Let’s talk about the very interesting phenomena of communicating with potential candidates in ways that have not been there before. For years, we have been discussing whether to call first or email first. Some gurus suggest that you first send a detailed email, then leave a phone message, and then send a short email mentioning that you had called. Fine, but here are your other options today:

• Join a group on LinkedIn where the person is a member and send a message (which is free, by the way)
• Invite them to join a group on LinkedIn dedicated to their technical skills or their industry
• Look the person up on Twitter and follow him/her
• Re-tweet or reply to their tweets
• Share an article with them using the “share” button available on Ning and on many blogs
• Invite them to an interesting event posted on LinkedIn, or Ning, or elsewhere

(Note that when you invite somebody to an event or share content, you do not need to worry about the person not wanting to hear from you. All those systems have their built-in means of managing the person’s subscriptions.)

The above methods would let you reach more people, especially passive candidates. Your direct email may land in their junk folder. Your call may interrupt their day. (I can definitely say that as a former software engineer.) However, following them on Twitter or sharing news about their industry is a gentle, non-invasive way to get in touch with them. It also gives them a chance to take a look at your profile and figure out a bit about you before they respond. So, if you venture out on a particular network, make sure that your profile on whatever network that is, is professional, filled out, has your picture, and reflects your own or your company background.

Further on, built-in tools and tools built on top of social networks allow us to interact with lists of potential candidates with a touch of a button. It goes without saying that we need to figure things out about those people first, and avoid spam. But there’s nothing wrong in, say, following a list of people on Twitter whose profiles are promising, or sharing interesting content with a list of people who work in a particular industry. The “share” buttons available in many places, such as Ning networks, allow you to share an article with a list of email addresses. The (slightly buggy) tool twitterator.org allows us to bulk-follow a number of people on Twitter. You shouldn’t overdo this, of course; plus, Twitter has its (very reasonable) limitations and wouldn’t let you go too far in this direction. But these tools do increase our productivity.

Today most recruiters are on LinkedIn, many are on Facebook, and about 25% are on Twitter. This is based on some statistics that I have seen online, and is also true about my sourcing webinar attendees. There are endless online discussions on which network is the best, and whether some, such as Twitter, are “a waste of time.” Well, for one thing, Twitter and LinkedIn can hardly be compared. The functionality, the pace of communicating, the length and the nature of relationships are all very different, so your expectations also need to be different. And then, it makes most sense to me to use both LinkedIn and Twitter in conjunction, plus use other networks as well. If you have a targeted list of candidates, you can interact with them in different places simultaneously. You can look up information about them; they may be more present in one online place than the other. Perhaps they have a blog and would welcome your comments. You can invite the same person to a group on LinkedIn and follow them on Twitter, and so on.

There are ways to find the same people across networks. It’s, of course, easier if the person has a unique name and distinct keywords, such as technology skills, in the profile. However, if you get hold of an email address or a Twitter ID, this can sometimes get you pretty far in the sourcing process. In the recent SourceCon challenge I used the site pipl.com to look up people based on their username across networks. Pipl.com also allows you to look up people based on an email address.

An amazing, not explored by many, part of this communication with prospects is that the person may have very little info in their profile on one site vs. another, but based on what you have learned about them you might try to connect on either or both. Searching for candidates on one network and contacting them on another expands our sourcing capabilities.

Successful recruiting using social media requires new personal qualities. To conquer the social media world, we need to be fearless and open-minded. We also need either to be somewhat technical or to have coworkers who are. It’s not terribly hard to navigate different sites, but working with someone who is used to browsing and searching on the web helps. Then, there’s less structure out there now, so if you are creative, this is a useful quality; compare the well-defined ways of using a job board with the open-ended interactions on social networks. We need to get used to questioning our assumptions as we go. Facebook does not work like LinkedIn, so expect to see something different there. Assumptions do not work at all if you are used to searching in one or two places. Search syntax is different on Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Monster; though all these sites support Boolean logic, you can’t reuse the same searches around the social media.

Measuring our success is tricky. Since we still want to hire the best candidates and there are still traditional interviews and offer negotiation processes, perhaps checking how your social media activities affect your submission, interviewing, and hiring statistics makes a lot of sense. That said, we need to be spending a few hours here and there checking out what others do and what new tools show up.

It’s pretty exciting to be here, right?

(When I was choosing the title for the article I thought of some recent titles like “Is Internet Sourcing Dead?” or “Will Boolean Be Replaced by Another Language?” or “Why is Twitter So Yesterday?” It’s useful to step back once in a while and question things that seem obvious, isn’t it? Our reality is changing so fast!)

OK, let’s look at the technical side of things. Ten years ago, when I was a hiring manager, I developed a habit of Googling candidates. Though I do not have any current statistics, we all know for a fact that many recruiters and hiring authorities do that. Many will also look the person up on LinkedIn at a minimum.

