So you've been asked to complete a sourcing project in Poland. Where do you start?
Well may I recommend having a look at Goldenline.pl. For those of you who haven't heard of Goldenline it is the number two professional networking site behind LinkedIn (according to Alexa Internet) in Poland with over 1.3 million people registered. From experience there is some exclusivity between LinkedIn and Goldenline so it's definitely a worthwhile place to search.
Whilst the internal search is there and works to some extent I've found it to be much easier, quicker and less restricted to complete a 'normal' Boolean search through Google.
So how do we go about constructing a basic string to allow us to search through Goldenline? The first and obvious one is to utilise the site: operator.
So start with site:goldenline.pl followed by your search. In general the results are very clean although depending on the complexity of your search you can end up with some noisy results. To counteract this it's useful to focus in on candidate profiles only, unlike LinkedIn there's no /in or /pub to help to distinguish between people and 'others'. There is however a way to distinguish that I've found works pretty well. In the URL for candidate profiles the site is goldenline.pl/firstname-secondname. As such we can utilise the following to complete our search:
site:goldenline.pl/*-* plus your search should see you golden.
If you fancy combining this with a LinkedIn search you can try a base of:
site:goldenline.pl/*-* | site:pl.linkedin.com/pub | site:pl.linkedin.com/in -dir followed by your search.
One of the benefits of Google is that it seems to translate your search into the local language so you can unleash your search in English and you shouldn't miss out on any results.
It's a basic search but it's always good to share tips. I hope it helps.
