Stumped by candidate sourcing request

I have been given an assignment to find the following........

IT Systems Administrator/Support Engineer for Int'l finance company

20% Int'l travel

Relo to Hong Kong or Western Europe

US citizen

5-10 years living and working outside US

BS or higher in Computer Science, engineering or realted field

CISSP OR SCSA OR CCIE OR combo thereof

Exp in Perl, C, C++ and Java is a plus

When I look at Linked In it is rare that the company location where the person worked is listed.

Most resumes written for a US slant do not list Citizenship as much of the rest of the world does.

Does anyone have any ideas for where to look or how to format a string to get these results.

Thanks in advance for any help that is afforded to me.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Galley on April 12, 2011 at 12:30pm

Ben,

Some companies make it a hard requirement that ALL employees are US Citizen or Permanent Resident (some even go so far as to restrict to Citizen only - not sure on the legalities of that, though). Some do it just for certain jobs (finance in particular).

A list of such companies would help you greatly - I don't have one, but it might be worth scanning the job boards for advertisements listing US citizen requirements. Then you know that anyone working at those companies is more likely to be in the category you want.

You COULD search for citizenship status - naturalized citizens are MUCH more likely to advertise their status on LI or in resumes. Similarly, anyone who finds themselves frequently questioned as to their status, or anticipates they could be passed over by recruiters because of the perception they require work visas, is more likely to advertise. But this will be a more limited pool.

Or just do your search normally and know you will have to have a bunch of conversations with people who do not match the requirement to find the ones who are.

Some job boards do have a work status self-disclosure, but it varies from site to site. Monster.com, for instance, will let you search on those who are "authorized to work in this location" - meaning those who have (or claim) unrestricted work authorization will be the only ones to come up. Of course, this includes citizens, LPRs, certain student visas (unrestricted but of limited duration, generally), and various other immigrant categories as well. Not sure how this is implemented on other sites with searchable resume databases - we dropped our CB subscription years ago and I haven't worked with many others.

I had some thoughts for strings but they didn't pull up what you wanted:

---(american AND expat) AND ("systems administrator" OR "sys admin" OR "sysadmin") AND (cisco OR sun) AND certified

There are some expat focused job boards - even US expat focused job boards - and communities out there. Someone, surely, has worked overseas as a sysadmin. You could also look for State or DOD IT (if they were deployed or stationed overseas, surely this would satisfy your requirement). There are some other 'fingerprints' of non-explicit (or explicit but hard to search on) overseas work, too, I'm sure.

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Permalink Reply by Kameron Swinton on April 12, 2011 at 10:44pm

Ben -

You might want to try looking for candidates that mention secondary language skills in their profile/resume. These are candidates that may have lived in, worked in and/or travelled extensively in the areas you're looking for. For example, in Hong Kong one of the primary languages is Cantonese. Here's a search to use on Google:

site:linkedin.com (“Systems Administrator” OR "IT Support Engineer") AND (native OR bilingual OR speak OR fluent OR conversational OR "Full professional" OR Elementary) AND (Chinese OR Cantonese) AND (CISSP OR SCSA OR CCIE) -inurl:dir

The titles and certifications will be limiting factors so play around with the key words.

Good luck!

-kameron