me that Dice doesn’t recognize Microsoft Word’s default quotation mark format (aka “smart quotes”). Turns out that Monster, LinkedIn, and many others don’t recognize “smart quotes” for exact phrase searching either.

Here’s an example of Word’s “smart quotes:”

She then suggested that I either enter my queries directly into Dice or use Notepad to build and save my Boolean searches because they produce “straight quotes.”

Well, I didn’t want to build my searches in Dice’s search field because I could not see my entire search string as I was building it.

This is an issue with just about any job board resume database, ATS, Internet search engine, and social network – the search fields are all ridiculously short (e.g., LinkedIn’s is 37 characters).

Oh, and if you need evidence that LinkedIn does not actually recognize Word’s smart quotes for exact phrase searching, try this search on LinkedIn:

After my call with the Dice support rep, I started using Notepad to build and save my searches so I could simply copy and paste them directly into any job board resume database, Internet search engine, social network, and my ATS and they would recognize and obey the quotation marks as a request for an exact phrase.

However, it turns out there is a way to force Microsoft Word to not use “smart quotes” and instead use “straight quotes” – which most sites, social networks, databases, and search engines will obey as a request for an exact phrase. Continue reading

Bing’s Semantic Search, Phonetics and Undocumented Operator

I was recently performing some searches on Bing and came across something curious that I had never noticed before.

I’m not exactly sure if what I found is new or simply something I’ve overlooked in the past. I updated Twitter with “Did you know that Bing supports the + query modifier?” on November 10th, wondering if it was something that other people knew about.

I only received a few responses, including a couple from noted sourcing luminaries, and the consensus was that I didn’t find anything because it wasn’t documented anywhere and they could not get it to work.

However, the +/Plus sign does in fact work when searching Bing – just not like it used to in Google.

It’s always a little exciting to think you are one of the first people to stumble across something most people don’t know about, although I won’t get my hopes up that I’m the only person outside of some folks at Microsoft who’s ever figured out that Bing supports the +/Plus sign in searches.

This discovery also led me to proof of Bing leveraging semantic and phonetic searchContinue reading

Boolean Search Strings, Referrals and Source of Hire

I read an article on ERE about the other day titled “Love Writing Boolean Instead of Recruiting? Then Don’t Read This Post.

While I happen to be pretty good at and thoroughly enjoy writing Boolean queries for talent mining, I actually love the entire recruiting life cycle. Sourcing is a means to an end, not a means in and of itself for me. Even so – with such a provocative post title (nice work John!), I had to read the article.

The article is a pretty strong pitch for Scavado, which “does the search work for you, saving hours of time otherwise spent developing Boolean search strings and applying them manually to each site searched.”

Things really got interesting when I got down to the comments on the article, as I stumbled into an interesting exchange between Amybeth Hale and Keith Halperin which covered direct sourcing, referral recruiting, and outsourcing sourcing at $6.25/hour.

Read on to learn my thoughts on all of the above. Continue reading

LinkedIn’s Talent Connect, Talent Pipeline, and Certification

Talent Connect 2011 in Las Vegas  was just as good as, if not better than, Talent Connect 2010 in San Francisco.

Nearly 2,000 people showed up, which is around 3 times as many attendees as last year’s conference, and they represented over 700 companies from 17 countries.

One thing’s for sure – LinkedIn knows how to put on a conference. The Talent Connect events have been the most well coordinated, polished and produced conferences I have ever attended.

I won’t bore you with all of the details – but I will highlight LinkedIn’s new Talent Pipeline offering, Web 3.0 (the shift from social to data), touch upon how to automatically build Boolean search strings (yes, that came up at the conference), and inform you about LinkedIn’s Recruiter Expert certification. Continue reading

What is a Boolean Black Belt Anyway?

I’ve been blogging nearly 3 years now, and I realized I’ve never come out and actually defined the term “Boolean Black Belt.”

The concept seems pretty self explanatory, but there has been at least 1 person who’s taken the opportunity to point out (and gain some traffic in the process – but it’s all good!) that it could be perceived as a bit of an oxymoron to be an “expert” in something as simple as 3 Boolean operators.

Interestingly, however, I’ve found that most sourcers and recruiters don’t even fully exploit the various powers of the OR and NOT operators – not even close.

