Tutorial Tuesday - Starting a search online……..for Civil Engineers

Starting a search online……..for Civil Engineers

I was reading a post on RBC from Howie Appel – it’s here http://www.recruitingblogs.com/forum/topics/civil-engineering-resumes. So Howie needs Civil Engineers, preferably Professional Engineers (that’s the P.E. he alludes to) with DOT (Department of Transportation experience). This is a great topic for Tutorial Tuesday, let’s walk through a few search strings he could build to start sourcing!

I have a thing for Google, and I really like Chrome, especially the ability to just start plugging in my search string in the address bar. It’s a great place for me to play and beef up my search. So I’ll start really basic.

I’m going to look for resumes first – so let’s try this:

(inurl:resume OR intitle:resume OR inurl:cv OR intitle:cv OR inurl:vitae OR intitle:vitae) “civil engineer” pe dot

I get a lot of results, but I know we can get more and I know we can get better! We’re limiting ourselves with our keywords – so let’s expand them. We’ll re-write the abbreviation and utilize periods, and let’s also spell them out. Now let’s run the search like this:

(inurl:resume OR intitle:resume OR inurl:cv OR intitle:cv OR inurl:vitae OR intitle:vitae) "civil engineer" (pe OR p.e. OR "professional engineer") (dot OR D.O.T. OR "department of transportation")

And better yet, let’s go run it in Yahoo – because that’s my 2009 resolution –to break out of Google and use other engines regularly for basic Boolean search. My next step is keep my keywords the same but change up the types of documents I’m looking for and hit Yahoo again:

(inurl:”about me” OR intitle:”about me” OR inurl:profile OR intitle:profile OR inurl:bio OR intitle:bio) "civil engineer" (pe OR p.e. OR "professional engineer") (dot OR D.O.T. OR "department of transportation")

And then I’m going to try a FlipSearch, going after professional associations would be a great idea! So let’s try this string on Yahoo:

linkdomain:asce.org "civil engineer" (pe OR p.e. OR "professional engineer") (dot OR D.O.T. OR "department of transportation")

And then, I have to start in on XRay and LinkedIn is a source on my list, so let’s try this too:

site:linkedin.com civil engineer (pe OR p.e. OR "professional engineer") (dot OR D.O.T. OR "department of transportation")

Did you catch the changes in that last string? Obviously we’ve included site:linkedin.com but the quotes have been removed from “civil engineer” to open up our results on this particular site. It’s always good form to include –inurl:directory and –inurl:updates too, but for this first search, I’m going to keep them out and then add them in if I need to clean my results.

These strings work with just about any tough job opening you have and hopefully helped Howie do his sourcing with his in-house staff at lower cost. If you get stumped, drop me a line, or tweet me, I’d be happy to help. Wishing you a wonderful holiday and all the best in 2009!

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Sandeep on December 13, 2008 at 7:46am

Kelly,

One question, i feel that words like D.O.T. and p.e. should be in quotes as a search engine does not include OR ignores the words formed using special characters, period(.) in this case.

Your views please.

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Permalink Reply by Irina Shamaeva on December 14, 2008 at 12:18am

Sandeep,

You are right that Google ignores special characters (except in certain cases, like + or ~ in front of a word). You are suggesting quotes, but that won't help to include the special characters (.) either. Take the last example.
site:linkedin.com civil engineer (pe OR p.e. OR "professional engineer") (dot OR D.O.T. OR "department of transportation")
If you put p.e. and D.O.T. in quotes and search for
site:linkedin.com civil engineer (pe OR "p.e." OR "professional engineer") (dot OR "D.O.T." OR "department of transportation")
the results will be the same. Remove these words altogether
site:linkedin.com civil engineer (pe OR "professional engineer") (dot OR "department of transportation")
and the results will be the same again since the special charachter (.) was ignored.

What I like about this post is that Kelly not just presents a useful search string but explains the process of adjusting the string to get better results.

-Irina

Sandeep said:

Kelly,

One question, i feel that words like D.O.T. and p.e. should be in quotes as a search engine does not include OR ignores the words formed using special characters, period(.) in this case.

Your views please.

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Permalink Reply by Kelly Dingee on December 14, 2008 at 6:23am

Sandeep said:

Kelly,

One question, i feel that words like D.O.T. and p.e. should be in quotes as a search engine does not include OR ignores the words formed using special characters, period(.) in this case.

Your views please.

Hi Sandeep-

Irina is correct - your logic wants to put quotes around "p.e." but it is completely unnecessary and won't enhance your search results. I included p.e. as well as pe in the search string because I wanted to make sure I physically scanned my initial results for those key words when I reviewed them in Google.

That's one of my sourcing idiosyncracies. I did strike it from one of the searches when I re-ran it after reviewing your question and found it increased my results by 1. So no major difference at this time.

Thanks for taking the time to post a question - it was a good one!

Best,
Kelly