Tag Archives: LinkedIn

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 →

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:

Can you ever be sure you’re finding everyone there is to be found?
How do you know you’ve found the best people available?
How do you know you’ve found all of the best people?
Are there people on LinkedIn, in your ATS, in job board resume databases that are never found?
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 – X-Ray Location False Positives

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I was extremely pleased to receive many responses/solutions to the Ruby LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge I posted recently, including some from well-known online sourcing heavyweights, as well as a number from other talented folks who came out of the Internet ether from several continents to show off their skills and take a crack at solving the challenge.

Kudos to those who successfully found people on LinkedIn who have experience with Ruby but do not make explicit mention of it on their profile!

I sincerely hope everyone appreciated seeing the various approaches and methods people utilized to solve the first LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – that was my primary motivator in posting it.

One thing I noticed from some of the responses is that for a few people, the challenge seemed too easy.

So – if you’re up for another LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge, take a crack at this one – it’s at least a degree more difficult than the last. :-) Continue reading →

Do You Really Know the Size of Your LinkedIn Network?

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When people talk about the size of their LinkedIn network, many make reference to the “Total users you can contact through an Introduction” number, which is the total of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections.

However, many people don’t know that the number representing LinkedIn users three degrees away from you is just an estimate.

Yes, you read that right – it’s not the actual number of your 3rd degree connections on LinkedIn. Which means the total number is also an estimate. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Profile Search Engine Optimization / SEO

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I recently wrote about what happens when you search for yourself on LinkedIn.

Now I’d like to address what happens when people don’t search for you by name, but rather try to find people like you using “regular” keywords and titles.

When it comes to Internet search, the goal for most people and companies is to be on the first page of search results for your keywords, and ideally #1 if at all possible.

When you search LinkedIn with the titles you have on your profile and keywords you’ve mentioned in your metro area, do you show up in the first 10 results?

Have you ever wondered if there was anything you could do to positively affect your ranking in search results when someone searches LinkedIn looking for people like you? Have you seen heavily keyword-loaded LinkedIn profiles and wondered if it really does any good?

You could get lost in all of the YouTube videos and blog posts on the subject of LinkedIn profile optimization, but most of it is pure speculation.

Before I go into some detail as to what I think is going on with LinkedIn search ranking and what you might be able to do to positively affect your ranking, I’d like to show you a little experiment I’ve run and ask you to do something similar and see what happens.

You have searched or have had someone else search LinkedIn by the titles and keywords you used on your profile to see where you rank, haven’t you? Continue reading →

LinkedIn Tips for Seeing Full Names of 3rd Degree Connections

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I recently wrote about the change LinkedIn made that no longer allows people with a free LinkedIn account to view the full names of 3rd degree and group connections.

While you can go through the trouble of using a search engine such as Bing to view any public LinkedIn profile, there are a few ways that you can find and view the full names of 3rd degree and group connections from within LinkedIn even if you only have a free account. Continue reading →

Now Premium on LinkedIn: Full Names of 3rd level & Group Connections

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I had an associate with a free LinkedIn account contact me late last week complaining about how he could no longer see the full names of his LinkedIn search results for 3rd degree connections – his results only showed the first initial of the last name. Furthermore, he claimed that LinkedIn had started charging for the ability to see the full names of 3rd degree connections in search results.

My first reaction was extreme confusion.

I hadn’t heard or seen anything to support his experience or claims. Had I missed a major announcement or blog post? Not one of the few thousand+ recruiters that I follow on Twitter had tweeted about it, at least not that I saw, but it’s safe to assume that if this person’s claims were accurate, news would spread like wildfire.

Interestingly, I just ran a search on Twitter (@4:00 EST 10/3/2010) for [LinkedIn last names] and only found 1 tweet that could be possibly referencing it. Certainly odd if this massive change from LinkedIn really was taking root. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Demographics and Visitor Statistics

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If you have ever been curious about LinkedIn’s demographics, as well as LinkedIn’s visitor statistics broken down by country, city, and state, you’ve come to the right place! A while ago I stumbled across a very interesting and powerful website called Quantcast, which 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.” In other words, Quantcast directly measures LinkedIn’s visitors – which gives us some very interesting insights.

Continue reading →

A Better Way to Search LinkedIn for Industry Experience

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Sourcers 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 →

How to Search LinkedIn for Diversity Sourcing

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If you ever have a need to perform diversity sourcing, I’m going to show you a trick on LinkedIn that goes beyond the obvious and “everyone’s doing it” methods of searching for fraternities, sororities, specific universities, and of course groups, societies and associations.

Let’s say you were in need of identifying people with specific skills and experience that are also women (software engineers, CFO’s, etc.), and you’ve already tried the standard methods of identifying them. One tactic some people and organizations utlize is searching for common first names for women. However, with most search engines, you’re limited in the size of the search string you can run (sometimes as few as 100 characters!), so you can’t search for many names with a single search. Plus, limiting yourself to only the most common first names is, well…limiting.

While I’ve written about the fact that LinkedIn’s search fields appear bottomless (I have yet to find a limit to the number of characters/terms that can be entered and searched for), I don’t know of many people who try and take advantage of LinkedIn’s limitless search fields.

See where I might be going here? Continue reading →

LinkedIn Shows New Search Options, Some No Longer Free

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LinkedIn now shows some new search functionality to the masses who use LinkedIn for free. Perhaps of greater interest, some previously free search options are now premium filters.

I first noticed the changes to LinkedIn’s advanced search page on Saturday, June 19th. Did they appear earlier and I just didn’t notice them? Perhaps I missed a press release?

For those of us without a premium LinkedIn account, the advanced people search interface used to look something like this:

Now it looks like this: Continue reading →

Searching LinkedIn with Google and Yahoo for Free

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When 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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The 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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In 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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So 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 →

LinkedIn Network Connections: How Do You Measure Up?

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You’re on LinkedIn – congratulations!

So, how big is your network?

Without going into a rant on quality vs. quantity (who says we can’t have BOTH?), let’s take a different angle on the size of your LinkedIn network…at your current company, where do you rank in terms of number of connections?

Do you know off the top of your head? Why not?

If you don’t know where you rank at your current company in terms of LinkedIn network connections, here’s how to find out: Continue reading →

What Social Recruiting is NOT

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After recently writing about moving beyond the hype of social media and recruiting, I took some time to reflect quite a bit on the topic, and focused a critical eye on exactly what “Social Recruiting” is.

While there is no shortage of what people think “Social Recruiting” is, quite frankly – I’m not satisfied with any of the definitions and explanations I’ve found – most are too surface level and one-dimensional, as well as inaccurate, in my opinion. It seems that a large portion of what many people seem to be happy to accept as “Social Recruiting” is really nothing more than traditional job posting and employer marketing and branding in a 2.0 environment.

However, I can definitely appreciate the challenge of trying to nail down an accurate and concise definition of “Social Recruiting” – it’s quite the slippery fish. So rather than trying to answer the question of “What is Social Recruiting?,” I’m going to tell you what I think Social Recruiting is NOT. Continue reading →

LinkedIn Sourcing Tip: Searching by Company? Beware!

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Recently, 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