MarkMail - A Great Sourcing Tool

MarkMail.org is a fantastic little site which was introduced recently by a sourcer friend of mine; if you spend any time at all searching for niche technical engineering roles, then you're going to like this. It's also extremely useful for finding direct e-mail addresses if you're finding it difficult to reach someone via InMails or you have out of date contact details.

MarkMail searches through millions (57,938,113 at last count) of e-mails spread across thousands of mailing lists; typically these are mailing lists used for open source projects (for example, here you can see a list of e-mails about bugs found on the ubuntu kernel). You can see all the e-mails sent to this list, who sent them and usually the e-mail address of that sender.

You can search for a particular technology you're sourcing for; someone posting in the group org.perl.module-authors is likely to be contributing to Perl modules, or at least have an interest in Perl modules, so could be relevant to your Perl project once you've cross referenced them with other sources.

Let's take the top contributor to that group; A. Pagalzis:

It doesn't take a lot of detective work to find out that this is Aristotle Pagalzis; a quick Google shows that he looks like a pretty bad-ass Perl developer (amongst other things), you can some of his code on his GitHub account, and best of all he is not on LinkedIn so most of your typical overly-LinkedIn-reliant recruiter types will not be getting in touch with this particular candidate. I've not checked, but I would bet that Eric, Ken, David and Shlomi would be pretty good bets if you were looking for rockstar Perl developers.

You can use a number of different search parameters, including:

from: (which can include any part of a name or e-mail address, eg. from: ibm.com)
subject:
list:
attach: (searches any part of an attachment name; resume or cv perhaps?)
ext: (searches an attachment extension; .pdf or .doc?)

This is an amazing tool to have in your locker if you're a technology sourcer. Not many others will be using it, and it gives you direct access to extremely relevant candidates.

Good luck!

-Tom

Stripping a LinkedIn Profile

The excellent Boolean Blackbelt by Glen Cathy is a must read for any modern sourcer; and one topic in particular that changed the way I looked at sourcing was the post on LinkedIn's Dark Matter. Dark Matter, as Glen described it, are the thousands upon thousands of profiles which a standard LinkedIn search will not bring up; the same theory can be applied to other social networks, candidate databases or web searches. It is the ability to find these profiles that is where we add value, and it is within this Dark Matter that we can find the kind of superstar candidates that others will not.

These candidates are tough to find because their profiles are missed by our basic searches. They don't contain key words from your search; they have skeleton profiles, not completed, and often on purpose. One way to circumnavigate this is to start finding candidates without searching; easier said than done, right? Well, no; we just have to go back to the real basics we should always be doing - maximising the information we squeeze from each profile, and really putting some of that detective work to good use rather than relying on the same old searches.

So, how would we do this on LinkedIn? None of this is rocket science, but I do think some (or most) of these simple tips are often overlooked, purely because of the ease of regular searches. Try this out this week; get the profile of a candidate you know to be a superstar; somebody who you have recently hired is a good start; and check out the following...

1. Profiles of Interest

Other people will have done the work for you. Check out the most viewed profiles; they're usually going to be relevant, and is a nice starting point.

2. Similar Profiles

Still in beta, but this is a really cool and often overlooked feature. A unpredictable at times, but it's a great way to draw out a few extra profiles which could be of interest.

3. Tangent Search

The best thing you can ever learn to do and make a habit of on LinkedIn. Go through those past companies; if your guy is a rockstar, he isn't going to have been working in any mediocre engineering teams for long. Copy his job title and past company into a search, and run through all those doing that job. The real gems here are the ones with no information filled in on their profile; the kind you would never have found with your standard search, because by doing any kind of search other than the name of the company you are excluding them entirely.

Profiles like this are why we tangent source. No technical skills listed that you would typically search for, but I'm willing to bet my bottom dollar that he is a C++ developer of a similar nature to our first chap. No degree listed on his Education that you could search for, but you know he's gone to an elite university, and the chances are it is Computer Science or related.

4. Groups & Associations

Have a look at the bottom of the above profile. See the 'Groups and Associations' section? He has one listed, CVMP. A quick search shows us that the CVMP 'aims to bring together the worlds of academic algorithmic research [...] to discuss new advancements and innovative applications' - also worth searching through, if you ask me. You can find some really great localised groups, particularly for events and conferences, which unlike some of the larger generalist groups contain a great group of relevant candidates.

