How to Find Manager Candidates Online Based on Number of Direct Reports: Very Creative & Effective Sourcing Method Using Google

Q: I am trying to source for managers who have supervised at least 25 direct reports. Is there a way to efficiently target them in an Internet search?
A: The most elegant solution I can think of utilizes Google’s numrange command, which lets you find any number in a range, in the format lowvalue..highvalue (note there are no spaces on either side of the two dots). I explained another powerful way to find candidates via their certifications using this command in a previous post on my blog, inspired by Shally Steckerl of JobMachine.net, but this application is different enough to merit a separate treatment.
If you think about what’s in a resume or profile of somebody like this (we’ll use a software development team as our example, but you can substitute whatever’s relevant to your search), it probably says something like:
“managed virtual team of 25 professionals”, “managed cross functional team comprised of 25‚Ä≥, “Managed geographically distributed team with 25‚Ä≥, “managed and developed the development team of 25‚Ä≥, “managed and trained global project team consisting of 25‚Ä≥, etc.
Note the pattern (as all good sourcers do!). There are words between “managed” and “team”, and again between “team” and the number, which you can manage in one move with the * (wildcard). This represents a placeholder for any other word or words, so assuming you were ok with people up to 100 direct reports, it would yield this string:
“managed * team * 25..100‚Ä≥
which simply and elegantly finds them all! However, if it’s “managed team…” (no words in between), then you also need this:
“managed team * 25..100‚Ä≥
But don’t try to get too efficient, because
“managed * 25..100‚Ä≥
generates a lot of irrelevant results having nothing to do with one’s employees.
Of course, there are other variations like “managed 25 direct reports”, “managed multinational 25 person staff”, “managed a 25 person organization”, etc., so you should account for those if the above doesn’t generate enough results for your pipeline, a la “25..100 direct reports” and “managed 25..100 person”. However, *don’t* try putting them in an OR statement. If you search for something like:
(“managed 25..100 person” OR “managed * 25..100 person”) “software development”
it basically negates the numrange criterion. You might get a few good results at the beginning (first 5), but after that, it’s only searching for “software development”. This seems like a bug in Google to me, but it’s not hard to tell when there’s a problem, because the results count summary atop the first page changes from something like “results 1-100 of 439‚Ä≥ to “results 1-100 of 63,700,000‚Ä≥. The latter should always trigger your radar that there’s something wrong with your search string.
Last but not least, don’t expect much from (present tense of the verb)
“manage 25..100 person” “software development”
which generates only a few results. When you’re searching within a phrase, realize it’s doing an exact search — don’t expect it to find various forms of the root word. Since “managed” appears to be how most people reference it in their resumes/bios, you need to search on the past tense phrasing.
Glenn Gutmacher is a senior Recruiting Researcher at Microsoft Corporation and founder of Recruiting-Online.com, creator of the Advanced Online Recruiting Techniques self-paced sourcing course.
Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching entry-level jobs and other career opportunities.