If you’ve been following us on LinkedIn or Instagram, you may have noticed we started posting regular sourcing challenges. Now you can stretch your sourcing muscles every week by trying to answer Katharine’s cryptic questions. To get these challenges straight to...
Did ‘Projects’ just become a key part of LinkedIn Profiles?
Add Projects to your LinkedIn profile to improve SEO after LinkedIn restricts what information can be indexed by search engines. LinkedIn recently removed some key sections from our public profiles. Read about them here. Most notably, our Headlines and...
LinkedIn makes big changes to Profiles affecting X-Ray search
LinkedIn recently removed some key pieces of information from our public profiles. Your public LinkedIn profile is what can be seen by someone who is not logged into the website. It’s also the version of your profile that is visible to search engines. What...
Start 2024 with 12 weeks of Sourcing Training
I provide online training courses via Recruiting Gym. This year, Recruiting Gym are opening up the live training provision that goes along with our main sourcing courses for anyone to join. Q1 will be led by me and have a specific focus on using LinkedIn to its...
The best LinkedIn #hashtags for your #MeetYourRecruiter posts
LinkedIn #hashtags to help your content be seen. When someone you’re connected to on LinkedIn uses a hashtag you follow, you’re more likely to see their content. So, when you make posts on LinkedIn, it makes sense to add some hashtags. But not just any hashtags, you...
LinkedIn Update: Changes to the ‘Activity’ Section
New LinkedIn update to the ‘Activity’ Section on LinkedIn profiles, makes it far more obvious to the viewer whether the person they are viewing has posted or interacted on LinkedIn recently. The ‘Activity’ section is located near the top of LinkedIn profiles, above...
Sourcing Hat is now Cup & Sourcer
We are rebranding and changing the company name from Sourcing Hat to Cup & Sourcer! Here's why. In 2012 I registered Sourcing Hat as a limited company. I’d been debating a name, and nothing felt right until this idea dawned on me. I had talked about putting my...
The Benefits of ChatGPT for Recruiters
As a recruiter, your time is valuable. You have a lot of responsibilities, from sourcing and screening candidates to coordinating interviews and negotiating offers. It can be tough to keep up with all of the demands on your time, and anything that can help you work...
A Review of ChatGPT from OpenAI
As a writer the announcement of ChatGPT back in November 2022 made my heart sink. The creativity and imagination we writers love to use, could surely not be recreated by AI tech? But having used OpenAI’s DALL.E 2 image tool, I knew there was a possibility that the AI...
New Linkedin Feature: About This Profile
Have you heard about LinkedIn's new "About this profile" feature?LinkedIn doesn't tend to shout about new features, so it's very possible that this is the first you are hearing of it. I have to say, it is something from an employer or recruiter’s point of view, that I...
What is X-Ray Search anyway?
I get asked about X-Ray search all the time. The question cropped up again at the UK Sourcers meetup in Leeds this February.
It’s one of those terms that gets thrown around, along with search strings and boolean, to mean “whatever it is you do with Google to get those impressive search results that I can’t get”.
Well, all these terms do actually mean something.
A search string is just whatever you’ve typed into Google (or whatever database you are searching). Even if it’s just two words, that’s your search string.
Boolean is a type of mathematical logic. All databases use Boolean logic to return results for the search strings you enter. Boolean pretty much covers using the concepts AND, OR and NOT in your search strings.
An X-Ray search, sometimes called a site search, is a technique you can use on search engines like Google and Bing. X-Raying is a way to finding web pages from just one specific website.
If I type the search string site:sourcinghat.co.uk into Google, it will show me all the pages from this website that Google has indexed and has stored in its database.
X-Raying is actually very simple but don’t be fooled – it’s a ridiculously useful search technique that I use all the time.
My Top 5 uses for X-Ray search
Search company sites
If you have a list of target companies, why not run a quick X-Ray search on their websites? Look for job titles, contact details or news.
Search industry sites
Industry news sites can be a great source of names. Don’t forget associations and events too. Some of these searches can be useful when teamed up with Google Alerts.
Search sites with lots of user profiles
X-Ray searching LinkedIn is key skill for all recruiters and sourcers but you can X-Ray search any site with lots of user profiles like About.me, Branded.me, Github, Meetup, Stackoverflow, Viadeo, Xing.
Search for personal webpages
Did you know that you can also do a site search on a top level domain? Lots of people use .me domain names for their personal websites. Try searching something like site:me “download my cv” with some of your own keywords and see what you can find.
Taking sites out of your search results
I use this a lot when cross referencing a person I have found on LinkedIn. Sometimes LinkedIn is all over the search results I get on Google. To take them out and see what else is out there, we can use the minus sign with the site operator like this:
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