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Re: HOW TO: Leverage Twitter for Hiring

Glen Cathey — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:15:01 -0000

This is a good overview article with solid suggestions/examples. Nice to see @williamu and @SteveBoese immortalized as well.

If you are interested in reading a recruiter's personal account of how she used Twitter to make 3 hires in 6 weeks, I recommend you read this article: http://www.booleanblackbelt...

Re: The Real Targets of Social Media Recruiting

Glen Cathey — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:54:48 -0000

Nice post, and no worries Michael! I'm glad my late night tweet got you thinking!

Just to clarify, I'm referring to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics data (see Marvin Smith's excellent piece referencing it here: http://www.ere.net/2009/08/..., which found that approximately 14% of people are "active" job seekers, 20% are "casually looking," 32% are "passively looking," and 34% are not looking for employment at all.

That means the majority of people simply aren't looking, and that fully 66% of all people are either not looking or are only passively looking.

Those BLS stats are for the United States - not for any particular source of candidates. My comment regarding LinkedIn is that it doesn't magically have a larger percentage of passive and non-job seekers than any other source of candidates, even job board resume databases. When you're talking about a sample size of over 60M people globally, it's going to conform to average statistics. Also - I've found that approximately 80% of the resumes in databases like Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice, and Hotjobs are dated over 30 days old, and after that timeframe, can anyone say for certain what their job search status is?

It just irks me when I hear people refer to LinkedIn as a great source of passive candidates - it isn't any better of a source of passive candidates than cold calling, Twitter, Monster's resume database, or a company's ATS/private candidate database for that matter.

And BTW - I've practically made a career out of specifically targeting non-job seekers, preferring to hunt in the largest candidate pool of all. :-)

Re: LinkedIn SEO: How To Get More Calls From Recruiters

Glen Cathey — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 09:30:40 -0000

Jimmy,
Nice post!

I noticed from your screenshots that you had your results sorted by relevance. Relevance for LinkedIn is determined by a mix of network relationship (1st, 2nd, 3rd, group, and none) and keyword relevance.

When I run a simple PHP search sorting by relevance, you appear as result #10 in the New York area of 8,947 (we're 2nd degree connections, btw). I did not find you in the top 100 results globally.

When I switch the sorting of the results to "keywords" so that the search results would not be affected by my connection to you on LinkedIn, you come up #18 out of 8,947 in the New York area, and again, I could not find you in the top 100 globally.

Although not #1, both rankings sorted by relevance and by keyword are still strong for the New York area considering the nearly 9,000 total results available. But I have to tell you that there is a lot more going on with regard to LinkedIn's relevance ranking system.

A good start would be to check out the article I recently wrote on the subject: http://www.booleanblackbelt...

If you make any strategic changes to your LinkedIn profile, I'd be happy to check in from time to time to see if your profile moves up the ranks from my search perspective, now that we have a baseline.

Regards,
Glen Cathey

Re: How to Use LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators as Search Agents

Glen Cathey — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 21:10:14 -0000

Eric – I haven’t found an operator to search by last update, although you know I will be looking to accomplish that task. While convenient, I’m not so interested in hints that someone might be looking for a job, because you can recruit anyone, regardless, IMO.

Irina – the chart exists. Scroll to the bottom of this page: http://learn.linkedin.com/l... All of the operators work for me – give them a try.

Sarang – don’t think we can convert the LinkedIn search to an RSS feed. However, you can search for multiple companies with an OR statement. For whatever illogical reason, the only way it works is if you don’t use parentheses and use quotes instead, like this – ccompany:”facebook OR google” country:”united states” You can’t copy and paste that string because my blog alters the quotes. Build that string in LinkedIn or Notepad and it works.

Re: How to Use LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators as Search Agents

Glen Cathey — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:40:39 -0000

Re: How to Use LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators as Search Agents

Glen Cathey — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:42:38 -0000

Irina – the chart exists. Scroll to the bottom of this page: http://learn.linkedin.com/l... All of the operators work for me – give them a try.

Re: How to Use LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators as Search Agents

Glen Cathey — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:45:08 -0000

Re: How to Use LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators as Search Agents

Glen Cathey — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:05:49 -0000

Cathy - thanks for reading!

The easiest way to explain/see how to use Bing to search LinkedIn can be found here: http://www.booleanblackbelt...

