How to Find Active & Passive Software Engineers on Stack Overflow

  Do you source and/or recruit software engineers? Would you like to know how to find software engineers on Stack Overflow who are actually interested in hearing about new career opportunities? For free? If you answered YES!, YES! and YES! – you’re in in luck, because I am going to show you how to find active and passive job seekers … Read More

14 Tips on How to Use Twitter for Social Recruiting

  Twitter’s been around for nearly 8 years and has always been popular in recruiting circles, but there are still plenty of recruiters  who don’t use Twitter to its full potential or are simply new to using Twitter for recruiting. For example, just the other day I noticed in one of my Hootsuite streams a recruiter with 3 followers tweet … Read More

Some Very Interesting Google / LinkedIn X-Ray Search Results

  While I was writing last week’s post in which I explored using Google to X-Ray search within specific LinkedIn groups, I decided to perform some general X-Ray search syntax testing to challenge some assumptions, as well as to compare X-Ray results to LinkedIn Recruiter results. I notice quite a few folks seem to use the “people you know” phrase … Read More

Using Google to Search for People in Specific LinkedIn Groups

In this post, I am going to share with you the journey I took and the discoveries I made while investigating the answer to a Boolean search request for help I recently came across online about using -dir in a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn. Some of you may enjoy and appreciate seeing my methodology, others will likely learn a thing or … Read More

How to Find the Best Software Engineers on Stack Overflow

  Looking to source and recruit software engineers? One of the best places to find software engineers is Stack Overflow, where nearly 2,000,000 programmers from all over the world ask and answer programming-related questions. How would you like to know which software engineers might be the most talented and skilled? A year ago, Peter Kazanjy of TalentBin published an extensive … Read More

100+ Free Sourcing & Recruiting Tools, Guides, and Resources

  It’s been a LONG time coming, but I finally got around to updating my free sourcing & recruiting tools, guides and resources page where I now keep a current list of the best of my work all in one place for easy bookmarking and reference. You can find it here on my main page:     Additionally, I thought … Read More

How to Find People to Recruit on Twitter with Google & Bing

  There are over 500 million Twitter accounts with over 200 million represent active users globally. I’d say that qualifies it as a solid source for finding and engaging talent for recruitment. Of course, you can’t engage someone you haven’t found in the first place, and it’s been far too long since I’ve posted an update to how to search … Read More

Google Plus Search Guide: How to Search & Find People on G+

  Do you want to know how to search for people on Google+ by title/skill, company, AND location? If so, you’ve come to the right place – I’m going to show you 3 different ways to find people on Google+, and only one of them allows you to reliably search for and find people based on where they live: Google+’s … Read More

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

  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: Whether or not you should use “pub” and/or “in” (e.g. site:linkedin.com/in | site:linkedin.com/pub) Whether or not you should use -dir Using country … Read More

Do you suffer from Obsessive Exotic Sourcing Syndrome?

    Okay, that might have been a bit dramatic, but I do expect a strong negative reaction from some folks because I am going to address an issue that might be a tad sensitive to the sourcing community. The issue I would like to address is the apparent obsession of many with exotic sourcing. What is Exotic Sourcing? If … Read More

Bing’s Semantic Search, Phonetics and Undocumented Operator

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 … Read More

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

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 … Read More

LinkedIn Makes Obvious Moves to Affect X-Ray Searching

If you happen to do quite a bit of LinkedIn X-Ray searching, you might be noticing that some people are taking control of how they appear in public search results. Or maybe you aren’t noticing it, because you can’t. Confused? Read on to learn more. LinkedIn Profile Changes I’m not exactly sure when this change was introduced (anyone?), but I … Read More

Update Your Bing X-Ray Searches of LinkedIn to Target Profiles

  Beginning early last week, I’ve had a few people reach out to me and ask about some changes LinkedIn is apparently making to the public profile listings. In the past, I’ve written about how Bing is easier and more effective at searching LinkedIn profiles than Google. One of my suggestions for targeting profiles an avoiding directory and job results … Read More

Searching LinkedIn with Google and Yahoo for Free

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 … Read More

LinkedIn X-Ray Search Results Change: Update Your Strings

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:

LinkedIn Current Title Search: Internal vs. X-Ray Part II

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 … Read More

LinkedIn Current Title Search: Internal vs. X-Ray

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 … Read More

How to Search Across Multiple Countries on LinkedIn

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 … Read More

How to X-Ray Search Facebook for Candidate Sourcing

I recently wrote a post on how to search for candidates on Facebook where I featured all of Facebook’s “built-in” search capabilities. Shortly after publishing the article, I received a question from one of my regular readers asking why I did not include searching Facebook using the site: query modifier (as Google calls it), also known as X-Ray search. It was a … Read More