The Complete Guide to X-Raying LinkedIn #sourcing (2024)

Have you been finding that you are not getting the right results with some LinkedIn X-Ray strings that used to work? That is because the structure of public profiles has changed in several ways over the past few months. Here is what can and cannot be done as of now.

X-Ray LinkedIn for:

• Current Job Title: possible using the operator intitle:
• Current Company: possible using the operator intitle:
• Headline: yes, through special operators in Custom Search Engines (CSEs) and in Social List - these are the only two ways to search by headline out there, LinkedIn Recruiter included.
• Location: unfortunately, we have experienced a double-loss regarding locations, due to public profile HTML changes:

(1) You can no longer get the right results by searching for "location * * <location-name>" (take a note of it!)

(2) You can no longer query the location with a special Custom Search Engine operator, similar to this one.

All you can do now is just search for location names, which only works well if it's a distinct LinkedIn-defined area name (such as "San Francisco Bay Area"). Or, X-Ray for a specific location such as "Oakland, California" to find people who have chosen to display their location this way.

(As a side note, I have noticed that even when a public profile has a location like"Oakland, California", the location shows a generic name like "San Francisco Bay Area" when I'm logged in. This means that you may get lucky and find the exact location on a public profile vs. logged-in).

You can X-Ray LinkedIn for countries by using the location setting in Google's advanced search dialog. Or, use two-letter country codesunder the site: operator.

• Industry: we can no longer get the right results by searching for "industry * * <industry-name>".
• School: recently became available using a CSE operator in the format more:p:organization-name:<school>.Example. That's a gain.

Our Sourcing X-Ray tool Social List takes advantage of all of the above and doesn't require you to write any operators, just the search terms. Check it out if you haven't! (Otherwise, writing more:p operators is tiresome, at least from my experience).

There are also ways to X-Ray LinkedIn to find:

• publicly shared contact info or specifically "gmail.com" addresses
• job stability
• language proficiency
• (some) certification holders
• secondary profile language
• group membership,

and we can probably think of other creative X-Ray strings, depending on the search.

Check out the 90-min recording of our recent class "Linked Hacks" for other X-Ray examples and sourcing hacks for LinkedIn as well.