5. Recommendations

Another often unlooked source of candidates; check out the recommendations section. See who is recommending this person; it will more often than not be their peers or superiors at work, and again if they are working at the same place as your original superstar candidate, then you can bet their skills are going to be relevant, and they have already done the work for you by putting their names right there.

Sourcing on about.me

about.me, for the uninitiated, is a fantastic little service which offers users the chance to create a simple splash page which can home multiple online identities and link to social networking sites, websites and blogs. A page can contain as much or little information as one desires (those with far more imagination than me can create some really cool profiles) and users range from software engineers to physiotherapists, art students all the way through to little known technology recruiters. A simple idea, but one which AOL thought highly enough of to acquire the then startup just four days after their official launch back in 2010.

The Sourcer in me grew instantly curious; as always, the question was how could we leverage a new pool of potential candidates to our advantage? While about.me does contain a basic search function, it was rather limited for what we need; you can search by name, which could be useful if you are looking for further contact details for leads you already know, but not so much for sourcing new talent. The ability to search by 'tags' also exists, but is reliant on users tagging their profiles with the same keywords you are searching for.

Thankfully, about.me is indexed very neatly on our old friend Google; check out this simple search string to search for 'software engineers' across the site. Sweet!

site:about.me <your search query>

A little bit of tweaking, and you can do some pretty cool searches; keeping it as simple as possible seems to be the name of the game (try this very simple search for technology leaders in London, for example), but with a little imagination again a lot is possible.

Note: I have been using about.me to search for some time, and one golden feature which it seems has unfortunately been lost is that it used to actually search not only the about.me splash page, but incredibly all of the social networks contained within. This loophole appears to have closed, but it is still an excellent tool to have in the armoury none the less.

Happy sourcing!

Custom Search Engines

The Custom Search Engine (more commonly referred to as CSE) is a great little tool from Google, designed to "harness the power of Google to create a customised search experience for your own website." In effect, a little Google to use within a website.

How is this at all relevant or helpful to recruiters or sourcers? Well, a CSE doesn't just have to search your own website; it can be used to search through any public domain, in the same way that a standard Google search can. Where a CSE comes into its own is that it allows us to save a number of complex search strings and filters into one search engine, allowing us to cover more ground than would be feasibly possible with a standard Google or LinkedIn search.

The possibilities really are exponential, but I would suggest that every recruiter should have at two CSEs in their arsenal; one for campus recruiting, and one for diversity recruiting. In my experience these are two areas of sourcing which require a high volume of key words and as a result a lot of treading over the same ground. These problems are compounded by the recent limit on search terms imposed by Google, meaning you can no longer save a list of 50 top universities anywhere and past that in to your search.

I'd imagine at this point I've failed to demonstrate why a CSE could be so powerful; let me present a (relatively!) short guide to how to set up your own Custom Search Engine which will hopefully show a little better why they can be such a powerful tool...

Setting up a CSE

1) Define your Sites

First of all visit the Google CSE page, and click on 'Create a Custom Search Engine' on the right hand side. You will need a Google account of any sort to do this.

The Name and Description are self explanatory; you then get to the first good part: defining the sites you would like to search. Here is one of the most important (and powerful) parts of this tool; have a good think about the types of sites you would like to search. Interestingly you can use wild cards in your search. You could search across blogs (*.blogger.com or *.wordpress.com) for example.

In this case, we are going to leverage the CSE to search LinkedIn, so let's define our sites as follows:

2) Find the Control Panel

Click next until you reach the 'Get the Code' page, and click on the link at the bottom labelled 'Change the Basics'. This will take you through to the CSE Control Panel, which is where you are given a myriad of powerful customisation options.

3) Set your Refinements

Of particular use to us at this stage is the 'Refinements' page. This will allow us to define our custom search terms for our search engine. Click on the 'Add Refinement button at the top to get started, and for the purpose of this example we will add a simple elite college search for a couple of the elite colleges in the UK; Imperial College and Cambridge. Note you can add as many as you want; use your imagination!

The search terms use full Boolean operators (AND/OR, parenthesis and quotation marks). Again, be creative; use that 'minus' sign to eliminate certain terms (eg. -recruiter -recruitment to eliminate recruiters from your searches).

4) Run your Search!

