Boolean Strings

Here is how to find lists of professionals in a specific industry, from given countries or regions.

1) Start with one of the words: members, list, participants, attend (etc.)

(Note: Do NOT combine these words with an OR statement).

2) Add two to three specific country email domain extensions such as “de”, “nl”, “au”, “za”, etc.

3) Optionally, add a few phone codes such as 44, 31, etc.

4) Add one or two job titles or industry key phrases.

Here are some examples:

• members “nl” “co.uk” “de” 44 31 49 “supply chain”
• members “nl” “co.uk” “de” 44 31 49 “industrial engineer”
• list “nl” “co.uk” “de” 44 31 49 “industrial engineer”
• list participants “id” “sg” 63 66 sustainable development

Repeat multiple variations of 1)-4) until you see some interesting results.

What you can do next:

Work with the lists: narrow them down to the “right” professionals by filtering and cross-reference to find out more about those that are promising.

These searches are simple, do not use any advanced Boolean operators, yet they can be quite efficient.

Want to master your search for professionals across countries? Join me and my business partner, Master Sourcer David Galley for a deep dive into Sourcing Internationally (Lecture and Practice Session), coming up this week. Hurry, seating is limited.

The Program was created to keep Recruiting professionals and teams on top of all things Sourcing and Searching and to allow fair measurement of Sourcing skills. It is thriving and has evolved. We have made some changes in the format and content, based on our significant experience and user feedback.

We refresh the materials in the Guidebook monthly, to reflect everything important that has changed and the top new tools.

Sign up for the Info Session to find out the details about the Program.

Update after the Info Session May 6, 2015:

This was our largest info session ever! Also, now is the first time ever the Program is offering the premium subscription with HiringSolved.

The subscription prices go up June 1st. While the Program will continue to provide the best ROI among available sourcing training options after June 1st – if you are ready, you can go ahead and subscribe now.

Here, I will briefly outline the news:

Subscription. The Program now offers a yearly subscription to online multimedia materials that a participant can access at any time. The modules cover “everything” sourcing, from Search Engines to Social Networks and LinkedIn “hacks” to productivity tools. The formats include how-to posts with screenshots; videos; practice tasks; quizzes; and Tip Sheets.

Teams get special treatment: group discounts and interactive custom sessions.

At this time, we are also adding extra modules covering: candidate engagement; phone sourcing; and sourcing tips for various locations (in the US and worldwide) and industries.

Support. An outstanding feature of the Guidebook is that everyone receives support in navigating and applying sourcing skills for the whole year. (This alone is worth the price of the subscription!) We’ve been praised for caring about our customers.

If you feel you are ready, go ahead and subscribe.

Exams. While we now allow to take the exam and get certified without the subscription, the exam log shows that our subscribers do significantly better in the exams testing hands-on sourcing skills. The cost of the Exam is included with the Sourcing Guidebook subscription.

Reference Library. In addition to training and practice modules, the Guidebook contains Reference Tip sheets, including Boolean strings syntax chart, a library of “top” Boolean strings, lists of tips for “back-door” sourcing on LinkedIn, lists of tools and browser extensions, and more. Keep it open while sourcing.

Tools and Premium Subscription. We provide lists of Boolean strings and Custom Search Engines for participants to use.

As a new addition, we are excited to have a partnership with the people aggregator HiringSolved – the only people aggregator that searches across all locations and industries. Combined access to our training and reference platform is offered as a premium subscription (already available as an option) and provides outstanding ROI, as an All-in-One Sourcing Training/Reference/Tools solution.

Reports. We know that the measurement of training and sourcing performance is critical. At the request of team managers, we have developed reporting tools on the Guidebook and the tools usage.

Please note, all subscription prices go up on June 1st, 2015. Our solution will still remain the best in terms of ROI.

Please feel free to reach out to our Customer Support Manager George Glikman with questions or to help to get your subscription going.

German holds the second place among the most spoken languages in Europe.  The top Social Network for the German-speaking people is XING.com. More than a half of XING members, about 8 MLN, are German-speaking people from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In Germany, there are more XING members than LinkedIn members:

XING allows to message members; you need to have a premium account for messaging non-connections. This messaging ability is a clear advantage for a recruiter in Germany since reaching out to “passive candidates” has legal limitations there. (I am no specialist to explain further – check the appropriate sources if you need to know the details – but these restrictions do exist).

If your searches are targeting the DACH population, XING is a must-go-to.

