Tag Archives: LinkedIn Sourcing

Free LinkedIn Sourcing Webinar Wednesday November 20 @ 2PM ET

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LinkedIn Sourcing Webinar November 2013

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 of the people that can be found on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn 259 Million UsersNow that LinkedIn has grown to over 259,000,000 registered users, finding people has become much easier, but finding the right people becomes increasingly more challenging, and finding all of them even harder. As such, knowing how to effectively source talent on LinkedIn is now more important than ever.

During Wednesday’s LinkedIn sourcing webinar, I’ll review advanced human capital data retrieval concepts, techniques and strategies that you can leverage in LinkedIn Recruiter, including Dark Matter, Maximum Inclusion, Adaptive Search, Strategic Exclusion, Intelligent Results Processing, and Moneyball Sourcing.

Be sure to attend this LinkedIn webinar live, because this session won’t be recorded and the slides won’t be distributed afterwards.

Also, I simply have to recognize the LinkedIn team’s graphic designer for putting this “Lord of the Strings” image together – I’m a huge LOTR fan.

Although I like the concept of Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn having my back in the war for talent, I think I’ll stick with my shaved head. :)

Lord-of-the-Strings 2 LinkedIn

How LinkedIn Search Actually Works

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If you’re in sourcing, recruiting or HR, you no doubt search LinkedIn from time to time or perhaps even every day.

So why not gain a better understanding of how LinkedIn search actually works?

And what better way to learn how LinkedIn search works than from the Heads of Search Relevance and Query Understanding at LinkedIn?

Yes, you read that correctly – LinkedIn has folks specifically dedicated to understanding your queries in an effort to return the right set of results, emphasizing query rewriting, elaboration, and refinement.

Here is the LinkedIn Search Slideshare deck where you can learn about, among other things, LinkedIn’s contextual word sense and how LinkedIn deals with “keyword stuffers” and spammers.

[In]formation Retrieval: Search at LinkedIn from Daniel Tunkelang

If you would like to learn more about the LinkedIn search team looks at content, connections, and context, here is a fantastic Slideshare to review:

Content, Connections, and Context from Daniel Tunkelang

You may also learn a thing or two about how LinkedIn search works from their page dedicated to highlighting some of the search-related challenges they think about everyday:

Search at LinkedIn Main Page

My SourceCon Presentation – LinkedIn: Beyond the Basics

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I was honored to be asked to present at the Dallas 2012 SourceCon event – which turned out to be the largest SourceCon event ever!

When I was talking with Amybeth Hale back at the end of 2011 about what I’d like to present on, I asked if anyone had ever run a session solely dedicated to LinkedIn.

Now, I’ve been to every SourceCon save 2 (the first one and 2011/Santa Clara), I’ve spoken at 5 of them, and I couldn’t recall anyone delivering a LinkedIn presentation, and neither could Amybeth (for the ones I missed or sessions I did not attend).

That struck me as beyond odd, given how valuable a resource LinkedIn is for sourcing and recruiting.

What you see below is the deck from my “LinkedIn: Beyond the Basics” session, complete with YouTube videos.

 

 

8 Minute Video from my LinkedIn #InToronto Presentation

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I’ve had the distinct honor of speaking at every event that LinkedIn has put together in the U.S. and Canada, and I will also be speaking at the third Talent Connect event on October 10-12 in Las Vegas, where they expect well over 2,000 people to attend. I’ll be running 2 sessions on effectively searching LinkedIn (one basic and one advanced). I am also looking forward to speaking at the LinkedIn Talent Connect Europe event in London on October 23rd.

While the Talent Connect events in the U.S. are strictly restricted to corporate customers only, when I presented at the #InToronto event, there was a mix of corporate customers and agency users, and over 1,200 people showed up.

I ran two 30-minute sessions on searching LinkedIn to find talent, and the LinkedIn staff filmed one of them and compiled an 8 minute video that they recently uploaded to YouTube.

In case you hadn’t seen it, I wanted to share it with you here. Granted, my U.S. Talent connect sessions are usually 45 minutes to 1 hour, and they edited out quite a bit of the “good stuff” to get a 30 minute session down to 8 minutes, but I think you’ll find the content of interest if you happen to use LinkedIn in your sourcing and recruiting efforts.

 

 

 

How to View Full Profiles of Your 3rd Degree LinkedIn Network

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Just a short while ago I posted a piece on how some people are no longer able to view full profiles of their 3rd degree LinkedIn connections when logged in and searching withing LinkedIn.

At the time of the article, I had not been affected, and I kept checking daily to see if and when I would be.

Alas, the time has come – I can no longer view full profiles of 3rd degree LinkedIn connections with my free account when I am searching within LinkedIn.

