Sourcing Hacks, 2nd Edition Ebook [PDF]

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Sourcing Hacks, 2nd Edition

By Irina Shamaeva and David Galley

Sourcing Certifications by Brain Gain Recruiting • Palo Alto, CA • 2019

Sourcing Hacks, 2nd Edition, by Irina Shamaeva and David Galley

© 2019 Sourcing Certifications

Cover by: Sourcing Certifications

Published by: Sourcing Certifications, Palo Alto, California SourcingCertification.com

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

For permissions contact: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-0-9986349-3-7 1. Internet 2. Business Second Edition. First Printing.

Sourcing Hacks Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 1 HACKS FOR FINDING LISTS & DOCUMENTS BY GOOGLING ............................................................ 2 Hack #1: Look for CVs and Resumes Stored in the Cloud........................................................ 2 Hack #2: Find Resumes and CVs Using Image Search ............................................................. 3 Hack #3: Easy Searches to Find Contact Lists .......................................................................... 4 Hack #4: Find Contact Lists in an Industry by Searching for 2-3 Email Domains .................... 6 Hack #5: Find Lists of Software Developers in "Authors" Files ............................................... 7 TECH HACKS .................................................................................................................................... 8 Hack #6: Create Search Alerts from RSS Feeds with IFTTT Applets......................................... 8 Hack #7: Create Shortcuts with Chrome Search Engines ...................................................... 10 Hack #8: Collect Lists of Email Addresses Using a Combination of Free Tools ..................... 11 Hack #9: Use Schema.org Objects to Build Useful Custom Search Engines Quickly ............. 12 Hack #10: Search with Filters Using Custom Search Engines ................................................ 13 LINKEDIN HACKS ........................................................................................................................... 15 Hack #11: Source with Lists and LIR (LinkedIn Recruiter)...................................................... 15 Hack #12: Search by Postal Code and Radius on LinkedIn .................................................... 18 Hack #13: Work Around LinkedIn's Boolean Search Restrictions ......................................... 18 Hack #14: Source in LinkedIn Content ................................................................................... 20 Hack #15: Use Outlook Online Integration to View Your Contacts' LinkedIn Profiles .......... 21 Hack #16: Find a LinkedIn Profile by Email in Any Browser .................................................. 22 Hack #17: Discover Information You Won’t Find with the LinkedIn Search ......................... 24 Hack #18: X-Ray LinkedIn for Job Titles and Companies ....................................................... 24 MORE HACKS................................................................................................................................. 26 Hack #19: Use Google's Asterisk (*) Operator to Control Search Result Previews ............... 26 Hack #20: Google for

, ☏, ✆,

, ✉, or

to Find Contact Information ..................... 27

Hack #21: Find Direct Phone Numbers for Companies' Employees ...................................... 27 Hack #22: Find which Companies Use which Technologies .................................................. 28 Hack #23: Undocumented Twitter Search Operators ........................................................... 31 ABOUT THE AUTHORS ................................................................................................................... 33 iii

Sourcing Hacks Introduction

INTRODUCTION "Hacking is a subtle and arguably mystical art, equal parts wit and technical ability, that is rarely appreciated by non-hackers." - Urban Dictionary Welcome to the second edition of Sourcing Hacks! Sourcing Hacks is a book written by Sourcers, for Sourcers. Job titles aside, if you engage in Sourcing, you are a Sourcer, and we wrote this book for you. Sourcing is ultimately about bringing people together: a process that begins with identifying who the right people are for a given client, project, or new venture. A hack, in this context, is best defined as the solution to a challenge you face. Each hack presented in the book helped us overcome a real-world problem we have faced, either Sourcing for clients of Brain Gain Recruiting or assisting Sourcing Certifications training attendees. When selecting hacks to include in the book, we focused on challenges that are common to many Sourcers. We chose hacks that apply to searches across many industries, locations, and skillsets. The hacks selected will help you find resumes, lists, and other documents relevant to Sourcing quickly and easily. We have also included several hacks for getting the most out of essential candidate sources like LinkedIn and Twitter. No paid tools or technical expertise is required to implement any of our hacks. Through the step-by-step instructions and use cases, you can immediately add these techniques to your 'Sourcing toolkit,' improving your productivity. However, we believe that the why of each hack matters just as much as the how. With each hack, we have also explained the underlying concept, the reasons why the hack works, along with examples of the results you can expect. These explanations should help you get a better overall understanding of Sourcing techniques and allow you to modify the hacks to fit your needs. For the second edition, we have replaced several hacks that no longer work and added new hacks in their place. We hope you'll enjoy exploring these hacks as much as we have enjoyed putting them together. Irina Shamaeva & David Galley June 2019

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Sourcing Hacks Hacks for Finding Lists & Documents

HACKS FOR FINDING LISTS & DOCUMENTS BY GOOGLING The open web contains a wealth of information. Amongst the most immediately useful information you can find, are document files, like candidate resumes, and lists of professionals relevant to your search. Of course, not every professional, or even every category of professional will post their full resume online. Those resumes which are online can be found using techniques like the ones outlined in this section. Similarly, there are several straightforward ways to search for lists, whether of professionals attending an industry event, members of a professional association, or employees of a specific company. The following hacks explore the best ways to leverage Google search techniques to find the right lists and documents for your Sourcing needs.

