Should SourceCon become the site of a British murder mystery, never fear. We have our own Hercule Poirot or Inspector Morse to solve the case. Irina Shamaeva, Partner and Chief Sourcer of Brain Gain Recruiting, is as persistent as a detective. We’ll get more evidence of Irina’s expertise during the paid resource panel discussion at the SourceCon conference on October 14.

You were once an engineer. In 2003, you started BrainGain Recruiting. What made you change direction?

I wouldn’t say this was a long-planned change but it fits my personality really well. Software engineering was fun but not social enough for my taste. I had loved referring friends to jobs, had positive experience being placed by recruiters, and did well searching for employees as a hiring manager. I tried recruiting as an experiment back in 2003. It has allowed me to use my intuition, along with technical skills, resourcefulness, and creativity, and the change happened.

From an engineering perspective, what could most sourcers do differently to be more productive?

Sourcers could warm up to thinking out of the box vs. using pre-packaged “Boolean strings.” A sourcer needn’t be technical but some concepts of what’s going on underneath a search could help in getting better results and

enjoying the process. Sourcers could also look into productivity tools for collecting and parsing information; this side of sourcing is often neglected. Automated matching or searching rarely works, but automated sorting and parsing does.

You also run several communities for sourcers, Boolean Strings LinkedIn Group, Boolean Strings Network and the Twitter for Sourcing and Recruiting Group. You also write a blog. How do you find the time to be so generous? Do you think it is important to contribute to the sourcing community?

In 2009, when I started the first Boolean Strings group, I realized how huge the need for this type of knowledge was; it still is. This coincides with my desire to express myself, be creative, and be helpful. Since I source hands-on daily, it doesn’t take any extra time to invent new tricks; they just pop up while working. I’ve met some great people in the industry and appreciated the exchange of ideas. By now the Boolean Strings community has over 15,000 people from 65 countries.

Let’s talk Twitter for Sourcing (one of my favorite topics). Do you find proactively searching Twitter to be productive for most searches?

Sorry, I almost never use Twitter for searching. I do use it for cross-referencing candidates and also for branding my services and chatting with fellow sourcers. Cross-referencing and exploring “distributed profiles” is one of my favorite topics.

Please share a favorite Twitter sourcing tip.

The “Find Friends” function is a favorite tip. One can upload a list of email addresses (using a dummy gmail account) and discover those people on Twitter. The same trick works wonderfully on other major networks. I will

stop here, not to say too much .

Tell us a bit more about Irina. When you’re not sourcing, leading communities and running a business, what do you like to do for fun?

I love spending time with my wonderful children, the outdoors, free-form dancing, yoga, and watching British murder mysteries.

You won the SourceCon challenge in 2010 by being tenacious, digging deep, and being creative. Do most sourcing projects require such tenacity and creativity? What inspires you? What would you recommend to the average recruiter to improve creativity?

Thank you! That was fun. The SC challenges seem to be the perfect place for combining the right and the left brain; kudos to their creators by the way! Challenges inspire me. I am also very happy for my partner Julia Tverskaya who won the first challenge in 2011.

My recommendation regarding sourcing tools and creativity would be to be unafraid of experimenting, be open to change, and try not to control things that can’t be controlled anyway.

Anything else you’d like to learn from Irina? Ask in the comments below.

Stay tuned as we bring you more interviews from the presenters for the upcoming SourceCon conference in Silicon Valley, October 12-14. Don’t forget to register – we’ll see you there!

We asked Irina to share with us how she solved the contest puzzle:

To start with, I don’t know who designed the contest but it was very nicely designed! Every piece of information that showed up at along the way was meaningful and you really needed to pay attention.

Several of us (who guessed to scan QR Code from a sourcecon post with instructions) got to start at noon Eastern on Wednesday, with a shout from Twitter: GO! There was a handwritten message from someone on the Sourcecon site, signed “J”. The type of detail listed, such as degrees, made me think of LinkedIn profiles. If you check out the list of people on LinkedIn attending the event in DC, the person in question is one of them; it’s the mysterious Mr. John Essee. The message had so much overlap with John’s profile, it left no doubts.

I had thought that was all there is, and was rather disappointed – but it turned out there was more to discover. Mr. Esse is a book lover and had posted an Amazon reading list on his profile. A Google search using his name, “amazon”, and the book title “Facebook for Dummies” leads to John mentioning “sourcecon at why mail dot com” in a book review. (Oh, and John’s Twitter account repeats the author’s name, Pearlman.) Since John “likes phonetics”, I sent an email to sourcecon@ymail.com.

That was still not enough, as an auto-reponse told me. I had suspected that, since Facebook had been mentioned so many times by then. Looking up John using the email on FB, we see the same John’s profile photo, but the name is now “John Sc”; no wonder he couldn’t be found by name. I became friends with John, who was nice enough to quickly accepted my invitation.

When I got onto John’s  FB page I saw a competitor already there. Oh my! The competition was tough. The profile on FB had the info tab with a phone number to call and the final instructions on the answering machine. It seems that at least two of us got to this place almost at the same time. At last it was clear that it’s over.

For her efforts, Irina has won a complimentary pass to attend SourceCon at the International Spy Museum. Congratulations, Irina!

And – congratulations to ALL of the folks who participated in this contest – several of who completed it literally moments after Irina. The competition was fierce – we hope you all had a blast on the hunt and hope to see you in D.C. in a few weeks!

My daily work is a lot about looking for and making initial contacts with potential candidates for our job orders at Brain Gain Recruiting. I think that this how-to article should be easily applicable to any lead generation. The methods suggested below are free for all and are mostly Google-based.

