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Contest - Confidential Resume Search - Suggested Solutions

Here are the steps I typically take to solve this sort of problem:

1. For this particular scenario, the candidate’s confidential resume has been found in 1 of 3 places:

Careerbuilder.com
Monster.com
Craigslist.org

2. After the confidential resume has been found, you probably know WHERE the candidate is located. See if a .doc or .txt version of the resume can be downloaded. Save it to your desktop, right click on the document, and select “get info.” See if there is an “Author” of the document, in other words, who the software was registered to. This may provide you a name of the candidate, and can be most helpful if you know the city & company the candidate works for. This method has provided me my answers numerous times.

3. The next thing I do is think to myself, “If this candidate is on a resume posting site now, there is a good chance he has posted before.” Think about this fact: when writing your resume, you don’t really change anything about your past positions, you just add new experience, so theoretically, all past experience that you have typed on your resume generally remains the same throughout your career history. This approach is continued by step 4.

4. This candidate’s resume dates back to 1991. That’s 18 years of job experience. My next approach would be to look at the confidential resume, then copy & paste one line (approximately 6-10 words) of the job responsibilities from a past position (early in career history) to see if there is an old copy of the resume that was not confidential. If you try this on Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, or Craigslist.org for this particular example, you will find everything you need. If it doesn’t work the first time, try grabbing another phrase from a different position he held and running that. Run these strings on every job board you have access to in order to cover all your bases, including google, yahoo, and any other search engine. The candidate may have his own website on which he has posted his resume.

5. If the candidate has not posted a resume before, so no older “non-confidential” version can be found, my next thought is this:
“What is contained on this resume that would not likely be contained on any other documents?” There could be 2, or more, answers: the cities or his job titles are the first things that come to my mind.
If you were to take the confidential resume and search for the cities listed on the resume (Dallas Nashville Richmond Radford Chicago), Google will give you results of documents or pages with all of those terms contained on the same page. In this particular contest, the city search will not work because the companies are fictitious; therefore, they are not contained on the linkedin profile. (If the names of the cities were on the linkedin profile, running the site:linkedin.com function in google would not be necessary, but additional keywords would be needed to narrow the results down.) Try it now, just to see how it works:

Dallas Nashville Richmond Radford Chicago site:linkedin.com

You can do the same thing with his job titles, and in this contest, this approach DOES work. Run this search below in google, and you will see the linkedin profile of the candidate in the results.

“.net developer” “it analyst” “senior software engineer” “software engineer” “help desk analyst”

I recommend running these strings openly on google. Do NOT use the “site:linkedin.com” function. If this candidate did NOT have a linkedin profile, you just KILLED your search. He may have his own website on which he posted his resume, and by limiting your results to linkedin.com, you would not find his website.

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