Let’s imagine now that you can automate getting a person’s list of profiles.

Last week I spoke with my good friend Chandra Bodapati of eGrabber. Chandra pointed out to me that with his product ResumeFinder you can get a list of online profiles at a click of a button. You can then put the links into an email or a document and send them off. He proceeded to send me an email with a couple dozen links to my online profiles and mentions. It took him a split second to do that. You can look at the result on my blog.

There are, of course, other online products and utilities that can do similar things, and they are all better and faster than “just” Googling. There are companies that create complex sourcing solutions like Broadlook; companies that help automate web sourcing for those of us who do not care about Boolean syntax like Autosearch; sites like www.socialmention.com that help collect this info; and ATS’s that have this functionality integrated. (Note to the readers: I do not have the goal of suggesting a comprehensive list here. I plan to write an overview of sourcing tools elsewhere, and I also do webinars covering people search tools.)

Chandra said to me: since this information is so readily available, shouldn’t it become a new standard of submitting candidates to a hiring manager and/or to HR? We typically send a resume, a short paragraph, a standard questionnaire, and, for some openings, a technical test to our clients. Would it be beneficial to always send a list of profiles along with that?

If I were a hiring manager, I would, of course, review the resume first and foremost. I am looking for professional skills and experience. I want the person to perform well. How would (or should) her kids’ pictures on Facebook affect this? But look: first of all, the person’s profiles are out there on the web and I could glance over them whether this is submitted to me or not. I’d most likely skip Facebook, or will only spend seconds on it if I get a link. But I may look on LinkedIn and blogs; well, maybe on Twitter, too. By spending a few minutes on LinkedIn, I may get additional information about the person’s skills and experience; I also may get a sense of who the person is. We are looking for a live member of our team; this always involves some chemistry, so the person’s style of presenting himself matters. If I have dozens or even hundreds of applications for a position (we do these days) and am trying to choose those people with whom I’d like to start interviews, this quick glance may help me select candidates. Or, if at the end of interviews I am checking the references, I may pull out information from profiles for a more complete picture.

Is this fair to candidates? Is this ethical? Is this all legal even, given that we want to avoid discrimination and would never ask certain questions at an interview? These are all good questions, and it would be great to hear from experienced recruiters, hiring managers, and specialists. I am very interested in comments from the ERE community members.

To make it fair to candidates I as a recruiter can give my candidates a heads-up, so that they could clean up their LinkedIn profile if they choose to do so. I may skip personal sites in my submissions. Or I could have the candidate suggest links that can be added to her submission. There may also be links to information that are specific to a job opening. As an example, many software engineers would be open to including pointers to their code posted online, and hiring managers love that.

If we are looking for standards in a candidate’s submission, then profile information has its pluses compared to documents like resumes. Profiles are easier to parse and to search. Even the greatest resume parsing tools can’t possibly extract the information right in 100% of the cases. Candidates are required to fill profiles at job boards exactly for the reason of facilitating search and browsing.

My personal preference would be to have a professional chronological resume as “the” document (no colors; no pictures, please; substantial content in the “experience” section) and complement this with links to a number of profiles, if my client says that they would be interested in that. But looking into the future, could it happen that a submission of a candidate will not have a resume but will be done with a set of online professional profile links accompanied by a job-specific questionnaire?

So, will resumes become obsolete in their current form? What do you think?

Let’s try to find some clarity. I’ll write about Google here. Though other search engines are similar in many ways, each has its own syntax, somewhat different from Google’s.

Google syntax does, of course, implement Boolean logic, though in a limited fashion. It’s not what I want to talk about here; I’d like to talk about the additional, “non-Boolean” part of Google. Google syntax (shall we call it Googlean?) contains much more than an implementation of Boolean logic.

There are operators and special characters that instruct Google on how to use keywords in a search string. One doesn’t need to learn about all of the operators to become successful in one’s searches, but adding a few operators to your search will help quite a bit. Here I’ll cover some operators that I think are a must for a serious web sourcer’s toolbox.

Part 1 of 2 “Googlean” and Special Characters

One very important special character is the minus “-”, and in fact the minus works as part of the Boolean logic implementation. If you use it in front of a word, no spaces in-between, then it will mean “NOT”: -jobs

(But if you write 7-3 in your string, Google will make a different guess and use its calculator instead — try it!)

Most Special Characters Are Ignored

One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is trying to search the web for certain characters. In the majority of cases Google simply ignores special characters such as “@”. If you think your string with a “@” finds you this character in the search results, try to replace it with another special character of your choice and you’ll see the same results.

You almost never can search for any of @#$%^&*()=+[] and other special characters. There are some exceptions; for example, you can search for C# (a programming language), but these exceptional cases are few.