Hack #1: Look for CVs and Resumes Stored in the Cloud What is it about? Lots of resumes that are stored "on the cloud" (on sites that provide file storage), are public. You can use Google to find them. While you can also find these documents in many other places on the web, targeting specific filesharing sites can be beneficial in a few ways. First, it provides a way to segment your search, potentially surfacing results which may not have otherwise appeared on the top pages of results. Second, certain cloud storage sites are integrated with other platforms. For example, Amazon Web Services are used to host and run many organizational websites. When the storage for these sites is left publicly visible, we can sometimes uncover attendee, customer, and even employee lists that can't be found anywhere else. How do you perform the hack? To construct Google searches that would look for resumes and CVs on the cloud we need to: • • •

Use the operator site: along with the domain(s) to search Add terms that would help to search for resumes and CVs Add specific industry keywords, job titles, company names, or location keywords.

There is certainly not one particular "best" string to search for online resumes. A variety of strings can work, and it is useful to try a few variations each time you search. (Of course, your goal is to see mostly resumes in the search results; it is unrealistic to create a search that would find only resumes. A few false positives are always OK.) As always, the way to think about what search terms to use is to imagine what a good search result would look like and use that knowledge to construct search strings. 2

Sourcing Hacks Hacks for Finding Lists & Documents For example, most online resumes are in the PDF format; you can add filetype:PDF and get more matching results. As another example, most resume webpages have the word "resume" as part of the URL or page title, so you can search for inurl:resume or intitle:resume (vs. just searching for the keyword resume) and get good results. Hack Examples: Here are some search strings to illustrate. We have highlighted the X-Ray template part for each online document storage site: • • • • •

Find CVs on Amazon Cloud: site:amazonaws.com cv filetype:PDF london construction Find resumes in Google-based storage: site:google.com inurl:sites OR inurl:drive OR inurl:docs "resume" front-end developer "san francisco" Find resumes on Scribd: site:scribd.com resume "supply chain" manager dallas tx Find resumes on Github: intitle:resume site:github.* javascript engineer New York Find Resumes uploaded to WordPress: inurl:/wp-content/uploads resume "project engineer" oil and gas

Hack #2: Find Resumes and CVs Using Image Search What is it about? In addition to using the "general" Google, you can use Google Image Search to look for resumes and CVs posted online. It is a fun "visual" way to review search results. How do you perform the hack? SlideShare and some other sites for sharing documents automatically add an image of the published document to that document’s page. Because of that, you can search by keywords in Google Images and uncover uploaded documents that are resumes and CVs. Just use the word resume and your search terms in Google Images to find the documents. When you are searching for resumes in Images, you can additionally choose the Color > "Black and white" option (to match the typical document colors) and get even better results. Similar to searching on the main google page, you may want to exclude words like sample and example, to get "real" resumes. Hack Examples: Here are some searches demonstrating the technique: • • •

resume "account executive" new york -example -sample -samples -template templates resume java server engineer seattle "gmail.com" cv "chartered accountant" london -sample -example -template

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Sourcing Hacks Hacks for Finding Lists & Documents

Hack #3: Easy Searches to Find Contact Lists What is it about? When identifying candidates online, one of the most straightforward methods you can use is to search for contact lists. The lists of interest to Sourcers and Recruiters are typically employee, membership and attendee lists. Not every company, association, or event provides a complete and public list of the people associated with it, but there are several simple search hacks we can employ to find those lists when they exist. How do you perform the hack? To look for contact lists, you need to think what pages with lists would look like and construct your searches based on that. Here are some considerations: • •

Many contact lists are in MS Excel format. You can search for filetype:XLSX and expect to find lists. If a contact list is in an Excel format, it would likely have these column names: name, title, company, and email. You can add these keywords to the search.

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Sourcing Hacks Hacks for Finding Lists & Documents • • •

If a list has personal contact information, it might have Google- and Yahoo- based email addresses. Adding more than one email domain in the quotation marks, for example, "google.com" "yahoo.com" would help to find those lists. Contact lists are likely to have page titles like "contact list" or "member directory" (etc.) You can look for lists using these phrases under the intitle: operator. Lists of people would have many personal names. You can search for two or more common names and expect to find lists.

