Contest, LinkedIn Profile Search, MDs in Atlanta, and a Webinar

[Irina Shamaeva]

 

Are you ready for a sourcing CONTEST? 

Here is a custom search engine that looks for LinkedIn profiles. Enter a name or a keywords and see the results:

LinkedIn Profiles

Now, let’s search, for example, for

physician cardiology diagnostics MD "Greater Atlanta Area"

Let’s exclude the word “recruiter” from the above search:

physician cardiology diagnostics MD "Greater Atlanta Area" -recruiter

We got fewer results.

Contest warm-up: Did we just exclude recruiters’ profiles or did we also lose any relevant (non-recruiter) profiles in the search results?

CONTEST. Please give an example where excluding a keyword that we don’t want to see on a profile (like we just did) leads to excluding relevant results. Please either use the LinkedIn custom search engine  or a search for LinkedIn profiles using your own Boolean search strings, either on Google or on Bing. Please explain how this happens. (Or, instead, explain why this can’t happen if you believe that it can’t.) Of course, it could be a search for any type of professional in any geographical area.

The first person who sends the correct answer to [e-mail] gets a guest pass to the 2-part webinar 

https://booleanstrings.ning.com/events/extract-candidates-from-link... 

or a pass to a future webinar.

Please follow the directions very carefully.

[Irina Shamaeva]

Thanks all for trying! I have received 11 excellent reports on the above challenge today Jan 25). Great ideas were communicated.

The winners, not surprizingly, are two extra-class sourcers who are already featured on our site:

 

"See" you for our CHAT tomorrow.

Also, get ready for a really exciting (sponsored) contest  coming up really, really soon; like, on Monday.

Cheers,

Irina

P.S. I received four more solutions this morning (Jan 26), but none of them are exactly matching the goal. 

[Dave Galley]

In chat yesterday I said I'd try to clean up my original response and post it here. My original submission focused only on one of the sidebards, but when asked for clarifications I described the general case. I've blended those together and hopefully made it a bit clearer ---

 

The Curious Case of JavaDan

 

Consider the following --

 

software engineer mobile "Lincoln, Nebraska Area"

 

software engineer mobile "Lincoln, Nebraska Area" –recruiter

 

software engineer mobile "Lincoln, Nebraska Area" recruiter

 

One can clearly note there is exclusion happening by looking at the differences in results. The question is – is the exclusion relevant? The answer – sometimes. But there is also another issue going on here – false positives (erroneous inclusion).

 

Both are occurring for the same reason – when LinkedIn serves public profiles to the public (not logged in) web, it sometimes includes information that is NOT part of the profiles. At present, I believe there are three "sidebars" included in public profiles -- “Find a different [FNAME] [LNAME]:” (hereafter 'Same Name'), "People who viewed this profile also viewed:" (hereafter 'Others Also Bought'), and "Ads by LinkedIn Users" (hereafter 'Ads').

 

The first two sidebars (Same Name and Others Also Bought) generally includes the headline and location of the other suggested profiles. The advertisements could be anything, but there are usually two, and they often have very few words. I think the advertisements show on most profiles, but the other sidebars can appear together, separately, or not at all. This seems to be relatively new behavior, it is dynamic (changes over time) and the cached version Google has presently indexed for a given page may differ from the live version. The actual version of the page being served MAY ALSO (if not now, certainly in the future) vary depending on who is viewing it!

 

This means that even if your string is flawless, your logic sound, you may still exclude relevant results if anyone who shares the same name (or whose profile is frequently viewed together with) as a person who you are intending to exclude, will also be excluded, even if they are otherwise your ideal target.

 

JavaDan was an interesting case (Dan Green – first result of third link) because he is a software engineer in Denver, but another Dan Green (who was included in this sidebar) is a mobile apps sales consultant in Lincoln, NE. JavaDan shows up very low in the results for the first search, but when we search for recruiter (to see who was excluded by the second search) his results comes up #1 because there is a Recruiter named Dan Green as well. He is, for the same reason, excluded when we screen out the keyword 'recruiter' (search #2).

 

It is worth noting that there is one section of the profile which can cause similar incorrect inclusion/exclusion behavior - the publicly displayed groups membership. Drawing from Irina's original example of the MDs, a doctor who has joined an LI group for physician recruiters (in the hopes of getting noticed?) might be excluded by the recruiter keyword, as well. For completeness sake I suppose it's worth mentioning that anyone who, in this example, WAS a recruiter and BECAME a doctor would be excluded, regardless of their present qualifications for the role. And, now that I think of it, so will any doctor who says in their profile, "If you are a recruiter, please don't contact me!".

 

I would go so far as to say at any given time, for any given search, there is no way to guarantee 100% that excluding a keyword will NOT eliminate target people when performing an x-ray search. It is a chance you have to take (and sometimes go back and test for) with every search. Some searches and some exclusions carry a lower risk of this, some higher.

 

Internal LI search, of course, works differently.

[Tiffany Ballve]

awesome!  thanks for posting, Dave!