Let’s look at XING X-Raying.

Here’s what a public profile looks like (note that you will see the profiles in German or English depending on where you are searching from). Clearly, you can X-Ray for a name and a job title.

An X-Ray Google string would look like this:

site:xing.com/profile <job title>

or, for better precision, search for:

site:xing.com/profile intitle:<job title>

Myth #1. You can’t X-Ray XING for company names. The company names are seemingly hidden from viewing unless you join the network. But, in fact, the company names are here, in plain sight:

The company name is present in the title of a XING public profile. So, to X-Ray by the company name, you can search for

site:xing.com/profile intitle:<company name>

Of course, can be combined with the job title search and keyword search.

Myth #2. You can search for locations in XING X-Ray.

That is not true. Public profiles have the locations hidden. You will get some results by including a location name in X-Raying, but the results will miss many members at that location. The results will also list some members that have the location name on their profiles for some other reason than living there.

You can only view the member location while logged-in:

Signing up for XING is free. It’s best to view the search results while you are logged-in.

(You may wonder if you can view the obscured member photo in the first image above without signing up, and the answer is yes, but that is probably not much of practical sourcing interest.)

Summary: here’s your basic X-Ray template:

site:xing.com/profile intitle:<job title> intitle:<company> <keywords> location

Example: site:xing.com/profile intitle:Oracle sales

X-Ray for more info – in German

While XING is friendly to those of us who speak English, to X-Ray, you must have in mind the profiles in German. Here’s an example:

X-Ray for languages:

site:xing.com/profile “Sprachen, die” Englisch

(Searching for “languages spoken” will not do much good; just try it and you’ll see.)

This covers the basics for X-Raying XING.

Like LinkedIn, XING can be X-Rayed and can be searched using the provided member search functionality. Just like LinkedIn, XING restricts some advanced search filters and, most importantly, the number of fully visible search results from a basic viewer. But, unlike LinkedIn, XING charges under $10 per month to lift these limitations. If you must remain a free user, X-Ray is helpful. Otherwise, searching XING from a premium account may be less fun, but would probably be more productive than X-Raying.

Searching globally? I recommend signing up for our upcoming webinar

Sourcing Internationally

debuting this Wednesday April 29th, 2015, and learn about searching and X-Raying in ALL major social networks worldwide. As always, the webinar comes with one month of support on all “Sourcing Internationally” questions. Please hurry, the seating is limited.

A true Sourcer needs to be open-minded, resourceful, and creative. While some sites and tools may seem to cover the “wrong” territory, many can be used quite productively if you give them a chance and dig a little deeper.

To illustrate, let’s take a look at ZoomInfo, one of the oldest sites to source for professionals, which is still going quite strong. It’s one of my favorite sites to use in sourcing. Accessing it is paid (and decisions to subscribe are all yours) but it’s also X-Rayable via Google.

Let’s take a look at the site through an incognito window, without logging in. Here is the Zoominfo people search dialog:

From a quick look, the site covers contacts in the major English-speaking countries only.

However – the site can also be used (as an example) for sourcing in the Netherlands – specifically, for professionals from global companies with offices in that country. Since we won’t be able to search by that location, we can try to imagine what the found records would look like, to help to design a search strategy.

Many companies in the Netherlands have “B V” as part of their name. A “B V” is a private company with limited liability, similar to LLC in the US, Ltd in England, and GmbH in Germany. Knowing that can help to uncover thousands of profiles. A search for B V as the company name in Zoominfo yields over 90K results, most of which will be professionals working for an office in the Netherlands.

If you don’t have a ZoomInfo subscription, you can still use that insight and X-Ray. The general X-Ray template for the site is:

site:zoominfo.com/p (add keywords).

Here is an example search for professionals working at a specific company at a specific seniority level:

site:zoominfo.com/p “Elsevier B.V” Vice-president

Note: I used the local Google for the Netherlands – Google.nl – for better results.

Like the approach? Here are a couple of exercises to flex your sourcing muscle:

1) Generalizing the above tip, try to come up with search strategies for more contacts in the Netherlands and for contacts in a few other non-English speaking countries.

2) Can you X-Ray Zoominfo for a specific location in other ways? Take a look at a public Zoominfo profile to come up with some suggestions.

How many times was a LinkedIn post (such as this one , for example) shared – on LinkedIn and on other social sites? When you view a LinkedIn post, you see the numbers of “views” and “likes”, but not the number of shares.

