Composing and Playing the Boolean Search String Song of Hires

Have you ever heard Yo Yo Ma play Bach’s Cello Suite number 1 – Prelude? If you haven’t, I suggest it’s worth the 5 minute investment of time to do so. I’m amazed that a group of people can come together and create such a work of timeless beauty. A performance like that requires a finely made stringed instrument, a talented composer, and a well-practiced performer. This model of combining string, composer, and performer is the model I will follow.

I first started playing with Boolean strings in 2009. Over the years, I have taken classes, watched videos, and attended seminars to improve my string creating skills. Over time, I have come to realize how difficult it is to make a string play a song that ends up with me having more hires. I hope do demonstrate a technique that combines a few well-constructed strings, some carefully crafted instructions, and a well-trained sourcer to create a song that results in a hire. I will start with the string, then move to the composer, and finally give a performance.

First, I create the string. For me, Boolean has always been an excellent way to find contact information that I wouldn’t have access to in other ways. I love to use Google’s ability to focus its immensely powerful search engine on one site. I crafted the following string for Google as an example of one I might create when I was looking for contact information from a specific company. site:zoominfo.com *@its.jnj.com Next I open a tool called Mozenda. It is free for 30 days so you can have a chance to use it and decide if the tool is valuable to you in your search. After I created and account and downloaded the builder, I copied the page that from my Google search and dropped the URL into the builder as illustrated below.

Next, select Start a new agent from this page. Then use the “create a list of items” to match the fields as seen below.

Match the name then phone then email, the tool is actually designed recognize email and phone numbers in data sets and can separate them into different columns automatically. If you’re trying to get email from more than one page select “add list pager” then select the “next” on the web page to indicate you want the tool to continue the operation on the next page. That way you don’t have to repeat the actions for every page of your search results. You should see a preview of what your results will look at the bottom of the page.

Test your search. Once you are sure the search is running correctly, you can save it to use later as an agent or download the results into Excel right then. Once in Excel it’s very simple to format the data. You should end up with a spreadsheet that looks like the following.

Now, what do you do with all this great data? Once the data is in this form it can be used to create a mail merge email campaign, uploaded into an applicant tracking system, or matched into LinkedIn Recruiter via their data stacking tool that is called talent pipeline. To import the connections into your LinkedIn Recruiter seat, simply follow the instructions below.

Lists can have as many as 5,000 contacts. Fill out the required information and select continue.

LinkedIn will automatically identify the candidates that already have a LinkedIn profile. You can then tag your list and put the contacts in a project folder. The first name, last name and email should automatically match fields. This will allow you to validate the data you have acquired and it will match the information against a LinkedIn profile. This means that we are not solely dependent on Inmails

Even if you do not have a LinkedIn Recruiter seat you can manually search for the profiles from your personal account. You can the reach out to them via the information you obtained from your search string. From here we can email and call our prospects. This combination of Strings, Tools and Sourcer will allow you to create your own Sourcing Song of Hires. I hope to hear many of your masterpieces in the future.