Was doing a search by company name and title in the LinkedIn interface yesterday when I started receiving 0 results. I knew this couldn’t be true as I’d seen people that fit these parameters come up before.
I checked all the possible errors I could have made with my query such as a missing OR or perhaps a company name not in quotes. I looked at the industry box to see if I’d been too restrictive. I looked to see if I’d nested my title statements right. Yep, all good. Hummm. What next? Keep pounding my head against the desk? Nope.
Just to make sure I wasn’t falsely remembering that this had worked before, the next logical step was to use a search engine to do an actual site search or x-ray search of the public LinkedIn profiles.
Why do an x-ray search? What is an x-ray search? For those of you who want to know what x-ray or site search is, read my quick guide on x-ray or site search titled “X-Ray” Search or Site Search: A VERY Basic Introduction and Why Use it in Internet Recruiting and Names Sourcing - http://www.thenamessourcer.com/2010/03/x-ray-search-or-site-search-very-basic.html
I said this is a quick post, and so I’ll keep it that way.
Knowing what I wanted to find, I put together a Boolean query that incorporated the keywords and keyword phrases that I wanted to target. This may also include keywords or phrases that you don’t want in the query which is important when doing a site search of LinkedIn. This query could be plugged into any search engine though some minor modifications might need to be made depending on which ones you use.
A sample query may look like this:
site:linkedin.com (“plant manager” OR “operations manager” OR “engineering manager”) AND (metals OR copper OR aluminum OR steel OR etc…….) AND (company name OR company name OR etc…..) -recruiter (inurl:pub | inurl:in) -intitle:directory
This would target people by title and by the material they’ve worked with and the company they’ve worked at (or for). I’ve made sure that the results “screen out” recruiters as many recruiters add keywords related to the industry they recruit in. It’s also important to make sure that you’re getting actual public profiles and not results from the large directory listing.
I could go on and on, but that would take away from my point. Key to realize is that at times an internal search engine may not deliver the results you want. I can’t say for sure why the LinkedIn engine was not delivering the results I wanted on that day. However, instead of wasting time, my next step was to use site or x-ray search to indeed verify that the results I knew were there, actually were.
And were they? Yes!!
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