LinkedIn is a resourceful platform, especially for recruiters who can find best of the best talents at their fingertips. However, the effectiveness of your LinkedIn recruiting efforts is directly dependent on factors like the type of account you own, the quality of your network, membership in groups etc. This piece of blog would be of interest to those recruiters who cannot afford the pay-per-use pattern of LinkedIn, yet looking forward to leverage this great resource for recruiting.
To churn the best out of LinkedIn using your basic account, you need to have a decent grip of Boolean. Why? It would help you to access public profiles through search engines such Google, Bing etc. thereby overcoming the profile search/view restrictions posted by LinkedIn. Once you have the search results that suit your requirement you can start moving them to your database and act on them. Does it sound way too easy? Let’s face it. Putting the Boolean strings in and then transferring 100s or 1000s of resumes manually is not an easy job any day and will definitely eat in to your work time. After spending hours and days and weeks of hard work, you realize that you are still in the first stage of recruitment cycle – sourcing. Sounds familiar?
A smart way to tackle this problem could be switching to a sophisticated yet simple to use automation tool. eGrabber’s ResumeGrabber Suite will help you to leverage LI to its fullest, even with a basic-free account. Our tool gives you options to search within and outside your LinkedIn network. With specialized in-built search scripts, you can now go beyond your network and find suitable candidates. These scripts have been developed in association with industry leaders like Irina Shamaeva, Glenn Cathy, Jim Stroud etc and empowers to you source as good as these Boolean wizards. You just have to enter keywords relevant to your target Industry or Job title and our tool will generate a candidate database including resume, email address, phone number etc. Moreover, your whole sourcing happens in a matter of clicks.
LinkedIn groups are another great way of finding people with common interests, skills, domain expertise etc. and narrow down on the group members based on Titles, Location to get better results. Experts are already using such groups as talent communities. One of the major advantages of this tool is that you can source candidates from LinkedIn groups even without being a member of the target group. All you need to do is to copy-paste the group name in the “keywords” and the tool will do the rest for you. The complete list of the group members with their Name, Title, Company, Education, Recommendations etc. is made available to you in a neat structured form as a local file in your desktop/ATS.
Click here to download the trial version of ResumeGrabber Suite.
If you use Google a lot for your prospect-list / candidate-list building / for sourcing candidates, you will encounter a “Google Block” or a “Google Captcha”. This tip shows you a way of getting past the Google block, with one of Google’s own features.
A typical Google block looks something like this:
In most cases, if you enter the text in the image, you will get past Google’s security measure, and you’ll be shown the results you were searching for.
Google uses this “Captcha” to protect itself from automated robot programs trying to steal data from Google. However, if you are user of Google’s advanced commands, you get issued this Captcha too. In the worst cases, Google stops serving you results altogether and presents you with this:This is a severe Google block, with no way to get around it. There wont be a Captcha image either, there wont be any text to enter. At this point, you cannot perform ANY Google search, and you have to wait at least a couple of hours before Google service is resumed.
What’s the difference? It’s the same Google search, served to you over a secured connection. The security levels are the same ones used by your Bank’s online transaction system. This helps Google keep away unwanted intruders.
The results that you get from the Secured Version is exactly the same as the Regular version.
In a webinar I spoke at yesterday, we showcased three companies whose webinar invitees list was built from LinkedIn Groups using LeadGrabber Pro.
The companies got between 20-120 times improvement in their Email-Registrant conversion ratio, over the traditional method of inviting people.
Traditionally, these companies were purchasing contact lists or downloading contacts from Jigsaw and sending out webinar invitations to those contacts. Then, they were introduced to the eGrabber method of Identifying LinkedIn Groups, and using LeadGrabber Pro to make a list of the group members, with their email addresses. When they sent out email invitations, here were the results they got…
The first company is a virtual agent provider. As you can see from the table, with the traditional method they were able to get 4 out of 3500 contacts to register from a purchased list. However, by searching on Linkedin for user groups that were having discussions related to their webinar, they were able to message to a very targeted list of only 84 harvested contacts. The result is that they were able to get almost 3x more registrants, resulting in a 119 times better email to registrant conversion ratio.
The second company provides provides application lifecycle management and IT service management solutions. Here is a comparison of a purchased list with about 4400 contacts compared to sourcing contacts from a targeted Linkedin group. They almost had the exact same amount of registrants from harvesting 133 contacts. The key take away is that these examples are just samples of sourcing contacts from only one Linkedin group.