There used to be a hack to look up the numbers of shares – by opening the posts in an incognito window. That no longer works. However, LinkedIn doesn’t make a secret of the number of shares. In fact, LinkedIn has an API call that returns the number of shares for any URL.

If you do not write software code, you can still access this API call directly, via the following URL:

https://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?format=json&url=<URL>

Replace the <URL> above with the actual URL of the page that interests you. As an example, here is the number of shares for my yesterday’s post:

https://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?format=json&url=https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/breaking-5-major-boolean-syntax-changes-irina-shamaeva

Note: if you are copying a URL, make sure you strip off any parameters, i.e. the part that goes after the question mark (if present). For example, for the URL above, you may land on https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/breaking-5-major-boolean-syntax-changes-irina-shamaeva/edit?trk=pulse-edit-nav_art – just remove the part starting with the question mark (?trk=…) before checking the number of shares.

Of course, the above method is clunky and lacks user friendliness.

Other social networks have similar API calls that provide the numbers of shares for any given web page.

My favorite tool that takes advantage of those API calls on several social networks is the Chrome extension called ShareMetric. It provides the numbers of shares for the currently open URL on various networks. Here is what its display looks like:

View my LinkedIn posts and please feel free to share.

Things change so fast in our profession!

Here are the five major elements, that have just changed in Google‘s Boolean search syntax. If you are reading this blog, you will be one of the first people to know.

1. Synonyms in searching. Much to our delight, Google has restored the operator ~ (tilde). You can force Google to search for synonyms, again, using it right in front of a keyword (no spaces):

~resume

(Yay!)

Note: At the same time Google has stopped searching for synonyms automatically. This was a failed initiative (named “knowledge graph”); this code has now been removed from the search engine giant.

2. AND. Google has added a new operator AND to the set of its basic operators. It is a Boolean operator.

Note: you must write this operator in all-caps for Google to recognize it: AND.

3. The location operator. Unfortunately, the location operator loc: that used to work on Google pretty well, uncovering search results in specific locations, has stopped working. It was a big help in sourcing, as well as in “social engineering”.  That change happened on March 23rd, 2015.

Well, it was great while it lasted!

4. Parentheses. While Bing allows to change the order of the Boolean operators using the parentheses (), Google did not provide this capability – until today. You can now use the parentheses to control how your Boolean statements are executed.

Note: If you are new to searching, be careful if you decide to use nested parentheses; don’t forget to write as many (‘s as )‘s. There’s a new Chrome extension to help with that.

5. Email Search. Finally, the following syntax for searching for email addresses

“*@companyname.com”

has started working! It finds email addresses at the companyname.com mentioned in any web pages. Previously, Google interpreted the asterisk * as “any word” and ignored the special character @.

We can easily hunt for email addresses now. (I am investigating some Boolean syntax to reliably find phone numbers, but it’s too soon to tell what works and what doesn’t.)

The above report covers the major Boolean changes, globally, as of today, April 1st, which is also known as April Fool’s Day.

Additionally, for some interesting sourcing possibilities, check out a past Google innovation that you may have missed: Google Nose (still in Beta). We’ll be sharing some tips on that soon.

Happy Searching!

When a specific site may have target professionals, there are always two complementary ways to try to source them from the site:

• Deep Web Search, i.e. using the site’s search dialog(s)
• X-Ray, i.e. searching for the information  on the Surface Web, using a search engine’s (typically, Google’s) operator site:

Let’s apply the two approaches to sourcing on the site About.me.

Deep Web Search

 The About.me search dialog offers to enter “an interest, place, organization, or name”.

Apparently, the dialog interprets any entered keywords along these categories. For example, if you enter Microsoft, it is interpreted as an organization; if you add Seattle, the search is narrowed down to a place.

To control the searches better than the search dialog offers, you can use the syntax of constructing the search URL, filling out one or more of the search facets:

https://about.me/search/keyword:<keyword>/org:<organization>/place:<place>/name<name>

 X-Ray

 Obviously, you can X-Ray for keywords that are likely to appear on the profiles:

site:about.me microsoft seattle software

Notice that the employer, location, name, and education are often present in the titles of the about.me profiles. You can try X-raying in a more precise manner by using the operator intitle:

site:about.me intitle:microsoft

Here’s an X-Ray for contact information example:

site:about.me C# gmail.com

Finally, for those who really dislike advanced Boolean operators, here is an

X-Ray About.me Custom Search Engine

Use the Public URL: X-Ray About.me – or

Search here: