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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...
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 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...
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...
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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...
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...
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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...
X-ray search should be a key part of any recruiter’s talent sourcing tool kit. But what does it mean?
X-ray search is one of the things I’m asked to explain most often. Many experienced recruiters don’t know what it means, or why you might use it. That’s OK, I’m here to help.
It’s one of those terms that gets thrown around, along with search strings and boolean, to mean “complicated stuff you do on Google”. But all these terms do actually mean something, and they’re not that complicated either.
A search string is whatever you’ve typed into Google (or whatever database you are searching). Even if it’s just one or 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.
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 really simple but don’t be fooled – it’s a ridiculously useful search technique that I use all the time.
Search sites with lots of user profiles
X-Raying LinkedIn is an important skill for all recruiters and sourcers but you can X-Ray search lots of websites that have user profiles, like About.me, Branded.me, Github, Goldenline, Stackoverflow, Viadeo, or Xing.
Search industry news websites
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 company websites
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 for personal webpages
Did you know that you can also do an X-ray 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”, add some of your own keywords, and see what you can find.
Take certain websites out of your search results
I use this a lot when cross-referencing a person I originally 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:
I think you’ll agree, the X-ray search meaning is simpler than you expected.
If you’d like to learn more about X-ray search, or other sourcing techniques, please get in touch with me.
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