So what is a “Boolean Black Belt” anyway? Continue reading

How to Use Resume Search Aggregators

I am often asked my opinion on the best use of resume search “aggregators” such as those offered by infoGISTTalentHook, Data Frenzy RAM, DaXtra, AIRS SourcePoint and others.

If you’re not familiar with resume search aggregators, a resume search aggregator is an application that allows a user to enter a search string that will simultaneously execute across multiple free and paid job board resume sites and aggregate the results.

Many HR, sourcing, recruiting and staffing teams tend to use resume search aggregators at the associate level – enabling individual sourcers and recruiters to run Boolean search strings focused on specific hiring needs through a resume search aggregator to to simultaneously search several paid job boards as well as in some cases 100+ free job board resume databases.

While there is a huge convenience factor in using resume search aggregators in this fashion, as each sourcer or recruiter can save time and effort in not having to log into multiple job boards to execute Boolean search strings on each one individually, there are some limitations of resume search aggregators you need to be aware of, and I feel there is a better way to use this technology.

Limitations of Resume Search Aggregators

Limited Boolean Logic Support

Many of the resume search aggregator applications do not support full Boolean logic or even symbols such as the asterisk for root word/stem searching.

That, in and of itself, is a major limitation when attempting to mine information systems such as job board resume databases, because highly effective and precise search strings cannot be created.

Also, some of the aggregators don’t even allow you to “hand code” Boolean search strings – instead, forcing you to create searches using a query builder which often significantly limits the ability to create effective searches.

Similarly, not all job board resume databases support full Boolean logic.

Even if a resume aggregator application supported full Boolean logic, if it is being used to search a site that does not support it – you will not get the results you are looking for (or any results) because the job board resume database can’t execute your search string. Continue reading

Big Data, Data Science and Moneyball Recruiting

With each passing day, an increasing amount of data is being generated and transmitted by and about more people than ever before.

At Google’s 2010 Atmosphere convention, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that “There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.”

In case you were wondering, an Exabyte is 1,000,000,000 gigabytes, or 10,000,000 terabytes. That’s a lot of information.

Interestingly, Google’s CEO may have actually underestimated the amount of data being generated at the time. From their research, RJMetrics believes that a more accurate figure would be approximately 6.6 exabytes every 2 days. One thing is for sure – the number is even bigger today.

What does any of this have to do with recruting? Why should HR, recruiting and sourcing professionals, as well as corporate executives care about big data?

Well, because a chunk of big data is human capital data, and as I have been ranting about for the better part of 3 years, human capital data can be leveraged to identify and hire more great people more quickly.

If you’re a dinosaur recruiter or sourcer, I don’t recommend you read the rest of this post, because:

  1. I will challenge they way you think and work, and that might make you uncomfortable
  2. You’ll probably think it’s a load of garbage
  3. It might make you aware of your pending extinction (the precise timing of which is debatable)

I have to warn you that this is not a short, quick-hit post – this may be the longest single post I have ever written, which explains why you didn’t see a post from me last week. I wrote this piece to introduce a human capital paradigm shift, to challenge the long-standing conventional wisdom in HR and recruiting, and to (hopefully!) provoke progressive thought from my peers. If that’s not your thing, turn back now.

If you want a glimpse into the future of talent identification and acquisition, you’re always interested in figuring out how your company can gain a competitive advantage, and you’re wondering what the heck my “Moneyball recruiting” reference could possibly be about, then read on.  Continue reading

LinkedIn User Demographics and Visitor Statistics 2011

Would you like to know more about LinkedIn’s user demographics, as well as LinkedIn’s visitor statistics broken down by country, city, and state?

If so, you’ve come to the right place!

After patiently waiting for a whole year since my last post on LinkedIn statistics, I’m excited to bring you LinkedIn’s latest user demographics and visitor statistics for 2011.

In this post, I will compare the data I presented in September 2010 to the data I just pulled from Quantcast.

Quantcast 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.”

LinkedIn_Quantcast_Directly_Measured_Data

In other words, Quantcast directly measures LinkedIn’s visitors – which gives us great information and some very interesting insights!

Read on to see the following LinkedIn data:

  • Global monthly visitors
  • Global monthly visits
  • Visits per person
  • Pageviews per person
  • Visit frequency
  • Business activity
  • User demographics (gender, age, ethnicity, income, education level)
  • Monthly visitors by country
  • Monthly visitors by city (global)
  • Monthly visitors by state (U.S.) Continue reading

Talent Sourcing: Beyond Tips, Tricks, Hacks and the Internet

It’s bothered me for quite some time now that many people essentially equate sourcing with Internet search – using search engines such as Google and Bing to find resumes, lists, press releases, etc.