The third company provides IT security and compliance management solutions that help reduce the time it takes to complete the certification process. Similar to the previous example, they almost got the exact same number of registrants as they did from a purchased list. Resulting in a 19 times better email to registrant conversion ratio.
To see how LeadGrabber Pro builds the list of LinkedIn Group members, and appends email addresses, here’s a video.
– Extract from ANY LinkedIn Search page
– Extract LinkedIn Group members
– Extract Name, Company, Email address, Phone, and other fields
– Export as Spreadsheet / CSV or to CRM
The power of LinkedIn is the ability to manage your connections efficiently and to see the names and bios of the people connected to those in your network.
You might have 500 people in your direct network (first degree connections) but join the top 50 groups on LinkedIn and you’ll have a group reach of close to two million members
After you join target groups, you can extract the contact details of the group members by one click using ListGrabber with LinkedIn* macro
—————————————————————————————————————————- Disclaimer
*eGrabber is not affiliated with any providers of online directories or lists. ListGrabber is designed to import contact data that is visible on the screen and copy able to a clipboard. All eGrabber tools should be used only where it is legal to do so. Terms of use
An eGrabber prospect recently asked me to find LinkedIn profiles of Android Developers who had 2 years’ experience. She explained that when she did this in her LinkedIn account, she could find Android Developers, but she wasn’t able to filter them out by number of years of experience.
She had also tried adding the phrase “2 years” to the Keywords in the Linkedin search, but that didn’t solve the problem. The search only found people who put in the words “2 years” into their summary or experience.
I decided to show her how to find LinkedIn public profiles using search engines Bing and Google, since they provide a way to peek inside LinkedIn profiles, especially the ones you are not connected to.
The LinkedIn profiles that we are trying to get to are ones which look like this:
So this is the search string I typed in Bing. (click here to see search results)
“Present (2 years” “android developer at” (site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub) -”pub/dir”
A quick explanation what is going on…
The first term
“Present (2 years”
brings up people with that many years’ experience.
The second term
“android developer at”
only find people who are “currently” working as an android developer; this also means we will not get people who were android developers in the past, but that’s the kind of results she wanted.
The rest of the search terms
(site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub) -”pub/dir”
help us focus the search and only get LinkedIn profiles, and exclude LinkedIn directories. We want to exclude LinkedIn directories from our search, since they have the same profiles shown in a different layout.
Of course, the same search string works in Google too, but it brings up lesser results. I’ll leave the explanation you. If you thik you know why, leave a reply…
People join LinkedIn Groups to network, find new prospects and market their products & services. These groups are great places to find people with similar interests. You can find people from across industry verticals and across titles and hierarchies in the company.
Here’s an easy way to build a contact list of the LinkedIn Group Members (Works even if you are not a member of the group )
This video shows how LeadGrabber quickly copies and pastes profile data into a Excel / CSV file that you can send to your Hiring Manager.
Software also adds useful information like Timezone and figures out the City and State.
The demo shows copying of only surface details. Extensive details which are in the full profile can be copied too. Software works on one search page at a time.
If you constantly search LinkedIn public profiles using Google, typing in site:linkedin.com and all the other search terms can be a hassle.
At other times, you might answer a call to find someone new on the other side. All you want to do is type in the person’s name and have a LinkedIn profile appear; you want the browser to automatically fill in the site:linkedin.com etc etc for you.
We have that problem too… so here’s a Mozilla Firefox freebie to simplify things.
To install the freebie, open this blog post in your Mozilla Firefox and click here. Plugin is added directly to your Firefox browser. (Does not work with Internet Explorer)
Once you install it, you will see the LinkedIn public profile search option in your Firefox search bar.
Type in the name, title, company or whatever information you know about the person…
… and you’re taken directly to Google’s search results, which show only LinkedIn public profiles.
And in case you are wondering why searching Google for LinkedIn profiles is better than LinkedIn’s own search, read this post from the Boolean Strings network.
eGrabber develops the world’s most powerful B2B list building tools. Our tools enable average users to research like an expert, and experts to build at least 10x faster. We developed the most accurate research technology to build targeted B2B prospect lists & recruiting lists from the Internet. Our customers are those [...]
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