Well, I take that back.

Although I no longer enjoy automatically being treated to full profiles of 3rd degree connections while searching LinkedIn with my free account, here are 4 ways in which I can view a full profile of my 3rd degree connections:

#1 Use Google or Bing to search for the profile while not logged in

I can take the headline phrase or a unique combination of keywords from the 3rd degree profile I am trying to view and use Bing or Google to search for that phrase/term combo in another browser in which I am not logged into LinkedIn (or use Chrome incognito).

Here you can see Chrome on the left in which I am logged into LinkedIn, and IE on the right in which I am not logged into LinkedIn.

 

 

#2 Search for them by name

Even while still logged into LinkedIn, I can quickly X-ray for the person’s public profile, snag their full name, then search for them by name.

Because LinkedIn allows you to see full profiles of people you search for by name (they assume you know the person, otherwise why would you know their name? <unless you’re a sourcer>), you can see their full profile while logged in.

 

 

#3 Export to PDF

I can also view full profiles of 3rd degree LinkedIn connections if I click on the blue arrow below “See Expanded View” and select “Export to PDF.”

 

 

Once I open the PDF, I can see the full profile contained within.

 

 

Additionally, when I scroll to the last page of the PDF, I find a link with “Contact <first name> on LinkedIn.”

 

 

When I click on the link, I am taken to their profile on LinkedIn, which I can view in its entirety (note the content from the web profile below is the same as the PDF content above).

 

 

I tried using the same link format [http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=XXXXXXXX&authType=name&authToken=2Ol8&goback=] with different profile ID’s but that didn’t work for me.

Darn tokens.

#4 Share the profile

Some of you may be wondering why I’ve actually never written about the “Share” method in which you can send a profile to someone else and copy yourself to get a link to view the full profile.

While I know this is a popular method for many, it has never really been a viable method for me because my network is so large that when I try to type in a name or use the LinkedIn address book, the system either times out or I get tired of waiting for names to show up/load.

For the sake of this post I tried to be very patient and after a few attempts I was able to share a 3rd degree profile with someone, copy myself, and then view the full profile from the link in the message in my inbox.

However, it’s much faster and easier for me to simply use methods 1-3 above.

Of course, the LinkedIn team is likely already looking into closing these holes, but some of these methods have been published and in use for years, so you may be able to enjoy them for quite some time.

Sharing is Caring

If you found this post helpful, please share it with someone you think would benefit.

They’ll thank you.

 

How Would You Search for these Positions on LinkedIn?

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One of the things that has always struck me as extremely odd with regard to sourcing is the fact that there appears to be so little sharing of Boolean search strings.

While one can find basic search string examples in training materials and in various sourcing groups online, I know plenty of sourcers and recruiters that have never seen another person’s production search strings – those used to actually fill positions.

Why do you think that is? I have my ideas, and I’d like to know yours.

I believe there may be several contributing factors:

  1. Some people just don’t save their searches. If I were a betting man, from what I’ve seen over the past 15+ years, I’d wager that the majority of people don’t save their search strings. If they’re not saved anywhere – you severely limit any sharing opportunities to live, in-the-moment situations that may or may not ever present themselves.
  2. It simply never occurs to some people to share their searches with others – unless someone specifically asks, why would someone?
  3. Plain old insecurity. Some folks might not want to share their search strings with others because they are afraid theirs are somehow “wrong,” inferior or inadequate.
  4. The belief that their Boolean search strings are somehow their “secret sauce” and that in sharing their searches might somehow expose their competitive advantage.

What do you think?

How Would You Search for these Positions on LinkedIn?

Are you up to the challenge of sharing some of your searches with a global audience of talent acquisition professionals? Continue reading →

Top 15 Common Talent Sourcing Mistakes

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Practically everything I have learned about sourcing and recruiting didn’t come from a mentor or any formal training.

Instead, I learned how to become a top performing recruiter “the hard way.”

What that really means is that when it came to finding top talent, I tried a lot of things that didn’t work, and because I refuse to make excuses, give up, or accept anything less than the best results, I kept experimenting until I discovered things that enabled me to find people that others can’t and don’t.

With over fifteen years of experience in sourcing and recruiting, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes along the way. I’ve also had the opportunity to assess, train and coach corporate and agency sourcers and recruiters, which has exposed me to many myths, misconceptions and mistakes when it comes to leveraging information systems for sourcing and recruiting.

Here are what I believe to be some of the most common productivity-robbing and results-reducing mistakes sourcers and recruiters make when looking for the right match.

