Sched.com is a website that is designed to help manage conferences and events. It is also a great website to find candidates.
The very first thing I learned in sourcing was the basics, such as boolean, peeling back the URL, and x-raying. I decided to put some of these skills to the test and see if there was anything useful on Sched for sourcers.
X-Ray Search
I started with a simple x-ray site:sched.com and added the term “developer” to my search. I got a lot of results, but nothing useful. I found events and speakers, but no attendees. Speaker lists are usually easy to locate, so I wanted more.
I went back to the drawing board. I again started with a basic x-ray of site:sched.com but decided to get more specific. I decided to look in a thesaurus for other keywords I could use for my search. So when I put in “attendee” I also got “participant” and “list” retrieved “directory.”
I decided to use these keywords since Google has a search limit of 32 keywords. Since “directory” and “list” are words I figure would be in the title of a document and a title of a web page I decided to go with the operator intitle:, which leads us to intitle:(directory OR list), and add the keywords “attendees” and “participants.”
site:sched.com intitle:(directory OR list) (attendees OR participants) developer
When I ran this on Google, I received over 10,000 results. I clicked on the result titled Developer Conference 2015: Directory. I opened it and got a list of the attendees at the conference. This result had a mix of usernames and actual names.
I decided to open up one with the username. Once I did, it was like a light shined down, because inside was the company this person worked for, their title, and their email. I highlighted the email and used the Zapinfo search tool and searched PIPL and had all the information I needed, including their full name, title, company, location, etc.
I repeated this method for everyone found at this conference and mostly found what I needed. When I couldn’t find contact information for their real name, I decided to start popping the usernames into Google using the Sales Search chrome extension. I was able to find information related to the usernames pretty quickly and in some cases everything I needed.
Using a Google search got me about 40% of the results that PIPL did not get. So I now have about 80% of the entire list (about 20% left). Now mind you I had over 100 good to go, candidates, so the additional 20% was not needed. However, I wanted to see if I could get more done. So I decided to take the username and pop it into the Intelltechniques username search tool and populate all the places to search. Well as luck would have it, I ended up being able to identify all but one result by merely “following the bread crumbs.” I turned in my work and ended up getting a shoutout from my manager.
As most of you know, I did a short series on combining tools, and how they can let you do more than each tool individually. Well guess what without meaning to, I did just that, but the key here is I started with sourcing fundamentals. I began with boolean and with x-raying and that opened a whole new place to source and combined it with tools to make it even better. Isn’t funny how that happens.