Ok so most recruiters know the basics on what X-Raying and the perks of doing so especially for LinkedIn but there are a lot of more advanced bits of pieces that can really up the quality of your searches and a number of other sites that can also be x-ray’ed to help your sourcing efforts.

Searching Specific Fields

When entering your search on google you can do more than simply add keywords to your search you can also search specific fields most specifically Location, Current Employer. and Job Title. Simply add *Job Title*, *Current* or *Location* followed by your criteria to your search and you will soon hopefully see better results.

Full disclosure I have seen other places saying you search using the following syntax “* Current ([search criteria]) *” however I think my search is more accurate but feel free to give it a try yourself and see what works better for you.

Search more than just LinkedIn

Everyone knows LinkedIn is great for recruiters and every recruiter on the planet is on there. However not every candidate is on LinkedIn so consider looking at other social networks such as Stack Overflow or Github and many other sites.Simply using the “site:” operator and having some experimentation with whatever website you like. I have seen Google+, Stack Overflow, Github, Twitter all done and from a quick bit of experimentation, it looks like angel list should be relatively straightforward to get sorted.

So for a couple of examples github can be searched using

site:github.com “joined on” -intitle:”at master” -inurl:”tab” -inurl:”jobs.” -inurl:”articles”

And Stack Overflow can be searched using

site:stackoverflow.com/users -“Keeping a low profile.”

Dont forget to go incognito

might not seem that helpful at first attempt in fact if you do it on your first search it might slow you down but if you have an ongoing search and you want to find every last candidate. If you are logged into your social media account it will affect the search results you receive.

Use X-Rays for more than just Programmers

Like I already mentioned all kinds of websites can have this method applied to them for this reason I emphasizing this for all recruiters, not just the technical ones to use these methods.

After spending a quick 5 minutes I managed to work out x-rays to help find artists

Firstly Artstation which anyone who has ever hired for games or film will know very well can be searched extremely simply with site:artstation.com/artist/

Why not build a custom search engine

Google easily lets you build your own search engines to search the web that can save you time on searches that you will have to repeat a lot of times. I won’t go through the full instructions on how to do this as it’s a rich enough topic to have its own post.

Well that’s it for now let me know if you have any questions or anything further to add.

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