Save your Refinement, go to your search page and go wild; let's try a basic Ruby on Rails search, and you will see that the search results are all from, of course, LinkedIn. This in itself has saved you typing in your usual Boolean X-Ray search string, but you will also notice your refinement saved just below the search bar ('Elite College UK'):

Clicking on this link will apply the additional search terms you have saved in your refinements; et voila, all results will now contain 'Imperial College' or 'University of Cambridge'.

Something else to note is that you can apply a refinement to a specific site; so you could, for example, have a 'UK Colleges' tied to uk.linkedin.com and 'French Colleges' tied to fr.linkedin.com.

The possibilities are endless; obvious examples would be to save refinements of every elite university in each country, saving lists covering diversity search terms (maternity, miss, mrs and the other usual suspects) or lists covering female names. You could set up a search which picks up pages containing e-mail addresses; or you could set up a search for CVs/Resumes using a refinement along the lines of 'format:.pdf OR format:.doc'.

See what you can come up with, and good luck! :)

Thoughts on Google+ for Recruiters

The numbers are impressive; less than a month in, and still only available on an invite only basis, Google+ has recently breezed past the 20 million user mark. It took Facebook three years and two months to get to the same mark. More than 10 users are joining Google+ every second. It also feels like there have been about that number of blogs and commentaries written about Google's fledgling social vehicle, so you don't need boring with these numbers again; what I would like to try and have a quick look at is how Google+ will effect us as recruiters, and have a look at some of the ways we can look to harness this new potential.

A first observation would be a simple one. Who is using Google+ at the moment? I'd wager if you walked down the street and asked ten people what Google+ was, maybe one would have heard about it; if you walked into the office of any technology related organisation and asked ten people about G+, you could bet your last dollar on all ten being able to tell you what Google+ is, who they have in which Circle, and how they managed to get in a hangout with Michael Dell last week. A very, very high number of these 20 million users are going to be technology guys; for those of us recruiting in areas around the web, technology or media, we have got ourselves a very large pool of guys who may well be more visible here as they get a feel for G+ than they every would be to us on Facebook or LinkedIn, for example.

There is a cool article by Irina Shamaeva which shows us a search string she has come up with for searching G+ for Google employees; check out this search string which brings up a list of Computer Science graduates from Cambridge. Obviously this is searching at the most basic level, so change the string as you see fit, but it's quite effective; it's also interesting to note that at the moment, most profiles have a 'send e-mail' button still active.

Circles. We've heard about circles a lot since G+ came out, and there are two clear ways that Circles are going to be useful to us as recruiters. First of all, get following people; treat it like Twitter. Follow Sergey or follow MySpace founder Tom Anderson; as with Twitter, in Google+ you don't need a reciprocated friendship to be able to see public updates from people who you follow. This is in theory going to allow us to reach more people more simply than we may do with say LinkedIn; here, you need to find a person, send an invite request and wait for the invite to accepted before you can share status updates to someones feed. Conversely with G+, you drop someone in a circle, you can see their updates - simple.

Circles will also be useful in that we're going to be able to separate our contacts in to very specific groups; this will allow us to send very targeted messages to a certain group, while not sending the message to others. We spend a lot of time developing our own personal branding, and I always felt typical recruiter status updates on LinkedIn could go some way to erode that. If Client A sees me as the de-facto expert in finding them C# developers to work on their highly specialised financial software, they may be a little surprised to see me posting a message reaching out to helpdesk support to work for Client B. We will also be able to separate personal stuff from work stuff but keep it all in one place which is cool; at the moment I am like I'd imagine many of us are, keeping LinkedIn professional, Facebook personal and Twitter as kind of a mix. This way we can keep it all in one place much more effectively.

There is so much more to discover about Google+ and it's really interesting to see so many different observations and thoughts already. Check out this blog by Katie Meeker and this by Jeff Moore for some further, far more coherent, ideas.

Google Images as a Sourcing Tool

We've all used Google Images before; be it searching for screen caps from a movie or searching for last minute clip art to use in a presentation. As a professional tool to help us in the sourcing of UX Designers or Software Engineers however? Probably not very many of us. I read an article by Adam Wiedmer recently which discusses candidate sourcing via Google Images and it got me thinking; is this something we do on a day to day basis anyway? Those in the UK will know instantly what I am talking about when I mention a front-page with a censored image of an 'Unnamed Premiership Footballer' - I can't be the only one who used Google Images to find the offending front-page when the story first broke?

