https://sites.google.com/site/resumesourcinghut/search-strings

How to Find Resumes on Google and BingJun 3, 2015

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[NOTE: Even though I'm no longer a full-time recruiter, a friend (and

client) asked if I could repurpose and update an old post I had

written for them a couple of years ago. This post can also be found

on FeeTrader.com's blog]

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about this topic and decided to

do some research and find out if things have changed since then.

Although things have mostly remained the same, there are a few

new concepts that can improve your results. (Plus, since I’m in

digital advertising now, I did some keyword research and found that

at least 20 people per month or about 250 people per year search

for this on Google, so people remain interested in learning how to do

this).

Searching for resumes on Google or Bing may not be applicable for

every type of search you’re doing (i.e., non-technical roles like

accountants and administrative assistants) but, what I’ve found, is

that it’s really good for finding creative people – UX/UI and design

folks, graphic artists - and anyone else that would benefit from

having an online portfolio.

Usually designers and, oftentimes, software engineers, will create a

website for their portfolio and throw up a copy of their resume. It’s

also a great way to find consultants and freelancers who typically

have a website promoting themselves, which usually includes a

resume.

However, it is sometimes difficult to know when the resumes were

last updated or, depending how narrow your search criteria is, may

not yield a lot of results, but I think it’s always a good idea to do a

quick Google and/or Bing search for resumes. You never know, it

might turn up someone that your competitors haven’t found and the

old resume you found still has contact info, right? Now they're a

"passive" candidate. Depending on the last dates shown, you may

have to make an educated guess as to where that person may be in

their career now and what type of role they would likely be

interested in, given the amount of time that has passed.

To save time, you can save a search string and just copy and paste

it into Google or Bing, changing only the required skills/experience

that may be different.

The Basics

When it comes to the basics of search, Bing and Google are very

similar and most of the symbols and operators used in Google will

also work in Bing, however there are a few things that Bing isn’t

able to do- one big one being the ability to search for a range of

numbers.

*Do

not include a space after the operator. (e.g., inurl:resume NOT inurl:

resume)

 

Google Resume Search in Action

So let’s take a look at an example. To make it more realistic, I did a

quick search for a UX Designer job opening here in the Seattle area.

I found the followingAmazon job that was recently posted (you’re

welcome Amazon Recruiter).

After reviewing the job description, here are some of the key

skills/experience I took away:

HTML, JavaScript, JQuery or equivalent, and CSS

Visio, Axure, Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, InDesign and

Dreamweaver

HTML5

User experience, UX

GUI

Mobile

Designer

There are quite a few terms there and, once we start adding our

search operators, the search string could get pretty long. Google

used to have a max number of terms you could use in a search

string and everything beyond that limit would not be considered.

That magic number used to be 32.

Since the only information I could find on this maximum was a

decade old, I decided to test this and try to perform a search that

included every key skill/term I pulled from the job description.

Here’s what I used to search for the desired skills:

designer (“user experience” | UX) GUI HTML5 mobile (HTML |

JavaScript | JQuery | CSS) (Visio | Axure | Illustrator |

Photoshop | Fireworks | InDesign | Dreamweaver)

If I were to just use this search string it would turn up over 508,000

results, a number of which are not resumes.

So, let’s try to narrow this down to resumes. To do this, we’ll use the

inurl: and intitle: operators. This will restrict our search results to

only those that include the term “resume” in the website’s URL or

title.

Here’s what that search string looks like:

designer (“user experience” | UX) GUI HTML5 mobile (HTML |

JavaScript | JQuery | CSS) (Visio | Axure | Illustrator |

Photoshop | Fireworks | InDesign | Dreamweaver)

(inurl:resume | intitle:resume)

As you can see in the results below, this got us a little closer to the

mark but still resulted in more results than we can get through

(111,000) and included some off-target results for job posting sites

and sample resumes. Still not what we’re looking for.

Now, an old school technique of trying to eliminate some of the false

positives we received in our last search was to exclude certain

terms such as –jobs, -job, etc. This would, in theory, get rid of the

job posting sites. However, this can be cumbersome and lead to

possibly excluding results we want to see (i.e., if someone used the

term job or jobs in their resume). A short cut to pare down the

results would be just search for sites in which people have included

an actual copy of their resume in one of the following file types:

Word doc, PDF or txt file.

Here’s what I will add to our search string to narrow our results even

further:

(filetype:doc | filetype:pdf | filetype:txt)

When I add this, here are the results I get:

 

Much better. We’ve gone from over 111,000 to 1,650. But it’s still a

bit unwieldy and, we can’t forget that these results are showing

people not just in the U.S., but also all over the world. Even though

Amazon has no problem relocating the right people for the job, let’s

simplify things a bit and just search for people in the Seattle area.

I know what you’re thinking. Are we going to have to include every

possible city we can think of in the surrounding area? That could be

a real time killer and would likely push our search string over what

could still be Google’s maximum search term limit.

Fear not, there’s a workaround for this. Remember, Google has an

operator for searching a range of numbers. This is great for

searching a range of zip codes. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work in

Bing and I was unable to find anything that was equivalent to this

feature.

The first step is to find all of the zip codes within a specified radius

of your location. I used the website zip-codes.com for this but there

are a number of others you can use.

Since I wasn’t sure what Amazon’s zip code was, I just used the zip

code where my office is located – Bellevue, WA – which is 98007. I

also narrowed it to a 10-mile radius.

Here are the results:

There were a total of 62 zip codes within a 10-mile radius of

Bellevue. That would be a lot of zip codes to add to the search. In

order to see the range, from smallest to largest, I simply clicked the

“Zip” column to sort these numbers. Now that I have the smallest

(98004) and the largest (98195) I can now include the range in my

search string.

Here’s what that looks like:

98004..98195

That really narrowed things down, cutting our results from over

1,600 to only 8. That’s not a lot of results and it would have been

great to get more, but there’s a high likelihood that those 8 will be

very relevant to my search.

Here are the results:

There’s still one thing to test. When it’s all said and done, this

search string consists of 37 words. That’s more than the 32 that I

was able to find when searching for a max. Since that information

was over a decade old, let’s test it.

To do this, I’m going to use the excluding operator “-“, since we

haven’t used that in our search yet. Instead of excluding a term like

“java” I’ll exclude one of their names. If 32 is still the max, then

nothing will happen to the results and the exclusion will be ignored.

If it is now larger than 32, then we’ll see a decrease in our results

from 8 to 7.

Let’s test this using “–Ewald”. Here’s what happened:

Look at that! Only 7 results! Granted, we only have determined that

we can at least use 37 terms, but we now know that 32 is no longer

the max and I would assume it’s quite a bit larger now.

Since it could potentially take me an hour or more to test this

further, I’ll just be content knowing that the maximum is now

greater than 32. If you end up creating a really long search string, it

wouldn’t hurt to do a test similar to what I did today.

In closing, Google and Bing can be a good resource to utilize when

searching for resumes and trying to tap into potential candidates

your competitors may be overlooking. Even if they were using these

search engines, there are number of variations that can change the

results and find overlooked resumes. In the example I provided, we

only came up 8 resumes, but that can be easily changed by doing

things like excluding the area code radius and using the  zip codes

of other cities where you know this kind of talent lives-that is, if

you're company as a relocation budget. You can also add or subtract

keywords to broaden the search.

Happy hunting!

https://sites.google.com/site/resumesourcinghut/search-strings