Please let me know if that helps. Thanks Cathy!

Re: How to Use LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators as Search Agents

Glen Cathey — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:20:52 -0000

Matthew,
The string you and your coworker came up with definitely works, with some limitations. For example, here is a result of someone who works at Microstrategy currently, and the result is returned because the company name is 5 words away. http://bit.ly/fN0EaX

If you chose to extend to NOT (current near:4 microstrategy) - that could bleed over into the "Past" line and eliminate some good results.

One idea is to prevent any results from being returned of anyone who has ever worked at Microstrategy. We can try to do this by eliminating the phrase "at Microstrategy" because that is how LinkedIn formats work experience at the top of profiles - "TITLE at COMPANY."

For example:
site:linkedin.com “baltimore, maryland area” powered microstrategy -"at Microstrategy"

Results: http://bit.ly/ibdywR

Of course, that could also eliminate people who have worked for Microstrategy in the past, but not currently. Interestingly, the above search allows past but not current employees of Microstrategy to show up in results.

Re: How to Use LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators as Search Agents

Glen Cathey — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:22:32 -0000

Matthew, your use of -ccompany should not work in Bing, or at least not be processed properly, because ccompany is a LinkedIn advanced operator, so I am not sure what Bing is doing with it. Oddly enough, it does seem to clean up the results somewhat, although I must admit I am not sure how.

However, some people who currently work at Microstrategy do slip into the results - see "Thomas" at the bottom of these results http://bit.ly/hfnvDC

Re: Update Your Bing X-Ray Searches of LinkedIn to Target Profiles

Glen Cathey — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:47:18 -0000

I like your angle, but there are still plenty of profiles with "pub" in the url instead of "in" - for example: http://bit.ly/hcwW2i

Re: #TRU London 3 Recruiting Unconference Review

Glen Cathey — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:04:11 -0000

Bill,
Of course the objective of a conference can be to make money by offering a forum of information exchange and thought leadership.

However, I will stick to my argument that there is still a primary motivator - the world is never a magically equal place where everything is weighted the same.

There's nothing wrong with someone identifying the opportunity to make money from conferences and capitalizing on it. But there is a difference between a person whose first thought is how to make money, and the person whose first thought is how to create the best event. It's the same with software or any product or service for that matter.

No value judgment coming from me - just a simple analysis.

Also - conference organizers have many choices when it comes to monetizing events. Some seek maximum gain from vendors and sponsors as well as attendees. Some seek maximum gain from vendors and sponsors to "subsidize" attendees and charge them less, lowering the cost barrier for entry and participation. A third choice is an option that no major conference I am aware of has implemented, which is to completely subsidize attendees through vendor and sponsor funds. It's all a matter of what you're really trying to accomplish and what is perceived to be acceptable profit margins.

Many attendees have to pay for their flight and hotel in addition to the cost of admission, so attending a conference can easily be a $2000+ affair. Of course, for many conferences, it is almost guaranteed that a number of major corporations will send a person or two, and these companies typically will allow their employees to expense the trip. This is money in the bank.

However, many companies - even large ones - won't allow employees to expense conferences which is a huge deterrent and prevents a larger attendance, not to mention less diversity in attendance as well (if it's always the same companies).

I argue that you can be 100% dedicated to quality and not charge over $1000 per attendee for an event.

BTW - I'm not a professional blogger, and as such I have never written a blog post for compensation of any sort.

Re: Does LinkedIn Offer Recruiters Any Competitive Advantage?

Glen Cathey — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:35:04 -0000

As with all things in life - it is always a combination of factors that leads to success.

The best full life cycle recruiters are able to find candidates in the same sources (LinkedIn, etc.) that others cannot as well as effectively message, engage and recruit people who were were not looking for a new job, but are interested in taking the next step in their career once you can show them what that can look like.

Ultimately, it's about the match between what the company/client/manager/team needs/wants/is looking for and what the person (potential candidate) wants/needs/is looking for as the next step in their career.