It bothers me because sourcing is so much more than that.

It also bothers me because I am aware that many companies (some quite large and well respected) limit their sourcers and recruiters primarily to the Internet as the only source of information.

I believe a major contributing factor as to why sourcing isn’t highly valued by some organizations and why sourcing doesn’t get as much widespread respect and recognition as it should is because too many people associate sourcing primarily with Internet search.

The future of talent sourcing will involve a shift from manual Internet search and ATS/CRM systems with only rudimentary search and analysis capability to highly specialized tools specifically designed for mining vast and proprietary human capital data sets dynamically compiled from multiple sources that enables predictive analytics.

It’s coming – will you be ready? Will you be ahead of the curve or behind it? Continue reading

Do You Have the Proper Perspective in Recruiting?

Perception and PerspectiveIt is all too easy for sourcers, recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers/teams to develop a skewed, distorted, and decidedly one-way view of the world. Perhaps spending 99% of the time on only one side of the recruiting process is to blame.

Regardless of the cause, it is absolutely critical to regularly take the time and think about, understand, and appreciate the recruiting life cycle from the candidate’s side – the job seeker, the passive candidate, the non-job seeker, and the elusive “A+ player.”

In this article I’m going to walk you through over 10 different scenarios in which I think recruiters and hiring teams can benefit greatly by taking the candidate’s perspective into careful consideration.

If you don’t take well to being challenged to think differently from time to time, or if you don’t like long blog posts, you may not want to read any further. This one clocks in at 3700+ words.

Consider yourself warned. :-)

Continue reading

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

Have you ever wanted or needed to search for top students of people who have achieved high grade point averages in high school or college?

While GPA is relatively unimportant to many employers – to others, a high GPA is indicative of a person’s ability to achieve results in an unstructured environment (no one is there making you go to class or study for your exams), which can provide clues to self-management capability and the drive to excel.

Some employers simply won’t hire candidates for certain roles without a specific GPA or higher, with few exceptions (e.g. Google).

Regardless of your personal philosophy on the (in)significance of GPA’s, a grade point average is an objective measure of performance and achievement, and one of the very few that can be found on a resume or a social media profile. Continue reading

All Recruiting Sources Are NOT Created Equal

While there is much written on the subject of how to search the various talent sources available to recruiters and sourcers today, such as the Internet, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, ATS/CRM systems, etc., there does not seem to be much written about their ROI as sources of talent/human capital information.

I believe that the value of any source of information is 50% based upon the actual information contained within (data depth), and 50% in the ability to extract out precisely and completely what the user needs (searchability). Information has no value if you are unable to easily access, effectively search for and find what you need and take action on it.

When it comes to leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition, it is critical to assess the depth of the talent/human capital data offered by the source as well as how “searchable” the source is.

Why is Data Depth and Searchability Important?

Quite simply, the deeper the data offered by and the more searchable the the source is, the higher the ROI for your sourcing efforts.

All electronic sources of talent are NOT created equal, and some offer sourcers and recruiters instrinsic advantages with regard to the ability to more quickly and precisely find more of the right people, yielding higher productivity.

I’ve created a graphic representation of a comparison of the data depth and searchability of the most common information systems used by sourcers and recruiters to find candidates. Continue reading

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

How to Search Google Plus to Find People by Location

Would you like to find people on Google+?

How about find people on Google+ that live in a specific area?

If you answered “Yes!” to the above questions, you’ve come to the right place.

I will walk you through the problems with Find People on Plus and Google’s own Google+ search before I show you something I’ve been tinkering with that seems to work well to reliably find people who live in a specific area.

UPDATE: I have a NEW Google Plus search guide updated for 2013.

Find People on Plus

If you’re interested in finding people on Google+, you’ve probably poked around Find People on Plus.

Find People on Plus has a few issues you should be aware of, not the least of which is the fact that it has only indexed a fraction of the total number of Google+ profiles.

Another issue is that you can’t reliably find people based on location, which is kind of important for most people.

For example, let’s take a look at a basic skill/interest and location search: Continue reading

How I Search LinkedIn to Find and Identify Talent

Would you like to know how I search LinkedIn when sourcing for talent?

