Tag Archives: Google

Searching Facebook for Candidates

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I recently received a request from a reader to come up with some example Boolean Strings for finding software engineers on Facebook who are from Top 10 schools (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, etc) and live in the Silicon Valley.

***Quick disclaimer***
I am definitely not a Facebook sourcing guru – I don’t see it as a high yield source for proactive and highly precise sourcing as it is a relatively “shallow” source of information, it’s search interfaces are quite limited, and when x-raying into Facebook you can’t see much information. I’d invite anyone reading this that has suggestions and best practices to please add them.

Okay, now that I got that out of the way, searching inside Facebook for people that you don’t “know” (they aren’t your “friends” yet) has become more and more restricted over time. There are a few ways to search for people within Facebook – I will cover 3. Continue reading →

Resumes on the Internet: Monster vs. Google

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If you are a sourcer or recruiter I am sure that at some point in your career you’ve read somewhere or heard someone say how the Internet has 10X the number of candidates that can be found on the online job boards. I’ve always taken that for face value because, to be honest, it’s really tough to prove or disprove such a figure/statement.

However, I am a little bit of a skeptic by nature and I tend to question everything. Socrates and I would have been fast friends. I don’t typically accept what other people say or write just because they say or write it. So that whole “there are TONS more candidates on the Internet than the job boards” thing has been slowly eating away at me and I’ve decided to take a stab at dispelling the myth by pitting The Internet (via Google) vs. Monster.

Before you jump all over the Boolean search strings I settled on for this little exercise – I’m going to keep them relatively simple for easy apples-to-apples comparisons. I am well aware that the searches you see below can be tweaked in many ways – and just so you know, I did experiment with them before settling on a particular search string format. I did not find any significant variation in the results by tweaking the approach I took to pulling resumes. For example, when I used intitle:~resume, I got a couple extra CV hits, but also a bunch of false positives that were not resumes – so I kept it pure and simple at intitle:resume.

I chose to go with 1 Internet search engine (Google) and 1 major job board (Monster). Yes – I know that there are resumes that you can only find using other search engines (hey – I do have a Black Belt in Boolean) – but I figured I would let the 800 lb gorillas of their respective niches battle it out. Plus, there are other major job boards – so we’re even.

It is important to bear in mind that I set out to just run a little experiment to see how many resumes I could find via Google for particular search terms/skills in specific locations vs. how many I could find on Monster with the same search terms and locations.  I chose the state of Maryland and a 20 mile radius of 94118 in San Francisco, CA. 

Google – are you ready? Monster – are you ready? Now, LET’S GET IT ON!!! Continue reading →

Targeting PAST experience on LinkedIn – can it be done?

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I recently had a recruiter ask me if there were any way to be able to search LinkedIn for people who have worked at a specific company in the past, but who are NOT currently working for that company.

I can see why some Sourcers and Recruiters would want to specifically target people who are not currently at a company, but have worked there in the past. I’ve done a bit of digging on this, and I have yet to find a way to reliably targeting past experience while ensuring that you only get results of people who are not currently working at the target company.  When searching within your network on LinkedIn, as you may know, the only controllable option you have is to be able to search for people who are currently at target companies. If you leave the “current companies only” option unchecked, you will get results with a mix of people who are currently employed at your target company as well as those who are no longer working there. Also – when searching inside your own network – you are limited to results of people to whom you are connected up to the 3rd degree.
 
Going beyond your own LinkedIn network, you can try using Google and other Internet search engines and employ the site: command to search into LinkedIn – but we have to be aware that this is not a method that affords you precise control over current or past experience.  However, I’m going to give Google, Exalead, and AltaVista a thorough LinkedIn Boolean workout. Continue reading →