Shane McCusker has done it again. If you don’t know McCusker or have used his extremely popular Facebook Sourcing Tool, stop what you’re doing right now and download it! You don’t even need Chrome to use it, as there is also a free web based version. I have been an absolute fangirl since its inception. This useful sourcing tool has appeared in just about everyone’s SourceCon presentation and has been featured on many of our webinars. It’s a mixture of our sourcing favorites: Facebook, tool, free. According to McCusker, even the Facebook recruiting team uses it.
McCusker announced a few days ago that the latest version of its chrome extension has been updated. It now includes Facebook searching for People, Posts, Pages, Events, Groups and Photos. According to McCusker in the SourceCon Facebook Group (where else would you announce this?), “perhaps best of all for sourcing, I have been able to introduce AND and OR searching on top of Facebook Graph. I don’t think that this as ever been done before.”
With this exciting announcement, I had to try it. For now, the updates are only available with the Chrome Extension.
After clicking in the Chrome Extension, the new updates were very visible.
Facebook Search
Job: Software Engineer OR Software Developer
AND
Lives: San Francisco
Brilliant! I noticed the results right away. The ability to use the OR operator works very well. For those of us nerds to like to manipulate the URL, here it is:
https://www.facebook.com/search/str/software+engineer/pages-named/employees/present/str/software+developer/pages-named/employees/present/union/str/san+francisco/pages-named/residents/present/intersect
Notice anything new? It appears the term “union” in the URL is the trigger that allows for the OR operator to function properly in Facebook.
One restriction that this update does not allow us to do is to search for two different OR sets. For an example, I can’t search “software engineer” OR “software developer” AND “san francisco” OR “oakland”
Despite this, the new updates were very useful. I had fun with a few more searches.
Facebook Search
Gender: Female
Job: Recruiter
Lives: Dallas
Facebook Search
Lives: Madison Wisconsin OR Milwaukee Wisconsin
Job: Recruiter
Facebook Search
Groups: Members Who Like SourceCon
There are many, many more useful search possibilities. Share your favorite searches in the comments below.