LinkedIn, the largest network of professionals in the world, is also the favorite hunting ground for recruiters and staffing agencies. Whether you are looking for a list of college students who are currently interning at Facebook or a head hunter building a pool of presumptive candidates, LinkedIn will not disappoint.
LinkedIn has a useful search function to help you find potential candidates but do you know that Google search can also help to find people on LinkedIn. Google indexes every public profile of LinkedIn and if you perform people search on LinkedIn via Google, you get a few additional features:
- While LinkedIn will only show 10 results per search query in one page, Google can return up to 100 results in one search results page.
- You can perform date-limited searches in Google and this is helpful when you are only looking for profiles that have been created or updated in a particular date range.
- You can automatically easily save your LinkedIn search results in a spreadsheet using the Google search Scraper for further analysis.
LinkedIn Scraper with Google Search
OK, let’s take a look at how we can search LinkedIn profiles with the help of Google. Say you are trying to find people for senior position who are based in New York area. Here’s how we’ll construct the Google search query.
1. Show LinkedIn profiles but exclude internal LinkedIn search pages:
site:linkedin.com/in/ OR site:linkedin.com/pub/ -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir"
2. Find LinkedIn profiles of people who have senior positions:
"head | vp | vice-president | senior | director" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir"
3. Find matching LinkedIn profiles who are based in NY (wild card search)
"Location * New York" "head | vp | senior | director" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir
You can further refine search results by adding the domain (like Sales & Marketing) or even the company name to limit your search to executives of a particular organization.
Find LinkedIn Profiles by Post Code
Google search supports number ranges meaning you can search pages that contain numbers within a specific range. For instance, if you say “apples 1900..2000” on Google, it will show matching pages that contain any number before 1900 and 2000.
We can extend the same trick to perform LinkedIn people search on Google. To give you an example, the pin code of Delhi is something like 110049. So if you are looking for web developers in the Delhi area on LinkedIn, you search query would be something like:
"web developer" 110001..110099 site:linkedin.com/in
One more thing. A search query like site:linkedin.com will perform a global search. However, you can use country specific sub-domains in LinkedIn to only show candidates from a particular country. For instance, site:uk.linkedin.com/in web-developer will find LinkedIn profiles from UK while site:ca.linkedin.com/in will only look for candidates that have set thir region as Canada.
Also see: Stop broadcasting your LinkedIn profile updates