I don’t have a premium LinkedIn account, so you may be surprised to learn that I don’t X-Ray search LinkedIn all that often.

I’ll tell you why in a moment, but first I would like to share my inspiration for this post.

I recently read a great post that addressed an issue with X-Ray searching LinkedIn and that pointed out that pattern recognition is critical to effective online sourcing.

I could not agree more – truly dynamic pattern recognition is something I think is unique to humans and is something that I believe cannot be replicated by applications claiming to leverage artificial intelligence, semantic search, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). I could elaborate further on this topic, but that would unfortunately bore 98% of my readers, so I will save it for another post that they can choose not to read later. :-)

Suffice it to say I wholeheartedly agree that is it more important to have the right investigative thought process than to have any specific Boolean search string or pre-built X-Ray search.

Getting back to how I specifically search LinkedIn to find people – you first need to understand some of the significant issues associated with using Internet search engines in an attempt to find public LinkedIn profiles. In other words, you should know they “why” before the “how.”

As an added bonus, you’ll also find that I’ve discovered that Bing and LinkedIn apparently don’t play well together anymore, and I’ll issue a LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge to the international sourcing and recruiting community to crowdsource the solution. Continue reading

The Passive Candidate Pipeline Problem

 

If you’re in HR or recruiting, you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to (and likely believe in) the concept that proactively building passive talent pipelines is critical to talent acquisition success. Some would say that pipelining passive candidates is one of the sacred cows of recruiting – you just don’t question it.

It’s my opinion that the belief in talent pipelines is driven heavily by the fact that it can be incredibly difficult to quickly find suitably qualified candidates once you actually have a hiring need if you don’t already have the right people identified and queued up.

As such, it seems only logical to begin to identify potential candidates prior to your actual need so that when you do need to hire, you have a number of people you can contact, engage, interview and make a final hiring decision from.

Sounds great in theory, doesn’t it?

I thoroughly enjoy sacred cow tipping, and I’m hard-wired to automatically question anything that seems to be generally accepted as truth. So if you’ll indulge me, in this post I am going to expose you to a critical flaw in the actual practice of passive candidate pipelining that no one seems to like to talk about. Continue reading

LinkedIn’s Undocumented Search Operator

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

Beyond Boolean Search: Proximity and Weighting

Beyond Basic Boolean

Most sourcing, recruiting, and staffing professionals are familiar with the basic Boolean operators of AND, OR, and NOT. However, I have found that few are familiar with what some refer to as “extended” Boolean functionality, such as proximity search and term weighting.

Proximity and term weighting, where supported, are not actually logical (Boolean) operators – they are more accurately referred to as text or content operators.

Whatever you call them – extended Boolean or text operators – they offer sourcers and recruiters significantly more control, power and precision when executing searches, and in the hands of an expert, they can enable semantic search. Continue reading

Why Sourcing is Superior to Posting Jobs for Talent

Posting a job online is perhaps the first action most companies take to attract talent when they have an opening.

However, posting jobs in an attempt to attract qualified talent has many intrinsic flaws, and here are the top 4 in my opinion:

  1. Posting jobs a passive strategy
  2. Posting jobs offers no control over candidate qualifications
  3. Job advertisements only attract candidates who are actively looking
  4. Posting jobs isn’t social!

In comparison, sourcing from Internet, LinkedIn, online resume databases, ATS/CRM systems and similar resources to discover and identify qualified candidates is an active strategy which offers significant control over candidate qualifications, can be used to specifically target passive and even non-job seekers, and is 100 times more social!

Read on for a more in-depth analysis of posting jobs vs. sourcing candidates, as well as to have your eyes opened to a new way of looking at the value/ROI of posting jobs. Continue reading

I’m Going to the Australasian Talent Conference SourceEvent!

I’m very excited to be attending and honored to speak at the Australasian Talent Conference SourceEvent in Melbourne  this August!

When I had a Skype call with Martin Warren, Kevin Wheeler and Trevor Vas and they asked if I’d be interested in coming to the first dedicated sourcing for recruiters’ event in Australia, it was an easy answer.

The sourcing and recruiting community is truly global, and after my excellent experience at #TruLondon, I jumped at the opportunity to brainstorm with the top sourcers and recruiters in Australasia!

I’ve been busy writing quite a bit on the current state of sourcing and what I see as the future of talent discovery and identification, and I look forward to discussing these ideas at the SourceEvent.

Here’s a bit of a preview: Continue reading