Do you X-ray?

No? What’s X-ray? Have I lost you already? Okay then, let me start at the beginning..…

When we search the internet for information, most of us open up a search engine in our browser – in fact, most of us open up the world’s No.1 search engine – Google. If we don’t use Google, then we are likely to open up the world’s No.2 search engine – YouTube, which, yes you guessed it is owned by Google. And then of course there are Bing and all the others available too.

If we want to find new candidates for our clients, we might use a search engine, but in reality most of us head straight to LinkedIn and try our luck there.

The problem with LinkedIn

The problem is that this requires us to have an account, and we can only find people who are linked to us in our network. For a free LinkedIn account this limits us to 100 results, which are ordered by our relationship with that person, i.e. 1st, 2nd, or 3rd tier. If we want more results and a better level of information LinkedIn is happy for us to buy up to a premium or recruiter level account, but this can be very expensive.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get unlimited results from inside and outside our LinkedIn network – as well as the ability to use a wildcard search term “*” to represent missing words in a keyword phrase, search multiple locations and countries, search date fields, get away from a results order based on our connections, and be able to accurately search languages?

Well you can, and its done using X-ray searching.

Finding candidates using social media by X-ray searching

X-ray searching is a method of interrogating the data in a specific web site using Google. It’s a great way to find exactly what you are looking for but it does require a little more understanding of Boolean than just putting some key words in to a search engine.

If we X-ray search LinkedIn we can find anyone we like, as long as they have their profile’s set to public, which most people do.

I’ve been raving about the benefits of X-ray searching for many years – the problem has been that it’s a little bit complicated. Until now that is.

So how do you do it?

You start your search with ‘site:’ to tell Google to look in that site only and then for basic search you need to add in the following:

site:linkedin.com (or uk.linkedin for a UK only search) then

(inurl:com/pub | inurl:com/in) -inurl:pub/dir

then your criteria, e.g. “oxford” accountant

Have I lost you again? Right, here’s the world’s best kept secret and I want to share it with you now.

The world’s best recruitment secret – THE ultimate X-ray short cut

A very smart group of people at a company called Clever Biscuit formed project team to build a tool to help recruiters search and they called it RecruitEm. Recruitem is completely anonymous, absolutely free and is not at all associated with LinkedIn. But most importantly it does X-ray searching for you!

It also helps you to X-ray Google +, Github, Xing, Stack Overflow, and Twitter!

Head over to recruitin.net and you can thank me later…..

(yes it’s spelt recruitin – that was it’s original name before the LinkedIn lawyers had a word)

Enjoy, it really is one of the best recruiter sites on the net.