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Mar 1, 2018

At SourceCon, we love our free tools! After each SourceCon conference, the news of the latest and greatest free tools are spread quickly over social media. For those of you who actually thought, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, think again. There are a few tools that continuously marvel attendees. One of which is Shane McCusker’s Facebook sourcing tool. If you don’t know McCusker or have been living in a cave, he is the genius behind the infamous Facebook Sourcing Tool. If this tool is new to you, stop what you’re doing right now and immediately download it. Seriously, do it now! You don’t even need Chrome to use it, as there is also a free web-based version, which is excellent for sourcers who aren’t allowed to download extensions.

McCusker announced a few days ago that the latest version of its Chrome extension had been updated.

According to McCusker, there has been a lot of work done to tidy up various bugs and improve the user experience. This means that it should be much easier to search for what you want and combine searches. For example, You can use the group search to find groups related to a specific programming language and then find the members of that group who live in a particular area.

Facebook is a fantastic place to find people based on the actions they take, so members of a group about a programming language are almost certainly developers. This is perhaps the most significant difference between sourcing on Facebook compared to LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, you’ve got very little to search on other than what they have said in their profile. With Facebook, however, you can find them based on their friends, the photographs they’re in, the posts they like and everything else they do. Given that one-quarter of the planet use Facebook every month and spend on average 20 minutes per visit, sourcers a wealth of ways to find people.

Some of the specific changes in the latest release include:

The drop-down selection is now much improved and gives much better results based on the search you are running. Another nice feature is that we have managed to bring back the image in the drop-down list. Facebook used to do this and then stopped which was a shame as it is advantageous to see the photo of the person you want.

The searches available were already quite comprehensive although I’ve been able to tweak many of them to get better results. Facebook does change from time to time, and different searches appear and disappear.

McCusker says that there are a lot more ideas that he is working on for this tool. Recently, its grown to a user base of about 75,000 people and it’s seeing over 300,000 searches a month. Stay tuned for more plans for McCusker to implement more searches and additional functionality over the coming months. “It is quite exciting to see how many more sourcers can get benefit from the work I do,” says McCusker.