Hack Examples: Based on the above ideas, here are some search strings that find public contact lists. • • • • • • •

filetype:xlsx name title company email "attendee list" healthcare filetype:xlsx name title company email CEO CTO CIO filetype:xlsx "gmail.com "yahoo.com" recruiter "talent acquisition" intitle:"contact list" "gmail.com "yahoo.com" RN LPN intitle:"member directory" dave mike jim construction lisa dave "attendee list" climate change "gmail.com "yahoo.com" "aol.com" "hotmail.com" "registered nurse"

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Sourcing Hacks Hacks for Finding Lists & Documents Hack #4: Find Contact Lists in an Industry by Searching for 2-3 Email Domains What is it about? Because contact lists are likely to contain email domains for companies, you can discover lists simply by searching for several email domains of companies in a specific industry. You can add a keyword like attendees or members to get better results but, otherwise, no additional keywords are necessary – you are going to find lists (if they exist, of course). How do you perform the hack? Find several email domains for major companies in a specific industry and put them, in the quotation marks, in a Google search string. Hack Examples: • • •

"boeing.com" "lmco.com" "gd.com" members (find lists in the Aerospace and Defense industry) "us.ibm.com" "accenture.com" (find lists in the Management Consulting industry) "novartis.com" "sanofi.com" "astrazeneca.com" attendees (find lists in the Pharmaceutical industry)

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Sourcing Hacks Hacks for Finding Lists & Documents Hack #5: Find Lists of Software Developers in "Authors" Files What is it about? Software code repositories often have "authors" files, listing contributors along with their email addresses. You can look for those files on sites for sharing software code, such as Github. To make the search more targeted you can combine it with technology keywords such as programming languages. You can also add a company email domain to the search, to look for employees of a specific company. Here is what an "authors" file can look like:

How do you perform the hack? To find lists of authors, X-Ray sites with public code repositories. Pages listing contributors typically have the word "authors" in the URLs; you can use that knowledge to look for the pages. The search template is: inurl:authors site:. Hack Examples: Search on github.com: • • •

inurl:authors site:github.com PHP (looking for a programming language) inurl:authors site:github.com django (looking for a specific technology) inurl:authors site:github.com "redhat.com" (looking for Developers from the company Red Hat)

Search on other code-sharing sites: • • • • •

inurl:authors site:gitlab.com inurl:authors site:fossies.org inurl:authors site:bitbucket.org inurl:authors site:sourceforge.net/p inurl:authors site:googlesource.com 7

Sourcing Hacks Tech Hacks

TECH HACKS Any modern Sourcer can benefit from using a few simple software tools to help speed up their work. A few years ago, Google Search Alerts just stopped working properly, missing many new search results, and providing them at unpredictable intervals. We tried several potential replacements, but nothing works quite as well as the old Google system did. Instead of relying on search engines, we hacked together our own alert system. Another hack will show you a great time-saving option: pre-built search "bookmarks" in Google Chrome. By chaining the right free tools together, you can also extract lists of emails for target professionals quickly and easily. For less technophilic readers, a few of these hacks may stretch beyond your typical comfort, but please give them a try anyway!

Hack #6: Create Search Alerts from RSS Feeds with IFTTT Applets What is it about? This hack is about being notified of new search results. How do you perform the hack? If This Then That, also known as IFTTT, is a free web-based service to create chains of simple conditional statements, which they call "applets." An Applet has a "trigger," fired when something happens, and an "action," that is executed if the trigger is fired, by the rules that you can define. IFTTT provides a way for us to be notified of new search results via its RSS-based triggers:

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Sourcing Hacks Tech Hacks As an action for an RSS IFTTT trigger, you can, for example, send yourself an email, save the item in Evernote, or share the content of the new item in a tweet. Here are some ways to get RSS feeds from search results, to feed to an IFTTT RSS trigger. Though it provides fewer and less frequent results than it once did, Google Alerts has an option to deliver results to an RSS feed:

You can change the Sources to "News" to get an RSS feed of news. Bing also provides a way to create an RSS feed from any search. To get an RSS feed for a Bing search, just add &format=rss to the Bing search URL. Now you can combine an RSS feed from search results with an RSS trigger in IFTTT. Hack Examples: Here is an example building an IFTTT Applet based on a Bing search. This RSS feed will be getting new items when Bing finds new search results containing the word "layoffs" - https://www.bing.com/search?q=layoffs&format=rss.

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Sourcing Hacks Tech Hacks In IFTTT, set these trigger and action:

The resulting Applet looks like this:

Any time Bing finds a new page with the keyword "layoffs," we will get an email with the URL and Title of the page.

Hack #7: Create Shortcuts with Chrome Search Engines What is it about?

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Sourcing Hacks Tech Hacks To speed up your searches, you can use Chrome Search Engines (which are not really search engines but shortcuts to various URLs). How do you perform the hack? To create a shortcut in Chrome, you need to go to chrome://settings/searchEngines and define a "search engine" by providing its name, "keyword", and a query URL. The query URL should contain this string: %s. The way shortcuts work is the following. When you type a search engine "keyword" into the address bar, followed by a space, followed by some terms, and press Enter, Chrome will insert your search terms in the place of %s and go to the resulting URL. Hack Examples: You can use Chrome Search Engines to speed up LinkedIn profile lookups, as described in Hack #10. Add a Chrome "Search Engine" named (for example) "r" and defined as follows: https://www.linkedin.com/sales/gmail/profile/viewByEmail/%s Now, when you enter r in Omnibox, followed by a space, followed by an email address registered on LinkedIn – you will see the profile!

