How often do we find ourselves scrambling to find new candidates? Wouldn’t it be nice to have free resumes to reach out to, and screen? The answer for most sourcing teams is a resounding yes. So how do you find them? The truth is candidate information might be right under our noses. Take a look at WordPress for instance.
What is WordPress?
It is a web hosting platform that supports blogging and website creation.
According to their website:
- They claim to power 28% of the web
- 409 Million people view 15.5 billion pages a month
- Their users publish: 41.7 million new posts each month
- There are 60.5 million comments added each month
Guess what that means? It is an excellent place to search for free resumes and candidate blogs.
Let me walk you through a few steps to source this fantastic platform.
I came up with a test string after knowing I needed certain profiles in a certain area. For instance the other day I was hunting for some specific folks for an ETL engineering role that had business intelligence experience. I came up with an X-Ray string:
site:wordpress.com (inurl:resume OR intitle:resume OR intitle:ETL OR inurl:ETL OR intitle:BusinessIntelligence OR inurl:Businessintelligence) ETL (“business intelligence” OR BI) -jobs
This simple string yielded some relevant results as you can see here:
This string yielded 181 results. As I clicked through one of my results I came across a CV page and then realized portfolio might be a good thing to try as a search term:
Upon further experimentation I decided to modify my string just a little bit more with the Portfolio term:
site:wordpress.com (inurl:resume OR intitle:resume OR intitle:ETL OR inurl:ETL OR intitle:BusinessIntelligence OR inurl:Businessintelligence OR intitle:portfolio OR inurl:portfolio) ETL (“business intelligence” OR BI) -jobs
New result:
Look for clues to published content via WordPress, which will, in turn, will lead you to other great candidates. Let’s look at marketing candidates for example who typically LOVE to share their content. Say I wanted to find a content marketing professional with strong skills in web 2.0 social media skills.
Try a simple string like this:
site:wordpress.com “content marketing” (blog OR Facebook OR Twitter OR “web 2.0”)
Now say you wanted all these skills. Just have a little fun with the AND operator.
site:wordpress.com “content marketing”(blog OR blogging OR blogged) AND Facebook AND Twitter AND “web 2.0”
Try adding some resume keywords if you want to limit your search to profiles.
site:wordpress.com “content marketing”(blog OR blogging OR blogged) AND Facebook AND Twitter AND “web 2.0″(resume OR CV OR Vitae)
This got me down to 800 results which is a bit more manageable. Try adding geography, city, and metro keywords into a bracket and see if you get more options.
You could interchange some different keywords and experiment a bit for different clues that could lead you to profiles. Remember WordPress is most often used as a blogging site so try looking for some blogs.
Say you wanted to find a finance person that knew something about financial auditing. Try searching for some blogs. I’ve seen keeping it simple works best.
site:wordpress.com (Finance OR Financial) (audit OR auditing OR auditor OR auditer OR audited) (CPA OR CFA OR CIA OR CISA OR CFE) Certified
Try adding some geography keywords to see how it carves it down further as an option or other experimental keywords. A/B test, rinse and repeat.
In the marketing example, there are plenty of candidates who blog and have personal blogs tied to their social profiles. Try adding to the string with this bracket to see if you can get some resumes OR profile for fun.
site:wordpress.com “Finance Manager” (audit OR auditing OR auditor) (CPA OR CFA OR CIA OR CISA OR CFE) Certified (resume OR CV OR profile OR “about me”) -job -jobs
This yielded some intriguing image results:
Conclusion:
Getting creative with a WordPress X-ray site: command could produce some very nice results as I learned while conducting several recent searches. Many of these candidates also link to their other social profiles. Give it a try sometime, depending on your need you might get some substantial outcomes and further options if you get stuck.