Let’s take an example. Suppose I am looking for a…

“Java/J2EE Engineer with good knowledge of the server side development and experience in software methodologies, especially Agile, living within 25 miles from Santa Clara, CA.” The employer named several competitors that are target companies for this search. The employer has a Dice account and has asked to only search for people outside of major job boards.

Let’s begin.

Step 1. Find a limited number of resumes and profiles of people who would be “the best” and contact them in a very personal manner.

a) Look for resumes on Google that are: 1) recent, 2) have as many keywords as possible, 3) are local to Santa Clara. As an example, you can run this search (this is just an example to show my approach; you could modify this string to your liking):

j2ee agile engineer | developer server intitle:resume | inurl:resume 408 OR 650 OR “Bay Area”

You can also do a few variations in order to find resumes:

j2ee agile engineer | developer server ~resume 408 OR 650 OR “Bay Area” -job -jobs -careers

j2ee agile engineer | developer server ext:pdf | ext:doc 408 OR 650 OR “Bay Area” -job -jobs -careers

b) Look for profiles. Let’s look on LinkedIn using X-ray via Google:

“Bay Area” j2ee agile engineer | developer server site:linkedin.com -intitle:answers -intitle:directory

(Have a large number of connections? Look using your LinkedIn account as well.)

Now, contact these great J2EE Server people in a very personal manner.

How? Review the resumes and the profiles. If the person seems outstanding, also do a bit of investigation; at least type his/her name into Google and see what comes up.

Write an interesting email to every person on this list; say that their background is impressive and mention a fact about them. Perhaps you also liked some graphic on their site? Are you both interested in soccer? A tiny personal touch can help to get conversation going.

If you are not sure that the person is looking for a new job, be gentle in your email: ask for his/her advice on finding others for this type of work or even just ask about his/her expertise. (Many of us know that this is a better way to start your communication with a “passive” candidate than asking whether they would want to interview for a job).

Follow up with a call. If you are going to call, it certainly makes sense to do some Internet research on that person beforehand.

You will find the contact information on the resumes but not on profiles. For profiles, you have to do some additional work. As an example, you can figure out the email address knowing the company and its email pattern; or send these people a message on LinkedIn if you belong to the same group, or do other applicable things. (I can write a whole separate blog post on this.)

Step 2. Now, relax your Google resume search: drop some keywords or drop the page age requirement or drop the location keywords etc.

Look only for resumes to start with. As an example, use the string with no location restriction:

j2ee agile engineer | developer server ~resume -job -jobs -careers.

Other things to do with the initial string may include: use “methodology” instead of “agile“; try removing the word server; try using architect or lead or programmer instead of the above titles etc. Make sure the number of results remains reasonably low (under a few thousand), otherwise you are likely to get too many irrelevant results.

You can collect email addresses by hand, or using Contact Capture from Broadlook or some other tool.

Now you are about to write to many people who are still likely to be fine candidates. Perhaps you can’t be as personal any more. Send them a relatively short note asking “whether they might know someone who would be qualified…”. Your email doesn’t need to feel impersonal to these people. Try sending your draft email to yourself and see how it feels. Always send individual emails, or use an email merge tool to send your email separately to every person.

Do not overload your email with too many details and (pretty much any) graphics.

Do not ask these people about too many things such as several open jobs. Do not expect them to click on links to your pages; put enough information right there in the email.

MS Word and Outlook will work well as email merge tools. Anybody you email should be able to ask you to stop emailing.

Step 3. Now, look for profiles, also having relaxed your search. The problem here is that you are looking to contact many people but there’s no published contact info for most of them. A work around in terms of efficiency may be to look for people from a particular company (and do this for every target company). If you get first, last names from LinkedIn and know the company’s email pattern, you could create an email list. Tell these people that you saw their profile on LinkedIn. Mention their company for a personal touch. If you are writing to someone’s work address, be careful about the subject; it’s probably best for the subject not to mention “job openings”.

Step 4. Look for contact information of people who might be relevant to your search. In particular, you can look for email addresses. There are so many places where you could look. Look on forums, conference sites, blogs, etc.

There are many search strings to help to look for email addresses. As just one example, including the work gmail in your search string is likely to bring gmail.com addresses.

Let’s do this for a (theoretical, just to make my point) example; the search below will bring some resumes but will mostly bring non-resumes:

-resume j2ee agile engineer | developer server -job -jobs -careers “email ** com”

We did use relevant keywords but there’s absolutely no guarantee that every email address on the result pages belongs to a software engineer.

Collect email addresses carefully, or you may accidentally grab emails from a high school alumni site or a nonprofit these people belong to. It’s useful to review your email list before you send out your email, and perhaps do some additional filtering. More recent pages found with more relevant keywords may be slightly more reliable in bringing in relevant addresses. After your email list is complied, you can remove addresses that come from irrelevant companies/domain names. Remove email addresses that come from a different country (ending in a two-letter country abbreviation such as .uk, .in etc.)

You could also try to find these people elsewhere and get more information about them before you write to them.

Be ready to respond. As a result of this process, I often get referrals, suggestions where to post the job, etc. Sometimes, also, one of my “best” candidates would reply saying that she doesn’t know anybody else but she is interested in the job herself!

Irina Shamaeva is an Executive Recruiter and an Expert Sourcer. For the past 5 years she has been a Partner with Brain Gain Recruiting, placing senior full time employees in IT, Strategy Consulting, and Finances. She has an MS in Mathematics and a strong technical background.

Irina runs fast growing “Boolean Strings” Groups on LinkedIn and Recruiting Blogs. She organized the Boolean Contest for Recruiters and Sourcers in 2008. Read more on her blog. Irina’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.