Hack #8: Collect Lists of Email Addresses Using a Combination of Free Tools What is it about? Here is a way to collect email addresses from multiple pages, such as Google search results, fast. How do you perform the hack? We have built a Chrome extension called Email Extractor. You can find it at http://bit.ly/emailcollector. The tool extracts and collects all email addresses and can combine the email addresses from all the pages you visit. To start collecting addresses from multiple pages, choose the "run in the background" option:

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Sourcing Hacks Tech Hacks Click on the yellow extension icon in Chrome to start collecting emails. As you go through the pages of interest, you will see the growing number of collected emails in black: . Click on the icon again when you want to stop collecting; you will see the number shown in red: . At this point, the tool copies all the addresses to the Clipboard. Now you can paste the emails into your document (such as a text or MS Excel file). You can use Email Extractor together with the Chrome Extension AutoPagerize, which is a tool for auto-loading paginated web pages. AutoPagerize works, for example, with Google search results and Github user search results. As you scroll down a page with search results, AutoPagerize will append the content of the "next" pages to the bottom of the current page, and Email Extractor will keep collecting the addresses. Hack Examples: Perform this example search on Google: site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir enterprise software sales intitle:director "san francisco" "gmail.com". Click on the Extractor envelope icon to start collecting email addresses. Use Autopagerize to scroll to the bottom. Email Extractor will copy all the visible email addresses, and you can now paste them into a text file.

Hack #9: Use Schema.org Objects to Build Useful Custom Search Engines Quickly What is it about? Google Custom Search Engines can restrict search results to specific types of pages, such as social profiles or bios. (Google.com itself does not provide this capability). By using the feature, you can avoid writing complex X-Ray search strings. One of Custom Search Engine settings allows you to restrict search results to a specific "object" type. The feature is based on Schema.org objects, invisibly included in web pages by webmasters. Schema.org defines a standard set of types of "objects", such as Person, Physician, Organization, Event, Job Posting, and Blog Posting. "Objects," such as "Person," can be included (invisibly) in a page HTML code by the page creator, signaling to search engines that the page contains someone’s bio. Googlebot identifies the objects and stores this information in Google Index, along with the page content. Examples of sites that include the Person object in public profile pages are LinkedIn, Meetup, XING, Github, Bloomberg.com, ResearchGate, and Doximity.com. Custom Search Engines allow to narrow the search down to a Schema.org Object, such as "Person", by using a setting. How do you perform the hack? In the Control Panel for editing a Custom Search Engine, you will see a field where you can specify an Object to look for – "Restrict Pages using Schema.org Types": 12

Sourcing Hacks Tech Hacks

Once you define the object type, the results will be limited to pages with this type. For example, narrowing the search down to the Object "Person" while X-Raying a Social Network, you can often get only results that are social profiles. (Google itself does not have the capability to search for Objects but Custom Search Engines do!) Hack Examples: Here are three examples of searches using Custom Search Engines, which X-Ray LinkedIn for three kinds of "Objects." You can recreate them using the instructions above. • • •

CSE: LinkedIn/Person example search: vp manufacturing CSE: LinkedIn/JobPosting example search: vp manufacturing CSE: LinkedIn/BlogPost example search: 3d printing

Hack #10: Search with Filters Using Custom Search Engines What is it about? It’s little known that Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) allow us to use special search operators, unavailable on Google.com. The operators look like this: more:p:. Operators search in web pages’ structure, that contain schema.org objects like Person and provide you with results matching the values like location or company precisely. The operators you can use depend on the site you X-Ray. Our hack shows how to use operators while X-Raying LinkedIn and Github. You can include multiple terms for the more:p: operator by combining them with * (stands for AND) or , (stands for OR). How do you perform the hack? This is a CSE for X-Raying LinkedIn – https://bit.ly/Search-LI. Based on structured information in public LinkedIn profiles, you can search for: • • •

Headline: more:p:person-jobtitle: Employer: more:p:person-org: Job Title: more:p:person-org: 13

Sourcing Hacks Tech Hacks • •

School: more:p:organization-name: Name: more:p:person-name:

This CSE searches for Github users – http://bit.ly/SourceOnGithub. Operators for X-Raying Github are: • • • • • • •

Location: more:p:person-homelocation: Programming language: more:p:code-programminglanguage: Code name: more:p:code-name: Code description: more:p:code-description: Name: more:p:hcard-fn: Personal site: more:p:hcard-url: Company: more:p:person-worksfor:

Hack Examples: Here is an example CSE LinkedIn X-Ray search (for some very important people) – more:p:person-jobtitle:visionary*guru – results are profiles where the Headline contains both words, visionary and guru. Other searches with CSE operators: • • •

more:p:person-org:Swedbank more:p:person-org:developer,engineer – developers OR engineers working at Swedbank more:p:organization-name:university*tartu – graduates of the University of Tartu more:p:person-name:david*galley – LinkedIn members named David Galley