Quotation Marks

If you put a phrase in quotation marks, Google will look for the whole phrase. As an example, you could search for “Database Administrator”.

Interestingly, Google will recognize the operator OR within the quotes. You can search for
“Database Administrator OR Developer”
and you will find pages with either “Database Administrator” OR “Database Developer”.

Here are some sample uses.

Got a job post to work with? Use quotation marks to find out who is competing with you. Pick a several-words-long phrase from the job description, put it in quotation marks, and search for it on Google. You will land on all web pages that advertise the job.

Or, if you see a job description posted by a recruiter and you are interested who the client is, do the same as above, and you are likely to find the same job post made by the employer.

Looking for a person? If the person’s name is rare enough, putting it in quotes and Googling it may help. I also use Google advanced image search with the “faces” option and often land on the person’s blog or homepage.

Asterisk

Asterisk * is a very mysterious symbol in Google. Though it formally means “some words,” in reality (or is it better to say in practice?) it stands for “one word or very few words.” (The symbol * does not stand for a part of a word on Google as it does elsewhere.)

Here’s a quick example showing how it works. Search for “Oracle * Administrator” (plus keywords) and you will find Oracle Database Administrator, Oracle Discoverer Administrator, etc.

The asterisk * is actually a very powerful tool. Here are some uses.

If you are looking for an email pattern for a company or are trying to collect email addresses, you can use
“email * companyname.com” or
“mailto * companyname.com “

Since the symbol * typically stands for one word, you can add more asterisks to these strings and get different results.
(“email * * companyname.com” etc.)

Please note that since Google ignores special symbols, including the symbol @ in your strings is not necessary.

Here’s one of my favorite sourcing “tricks.” You can look for phrases and land on blogs, forums, and homepages, not resumes, but this may put you ahead of the competition if they only look for resumes.

Here are examples of Google searches for phrases. This would bring up pages written by people who work or used to work for or have something to do with Accenture. (Replace Accenture with your target company name.) Add your keywords to these strings to narrow down the searches:

“I work * Accenture”
“I am * Accenture”
“when I * Accenture”
etc.

You can use phrases as a research tool. You can be really creative!

Note that we didn’t even use Boolean logic in these last few examples but we got interesting results.

Tilde ~ and Plus +

Tilde in front of a word means any word “like” this word. It needs to be used with care since you have no control over what Google may think is “like” your word. However, if the number of results is small or if you suspect you may not know of some synonyms for your keyword, using the tilde may help.

The plus sign in front of a word tells Google to use exactly this word. This may be useful for two reasons. One, Google typically ignores what they call “stop” words, meaning very common short words like “the” or “in”. If you put a plus + in front of the, it will be included for sure. Two, Google “auto stems” which means that it will look for some variations of a word you include; if you search for manager it will show results with management as well. Put a plus in front of manager and the results will contain exactly this word. (Sorry, this may sound a little too technical, but it’s important to understand how your results are put together.)

Here is a good summary of using special characters.

Part 2 of 2 Google Operators

Let’s take a deep breath, stretch, walk around a bit, and move on to the second part of my story, Google Operators.

Operators are special words that Google recognizes that instruct it to treat keywords in a special fashion.

X-ray

The operator site: tells Google to look only within a specific website; this is commonly referred to as X-raying.

How can you use it? As an example, there are certain sites that are likely to have resumes posted, such as resumebucket.com
On Google, search for
site:resumebucket.com <your keywords>

to find resumes. I would search for
site:resumebucket.com Java weblogic

to find resumes of people with those skills on the site resumebucket.com.

inurl:

This operator tells Google to go only to the pages that have a given word in their URL (URL means “web address”). Since all LinkedIn profiles have either “in” or “pub” in the addresses, we can search for LinkedIn profiles like this:
site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub <keywords>

Let’s combine this with the phrase search we discussed previously. Here’s an example:

site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub “looking * work OR job” OR “laid off” OR available <your industry and/or location keywords here>

The string
site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub “looking * work OR job” OR “laid off” OR available SAP ~Consult
will look for profiles that have the word SAP and a variation of “consult” such as consultant or consulting.

intitle:

…will be the last operator to discuss today. It tells Google to look for the given word in the title of a web page.

Since the introduction of social networks, we have started searching for “profiles.” Profiles on a given network often have a similar structure to the page titles and/or URLs. If you figure out the structure, you could use it to look for profiles from a given site or a network. Here are a couple of examples, in addition to the LinkedIn example above.

Look for someone on social networks:
site:ning.com intitle:page <name here>

Look for resumes on craigslist:
site:craigslist.org inurl:res <keywords>

There are many more Google operators (see here for descriptions) but you can get very far by using just the ones I have mentioned.

If you are interested in the subject, please join our network called (as we now know, somewhat inappropriately) Boolean Strings Network. We discuss all sides of web searches and sourcing there. See you online!

