Want to maximise your LinkedIn search results? Become a LinkedIn Ghostbuster
Did you know every time that you do a search for people on LinkedIn, there are many more people that could be suitable for your search, but you just won’t find them. Ever. There are probably some really awesome candidates in there as well!
These are the Linkedin Ghosts - candidates you think are there but can never see! [This excellent phrase originates from Glen Cathey from a presentation he did recently (link at bottom of post)]
So, why can’t you find these LinkedIn ghosts?
Answer: you are not looking for them properly!
To find them you need to put your overalls on and strap on your Proton Pack and go searching for them. You need to become a Linkedin Ghostbuster!!
What I am of course referring to is the social media ectoplasm - user generated content! This is completely out of your control and makes your life as a recruiter/resourcer/researcher that much harder! The secret powers of your own Proton Pack are synonyms and the word “OR”. (Sorry if you were expecting some new tool, platform or software!)
As Glen says - for every search you do on LinkedIn you immediately create ghosts. These ghosts are all the candidates you have immediately excluded from your search because you haven’t taken the effort to use the right keywords to find them.
For example, searching for a Sales Representative (what the job title says) in London, LinkedIn gives me 2940 results. But what about all the people that do a similar job but call themselves something different >> time for a few synonyms!
“sales representative” OR “Sales executive” OR “sales rep” OR “business development manager” OR “business development executive” OR “account executive” OR “sales account manager” gives me 51,404 search results.
That’s a lot of “ghosts” that have been “found” just by some simple lateral thinking. (Obviously you would add other filters into this, but you get the idea)
And if you think it just applies to job titles, you would be mistaken. Glen gives the example of company names also being described differently by their own employees!
PWC = 63.625 results
PriceWaterhouse Coopers = 5,804 results
PriceWaterhouse =1,243 results
Price Waterhouse Coopers = 56,076 results
Now do you see what I mean about user generated content - it really can be messy, just like ectoplasm!
So before you embark on searching on LinkedIn, first take the time to understand all the different words, descriptions and titles that you could use to find your target people. Synonyms. Then build your search strings accordingly AND save them! Either save the search in LinkedIn or save the string to file on your desktop for next time.
So what are you waiting for, go strap on your Proton pack and find yourself some ghosts!
Glen Cathey’s recent keynote he delivered at a LinkedIn conference.He also talked about stealing cars and picking apples! Worth watching.
Picture credit: Flickr
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Comments 4
Irina Shamaeva (@braingain)
These are great thoughts and Glen’s presentation is impressive, as usual.
I have slightly different views on some points that a “perfectionist” like Glen may be after, that I’d like to share:
1. I think it’s OK not to find a candidate(s) who is a match. The goal is interviews and placements, and I’m looking for a reasonable pipeline and that one candidate who makes it. It’s just not possible to find every person who’s a match in a reasonable time frame.
2. It’s right to vary the search keywords, add synonyms, and have groups in mind. This advice alone will make many recruiters more productive in their searches. However, in my estimate, about 90% of people on LinkedIn are very hard or impossible to find using keywords, because they didn’t fill out their profiles. Those people could be found by searching elsewhere and cross-referencing on LinkedIn. Or, you could assume that a person with a certain title at a certain company likely has the skills you are after, because it’s what they do at that company.
3. It’s fun to write 2,000 character searches, but practical searches need to be short and clear. The exception may be the “best schools” and “target companies” - but ONLY if those long search strings bring back short lists of results. Otherwise it makes sense to search (say, for your target companies) in turn.
4. LinkedIn Recruiter shows *exactly the same search results* as any other account. The difference may be in the number of results displayed, 1,000 vs. 700 in Talent Finder, and, in rare cases - only when the person is (1) not in your network, (2) has turned off their public profile, - extra data visibility.
The extra search facets in the Recruiter work only for that 10% of the LinkedIn members that have filled out their profiles.
Andy Headworth
Irina,
Thanks for the reply. A good heads up - but I just wanted to clarify that (like you) I think the aim on LinkedIn is about getting the search right to produce a tight manageable set of accurate results. From my recent experiences with recruiters, it would seem the use of keyword searching is still a novelty!! Seriously!
Like you and Glen, I try to get people thinking about what they are searching for and where they need to be looking for them within a LinkedIn search.
For all the people that ‘reckon’ they are using LinkedIn well, I estimate that only <15% actually are!