Other LinkedIn Headline search examples: • • • •

“Open to new opportunities” – more:p:person-role:open*to*new “I am hiring” – more:p:person-role:i*am*hiring Lists a Gmail address – more:p:person-role:gmail Self-identified top skills example (lists skills, not a job title in the Headline): more:p:person-role:django*python

Github CSE Operator Examples: • • • • • •

Has repositories both in Java and Scala: more:p:code-programminglanguage:java*scala Writes in R, lives in NYC (spelled as “New York” or NYC): more:p:codeprogramminglanguage:R more:p:person-homelocation:new*york,nyc Has a resume (uploaded to the “code” section): more:p:code-name:resume Writes in Typescript, code description contains Android and iOS: more:p:codeprogramminglanguage:typescript more:p:code-description:android*ios Has a LinkedIn profile as the personal site URL: more:p:hcard-url:linkedin Works for Google, lives in Mountain View more:p:person-worksfor:google more:p:person-homelocation:mountain*view

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks

LINKEDIN HACKS LinkedIn remains a top site for Sourcing due to its accumulated "big data" and messaging functionality. Unfortunately, for the last few years, it has become increasingly challenging for users without LinkedIn Recruiter or Sales Navigator accounts to make effective use of the site. LinkedIn has restricted search by location to broad geographic areas and limited even basic Boolean search functionality. LinkedIn has also removed many useful search filters from the main search interface - even for premium users. The hacks in this section are aimed at compensating for the lost functionality. We have provided a hack for searching for users by ZIP code, as well as a hack to include as many Boolean operators as you want in your searches. We have also developed Google search hacks to help us source in ways LinkedIn doesn't support. Have you ever wanted to build a quick list of LinkedIn users by title and company, without running afoul of LinkedIn's anti-scraping rules? What about finding currently unemployed users? We’ve included hacks for these use cases and more. Use these hacks to explore LinkedIn's data in new and exciting ways. Finally, we've included hacks to help overcome the challenges faced by LinkedIn's limited messaging features, such as the ability to quickly validate users' emails to get in touch when InMails aren't effective.

Hack #11: Source with Lists and LIR (LinkedIn Recruiter) What is it about? Many LinkedIn members have "shallow" profiles, omitting useful details of their experience that make for effective search terms (e.g., software developers may not list programming languages they use). When we collect lists from other sources, we may already know these individuals meet certain criteria, even if those details aren't mentioned on LinkedIn. The Sourcing Power lies in combing the information from both sources. This Hack is based on the LIR feature called Talent Pipeline (aka Import Candidates), that allows subscribers to upload contacts and additional information, then, search across LinkedIn profile data and your uploaded data at the same time. Sending InMails to the uploaded profiles does not affect your InMail point count - so you also save on using paid InMail credits!

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks How do you perform the hack? The two steps are: Step 1. Collect a list of people's emails from a source where you can be certain most of them will share a qualification or skill. One example (which we use frequently) would be to perform a search on Github for users who know specific programming languages. Save this information in an Excel file (see LinkedIn's help page for details on formatting the file correctly). Step 2. Import the Excel file into LIR’s “Talent Pipeline” – and: • •

You can search for info from Github and LinkedIn together Save on InMails

Hack Examples: For Step 1, collecting contacts, you can use Hack #8: Collect Lists of Email Addresses Using a Combination of Free Tools to speed up the process. Search on Github for target location(s) and language(s) – for example, language:java location:"bay area" location:"san Francisco" location:SF – and use Autopagerize and Emailcollector to gather a list of email addresses. An Excel File to Import to LIR must have at least: • •

A column containing the Full Name, or a column for the First Name and a column for the Last Name A column containing the Email addresses.

It doesn’t matter, for the purpose of cross-referencing the records, what the names are, and you can just leave them at “a b” (or invent something funnier). Step 2 is uploading the contacts using this LIR menu item – “Import Candidates”:

LIR will verify that the required columns – name and email – are present:

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks

and will start uploading records. As it identifies profiles matching email addresses, it indicates so:

Profiles can be added to a Project (up to 2K records) - or you can assign a Tag to them (e.g. San Francisco Java Developers, in this case). Now you can search throughout the combined info. Note that a significant number of people who have Java repositories on Github don’t even have the keyword Java in their LinkedIn profiles! The described method allows you to surface them. An additional advantage is that InMails sent to imported profiles do not spend “points”:

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks

Hack #12: Search by Postal Code and Radius on LinkedIn What is it about? This hack works with any basic or premium LinkedIn account and allows to search for members within a specified postal code and radius. (There is no "official" way to search for a postal code and radius in basic or premium LinkedIn). How do you perform the hack? Run a search on LinkedIn, then add (for example) this to the end of the search URL: &distance=5&locationType=I&countryCode=us&postalCode=20001 Replace postalCode, countryCode, and distance parameters with the values you need. (The distance must be between 5 and 500). The resulting search will look for members within the zip code and radius, on top of your other requirements. Hack Examples: • •

Keywords=energy efficiency, Title=account manager, Location=Jackson, MI, radius=30 Keywords=Energy (HVAC OR heating), Title="account manager" OR "account executive" OR sales, Location=Jackson, MI, radius=120

Hack #13: Work Around LinkedIn's Boolean Search Restrictions What is it about? LinkedIn has introduced (unfortunate!) restrictions on Boolean search. Using more than a few ANDs or ORs in a query - in the keywords, company, title, school, or name fields – now produces "no results." All personal accounts are affected, including premium subscriptions. The restriction is documented here: Boolean Query Limitations. What LinkedIin's documentation doesn’t tell us is that using more than a few NOTs in a search is now restricted too!