In no particular order… Continue reading →

How to Effectively Source Talent via Social Media & Networks

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Sourcing talent via social media requires an entirely different mindset than sourcing with other forms of human capital data, such as resumes/CV’s, employee directories, conference attendee lists, etc.

Back in early 2009, one of only 2 guest posts ever co-written on my site was published on the topic of non-standard descriptors and the role they play in social media. Valerie Scarsellato was a Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation at the time when she put together the framework for the original article on sourcing via social media, and she has now moved into a Segment Marketing Specialist role at Intel and is loving it. For those of you who feel that employer marketing/branding/communications is a logical extension of sourcing, Valerie would wholeheartedly agree with you – check out this video in which she discussed her award winning _codehearted; work for Intel.

Now that nearly 2 years has passed since the Searching Social Media Requires Outside-the-box Thinking article was published, social media usage has continued to explode – monthly visitors to LinkedIn and Facebook have doubled, they’ve nearly quadrupled for Twitter , and we now have Google+, Pinterest and others springing on the scene, making the topic even more relevant today. As such, I wanted to rework the original piece and update it with a few more examples.

The primary challenge when leveraging social media for sourcing talent is that nonstandard terminology is prevalent – it’s generally acceptable to use slang and other verbiage that would otherwise never be found on a resume, even when it comes to describing one’s profession.

If you use the same query terms when sourcing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. as you would when searching for resumes, you will certainly find people. However, you will also exclude a decent portion of the available results, unknowingly relegating them to Dark Matter and otherwise undiscovered talent. This is because you can only retrieve what you explicitly search for. Continue reading →

How to See Full Names of 3rd Degree Connections on LinkedIn

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For a while, there was an interesting little method for revealing the full name of 3rd degree and group connections on LinkedIn. However, LinkedIn has changed the “get introduced” functionality and UI for most people and effectively eliminated that method (albeit unintentionally, IMO).

Oh well – it was easy and fun while it lasted.

Fortunately, I’ve recently become aware of another way of revealing the full names of 3rd degree connections on LinkedIn with a less-than-premium account that I would like to share with you.

But before we get to that, I’d like to cover some basics as well as some things I have been noticing about LinkedIn – I believe they may be tinkering with free access profile visibility.

Oh, and if you’re on the fence about attending SourceCon in Atlanta next week, it’s shaping up to be the largest in SourceCon history, and you still have time to register and get a 10% discount using my SC12GC code.

LinkedIn Public Profile Search to View Full Names

Now that the nifty “get introduced” full name visibility trick is seemingly dead, people without LinkedIn Recruiter access can of course still grab one or more unique phrases from 3rd degree and group-only LinkedIn connections and throw them into Bing or Google to find their public profile and thus their full names.

For example, I can take the headline phrase and couple it with the location phrase from a LinkedIn search result…

 

 

…and enter this into Bing: “Senior Software Development Manager, IBM” “Ottawa, Canada Area”, and here’s what I get: Continue reading →

What is Your Talent Sourcing ROI?

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Anything worth doing is worth measuring, and sourcing isn’t exempt from this.

If you want to know which method of sourcing has the highest ROI in terms of enabling a person to find more of the right people more quickly, then you’re in luck – because that’s what this post is about.

Human capital data comes in many forms – resumes, social network profiles, blogs, bios, press resleases, etc. – and I have found that a key and critical aspect of sources of human capital data that many people fail to formally recognize is the depth and completeness of the data that can yield information through review and analysis.

When it comes to leveraging information systems such as the Internet, applicant tracking systems, social networking sites, job board databases, etc. for sourcing and recruiting – the operative word is “information.”

Data is the lowest level of abstraction from which information can be derived. For data to become information, it must be interpreted and take on a meaning.

Generally, the quality and amount of information that can be gleaned from any particular source is directly linked and limited to the quality and amount of data present to be reviewed and analyzed. How useful is an information system supported by only a small amount of limited data?

In this post, I will:

  • Review the major sources of human capital data
  • Examine sourcing return on time invested
  • Explore the potential candidate’s point of view
  • Ask you to take a quick sourcing test

Ready? Continue reading →

LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – Can You Find Everyone?

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So far, I’ve launched 2 LinkedIn sourcing challenges – Ruby and X-Ray Location False Positives.

The former had very strong participation as it was a little on the easier side (for some!). The latter had fewer participants, perhaps because it was more technical – but those who did participate did so heavily.

For my 3rd Linkedin Sourcing Challenge, I think I have one that is universally appealing because it requires no technical or advanced sourcing experience to participate, nor to win the challenge!

Continue reading →

LinkedIn’s Dark Matter – Undiscovered Profiles

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Sourcing has a fundamental problem: All searches return results.