Sourcing of a sort, although more to cure my curiosity rather than serving any professional purpose; but how could this be relavent to us trying to source candidates? CVs are (for the most part) blocks of text after all. What Google Images can do is help us to eliminate some of what Glen Cathy describes as 'Dark Matter' - that is, those candidates who remain hidden to the usual search strings and methods.  A typical boolean search on Google will begin with some combination of (cv OR "curriculum vitae" OR resume OR portfolio) and so on, which immediately eliminates a number of pages which may contain information which is relavent to us. If we try plugging the skill sets and a location in to Google Images, we can find some results which would otherwise be hidden to us. We are going to achieve this by using the (unnervingly accurate) 'Face' image recognition which was introduced to Google Images following their acquisition of Neven Vision in 2006, and is found on the bottom left hand side of an image search:

As an example, a (very basic) search for a 'User Experience Engineer' in London:

(intitle:cv | intitle:"curriculum vitae" | inurl:cv | inurl:"curriculum vitae") -submit -jobs -template "user experience" engineer (london | 020)

Brings the following 1,650 results:

A successful first search with a set of CVs which look relavent; but lets try running the same search in Google Images but eliminating the 'must have' variations on resume, which will demonstrate a number of pages which we will not see running a standard text search:

"user experience" engineer (london | 020)  (-intitle:cv | -intitle:"curriculum vitae" | -inurl:cv | -inurl:"curriculum vitae")

This has given us 70,900 hits which can not have appeared in our simple text search:

While the pictures of the faces may not be much use, click through and read the page behind the images and see what you can find. One result which stands out is the big blue chap in the middle; a UX dev who has a very strong looking portfolio indeed, is based in London and is looking for work right now:

Other results include lists of speakers at UX events, several blogs, and even a little cheekily bio pages on company websites; all of which would have become more 'dark matter' using simple text based boolean searches.

-TW

X-Ray Searching - The Basics

The idea of X-Ray searching is one which has been covered countless times across various recruitment blogs (most notably and thoroughly in Glen Cathy's outstanding Boolean Black Belt) - yet it is a technique which I believe is criminally underused, particularly here in the UK. Anyone familiar with the concept, please switch off now; this is very much a bare-bones guide to X-Ray searching.

Background

X-Ray searching is a term denoting a technique for searching LinkedIn (or other similar publicly available databases) via search engines such as Google or Bing. The overwhelming majority of LinkedIn profiles are public, which leaves them open to being indexed by any search engine for finding using familiar Boolean search techniques.

How?

Step 1: Load up Google.com. As simple as that. Nearly, anyway; if like me you are based outside of the United States, you will be redirected to Google's localised site (so in my case Google UK) - this can actually skew your search results slightly, so click on the link at the bottom of the page which says 'Go to Google.com' (or, navigate to google.com/ncr).

Step 2: Build up your search string. The basic building blocks will be:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub | inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:groups -recruiter

You then need to enter your keywords; in this example, let us try a very simple search for an iPhone developer with some kind of Agile experience.

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub | inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:groups -recruiter iphone (agile | tdd)

Next; location. A little different to a standard Boolean search, but only in ways which make it easier for us. Not too long ago, LinkedIn added the country code to the beginning of their URLs which makes for easier filtering; as a quick example;

site:uk.linkedin.com (inurl:pub | inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:groups -recruiter iphone (agile | tdd) "London United Kingdom"

3. Search! :)

Why?

There are several reasons why one would X-Ray search rather than search directly in to LinkedIn; the big ones, for me, are that first of all it is simply quicker to run a search and skim through names via Google than LinkedIn, and that you are not limited to connections within your own network, but to anybody on LinkedIn with a public profile. You are also limited to 1000 search results when using Google; in a (free) LinkedIn account, your search is capped to 100 results.

The big loss when using Google in comparison with LinkedIn itself are the advanced search operators and the control that comes with them; it is difficult to control the distinction between current or past employers, for example.

Conclusion

Add this to your arsenal of search tools. If it is something you don't do at the moment, do it! :)

I have only touched the tip of the iceberg of what is possible with this introduction; I will add more advanced tips from time to time, but as with any kind of sourcing, it is up to the individual to take these ideas and really make them your own. Take the examples shown here, tweak them, change them, and use them.

-TW