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks Let us explain how to work around the new restrictions and continue to be able to search for ANDs, ORs, and NOTs of multiple terms. How do you perform the hack? To work around the AND restriction, just don’t use AND explicitly. To work around the OR restriction, you need to reformat your search strings, in the following fashion: 1) put the parentheses () around each search term, 2) remove the spaces between the OR operator and the opening "(". To work around the NOT restriction, do the same: 1) put the parentheses () around each search term, 2) remove the spaces between the OR operator and the opening "(". Hack Examples: The AND search software AND Java AND spring AND aws AND nosql AND "elastic search" AND microservices doesn’t work, but this approach does: software Java spring rest aws nosql "elastic search" microservices. This OR search, which looks for common women's names, produces no results due to the Boolean restrictions: Mary OR Emma OR Sophia OR Linda OR Olivia OR Emily OR Victoria OR Lisa OR Isabella. Following the steps above, we can produce the following string which does work as intended: Mary OR(Emma) OR(Sophia) OR(Linda) OR(Olivia) OR(Emily) OR(Victoria) OR(Lisa) OR(Isabella).

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks Here is another OR example. Instead of searching for ("multi-processing" OR multiprocessing OR threading OR threaded OR multithreaded OR multithreading OR concurrent OR concurrency OR parallel), which produces no results, reformat the query so that it works: "multi-processing" OR(multiprocessing) OR(threading) OR(threaded) OR(multithreaded) OR(multithreading) OR(concurrent) OR(concurrency) OR(parallel). The following NOT search - engineer NOT senior NOT manager NOT director NOT recruiter NOT cto NOT ceo -- produces no results, but engineer NOT(senior) NOT(manager) NOT(director) NOT(recruiter) NOT(cto) NOT(ceo) does work.

Hack #14: Source in LinkedIn Content What is it about? While searching for members is our main activity on LinkedIn, we can find additional data in the content users share – most notably: making posts about successes (e.g., achieving a certification), and sharing job openings. How do you perform the hack? Search for information in LinkedIn Content. This content consists of status updates (posts) and articles published by members in your network or whom you follow. Hack Examples: If you are looking for a job, doing business development for your agency, or exploring which jobs are offered, it helps to search for posts containing relevant information. For example, search for people talking about their recent achievements: •

"verified achievement" (Based on people joining the site youracclaim.com and entering achievements)

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks • •

passed exam salesforce oracle ("course completion certificate" OR "successfully completed")

You can also filter the search by company or industry:

Be creative!

Hack #15: Use Outlook Online Integration to View Your Contacts' LinkedIn Profiles What is it about? It’s been a while since Microsoft acquired LinkedIn. We have been anticipating some sort of integration between MS Office and LinkedIn, but nothing significant has happened. However, we can now look up contacts (email addresses) in Outlook Online. How do you perform the hack? Step 1. To connect Outlook Online with LinkedIn, either: • •

add the email address used for your Office account (if you have one) to your LinkedIn account via https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/email, or create a new account at https://outlook.live.com (it’s free) using one of the emails associated with your LinkedIn account.

The same email address must be used on both sites for the integration to work! Step 2. Next, go to your Outlook Online Contacts, and upload a list of email addresses that you would like to cross-reference. Step 3. In the Contacts section at https://outlook.live.com/people, select a contact. Then click on the "LinkedIn" tab, and you will see their profile:

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks

If no "LinkedIn" tab appears, this means no LinkedIn profile is associated with that contact's email address.

Hack #16: Find a LinkedIn Profile by Email in Any Browser What is it about? When you source, it is quite common to have someone’s email address (perhaps from an old resume or a contact list) and need to look for more information about the person. Alternately, you may have a guess about someone’s email address (e.g., based on their first and last names and their company's email format). If you can see that your guess was in fact used to register the person's LinkedIn profile, that is a strong indicator that your guess is right. In both scenarios, it is beneficial to have a convenient way to cross-reference email addresses to their corresponding LinkedIn profiles. Many people are familiar with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lite extension for the Google Chrome browser (formerly called Rapportive), which identifies LinkedIn profiles based on email addresses. Using the Sales Navigator Lite extension requires both that you use Chrome and have Gmail account, and it is also incompatible with many other extensions (such as FullContact and YesWare) that extend Gmail functionality.

