Peopletoucher.com Search Engine

As LinkedIn grows upwards of 40M+ users, spanning 150+ industries and representing every country in the world, recruiting and sales professionals outside of the US continue to find value in searching for business contact names.

Considering all of the Search enhancements LinkedIn has released over the past few quarters, it's a surprise to see how hokey the Advanced People Search is when trying to search for contacts based in or near any non-US cities.

For the US-based recruiter who needs to place the occasional candidate based outside the US, it isn't terribly difficult to memorize a token postal code to put into the Postal Code field.

However, this process can get old rather quickly if you are not based in the US, and require city/regional focus to source contact names.

Soon after LinkedIn launched in May of 2003, it became apparent the professional networking site would turn into a great resource for B2B salespeople and recruiters.

In 2008, the site launched LinkedIn Recruiter for large enterprises and recruiting firms, yet the advanced search function (the free search tool available to everyone else) has always been watered down in order to appeal to a variety of backgrounds outside of business development and recruiting.

While creating the Peopletoucher Search Engine we took apart the features of LinkedIn's Advanced Search and put them back together piece-by-piece with our audience in mind. Here's what we found:

Now that Peopletoucher.com has been up for a few months and pre-season is over, it's time to get down to business. Let us know what to work on and please leave additional thoughts in the comments!

Certain company names are too long to fit in the company field, especially if they were made of multiple words. The company in question was "Agrium Advanced Technologies".

We restricted company length to 25 characters to prevent you from entering unnecessary words -- this search should simply use Agrium.

Unnecessary words like Incorporated, Corp, Company, and Inc., will skew search results because people create profiles with multiple variations of the same company name.

Today's question came in from Mark: "I ran a query using the title of "project manager." Is it possible to use peopletoucher to search both current and previous titles and companies?"

When building the Peopletoucher Search Engine, we decided to make the default behavior current company and current title only, in order to increase the accuracy of the search results, and help promote the best searching behavior.

Here's some probable solutions to your issue and searching best practices.

I was discussing the Peopletoucher.com Search Engine with the author of Engineers Can Sell, Eric Bono, and he asked for an example of how it could work in his industry. (Besides a blogger, Eric is an engineer and salesperson working in the aerospace industry.)

Eric targets senior director and VP-level decision makers at global companies like Boeing, who purchase materials and new technologies used in manufacturing.

This is a step by step guide using Eric as an example.

Step 1: Start with the target company

Enter the company you're targeting:

• You can enter multiple company names separated by commas.
• Quotes are added automatically for multi-term companies
• Enter multiple names to match common variations. (e.g. JP Morgan, Chase)
• Linkedin drops off "corp", "co.", ".com" and "inc." but you shouldn't include them anyway.

Results: 25,607 (your results will vary but this is obviously too many contacts to sort through)

Step 2: Narrow down targets using the RankFilter

The RankFilter let's you narrow down your target by executive level:

Results: 5,905 (still too many)

Step 3: Use title search terms to narrow by area of expertise

Pick title search terms that apply to your target:

• You don't have to worry about 3 letter acronyms like "CTO" as they are added for you automatically if "C-Level" is selected with the RankFilter.
• This is the equivalent of putting a bunch of "OR" statements in the search box, your target could match any one of these terms but must match atleast one.

Results: 970

To narrow the list down to the ideal number of targets (less than 50) you should deselect some terms from the title search terms box and search again.

The term "technology" is probably picking up a lot of IT contacts that aren't needed here, so lets deselect "technology" and see the results:

Results: 211

This is a lot better and should give you an idea of the power and accuracy of using title search terms and the RankFilter to narrow down your list to the right people.

Want to try this search with your network?

http://peopletoucher.com/linkedinsearch/?sel=Yboeing,Wtechnology,Caerospace,Cdevelopment...