Andy
Glen Cathey
Andy,
Thank you for this post - I appreciate the Ghostbuster analogy on a number of levels and can tell by your content that you really grasp the importance of the main concepts I talked about in that LinkedIn video, and a surprisingly large number of people don’t.
I also have to admit I enjoyed the ectoplasm reference.
Irina,
Thank you for your kind words, although I would consider myself an “exhaustionist” rather than a perfectionist.
To your points:
1. The goal is always interviews and placements - that’s what I help people achieve on a daily basis. We have clients for whom we fill over 100 positions per week, and in some cases - over 100 positions in a single day (how’s that for scale?!?). Finding one, two, or even ten great candidates quickly is easy. However, it’s challenging when you’re hiring at volume for the same profile month after month, year after year, as many corporate and RPO recruiters are challenged to do. You can easily bottom out the obvious matches quickly, and that’s when it takes some search gynmastics to uncover more people than what the usual and customary searches return.
2. I agree with you on your high estimate on the number of people on LinkedIn than cannot be found via usual and customary search methods. To find the remainder requires outside-of-the-box methods.
3. It’s not only fun, but practical (e.g., filling job openings) to write long search strings - and not just for schools and companies. That LinkedIn video is edited to 8 minutes from a 30 minute presentation, which I usually deliver in 60 minutes.
4. I agree - if you know what you’re doing, you can accomplish nearly anything you need to in terms of finding people with a free LinkedIn account. I used a free account for over 7 years, but I have to admit, I do enjoy and benefit from my current LinkedIn Recruiter account, and I would miss it if I no longer had it.
To all - happy hunting!
StephenTurnock
Hi All, Andy, Irena & Glenn..
Recruiters just love the search part don’t they!.. and this is also the drudgery part - e.g. wading through those lists. I’m sure it’s a labour of love sometimes for many even while it is the obstacle and hindrance to that next placement in a timely manner - which is of course the desired outcome. Yet still, for some time now, many recruiters still build lists every single day which are not always the best starting point since they already exclude people through improper use of keywords – e.g. not putting in the effort at the start. It’s a haunted freaky horror show of ghouls and ghosts save for a little thought at the outset.
It got me thinking about the roots of these haunting evils which go back to the early Ghostbuster years of circa 1984 , where speedy success was then about organising your candidates in a fashion that those cupboards full of paper CV’s would hold the envy of any librarian - each specially coded with location grids, a labyrinth of job tiles and associated disciplines, industry type, qualifications, skills and weightings of experience and where applicable, the candidates actual availability. This was a pretty efficient system especially in conjunction with the ‘hot files’ for those candidates available right now and those known to be not available but ‘looking’ for a move [active] gleamed from our regular talking to the database [passives] on a regular basis or while step-stoning our way via referrals ! Then, with the treasured job spec from your client hiring manager in hand, you could soon have your hands on a bunch of very relevant CV’s to start ‘talking’ to.
Now enter the early search systems in the late 80’s that were replacing those cupboards of meticulously filed CV’s. These were your standard DB2 ilk and largely keyword/codes based hence search results were only as good as the knowledge of the initial coders - which if not done by actual recruiters, were sometimes expertly coded by trained keyword coders and often included every conceivable synonym - making it easier for the recruiter doing the searching not to miss anyone down the line.
Next arriving was the indexing capability of more powerful databases and the ease of free text “phrase search” together with fuzzy* logic . Arriving at the same time was the en masse CV era as well as the breed of the more transactional / sales recruiter. The new database cleverness then had tended to help encourage recruiters to forget the need in the understanding of how data is stored and therefore be less inclined in getting to grips with even the basics of Boolean and the thought process associated with keywords.
At this time, Increasing demands for volumes by those recruitment models and supply frameworks based on managed solutions and outsourcing processes in some cases disenfranchised recruiters further in a lesser understanding of the actual role and interpretation of the client requirement.
And today, as we manage increasingly bigger data everywhere and contemplate sourcing local and external sources that includes the noisy user generated content out in the clouds [ the social media ectoplasm] we are managing vastly bigger ‘long’ and ‘short lists hence recruiters putting efforts back into understanding how to produce better quality long lists at the outset e.g. tighter more manageable set of accurate results as Andy says, just has to be a winner in getting to the better shortlist with better signal!
The next challenge, not least in how to engage innovatively and with a now increasingly mobile and dynamic network [as opposed to just a static ‘list of people’], but also in the useful retention of that knowledge, analysis of it together with updating, refining and sharing this ‘value’ with your co-recruiters within your organisation to become your efficient pipeline[s] of talent.