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks Here is a quick way to look up a LinkedIn member by their email address, which does not require any browser extensions - or Gmail - and will work in any browser. How do you perform the hack? First, make sure that in the same browser you are planning to use the hack, you are currently logged in to LinkedIn. You must be logged in on the same browser for this hack to work. Then, to find the profile associated with an email address (if one exists), append the email address in question to the end of this URL: https://www.linkedin.com/sales/gmail/profile/viewByEmail/. You will be taken to a web page that displays the same information that the Sales Navigator Lite extension does! Hack Examples: In this example, we have appended the email address Hung Lee to the template above: https://www.linkedin.com/sales/gmail/profile/viewByEmail/[email protected]. Here is what you will see; it is a summary of the profile data and a link to the profile:

Now replace Hung’s email with any email in the link above to reveal the corresponding profile!

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Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks Hack #17: Discover Information You Won’t Find with the LinkedIn Search What is it about? Here are several additional X-Ray templates and examples that search for some information on LinkedIn profiles, for which we can’t search in LinkedIn. How do you perform the hack? To X-Ray search LinkedIn for recent job changes, use the template site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir "present (1 month)". To X-Ray search LinkedIn for job stability (this search will find people who have spent no less than 3 years at each job), use the template site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub pub.dir -year -"2 years" "months" "years". To X-Ray search LinkedIn for publicly listed Gmail addresses, use the template site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir "gmail.com". Note that if you try to search for "gmail.com" on LinkedIn, it will quietly hide profiles that have publicly listed "gmail.com" addresses from the results – it’s an undocumented restriction. Hack Examples: • • •

X-Ray LinkedIn for recent job changes: "human resources manager" london site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir "present (1 month)" X-Ray LinkedIn for job stability: "human resources manager" london site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir -year -"2 years" "months" "years" X-Ray LinkedIn for Publicly Listed Gmail addresses example: site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir "gmail.com" graphic designer "greater los angeles area"

Hack #18: X-Ray LinkedIn for Job Titles and Companies What is it about? A recent change in public LinkedIn profiles has facilitated X-Raying LinkedIn with better precision. Several months ago, LinkedIn changed public profile page titles. For members who have current jobs listed on their profiles, the page titles now include: • •

Current job title Current company name.

Googlebot has been catching up on the new page titles, and you can take advantage of that! How do you perform the hack? So now you can X-Ray LinkedIn for people’s job titles and companies using the operator intitle: The search template looks like this: 24

Sourcing Hacks LinkedIn Hacks site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir intitle: Hack Examples: Here are a couple of simple examples: • •

site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir intitle: chief financial officer finds people with the title "Chief Financial Officer"; site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir intitle:facebook finds people who work at Facebook.

Please note that members without a current job do not have company names or job titles as part of their profile pages titles.

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Sourcing Hacks More Hacks

MORE HACKS While the rest of the hacks may not fit neatly into a single category, they do fit squarely into our daily workflows. Exploring many search results one by one is very time-consuming, so we have a hack to help put the most relevant information right there on the search results page. Ever notice that some websites don't use the words "phone" or "email", replacing them instead with symbols? We have a hack to help find these previously "invisible" contact details. We have included our favorite hack for finding direct dial numbers for a given company's employees, as well. Whether you are prospecting for new clients, marketing your high-value candidates, performing competitive intelligence research, or looking for companies to pull candidates from, knowing which companies use which software is becoming increasingly important, and we have a hack to research that, too. There's even a hack for leveraging lesser-known Twitter operators to help make drinking from that firehose less daunting by surfacing the most relevant results.

Hack #19: Use Google's Asterisk (*) Operator to Control Search Result Previews What is it about? Seeing information that interests you in Google snippets can contribute to fewer clicks on the results, increasing your search productivity. Here is how to force information of interest into Google snippets. How do you perform the hack? The operator Asterisk (*) stands for one or a few words on Google. Its suggested use is to search for a phrase with missing words. But you can also use the asterisk (or several asterisks) at the beginning or end of a phrase, which would make the words preceding or following the phrase visible in snippets for most results. Hack Examples: • • • •

"* * has joined * as managing director" site:uk.linkedin.com/in sales marketing manager "email me * * *" "call me * * *" "worked at Oracle as * * *" "* * is a QA Engineer at * *"

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Sourcing Hacks More Hacks Hack #20: Google for

, ☏, ✆,

, ✉, or

to Find Contact Information

What is it about? Did you know that Google can search for the above symbols? Using them in search allows to find pages that contain contact information. How do you perform the hack? Add one or more of the symbols include the symbols.

, ☏, ✆,

, ✉, or

to a Google search to find pages that

Hack Examples: Here is an example search for contact phone numbers publicly posted on LinkedIn profiles: site:nl.linkedin.com/in paas software sales director (☎ OR ☏ OR ✆ OR 📱) 31. This Custom Search Engine is based on searching for the symbols and looks for publicly listed contact info on LinkedIn profiles: http://bit.ly/LinkedIn☎✉.