Opportunity discussions go remarkably (and predictively) well if you can translate a hiring need into queries that find people for whom you know the opportunity will be an attractive move. :-)

Re: Update Your Bing X-Ray Searches of LinkedIn to Target Profiles

Glen Cathey — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:46:34 -0000

Sleuthy,
I've found +powered (and now other statements) are inclusive for profiles, but only on Bing - not Google. -dir works very well on Bing as well, and I appreciate how simple and efficient LinkedIn searches can be with Bing over Google. With Bing, I don't even have to use -jobs - rarely do jobs even sneak in. Sweet. :-)

I haven't noticed profile info in Spanish yet - that's quite odd and interesting!

Re: Update Your Bing X-Ray Searches of LinkedIn to Target Profiles

Glen Cathey — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:48:14 -0000

Ryan - quite interesting! The next time you come across a public profile that is an image, can you send me the string that produced the result so I can check it out? I'd love to inspect one!

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – Ruby

Glen Cathey — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:51:29 -0000

Nice work gentlemen - I sincerely appreciate your immediate attack of the challenge!

I do hope more people respond with different techniques/approaches (hint, hint - you who's reading this...).

Amongst you, there were 4 angles - some starting with an Internet search engine and others starting with LinkedIn:

Jeff used linkdomain, which if I remember correctly is what Jeremy used. This definitely works, but it isn't guaranteed to ID people who do not mention Ruby on their LinkedIn profiles (e.g. result #2 for me - Seth).

Kameron targeted a related and relevant group (Merb)

Sarang performed a Ruby group search and eliminated the keyword Ruby

Luis used a Bing X-Ray targeting Merb -ruby

Jason - you definitely found a profile that solves the challenge, but it would be ideal if you could explain precisely how you identified Rob. :-)

To anyone else reading this - can you solve the challenge from a different angle than the intrepid gentlemen listed?

And to those interested - I have a very interesting Gordian Knot for you to hack at for next week's sourcing challenge.

:-)

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

Glen Cathey — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:11:02 -0000

Interesting approach Gary. Were you trying to use Bing's location: operator? For those who might be interested - here is a good list of Bing operators: http://msdn.microsoft.com/e....

While the search results page does show positive hits of the phrase "Location Greater Atlanta Area," if you open up a result from Gary's search (http://bit.ly/f1RSfz - cached or otherwise), there actually isn't any mention of the word "location" anywhere on the profiles.

Gary - I noticed your search produces less than 150 results (if you click through all pages)...not the 300+ that Bing estimates.

For what it's worth - there are 336 results from a keyword search inside of LinkedIn, in a 50 mile radius of 30303 (center of ATL). http://linkd.in/g1XINi

So, I did some quick research and used -location to find some people that your solution does not find.

Here is the search:

site:linkedin.com -location "greater Atlanta area” java j2ee weblogic -dir

Here is one example result:

http://bit.ly/gisBaU

She's in Atlanta and mentions java, j2ee, and weblogic.

You cannot find her using your location NEAR:2 "greater Atlanta area" search - you can test it by adding her first name to your search and see no results are returned:

site:linkedin.com margarita location NEAR:2 "greater Atlanta area” java j2ee weblogic -dir

However, you can find her using this search:

site:linkedin.com margarita java j2ee weblogic -dir "greater Atlanta area”

http://bit.ly/eOmYfg

Here is another person your original solution does not find:

http://linkd.in/fMgM7u

For anyone else responding - please take note of how I approached testing the solution to uncover flaws...

This challenge isn't as easy as it seems on the surface...it will take some serious hacking. :-)

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

Glen Cathey — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 20:34:41 -0000

Sarang,
I do recommend using more search keywords so we're not dealing with such a vast, generic, estimated data set (6,000+).

Adding a few more terms gets it down to a manegable #. For example:

site:uk.linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) java j2ee apache "location * London, United Kingdom" -dir -jobs

This search, retaining your "location * London, United Kingdom" tactic returns 269 results: http://bit.ly/gAah9o

Doing exactly what I did with Gary's approach, excluding the term "location" with -location yields 318 results: http://bit.ly/hFGfVm

site:uk.linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) java j2ee apache -location "London, United Kingdom" -dir -jobs

Notice result #4 - first name Teofilis: http://linkd.in/hj1Jut

He lives in London and matches the search criteria.

