Paper Sourcing

Reading through Wednesday's Telegraph whilst on a flight. I came across a section focussed around engineers. In particular it was a page showing who had recently achieved chartered status. 

Now we all know engineers are a difficult bunch to find and chartered ones have a little extra attraction. So how about an entire broadsheet spread of names including what they've chartered in...? Sounds pretty awesome. Combine that with a cross reference through social media and you've got yourself a lovely pool of candidates to target.

That led me to think if that potential pool of candidate is sat there, already verified in a paper then what else can we garner from the press? 

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has sourced (or tried to source) candidates that have come up in the press through a Boolean search. Nor will I be the only one who has sourced (or tried to source) after watching a TV show and seeing a potential candidate. But how many times do you look at the paper when your flicking through with your Sourcing hat on? Probably a number of far better sourcers than I for sure, but the rest of us... 

The world is full of little snippets of sourcing gold and some of that data isn't available from the internet or phone. Take a look around!

Taking the Goldenline to Polish sourcing success.

Yes that is a pretty darn awful title I admit.

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. 

Searching The Official Board

I found an interesting website the other day that I have had a play around with. It seems to contain pretty much accurate top level org charts (although I would take the reporting lines with a large pinch of salt!) for a large number of companies. Having been using it we've found that it has been mostly accurate in terms of people and a large number of these weren’t available via LinkedIn or similar websites. We identified a large number (150+) of people across multiple countries and 10 companies with only 3 or 4 not being within their organisations.

The website is www.theofficialboard.com and it contains a large number of org charts for a lot of large corporates across the world. When you look at organisational structures within this a most of the names are obscured though their titles are not.

As such you can chuck in a quick search to uncover the names for each position:

site:theofficialboard.com Company Name Job Title

For example on: 

http://www.theofficialboard.com/org-chart/accenture-united-kingdom

You will see there’s a Business Process Outsourcing Director whose initials are P and G.

To search this you could enter into Google:

site:theofficialboard.com Accenture UK Business Process Outsourcing Director

The first link shows Peter George in the News section of the website, the second link points to Peter’s bio.

It’s not flawless but it seems to be pretty useful for high level searches across the world.

The end of the /pymk/pcard?

The end of another great LinkedIn hack

It was great while it lasted wasn’t it? We’ve had a great method for uncovering the names that aren't immediately obvious on LinkedIn using the http://www.linkedin.com/pymk/pcard?mid= (candidate number) hack, recently publicised on various websites. This has allowed us to use the above address plus a potential candidates number to uncover their full name (leading to the below):

Unfortunately it appears LinkedIn has gotten wise to our sourcing games and have managed to block off this loophole. It also appears that this is a staged roll out as this method seems to still be working for me but not for a number of my colleagues. *Edit - It has now stopped working for all of us in our office. Instead of the above card they are getting redirected straight to the People You May Know page. Sad times.

Luckily for us some of the other, slower, methods still work but I’m sure it won’t be long until the next hack appears. It may even already exist! Well time to get searching.

Happy hunting and happy Christmas!

Liam

Can You See Your Candidates?

Through my normal pre-work reading of various blogs (mentioned in previous posts!). I came across the infographic below on +Jim Stroud's blog. That post was focussed more on the legal side of social media. However for the sourcing community there were a number of interesting points.

How visible are your candidates?

Of these points the ones I found particularly interesting were the 1st and 2nd ones. 

The first is about the number of adult internet users who are on social media - roughly 70%. That leaves a massive 30% of potential target candidates unavailable through internet search. 

The second point is the more important for me, it's about the percentage use of different age groups:

If the roles you are working on are towards the junior end of the market - 18-29 then luckily for you 83% of the candidates will have an online profile meaning that only 17% are a little more tricky to get hold of.

If however you're working the more senior end of the market in terms of experience then you'll probably be looking towards the 50-64 category. Here you'll only find 52% of the candidates with online profiles. Clearly this leaves a huge proportion of the potential population unavailable. 

Of course these above numbers are absolute and don't correlate with the amount of profiles that are actually findable (within the short periods of time that we are given to complete a sourcing project). Along with this caveat is that within different sectors these numbers fluctuate wildly with some having little to no online presence and others having a very strong presence.

What is a Sourcer to do?

Once you realise the number of candidates that are unavailable through internet searching of any kind there is for us one main option. That main option is to get on the phone to look to understand the size and structure of the target teams and begin to map out the potential candidates that we are missing. I won't go into the methods in this post but if you want further reading I'd recommend looking up +Maureen Sharib and her many posts on the subject!

