Sourcing Location without Getting Lost

There are so many different ways to find candidates. The variety of searches and candidate sources make it worthwhile to try these different methods out. But not all methods are created equal. And some don’t have all the information in once place.

What about location, for example? Sure, these great searches will find you many candidates, but what about candidates in your part of the pond?If you are someone who sources all the time in your job or only part of the time, you still want to get as much information as you can for these searches.

So let’s talk about location. In order to add a location aspect to your search, wherever it may be, you need to first figure out the different ways that your audience will reference that specific location. They could include ANY of the follow and more:

• City names – This is pretty obvious, though you have to watch out for false positives.  (i.e. you search for “Zurich” as a search term, but you find a candidate who lives in San Francisco and they attended the ETC Institute)
• Country names – Same reasoning as the city name searches.  Also, hint: you may want to think about translating cities and countries into their native language
• Regional names – Not every location has a snappy regional name that goes with it.  For example, regional names like “Bay Area” or “Sophia Antipolis” or “Research Park Triangle” do exist.  But not every region has one.
• Websites – This is the one that gets missed many times.  If you are sourcing for your country or a different one, then all you have to do is reference the country domain.  The idea here is that a page that resides on a server in Poland will come from a .pl website.  This is not full-proof but it’s still better than nothing!

Actionable Search

Here is an example of how to put this into action.  We want to target GitHub profiles in the Czech Republic.  Normally for a Google search of GitHub profiles, you will start with a base string:

site:github.com “block or report”

And then you would add a focus, language or type of software that the user is working on (in this case, artificial intelligence / computer science background):

site:github.com “block or report” (“algorithm” OR “algorithms” OR “machine learning” OR “neural network” OR “deep learning” OR “pattern recognition” OR “computer vision”)

Now that string will get you a lot of people.  But we want to focus the search for a specific location.  In this case, we want the Czech Republic:

site:github.com “block or report” (“algorithm” OR “algorithms” OR “machine learning” OR “neural network” OR “deep learning” OR “pattern recognition” OR “computer vision”) (Česko OR Česká OR prague OR brno OR Czechia OR Czech OR “www * cz” OR “http * cz” OR “https * cz”)

Woah.  What is happening?

So yes, there are many cities in the Czech Republic.  And there are many different ways that you may reference your location.  There are also users who might not mention their location at all.  So instead, we look for the terms that will get us the highest yield.  We include capitals, major cities and countries in English and Czech.  When you do so, you end up with a few more candidates that you would not have found.

Also, some users will not post location but they will post a personal website.  If you search pages that come from the country, then you would look for http://www.anydomain.cz (since people may post with the world wide web host or hypertext transfer protocol, then you search for “www * cz” OR “http * cz” OR “https * cz” as well).  Since we don’t know how many words exist between www or http or https and cz, we will use Google‘s fill-in-the-blank operator, the * which takes the place of missing words.

In Conclusion

Make sure to try out these searches on your own and for the part of the world that you are sourcing for.  As always, make sure to translate jobs and software into multiple languages.  You will find more candidates when you do!

This sourcing method and thought process will be just one of many that we cover at the upcoming EVOLVE Masterclass that is being held in Prague and Budapest.  There are only a few seats left, so sign up at www.evolvemasterclass.com

See you then!

Mark Tortorici
Founder & Training Expert
Transform Talent Acquisition

Advertisement