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:
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:
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.
The rpo services Outsourcing team provides complete resume sourcing and screening solutions to our clients. We source through thousands of curriculum vitea’s from online job boards to find the candidate right for you. Using search engines, online communities and groups, we make full use of the age of technology for our clients.
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