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May 5, 2017
This article is part of a series called Editor's Pick.

Do you have the attention span of a five-year-old? I do. In fact, many great sourcers have short attention spans. If you had to read that sentence twice, or perhaps skipped the verbiage in this article and gone straight to the images and search strings, you might have SADD (sourcing attention deficit disorder). Squirrel!

It’s not our fault that we suffer from SADD. I blame resumes. They are sad and boring. Resumes are an essential part of our job, but after viewing thousands of resumes in my career, I need more. I need images. I need a life! I need people.

When I first started sourcing, I used to make a collage of all the images that candidates placed on their resumes. I thought this was an odd habit (don’t judge me), but then I realized how much I like to spice things up and how much I like, well, looking at other people. So I started to dabble in image sourcing. I took advice from many people who are smarter than I (Laura Stoker, Shally Steckerl, Holly Mallowes, Mark Tortorici and Jim Stroud to name a few influencers).

Using images to source has been a featured in many past SourceCon presentations. Mallowes nailed it in Fall of 2016. Steckerl was on fire in Spring of 2016, and I even covered it in the Fall of 2015. In fact, I can’t recall a SourceCon that didn’t cover this topic. We clearly can’t get enough.

Image searching is fun and easy. It’s our antibiotic to SADD. It’s unique, creative and it works! To start, you need to know Boolean. One of the many beautiful aspects of Google is that it allows us to use Boolean commands in a Google Image search.

Let’s start with the basics.

resume “financial (planner OR advisor OR consultant OR representative)” (cfp OR cpa) “new york” -jobs -sample

Great, easy. But let’s take a look at that same search in Google Images.

Hooray, people! But wait, there’s more. Select, Tools, Color, Black and White.

Now I can see those boring black and white resumes.

Want to bring back those beautiful faces? Select Type and Face.

To bring back those lovely faces in color, just adjust Black and White to Any Color, and you’ll get a new set of faces to source.

Remove the word “resume” in the search, and you’ll get even more viable candidates. Remember, not every financial advisor will have their resume posted on the interwebs.

“financial (planner OR advisor OR consultant OR representative)” (cfp OR cpa) “new york” -jobs -sample

Since financial advisors in New York appear to lack diversity, change up the search and add a few pronouns and gender specific terms.

(she OR her OR female OR woman OR women) “financial (planner OR advisor OR consultant OR representative)” (cfp OR cpa) “new york” -jobs

Much better. If you’re interested in targeting a group of people, try searching for common terms that could be used to identify a list of names in a picture. It is recommended to search Any Type of image on this search and not solely Face.

(“right to left” OR “left to right” OR “l to r” OR “r to l”) “financial (planner OR advisor OR consultant OR representative)” (cfp OR cpa) “new york” -jobs

Lastly, don’t forget to search for our coveted award winners.

(finalists OR award OR congratulations OR honored OR received) “financial (planner OR advisor OR consultant OR representative)” (cfp OR cpa) “new york” -jobs

 

Did you make it to the end of this post? Good for you. You’re one step closer to curing your SADD. Spice up your search and live a little. These techniques have been around for years. Some of this images can even be found on other websites. Just right click and select Search Google for Image. But, we already knew that, right? After all, old school is the new school.

 

This post was inspired by Blake Thiess’ article on Sourcing With Images.

This article is part of a series called Editor's Pick.
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