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A New LinkedIn X-Ray Tool for Sourcers and Recruiters by @sourcebreaker

Mar 4, 2015

bigstock-X-ray-of-both-human-hand-OK--27043520Our Technology Director extraordinaire, Dave Sherlock, has found a great new way for you to X-Ray search LinkedIn with 100% accuracy on Job Role, Company and Location.

The techniques I’m about to show you only work using Custom Search Engines configured for LinkedIn.

(Before clicking the below link to the CSE, please make sure you read the post below as otherwise you won’t know what special operators to use when searching, and it won’t work!)

Lucky then that we have a free one you can use by clicking this link!

This method may look complicated at first glance, but if you open the CSE and run the searches as you go, it will soon make perfect sense.

How it works

Start off with this, the core element of every search:

more:pagemap:person

To filter by Location, you put -location on the end, followed by a colon and the location you want to search:

more:pagemap:person-location:London

Want to search multiple locations? No problem! With this method, a comma with no space acts like OR:

more:pagemap:person-location:London,Leeds,Bristol

We also want to find people who are Managers. We follow the same format as before, but replace location with role.

more:pagemap:person-location:London,Leeds,Bristol more:pagemap:person-role:Manager

Still with me? Let’s take it up a notch

This method of X-Ray doesn’t support “quotation marks” when used with the filters, so to obtain results with two or more words, you need to use an asterisk – this guarantees the words will be in the title, but not necessarily next to each other. More often than not that’s a good thing anyway. Here we’re going to filter on Project Managers across the United Kingdom.

more:pagemap:person-location:United*Kingdom more:pagemap:person-role:Project*Manager

So what if we want to also return Programme Managers?

A bit unwieldy, but you need to match Manager with both Project and Programme, so it would look like this:

more:pagemap:person-location:United*Kingdom
more:pagemap:person-role:Project*Manager,Programme*Manager

Adding Companies

We’ve built a search to find us Project and Programme Managers in the UK, but now we want to be even more specific, focusing on particular companies.

The company falls under the role operator, so just insert another more:pagemap:person-role: followed by your target companies, separated with a comma.

more:pagemap:person-location:United*Kingdom
more:pagemap:person-role:Project*Manager,Programme*Manager
more:pagemap:person-role:Accenture,Capgemini,IBM,Steria,Tata

And finally, adding standard search terms

This bit is as it ever was, add in keywords that you want to see in candidate profiles. You can use “quotation marks” and the standard operators you’d usually include in an X-Ray search. In this example, we’re going to go for a technology focused candidate, so throw in a few words that will generally mean their expertise is in technology..

more:pagemap:person-location:United*Kingdom
more:pagemap:person-role:Project*Manager,Programme*Manager
more:pagemap:person-role:Accenture,Capgemini,IBM,Steria,Tata
Cisco|VMware|Citrix|ITIL

Give me Use Cases

So as you’ll be able to see if you’ve run the search yourself, you’ve got 100% accurate results. In case that wasn’t enough for you to get your teeth into, here are some practical use cases that will make life easier for you..

Leads – Find senior Technology professionals, likely to have hiring power, in New York, who’ve just started new jobs…

more:pagemap:person-role:Director,Manager,President,VP,Head more:pagemap:person-role:IT,Technology more:pagemap:person-location:New*York “January OR February 2015 * Present”

Easy pickings – Find Developers in London who have a publicly available email address

more:pagemap:person-role:Developer more:pagemap:person-location:London gmail.com OR yahoo.com OR hotmail.com OR gmail.co.uk OR yahoo.co.uk OR hotmail.co.uk -“property developer” -“business developer”

Even easier pickings – Find Developers in London who have a publicly available phone number

more:pagemap:person-role:Developer,Programmer,Engineer more:pagemap:person-location:London PHP HTML “7000..7999 101..999999” -“property developer” -“business developer” -nexus

This is still a new technique to us as well, so for the sourcing experts out there who like to improve and also break stuff, we’d love to hear your feedback and new tricks that can be applied to this. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

This post originally appeared on sourcebreaker.com.