Using Google to Search LinkedIn

By Mark Berger

Many of you that are members of LinkedIn have undoubtedly tried to recruit members for your open requisitions. With about 60 million members, most of those professionals, it is fertile recruiting grounds for all types of people. I imagine your typical process would be to log in, go to the Advance Search screen, type in your keywords, title, and location, hit the search button, and then go forward from there.

That is a great way to go, but there is a better, more productive method. Using Google.

The downside of using LinkedIn Advanced Search is that your results are limited to those in your extended network. Those with a free (personal) membership and/or a small network are simply not going to get a lot of quality results. Even those at the lower echelons of a paid membership are only getting access to a smaller additional percentage of members.

By using Google, you can have access to the vast majority of the members. All those with a public profile. The technique is simple. Go to www.google.com.

Type in:

site:linkedin.com "mechanical engineer" hvac "greater boston" -intitle:directory

The site technique is used in Google and other search engines to search one website, in this case LinkedIn. In the search string above, we are searching for mechanical engineers with a hvac background in the Boston, MA area. Mechanical engineer is in quote marks as that tells the search engine to find an exact phrase. HVAC is another search term. Then we have Greater Boston in quotes as well as that is how LinkedIn denotes geography. They use the work greater in front of the metropolitan area name. Then the last component, the -intitle:directory, removes unwanted pages from our results.

To try this on your own, simply recreate the string above and replace my title, keywords, and city with your own. Leave the first and the last components as they are.

Happy recruiting.