Tag Archives: Facebook Search

Diversity Sourcing is a Breeze with Facebook Graph Search

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In some respects, Facebook’s Graph Search has literally changed the game when it comes to diversity and inclusion with regard to sourcing.

If you don’t already have access to Graph Search, you may not be aware just how easy it is to leverage diversity criteria such as gender, race and ethnicity.

How easy is it?

I’ll show you how.

Gender Sourcing with Facebook Graph Search

Imagine being asked to find and identify as many female _______________ (accountants, project managers, software engineers, etc.) who currently work at a particular company or any company.

Think about it.

Without Graph Search, how would you go about accomplishing this goal?

It’s no easy task. I know several people who’ve worked at some of the top software companies in the world who have had to do some crazy search gymnastics in the past  in order to even somewhat successfully identify a small portion of female software engineers at target companies in order to diversify their software development talent.

With Graph Search, it’s now simply a matter of asking Facebook for all of the female software engineers or any role you’re targeting at any company.

For example:

 

 

As you can see, sourcing for gender diversity is so easy that Facebook’s Graph Search has essentially rendered it a non-issue, at least when it comes to searching for people by title and/or company.

I have to imagine that this has already been done by sourcers and recruiters at Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, etc.

If not – hello!

Not that it wouldn’t, but this approach also works just as well if you were looking for female engineers in Germany, or any position in any country. Continue reading →

Searching Facebook for Sourcing and Recruiting

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As Facebook approaches 1 billion users globally, it would be folly to ignore the vast amount of human capital data that Facebook has to offer.

However, as I have written and spoken about many times, the value of data is directly proportional to the ability to retrieve it.

And therein lies the rub of Facebook.

It’s just not very searchable, and the structure of Facebook source code doesn’t make it easy to reliably target the really good stuff that sourcers and recruiters would be especially interested in.

Aside from being highly unsearchable, Facebook doesn’t score highly on the depth of professional content either.

I am aware that many of you probably believe that very few people enter in any professional information into their Facebook profiles, but you might be surprised to learn that more people than you would assume actually do enter titles and the companies they work for.

Also, while the percentage of Facebook users entering in professional details might be relatively small (for the sake of argument, let’s say 10%), given the nearly 1 billion profiles, that would be almost 100,000,000 profiles with some amount of professional data.

I don’t know about you, but I can work with 100,000,000 profiles.

So, while Facebook isn’t very search-friendly, and not everyone enters professional information on their profiles, there are a few ways to search for and target people based on what they do and where they work.

Let’s get on with a walk through of some of the ways you can leverage the professional content that is present within Facebook. Continue reading →