However, if you try and add his first name to your search format, you get 0 results:

site:uk.linkedin.com teofilis (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) java j2ee apache "location * London, United Kingdom" -dir -jobs

http://bit.ly/hPG9mP

You CAN find him by adding -location to the search:

site:uk.linkedin.com teofilis (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) java j2ee apache -location "London, United Kingdom" -dir -jobs

http://bit.ly/g5fd81

This is but one of many people who do live in London that are excluded by your proposed solution, and it would be easy to assume they don't exist. I'd estimate your approach eliminates at least 100+ viable results of people who live in your target location, but cannot be found using "location" in the search string.

Gary - there is no single correct/right way to solve this challenge. :-)

I fear that more than a few people took at swing at this challenge, but failing to solve it quickly, gave up.

Last week's LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge racked up many responses the same day I posted it - but it was an easier challenge. So far, at 8:34 EST, only 3 people have tried to solve this one so far (publicly).

Can anyone crack this LinkedIn X-Ray Sourcing Challenge?

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

Glen Cathey — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 20:49:33 -0000

Leveraging "location" in the search string definitely yields results, but likely the same results anyone/everyone else would find.

I've always been especially interested in finding people that everyone has access to, but cannot and do not find. :-)

There is no single 'correct' way to solve this challenge - likely many different angles, just waiting to be discovered.

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

Glen Cathey — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 20:53:14 -0000

Luis - that's the tough question. :-) Using "location" in the search string appears to "work" because local results come up, but using that term eliminates people you don't actually want to.

Thanks for being 1of 3 brave souls to publicly take a crack at this challenge Luis - it's definitely tougher than last week's Ruby sourcing challenge!

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

Glen Cathey — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 21:27:28 -0000

No doubt Gary - but the challenge I issued to the world (literally!) to return the maximum # of local profiles while eliminating non-local profiles remains unsolved. :-)

I sincerely hope someone comes forward with a solution.

As a hint - it may have nothing to do with trying to manipulate the location phrase under the headline...

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

Glen Cathey — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:23:16 -0000

Gary's original suggested Bing search solution is a sound one, with the exception that it actually excludes some results of people who do live in the target area.

site:linkedin.com location NEAR:2 "greater atlanta area" java j2ee weblogic -dir

Bing claims 322 results, but if you click through to the last page (#13), there are only 123 real results.

http://bit.ly/fUkrXf

You would not be aware of the results you missed with the above search unless you experiment with -location to see the effect (as I have previously noted).

I've configured this Bing search to specifically target the profiles that Gary's approach cannot find - it pulls 53 real results, the MAJORITY of which are mutually exclusive of the above search.

site:linkedin.com -location "greater atlanta area" NEAR:25 current java j2ee weblogic -dir

http://bit.ly/fMaEo7

I emphasize MAJORITY because there are a small # of overlapping results that can be found in each query.

For these outlier results, I've noticed a pattern, and it's odd. I'll write a post on my findings soon, as it will be easier to demonstrate with images.

In the meantime, can anyone pick up on the pattern?

:-)

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

Glen Cathey — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:33:46 -0000

Thanks Siacampo!

When I checked a cached result from your search, it does not appear that the search engine is interpreting/processing your search the way you think it is.

For example, looking at this result http://bit.ly/eqHsgQ, you will see it did not process your attempt at using Near the way you intended.

When using Near, you need to follow it by a # for the word distance, such as Near:2.

Also - while eliminating false positives is half of the challenge, and perhaps the easier part. The very difficult part is not eliminating results of people who do live in the target location. :-)

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

Glen Cathey — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:39:32 -0000

Sarang,
I've found Google's AROUND operator to be fuzzy at best, and certainly not always adhered to.

In my searching, I have yet to observe an instance in which Bing's NEAR operator clearly isn't operating as intended, but that doesn't mean we can't break it and find one if we try.

Re: LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – X-Ray Location False Positives

Glen Cathey — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 10:54:23 -0000

Balazs,
You are definitely on to something by targeting words that are in the search result preview but not in the actual profile.

However, it appears to artificially limit the # of results.

Adapting your string to my area, I get 86 local results with Google.

site:linkedin.com "greater atlanta area * industry" java j2ee weblogic -dir

http://bit.ly/gQ7Rbt

Using location NEAR:2 on Bing, I get 124 local results - approximately 50% more.

site:linkedin.com location NEAR:2 "greater Atlanta area” java j2ee weblogic -dir

http://bit.ly/hvVgdx

Any thoughts as to why it does not pull all available local profiles?