Fear and The Future Of Search

I'm not a psychologist. What I am is a Recruiter with a strong affection for all things good and bad (Light and Dark if you will) in the Star Wars Universe. This past week, there was a tremor across the Recruiterverse, a panic and a fear.

Did you feel it?

Or, were you immune to it?

At 3:59PM ET on Wednesday, I got a text from David Marr, CIR, CSSR ; he was asking if LinkedIn was working for me. This was the first of many texts from a lot of recruiters.

Did you feel it?

Did it cause your recruiting efforts to come to a deafening halt?

Across Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Slack, and Discord, a confirmation came: LinkedIn was down.

Immediately, my head went to what I had just taught on Tuesday at Benjamin Mena 's Recruiter Growth Summit. I didn't wonder if LinkedIn was down. I didn't care. What I had taught against and dispelled was the fear that X-Raying LinkedIn was dead. I tried a string I did during the live sourcing at the end of my session.

site:linkedin.com/in "@yahoo.com" (tx OR texas) (sale OR selling OR consult) (leader OR manager OR director) (EE OR "electrical engineering" OR ME OR "mechanical engineering" -account -recruiter

Okay, so X-Ray was still working. Whew. I could still find email addresses associated with my searches. My CSE's still worked.

But that is when it happened... when I clicked on a profile, I could not login into LinkedIn. I was getting the error message that so many of the people texting me were getting.

Again, I didn't care.

I was not worried.

I had X-Ray.

And that, my friends, reinforces what I've spent most of 2024 teaching in webinars and conferences. It's what I'll be teaching at Transform this week in Las Vegas.

I'll be dispelling the fear-mongering and doubt that has ensnared our recruiting community. I'll be showing you and others that there is a path forward.

I'll be doing it at ad hoc sessions with Thomas Alascio when he invites me on this Recruiting Roundtables.

I'll be teaching the fundamentals at SourceCon this coming April.

I'll be cheering on the next generation of Sourcers like Martel H. and ??Chris "Aquaman" Carver?? when they publish their strings.

But, I digress.

Why Are We So Hung Up On LinkedIn?

Not for a few minutes. No, the champion tool was down. And it wasn’t the first time, LinkedIn's experienced widespread issues before. If you need the history lesson, try RecruitingDaily 's accounts of this epidemic or long onto the Wayback Machine.

While I watched those different feeds on Wednesday, I wondered: why do we all care so much about LinkedIn and LinkedIn Recruiter?

I think that for some it’s obviously their number one source of hire. There’s no shame in that. It’s a highly effective tool.

But with LinkedIn’s sinister easy-of-use, is it making us less effective recruiters?

There was a session I gave back in 2016 shortly after Microsoft acquired LinkedIn. It was at the same conference that I met Matt Charney , Derek Zeller (Just Human) , Pete Radloff , and Steve Levy .

I gave the talk, Charney asked if I thought anything would change to LinkedIn.

Keep in mind, this is just after the acquisition, and I explained that LinkedIn would always be there for us to “freely” extract information because of the SEO and link building that had gone into the site. It was in the middle of the Q&A that Levy challenged the audience to “find one day a week that they sourced from a resource other than LinkedIn.”

Three things happened that day:

1. Levy told me what I needed to do to be a better recruiter.
2. Levy told the audience what they needed to do to be better recruiters.
3. Levy coined the term “inmauling”.

(For these and other reasons, I consider Levy a force of good and a hell of a mentor to the greater community. You can catch him bi-weekly on hireEZ 's Recruiter Therapy hosted by Daniel Harten and Shannon Pritchett ).

Let’s come back to focus on the first two things that happened as they are one and the same and if anyone is following Levy’s advice then they did not freak out on Wednesday.

Why didn’t they freak out?

Because they know more than one way to source and they also know that they can still use Google to extract relevant information from a downed LinkedIn.

They are in the words of Taylor Swift "Fearless."

Better Boolean

When LinkedIn goes down, then we look to other networks. Shouldn’t we be looking all along at different networks?

Do we know how?

While I realize there is only so much time in the week, I'm eager to dispel the fear around Boolean Search. Despite great efforts to automate it (shout out to Edan Krolewicz 's ExactBuyer , Jeremy Schiff 's RecruitBot , Anoop Gupta 's SeekOut , and Steven Jiang 's hireEZ ), there is still exceptional value in exploring URL's the "old-fashioned way."

If you need a Boolean refresher, maybe I'll see you at Transform , SourceCon , or RecFest UK - I am happy to sling Boolean with the best of them.

If one of these events is NOT in your future, I'm happy to lend you 15 minutes on a Friday for my Open Office Hours - the only thing is you have to promise to share what you learned for free with others freely. Think of it as the circle of Recruiting life.

That's right, I don't charge for Office Hours.

I think of it as my way to pay homage to my mentors. That's also why I volunteer to speak at a lot of events.

If you'd like to support me and further your career simultaneously, there's this book, Talk Tech To Me.

Brian Fink is the author of Talk Tech To Me. He takes on the stress and strain of complex technology concepts and simplifies them for the modern recruiter. Fink’s impassioned wit and humor tackle the highs and lows of technical recruiting with a unique perspective — a perspective intended to help you find, engage, and partner with professionals.