LinkedIn and its user agreements, yes they make some recruiters and sourcers uneasy, but I always tell my cohorts, there is always another way to the information.
LinkedIn has been on top of the professional social networking sites, but monetizing their business model may not be best for the long term. Placing limits and restrictions may seriously alienate the customer base, or leave the door for other social networks to swoop in and steal their thunder.
Look at Facebook, free sharing of information with more pop ads, sure, but they’ve expanded their audience. Look at Rallypoint, connecting the military audience, and no charge to search. Same for associations in healthcare. And the directories are out there; you just have to know where to look, right Steve Levy?
When I look for scientists, I start with the publication sites, before even touching LinkedIn. This leads me to experts quickly, often untouched because their public profile is slim on content. LinkedIn is a secondary cross-referencing tool in this case. Email aggregators are helpful and can sometimes give me an email. However often times the email may be out of date or wrong. You can usually find a current email (for this population) by looking on their company website or on their cited works.
There are a lot of great things about LinkedIn, it has many users and industries, they have significantly improved LIR search features (once you relearn how to combine strings and keyword “bubbles”), but unfortunately, you have to pay to play with these options. Personally, I think some of the recent updates to publishing are vast improvements. But they are turning away from the free model more and more. Honestly, many of the Chrome extensions have been in danger since the Connectifier acquisition.
So what we have to do now is stay innovative. There are alternative pipelines out there, now is time to harness them and adapt. We aren’t mindless zombies with only one bag of tricks, time to pull out all of the Jedi Mind Tricks. Honestly, talking through these challenges with the folks from Hiretual, Prophet, as well as others will help us drive the industry forward as well as help one another through it.
Some Lightsabers are Doublebladed
Chrome extensions are just one side, y’all. Sometimes you can just copy and paste or go to print view. Data extraction is excellent, but sometimes the answer is straightforward and old school.
There are other ways to find talent. For example, when looking for Dietitians, Josh Jones and I combined some Boolean strings for Instagram:
site:instagram.com (“integrative medicine” OR “functional medicine”) nutrition -inurl:company
Many of these profiles lead to direct websites, portfolios, and direct email addresses.
You can use the same sort of search for Pinterest too. I was getting quite a bit of junk initially, but when we put images in the string, it pulled a better focused list of profiles. Jones had a good question too, “Why did you put “by” in the string?” It was to target authors. Using certain words like this can help refine your results. You can also try using hashtags (#dietitian), but they were significantly limiting my results in this case.
You can try similar searches on Pinterest too. Site searches (site:) make it a bit easier to pull a list of users than sifting through a random list of images.
site:www.pinterest.com/* “integrative medicine” (“by RD” OR “by LD”) -Doctor
site:www.pinterest.com/* “integrative medicine” by RD LD -images
Note: Why does this screenshot look like a Coldplay concert? That’s Multi-highlight, an extension that makes scanning data much easier.
And sometimes searching in this way can lead you to a random directory (that is searchable with phone numbers):
https://www.healthprofs.com/cam
For healthcare folks, you can also search other job titles, including dentists and doctors! And you can copy and paste the result into a word documents in case you don’t know how to use Data Miner or the Recipe Creator:
Verified by HealthProfs.com
Dentist, DDS
“My desire is to treat each patient as if they were a member of my own family. As a Dallas dentist, most of the new patients we see are referred from other patients who are thrilled with the level of care, compassion, and service they receive from myself and this amazing staff.” “Delivering high quality dentistry is a must, but people deserve more than just beautiful dentistry. They need to know how much you truly care about them.” Experience the difference at our Dallas area Family and Cosmetic Dental Practice, you and your family become part of ours.”
(214) 506-3866
You can also use Doximity, ZocDoc, and Healthgrades in the same way if you are looking for doctors or dentists.
Sourcing like a Sith: Tool Drop
More tools can be found on the HRSourcingToolbox.
Here are three of some of my other favorite tool sites that have helped me with building alternative pipelines.
http://booleanstrings.com/tools/
http://www.thecandidategenerator.com/
http://thesearchauthority.weebly.com/tools.html
We will all figure it out together, as we get a better definition as to what we can and can’t do, we can “stack the deck” by looking into other avenues of information. The information is out there, so let’s find it.