My recruitment webinar this week was all about making contact with candidates particularly when you may not have all their contact details. The Social Media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook really limit a recruiters ability to get in touch and unless you already have their details on your ATS or recruitment system it can be a real challenge to make contact.

LinkedIn doesn’t like recruiters.

More and more Linkedin is limiting the information it will give you about the people you find. To get good information, you need to be directly connected but Linkedin are also trying to make it difficult for you to connect.

When searching on linkedin moving from the search results to view peoples profiles, linkedin works as follows

1^st degree connections

Full profile is visible, send messages, see email or other contact details.

 2^nd degree connections

See most of the profile, can’t send messages (only InMail, which LI charge for) can’t see contact details such as email addresses.

 3^rd degree connections

Can’t see their full name, can’t send messages, can’t invite them to connect, can see any email or other contact details.

 Profiles outside of your network are even further limited.

However, LinkedIn does allow you to send messages to 1^st, 2^nd 3^rd and group connections. To see this, go to a group and hover over the name of someone posting to the group. In this circumstance Linkedin does allow you to message and send invite connections.

In my webinar I demonstrate another method to message 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and group connections by knowing their ID this is also a very useful way to message people when LinkedIn is trying to make life difficult for you. This is a wonderfully useful way to message people and a trick evvery recruiter should know (I have a range of other trick like this one and they can be found on some of my other recruitment blog articles)

Be careful with inviting people to connect, if too many of them say they do not know you LinkedIn will block you from inviting anyone else without their email address.

Google Search.

The are a range of Boolean search strings for finding email addresses and other information. Here is one from Martin Lee

 site:uk.linkedin.com "qualified accountant" (email | gmail | co.uk | com | hotmail) -dir -~jobs

Some time ago I wrote a very useful Google Custom Search to find candidates and their linkedIn profiles. This search is here (Search LinkedIn) and is a really useful free tool.

Type it into Google and see what happens. Martin also recommends using http://eel.surf7.net.my/ which is a great way to strip out the email addresses from the result. I also like Outwit hub which does the same thing.

The problem with Google search for email addresses however is that the person you are looking for may not have their email address on the internet when Google can find it.  Very often however the email address of the person you are looking for will be reasonable obvious.  If you know their employers domain (eg intel-sw.com) then their email address is likely to be of the same format of everyone else in that company.

Once you guess an email address then http://www.verifyemailaddress.org/ is one of many email verification sites that can check your best guess. I also use LinkedIn as in group invite will let you know if this email address relates to a linkedin profile.

Call people:

Skype has 663 million registered users at September 2011. Ok Facebook has 845 million but Skype is still a good bit bigger than the population of the USA. Skype also allows you to search for and message/call people simply by knowing their name. Skype seems very underutilized in the recruitment space and this seems to be a missed opportunity.

Is it just me or does it seem that many recruiters seem to be nervous about picking up the phone. The internet seems to have provide the telephobic with an excuse to avoid actually talking to people and this is not good.

Google Plus:

All profiles are relatively new and therefore up to date, the information is easily searchable and Google Plus has no problem giving you all the contact information they have. Google plus is a fantastic resource for recruiters. Google Plus It has not achieved the stickyness of Facebook (people spend a whole lot more time on FB than GP) but it is a wonderful resource to find contact details.

A simple x-ray search of Google Plus is

site:plus.google.com "Occupation * * Recruitment Consultant"

To round off the webinar I mention other useful sites such as www.pipl.com, www.zoominfo.com and www.plaxo.com.

Finally, for a bit of fun, try the Google image search. https://www.google.com/imghp Upload a photo and Google will find sites on the internet where that image appears. This is a great way to link social profiles. It is also fascinating to discover that Google thinks I look like Arnold Schwarzenegger!!

I am running free recruitment webinars every fortnight. If you would like to know about the upcoming events then please connect with me on LinkedIn and I'll send you more details. Alternatively email me or visit my blog.

Shane McCusker

Intelligence Software

+447973828811

shane@intel-sw.com