If you can write your own strings to use with Google or Bing then they will be looking for exactly what you want to find and you will know how to edit them if they don’t give the results you expect.
Sometimes it is useful to get inspiration from other people’s search strings – everyone has different ideas and different ways of constructing a search.
So
here are three search strings that hopefully will inspire you to write some of
your own and find a few names.
1. Search London marketeers on LinkedIn
This
string is looking for the linkedin profiles of marketing professionals in
London.
The
results for this search include a lot of profiles that just mention London –
ensure that you search uk.linkedin.com to just see UK profiles.
You
may also see some directory pages coming up in your results, you can get rid of
these on Google using -inurl:dir
Your string will then be site:uk.linkedin.com/pub
“marketing manager” London –inurl:dir
Use
different job titles and industry keywords to look for the types of candidates
you are interested in. Add more skill or qualification keywords to narrow your
results.
You
might want to add more location names too – London for example could be
expanded to (London OR Barnet OR Croydon OR Ealing OR Bromley OR Enfield OR
Wandsworth OR Southwark OR Lambeth OR Redbridge OR Lewisham OR Hillingdon OR
Brent OR Westminster OR Newham OR “Tower Hamlets”). Those are the largest
London boroughs by population as listed on Wikipedia.
Bing is very good at finding LinkedIn profiles
without polluting the results with too many directory pages and the like. This
means that you see better results with less need to be too exact with your
Boolean skills.
If
you’re using long lists of place names like the one above, you might be better
to use Google. Google will take 32 search terms but Bing limits search queries
to 150 characters in length.
2.
Search London marketing event attendees
This
string is looking for lists of people from marketing events in London. This could be lists of attendees or
speakers etc.
The
brackets in these strings are notstrictly necessary – Google totally ignores
them and the strings follow Bing’s natural order of operations anyway. I like
to use them though, if onlyto keep my own thoughts organised.
This
string returns lots of interesting information about marketing sites, networks
and events but not much in the way of rich people data. You could include
people keywords like (attendee OR delegate OR member).
You’ll
then notice that some of the actual delegate lists in your results are pdf
files. Delegate lists are often in pdf or SpreadSheet formats – so adding
something like (filetype:pdf OR filetype:xls) to your string will probably
bring back lots of rich results. Even if events aren’t marketing focused, the
people on the list might have “marketing” in their job titles.
To
make the results relevant to you, start by changing the industry and location
keywords as appropriate. You could try using a job title of interest along with
a broad industry keyword.
3.
Search for CVs Uploaded to Scribd
This
search string is looking at pages from the document hosting website Scribd. I
think of Scribd as a YouTube for documents instead of videos. People upload all
sort of documents like reports, magazines, presentations and even CVs.
I
found a lot of template and example CVs on Scribd so it helps to add -template
-sample -example to your string to eliminate these.
Add
industry keywords or job titles to the string to see if there are any CVs of
interest to you on Scribd.
Google
seems to get to the CVs of real people much easier than Bing does. I found that
the results I got from Bing were dominated by documents from just one Scribd
user.
There
are lots of document sites like Scribd, you could also try site searching
issuu, docstoc and SlideShare.
Source
: theundercoverrecruiter