Yes, that is actually a problem.

Why? Because everyone’s a winner.

Type in a few keywords and BAM! – you get some good looking results. Hey, this sourcing stuff isn’t so hard!

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times – sourcing is easy. In fact, it’s ridiculously easy to find some people.

So if you and your company are happy with finding some people and not necessarily the best people available to be found, then you can stop reading now and go back to finding some people.

For everyone who’s still reading this, try answering these questions:

  1. Can you ever be sure you’re finding everyone there is to be found?
  2. How do you know you’ve found the best people available?
  3. How do you know you’ve found all of the best people?
  4. Are there people on LinkedIn, in your ATS, in job board resume databases that are never found?
  5. How can you be aware of social media profiles and resumes that your searches can’t return in results – but are there?

Sourcing is easy, but it’s not easy to get to the point where you are sure you have found all of the best available results, nor is it easy to specifically target and find people others cannot and do not.

Most people use relatively basic, straight forward/direct keyword and title searches. There’s nothing wrong with that – they clearly “work” – anyone running those kinds of searches will find results.

However, they will also find exactly what everyone else finds when searching for the same types of people, which yields zero competitive advantage.

The fact that all searches produce results is a problem because it lulls people into thinking that sourcing is easy, and at least on the subconscious level – it leads people to believe that the results that are returned from searches represent all available matching and relevant results.

However, it is a fact that no single search can find all of the people you’re looking for, and there are many social media profiles and resumes that are never found.

Let me introduce you to the concept of Dark Matter. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – Ruby

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During my SourceCon NYC session, I gave an example of a sourcing challenge that can verify one’s “capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge. It is the ability to analyze novel problems, identify patterns and relationships that underpin these problems and the extrapolation of these using logic.”

This capacity is otherwise know as fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning .

The LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge

If you and/or your team are up for a test of your fluid reasoning and sourcing capability, try solving this challenge:

  • Find a LinkedIn profile of someone who has Ruby on Rails experience, but does not mention Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Rails, or RoR in their profile, and show with a link or other evidence exactly how you are certain they have Ruby experience.

There is no single correct answer – there are many different approaches to solving this challenge.

I’m going to recognize Jeremy Langhans once again for being able to solve that challenge in about 15 minutes before I even finished my presentation, using only his iPhone. To this date, no one else has even tried to take a crack at it.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. I hope at least a few people are up to the challenge! Continue reading →

A Better Way to Search LinkedIn for Industry Experience

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LinkedIn Industry SearchSourcers and recruiters are often tasked with finding candidates that have experience in a specific industry. I’m sure that such a thing seems easy to the hiring managers and clients making the request, but it’s actually not an easily accomplished feat to perform exhaustively.

Sure, finding some people who work in a specific industry is easy – simply target one or a few major companies/competitors and you’re off to the races, right?

Not so fast, unless you’re happy only finding some people and you’re not really concerned with finding the best.

Most industries are comprised of many companies, and some have several hundred to over 1000! How can anyone say for sure that if they targeted 10 or fewer companies in an industry that they were exposing themselves to the best talent available?

Some people (and companies) think that the best talent can only come from a short list of companies they’ve identified, which seems both absurd and short-sighted in my opinion. The most talented “game changers” don’t always come from a blue chip Fortune 500 company.

However, even if a sourcer/recruiter wanted to identify people who worked at any one of a large number of companies in a particular industry, they are stuck to only searching for a few companies at a time because most search engines/interfaces have limits to the length of the search string that can be run. This can make for an extremely tedious and laborious search process, which explains why most sourcers and recruiters only search for a handful of companies or make use of built-in industry search functionality. Continue reading →

LinkedIn X-Ray Search Results Change: Update Your Strings

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LinkedIn Kickball M by Jerry Luk via creative commonsThe game is afoot.

It appears that something’s happening behind the scenes at LinkedIn. Have you noticed anything odd when running a typical LinkedIn X-Ray search on Google and Yahoo?

I have. For example – try running this search:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory (controller OR CFO) “Charlotte, North Carolina Area”

You’ll get results that look like this: Continue reading →

LinkedIn Sourcing Tip: Searching by Company? Beware!

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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 Sourcing Tip: Industry Search Issue

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LinkedIn_Industry2Do you ever use social networks to such as LinkedIn to search for people with experience in a specific industry?

If you do, I can almost guarantee you that you are not finding everyone you’re looking for.

How?

There are intrinsic issues associated with any user generated content, especially when it comes to how users of social media identify themselves, and they can actually prevent you from finding the people you’re looking for.   Continue reading →

LinkedIn Search Results Sorting: Relevance or Keyword?

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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 →