Hack #21: Find Direct Phone Numbers for Companies' Employees What is it about? It is obviously useful to know how to find direct phone numbers at a company. For many companies, direct phone numbers for employees have the same beginning digits and varying last four digits. Knowing that, we can Google for phone numbers. Search results would usually contain names, job titles, and email addresses, in addition to phone numbers – this is an extra benefit. How do you perform the hack? You can usually easily find the main phone number for a company office by searching on Google Maps. Once you have found the main number, use it, without the last four digits, in a Google search, and you will often find multiple direct phone numbers for employees at the office, along with other information about them. Hack Examples: Our example is for a US-based company, but the same technique would work internationally. Step 1. Find the company phone number for an office in a city on Google Maps by searching for near , for example, PwC near NYC:

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Sourcing Hacks More Hacks

Step 2. Google for direct phone numbers. Search for the numbers without the last four digits and you will find many direct numbers: "646-471". You can optionally add the company email domain to the search and find full contact info for company employees: "us.pwc.com" 646-471.

Hack #22: Find which Companies Use which Technologies What is it about? This technique helps to find potential candidates who likely use a specific technology but haven’t necessarily put the "right" keywords on their profiles or resumes. If you know that a company X uses a technology Y, you can assume that its employees (with relevant job titles and responsibilities) use Y – even if they do not mention Y on their profiles. Therefore, if you are looking for professionals with experience in Y, you can narrow the search down to the company X employees, drop searching for Y, and expect the results to still match your requirement.

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Sourcing Hacks More Hacks How do you perform the hack? To identify the companies, you can use Indeed Jobs or Resume search, or Google Jobs. To identify target companies via Indeed Resumes, search by a technology keyword (optionally, add other search parameters such as location) and see the list of companies:

To identify target companies via Indeed Jobs, look for a technology keyword (optionally, add a location and other search parameters) and see the list of companies:

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Sourcing Hacks More Hacks To search on Google Jobs, enter a skill and location and see the list of companies under the "employer" tab:

Hack Examples: Let’s search for companies using the Software programming language Scala in the San Francisco Bay Area. A search on Indeed jobs shows these target companies:

This search on Indeed Resumes shows these companies:

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Sourcing Hacks More Hacks

And a Google Jobs search shows these companies:

While there is some overlap between the results, we now have quite a few potential target companies to source from!

Hack #23: Undocumented Twitter Search Operators What is this hack about? Due to the "firehose" nature of the Twitter feed, and the strict length limits on both Tweets and profile bios, it may seem like useful info for Sourcers will be both in short supply, and promptly buried in the general noise of this busy site. However, Twitter has several unique features that can provide great value when Sourcing. For example, if someone posts a link on Twitter that makes use of a URL shortener (like Bitly), Twitter automatically follows that link, and makes the

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Sourcing Hacks More Hacks full, unshortened URL searchable! No other site (not even Google) provides the ability to search in this way. Twitter does provide a list of common operators on its search page, but there are a few neat operators that don't appear in any Twitter documentation. In conjunction with good keyword choices and the more well-known operators, these open up new doors for discovery on Twitter. How do you perform the hack? To use any of these undocumented Twitter search options, just enter them in the search bar. New Operators: • •

min_faves: (find tweets with a minimum number of favorites) min_retweets: (find tweets with a minimum number of retweets)

New Options for the filter: Operator: • • • • • •

filter:replies (include replies to tweets in the results) filter:nativeretweets (include Retweets in the results) filter:images (include Tweets with images in the results) filter:videos (include Tweets with videos in the results) filter:follows (include Tweets from people you follow?) filter:likes (include " liked this tweet" notifications in the results)

Since they work just like Twitter's other operators, you can combine them with each other and with Boolean operators. Combining filter: options with the minus sign (NOT) is especially useful. Hack Examples: • • •

filter:follows -filter:replies -filter:likes - see just original tweets (no replies or other notifications) from the people you follow. It's Twitter circa 2015! filter:links filter:replies "kaggle.com" - see Tweets where someone replied to another tweet, and included a link to the data science site Kaggle. #pycon -filter:nativeretweets -min_faves:5 - see original tweets about PyCon, with less than 5 'favorites' - more likely to be attendees than media outlets

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Sourcing Hacks About the Authors

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Irina Shamaeva is a Partner and Chief Sourcer at Brain Gain Recruiting, Blogger at Boolean Strings, a world-class trainer providing webinars on Sourcing, and co-founder of SocialList.io. Her first book, 300 Best Boolean Strings, is now on its 3rd edition. Previously Irina was a Software Engineer and Manager at several startup and biotech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MS in Mathematics from Moscow University.

David Galley is a self-described "Sourcing nerd" and enjoys digging deep into technical details, discovering information others may have missed. David heads up development and delivery of the Sourcing Certifications Training Library and Certification Exams. He also runs custom online and on-site training programs for corporate teams and recruiting agencies. David holds a BS in Accounting from Colorado Technical University.

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