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. 

Markets...

How well do you know the market?

It's 3am and I'm currently sat in my car as we traverse Europe. (I've done my stint but I can't sleep in cars... I'm not blogging while driving, don't worry). Any way where was I? Right we're currently crossing Europe, somewhere in Germany. I've not seen the sign for Düsseldorf but we can't be far off. Nearly half way!

Back to the point. I've just filled up at the petrol station and it confused the hell out of me. Nothing to do with being up nigh on 24 hours. This led me to think, how well do you (me) really know your markets? I mean if something as simple as filling up your car (on much cheaper diesel) is significantly different then what else is?

There certainly must be a number of factors in sourcing and recruiting candidates that differ from home. So if you are recruiting outside of your own nation, how much do you really know about the factors that will impact your ability to attract candidates... There's two ways to find out I guess, research and immersion. I'm all for immersion myself but I guess the boss isn't going to send me out to Indonesia next time I have a role there..

I'm lucky in that I'm able to do the in depth research for my clients and have access to a fantastic team of insight consultants who are the best around at finding this info (and lots more) out. I'd be interested to learn how you find out that petrol stations are different?

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