How would you go about finding the other half?

What do you read? Part 1

Not really relevant but hilarious anyway!

I thought it would be good to share some of my favourite things to read and some of my favourite people to follow across social media (in no particular order). I've split this into two posts one based around sourcing specialists and the second part, to follow, based around the wider Recruitment & HR world.

Sourcing Specialists

This is who to follow if you want to stay ahead of the game when it comes to sourcing and searching.

+Glen Cathey (Twitter: @GlenCathey, Web: booleanblackbelt.com)

Glen is a recruitment legend, his knowledge of internet sourcing is probably second to none and his blog posts are always a fascinating educational experience.

+Irina Shamaeva (Twitter: @braingain‎ Web: booleanstrings.com)

Irina is in the same league as Glen when it comes to knowledge around sourcing, her website booleanstrings is one of the go to resources for all things search. She also runs a very interesting community who are always free to help out.

+Martin Lee (Twitter: @mrmartinlee Web: linkedin.com/in/martinjlee‎)

I had the pleasure of working with Martin during his time at Talent Works and he always had the time to help out with the many sourcing quests that we complete. If you ever have a question just drop him a line and he’s sure to be able to help or know of someone to help.

+Katharine Robinson (Twitter: @TheSourceress Web: uksourcers.co.uk)

Katharine is one of the UKs leading Sourcers (Sourceress’s?) and is always around to share great insights into sourcing techniques. She’s also a Sourcing Grand Master so is definitely worth following.

+Dan Russell (Twitter: @dmrussell Web: searchresearch1.blogspot.com)

Dan is a Google insider and his blog is an always fantastic place to hone your search skills. Some of his challenges have become legendary (the tower one in particular) and they’re a great place to really push your searching abilities.

+Maureen Sharib (Twitter: @MaureenSharib Web: http://magicmethod.ning.com/profiles/blog/list)

As much as the internet is fantastic. We sourcers cannot afford to forget telephone sourcing techniques. They can uncover a lot more information than the internet can offer. Maureen is, for me, the go to person for information around this.

+Jeremy Roberts (Twitter: @imJeremyR Web: http://jeremyrobertstx.com/)

Jeremy is the editor of SourceCon and has an extensive past in Talent Acquisition. Along with sharing all the great SourceCon knowledge Jeremy also hosts Google+ Hangouts where sourcers unite to right wrongs and help one another out.

+Jim Stroud (Twitter: @JimStroud Web: http://blog.jimstroud.com/)

Jim is the producer of some of my favourite videos related to sourcing they're always worth a watch and will always raise a smile along with provoking thought and relaying new ideas.

+Balazs Paroczay (Twitter: @TheBalazs Web: http://thebalazs.com)

Balazs leads one of the best sourcing functions around and his blog posts are always worth paying attention to - in particular see his deconstruction of Facebook searching, it really is fantastic work.

+SourceCon (Twitter: @Sourcecon Web: www.sourcecon.com)

SourceCon should be one of the go to sources for anyone with an interest in recruitment, there's always a wide variety of content based around sourcing. They are of course the hosts of the SourceCon events and the infamous Grand Master Challenge (which really does live up to it's name).

So that is my list of who to follow, there are so many great people within the sourcing world on social media that this post could've been the best part of 20 pages long. Who else should I be following or reading? 

Of course you shouldn't forget to follow me! (Twitter: @LiamTFitzG LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/liamfitzgerald)

You're banned... (a short tale about Xing and being a robot)

I have recently had an issue with Xing that I wanted to share, just in case you find yourself working on a German language project and don't have access to a premium account. Due to the restrictions on the free search I decided to utilise Google to perform an X-ray search. 

The following is the basis for all my search strings around Xing, it usually needs some tweaking but that's for another post:

(site:xing.com/profile | site:xing.com/profiles) “Insert Search String Here”

As I was looking at a number of profiles I had a large number of tabs open at the same time (not really that many by my standards). This actually led Xing to suspend my account. When I spoke with Xing about this they advised that having multiple tabs open at any one time makes it look like you are a robot opening pages in multiple locations. I explained what I did and they advised not to open more than one or two tabs at any one time otherwise I’d be picked up as a robot again and banned. 

So in essence, don't open a barrel load of tabs on Xing or you might get yourself banned...