Join LinkedIn Groups

Suppose one of your areas is, like mine, SAP Consulting. Search for groups using the word SAP in the group search box. The groups will be shown in the order of size. You will find:

SAP Community with almost 15,000 members
SAP Network Global (12,000+) … Active 12,000 members
SAP People Forum almost 8,000 members
etc.

Join these groups. The instant benefit is that all of the members are now in your network even if they are beyond the 3-level connection distance.

Search for Group Members and Send Them Messages for Free

There are two ways to search for people in a group. First, there’s a simple search box within the group members tab. You can search for members by keywords. The advantage is that you will see 500 results.

Now notice that you can “send a message” to any of these people using a link under their name in the list of results. If you go to the very last page of the search results, you will likely see people who are connected to you only through the group, yet you can send them a direct message. That is just like sending a LinkedIn “Inmail” but is free.

The second way to search is to use the new advanced people search functionality. You are able to check one or more of your groups on the advanced people search page to target your search at these groups’ members. You can now combine your search with keywords, target title, company, location, etc. If you have a free account you would only see 100 results. (It used to be 500 just recently.) I don’t see it as a big limitation; there are always ways to run a variety of searches to see more results. If you mouse over a person’s profile in the results list you will see the link “send message” for people who are either connected to you or are in your group. If you go to a profile view, you will see the same “send message” link there as well.

Important Notes on the LinkedIn search syntax:

a) LinkedIn search allows you to use Boolean syntax: as an example, in the group search members box you could look for
“SAP FI” AND Consulting NOT Recruiter.

b) However, just like Google, LinkedIn search does not recognize special characters like @. It’s no use to include @ in your search string in order to find email addresses either on Google or on LinkedIn.

c) While Google search would see the symbol * as “a word or a few words” and some databases like Monster would allow to use it as a “wildcard,” LinkedIn search doesn’t recognize the symbol * at all.

Post Discussion Items on Groups

On the majority of LinkedIn groups, the discussion boards have anything and everything. People self-advertise, announce that they are “open networkers,” etc. However, if you post a discussion item about your opportunities there’s a chance you will see some relevant responses.

Or, post an interesting industry-specific question in the hopes that you will hear from experts.

Explore the Company Pages

The company search is located at http://www.linkedin.com/companies

Search for the company you are sourcing for. LinkedIn shows a lot of information on a company page. That includes the “career path” that helps identify target companies for your sourcing.

Search within the companies is rather limited, but you could also do a Google X-ray search like this: <keywords> site:http://www.linkedin.com/companies
to investigate target companies and look for their employees.

As an example, do a Google search

SAP Consulting site:http://www.linkedin.com/companies “San Francisco”

and explore the results.

Use Contact Capture to Parse and Organize Your People Searches

Broadlook Contact Capture is a great tool with many uses, and it’s free. You can download it at http://www.broadlook.com/braingain

On the “people search” page on LinkedIn, use the “extended” view. Highlight-all on the page and use Contact Capture to capture the results. The tool was not made for pages like this, and you will get some extra “junk” — but this will capture all the first and last names. If you searched for employees of a specific company where you know the email pattern, you can now create an email list for these people.

(Another relevant tool comes from eGrabber. It is not free but is extremely useful for capturing and parsing LinkedIn profiles. Go to the site www.eGrabber.com and look for the “Excel” tool.)

Have Their Email Address? Learn More About the Person

If you have an email address that is likely to belong to someone you’d like to learn more about, there are several ways to do it using LinkedIn.

You can enter it in the “import contacts” page. If the person is on LinkedIn and is not in your network you will get a link to his/her profile. Another way is to use the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar. If you create a contact in Outlook with the email, save it and reopen, you will see a link to the profile. You can download the Outlook toolbar from http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=outlook_toolbar_download

Drive Traffic to Your Profile

It is somewhat similar to search engine optimization for websites. Make sure your profile is complete, and it’s clear what your competency is and who you are looking to connect with. Make your profile rich in content; add links and applications such as WordPress if you have a blog. Use relevant keywords in your profile including variations (such as consultant and consulting).

To get more relevant people to find you, post interesting questions and answers in the LinkedIn Q&A section; start LinkedIn groups; use your LinkedIn profile link in your signature in emails, blog posts, Twitter posts, etc. (Here’s mine, by the way: http://www.linkedin.com/in/irinashamaeva)

Being an “open networker” or not is, of course, a personal preference. I think though that with 30+ million of people on LinkedIn, it’s a good idea not to limit yourself to networking with a just few people whom you closely know, but allow yourself to see and be seen by a larger community.

I hope you liked what you read. I’d also like to invite you all to join our “Boolean Strings” group on LinkedIn. It’s a great community of people and you will have a chance to learn a lot and to share your web sourcing knowledge.