Are you a Recruiter looking for talent online? It didn’t use to be some years ago, but now searching for online resumes on Google is a bit of a pain. We need to use advanced operators (intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) and add keywords. Then, we need to exclude job posts (-job -jobs -careers …). Need to exclude resume samples and templates (-sample -example…). Even then, the results will be populated by partial resumes and search pages from the sites that will try to sell us access to their resume collections. We can narrow the search down by specifying the format (filetype:PDF OR filetype:Doc…), but if we do so, we’ll be missing the resumes shared in online document storage sites… Not easy!

Attention Recruiters: there’s a free resume database, easy to search, that few know about. It is quietly built and populated by hundreds of records daily.

Here’s (an amazing, unexpected) resume search example; before you read further, just go ahead and try it!

resume “risk management” consultant “gmail.com”

Note that I didn’t use any advanced Boolean operators and didn’t need to exclude tons of “false positives” such as job posts and resume templates.

This search is very broad; to find target resumes we would need to narrow it down or filter the results. But the results are almost all resumes.

Here’s what the search screen looks like:

The secret of easily finding resumes is that I used Google Image Search instead of the Google web search.

Believe it or not, that’s all there is to it.

Here are a couple more examples, for your surprise and enjoyment:

• resume account manager e-commerce “gmail.com” OH
• resume it auditor “gmail.com” FL

For this type of sourcing to be more on target, we can narrow the results down… by color. Let’s look at the black-and-white results only:

resume SaaS B2B account executive

Here’s what this search looks like:

Narrow the search down to JPEG files only, for even better precision:

resume iOS SDK gmail 408

(408 is one of the San Francisco Bay Area phone codes).

So why does image search work so well to find resumes? The reason behind it is a top business network’s acquisition of a document storage site. The Social Network encourages its members to add resumes to their profiles using the storage site. While the Network doesn’t give Recruiters any way to search within those resumes (either free or paid) – Google does. We just need to switch to the Image search on Google vs. the general Web search. These documents are ranked quite high in Google search, so we’ll find many.

I would be glad to connect – please check out my profile on the Social Network.