Recruitem - X-Ray Query Builder

Recruitem is a fantastic tool that makes it brain dead simple to build X-Ray Queries that target Google+, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc.

What’s an X-Ray Query you ask?

X-Ray Queries are complicated Google Search Queries – like the following:

“”competitive intelligence” “mountain view” “ca”-intitle:”profiles” -inurl:”dir/ ” site:linkedin.com/in/ OR site:linkedin.com/pub/”

And these queries produce output like the following:

Why should I care?

First off, unless you have a “high-end” LinkedIn account such as LinkedIn Recruiter, what you see of the LinkedIn universe is going to be limited.

For example with a “Basic” LinkedIn account you are only going to be allowed to see full profile data for 2nd degree connections and not 3rd.
To illustrate the importance of this, my connection graph on LinkedIn currently connects me to 1,682 people as 1st degree connections but up to 17m+ people as 3rd degree connections.

Secondly, you can search for certain things a bit more effectively using this method.

For example searching based on educational level is relatively straight forward with this tool. Whereas with LinkedIn’s standard search you aren’t provide with educational level as a standard search filter and this data has to be merely thrown in as a keyword search with mixed results.

Third, if you have a “Basic” LinkedIn account you are limited by the number of profiles that you can see – at the time of this writing – 100.

But is there more?

Personally we don’t think that you should limit your use of open source intelligence, and in particular use of LinkedIn, merely because you don’t want to “pay the freight” of a LinkedIn Recruiter or Premium level account. For example we give our analysts LinkedIn recruiter accounts and we think you should as well.

But we do know that at times people are looking for alternative methods to find XYZ piece of data and may also want to avoid paying a monthly subscription fee each month. And in these cases Recruitem helps out enormously.

In addition the tool makes it trivial to perform similar types of searches on Google+, GitHub, Xing, and Viadeo.

Therefore in sum, we recommend you take a look at Recruitem. At times it will be just the right tool for the job.

By:

Sean Campbell

Scott Swigart