Some of us, when starting a new search, go to LinkedIn, type a few terms - including, perhaps, a title and some skills - into the Keywords field in people search and try to assess the volume of potential candidates. However, if you do so, your answers may be flawed.

The LinkedIn Boolean Search Help…

LinkedIn has documented the operators firstname:, lastname:, title:, company:, and school:. They are redundant because we can search using the relevant textboxes. But it turns out there are many more search operators that work on LinkedIn.

Below is a list of LinkedIn search operators that work with any basic or…

Did you know that Google can search for symbols - including these: ☎, ☏, and ✆? We can use this capability to look for publicly posted phone numbers. Use an area code to find phone numbers in a target location.

Here is an example:…

Recently LinkedIn switched the former Rapportive tool to become Sales Navigator extension, which works in Chrome/Gmail. We've all experienced some intermittent problems with the tool.

Here is a way to uncover all that that extension does - even without the need for Chrome or Gmail. This link…

To the best of my knowledge, these are trustworthy, informative posts, correctly outlining Google's advanced search syntax as of now:

• Google Help (partial list; Google's Help no longer lists all of the operators)…

If you work at a recruiting agency, the following Boolean Strings would be useful for generating new business.

1) Find people who have recently started new jobs:

site:linkedin.com…

AngelList has recently introduced a "sourcing" function. To source on AngelList, you need to define your company and post a job. Then, press the menu item "Recruit" to launch the Sourcing function:

The free search filters AngelList offers for Sourcing include keywords, role, location, looking for full/part-time, work authorization, years of experience, and skills. Many members have their resumes and social profile URLs attached to their…

Lots has been said about using the natural language to search for potential candidates. Examples would be "I am a Software Engineer at Microsoft" or …

Association sites are an excellent source of professional and contact information. Are you familiar with associations in your industry? Finding them is as easy as Googling for <industry name> <location name> association.

How would you research an unfamiliar association site? When I research an association site, I am interested in pages with lists of members and in contact information (that will let me look up additional…

I must admit that until I started using the search technique that I am about to describe, I did not realize that a significant number of LinkedIn members customize their Headlines. I had expected most members to stay with the default Headline, which is <Job Title> at <Company>. Not true. It won't be easy to estimate the percentage of customized Headlines, but they are quite common.

What members put in Headlines often falls into one of these…

These are the top fifteen programming languages on Github, the top site where engineers collaborate on creating software. Scroll down on the advanced search dialog  and you will see the lo-o-o-o-ong choice of the languages, starting with the 24 most popular, then, listing "everything else":

Github also offers to search for languages using the…

Do you use LinkedIn Recruiter? Read on.

Given the UI design for advanced people search dialog in LinkedIn Recruiter (that I would call user-unfriendly), there couldn't possibly be a clean resolution for the vague "companies or boolean" field:

Indeed, if there is one word entered, which is a company name (like Apple), will it be looking for employees of that particular company (Apple) or for people from all the companies with this…

How can we search for pages local to a particular country?

For starters, there are country code top-level domains. To find pages that belong to a country-level domain, we can simply use X-Ray:

site:za 

But there are many other domains, that don't point to a location.…

Signaling that one is "Open to New Opportunities" without alarming your boss is certainly a good idea for a job seeker. Recently, LinkedIn introduced this feature.

If you are a job seeker, there are a couple of things to be aware of…

Want to search the Web like a Master? Here is a fast way to get there.

Searching the Web is not Rocket Science. Everyone can learn to search even for complex information, such as professional bios, quite efficiently, following the three steps that I am about to describe. And the good news is, you do not necessarily have to use advanced search operators to…

Many Sourcers know how to locate lists of professionals in Excel format by using the operator filetype: and the typical column headings, such as name, title, company, and email. Indeed, by adding keywords to a search like filetype:xls name title company email we can find lists of professionals whose background we can…

If you use LinkedIn Recruiter (LIR) and have upgraded to the long-awaited new User Interface and Search - have you noticed that previously working searches no longer produce the expected results? The idea behind the redesign was to provide suggestions - for example, for job titles. It's a good idea and should be of help, but...

Let me outline what has happened around the…

The content below, backed up by examples, has immediate practical implications.

Over the last few years, Google has made algorithm advances in the area of semantic search. Last Fall Google told us that…

Remember, when LinkedIn acquired this company:

... and integrated its functionality into the main product, we got this menu item - Contacts. I became a fan of it early on. The Contacts became the foundation of…

For starters, Prophet is not new any longer but has gained much-deserved popularity since it was introduced and is absolutely worth using.

In the past few months, I’ve noticed a myriad of other tools, all of which will try to find an email address, starting from a social profile or, in some cases, from the persons’ and…