Tag Archives: LinkedIn X-Ray

What’s the most effective way to X-Ray search LinkedIn?

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I’ve recently come across some blog posts and some Boolean Strings discussions on LinkedIn that inspired me to go back and tinker with searching LinkedIn via Google and Bing.

For example, I continue to see people talk about:

  1. Whether or not you should use “pub” and/or “in” (e.g. site:linkedin.com/in | site:linkedin.com/pub)
  2. Whether or not you should use -dir
  3. Using country codes in site: searches
  4. Using different phrases to target public LinkedIn profiles – e.g., “people you know”

My first reaction when people are curious about the most effective ways of retrieving public LinkedIn profiles is to encourage them to experiment on their own first instead of looking for answers to copy and paste. Quite literally 99% of everything I know about sourcing (and recruiting!) I learned through being curious and experimenting.

People learn by doing, and more specifically by failing/struggling, and not by copying and pasting somebody else’s work. 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 →

Bing’s Semantic Search, Phonetics and Undocumented Operator

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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 search.  Continue reading →

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

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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 →

Searching LinkedIn with Google and Yahoo for Free

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LinkedIn_Why_Join_LinkedIn2 from www.linkedin.comWhen it comes to searching LinkedIn using Internet search engines such as Google or Yahoo, there are many different ways to construct your search string (“X-Ray” or otherwise) and get results.

Ultimately, the goal of any good sourcer or recruiter is to find all of the best available potential candidates that a particular source has to offer.

A short while ago, Gary Cozin sent me a link to an article recommending to “forget complex Boolean strings” when searching LinkedIn using Internet search engines.

I read the article and appreciated the advice to go with the easier, simpler, more elegant search solutions, as well as the suggestion to try “Public profile powered by.” I had never thought of taking that approach – but more on that later. 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 Current Title Search: Internal vs. X-Ray Part II

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LinkedIn Wizard by 4_EveR_YounGIn the original LinkedIn Current Title Search: Internal vs. X-Ray post, I found that there was a large disparity in results between identical internal and external (Google X-Ray) current title searches on LinkedIn. 

At the end of the post I asked if anyone had any ideas as to where the missing 288 profiles were, why they weren’t returned using the basic Google X-Ray current title search technique, and how can you find them?

I received a few interesting and insightful responses – I will review them in this post as well as provide my own insight as to the difference in results experienced when running an internal LinkedIn search and a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn using the same search criteria.

I’ll also show you some interesting LinkedIn search phenomena. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Current Title Search: Internal vs. X-Ray

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LinkedIn_Current_Title_Search_vs_Google_current_title_LinkedIn_X-Ray_SearchSo you know how to X-Ray LinkedIn, and perhaps you even know how to target current titles with an X-Ray string. However, did you know that you’re not finding all of the available matches within LinkedIn using this technique?

Did that get your attention? Would you like to know approximately how many people you might be missing when you run a current title X-Ray search of LinkedIn?

Unless you have a premium Linkedin account, you will likely have to resort to using an Internet search engine to X-Ray into LinkedIn to find and view profiles of people who are not in your network, and being able to search by current title can be extremely useful at times to reduce the number of false positive results.

While I am usually not a big fan of title searching, a large percentage of LinkedIn profiles don’t have any text entered for each work experience entry. As such, title searching becomes a necessary evil as anyone who creates a LinkedIn profile doesn’t have to enter anything in the “position description” field, but they MUST enter a company and a title.

In this post I will show you the discrepancy between identical current title searches conducted using LinkedIn’s search interface and an X-Ray string – and it’s HUGE! At the end, I also throw in challenge for you. Are you up to it? Continue reading →

How to Search Across Multiple Countries on LinkedIn

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I’ve recently received a few requests from my European readers (thank you!) to write about how to use LinkedIn to simultaneously search multiple countries to identify candidates. In this post I will do exactly that – show you how you can search for candidates across multiple countries in one search. Although I will be using European countries in the examples, the same techniques can be successfully applied to any combination of countries.

LinkedIn’s Interface

If it was obvious how to search for people from multiple countries using LinkedIn’s search interface, I likely would not have received requests for help. I’ve personally never run into the need to source from a variety of countries, so I enjoyed taking on the challenge of figuring this out. Continue reading →