Double your LinkedIn power with Google

By Randy Woods
NWjobs

One of the common frustrations I hear from job seekers is that they claim to never be able to find the hiring managers for the positions in which they're interested. They have a point; a hiring manager is always an in-demand person and one who rarely advertises his or her location.

There is LinkedIn, which gives you the ability to determine if you have any potential contacts within an organization. The problem is the utility of these searches are only as good as your own network. If you're just starting out on the networking path, it will take some time to build up enough connections to reach the saturation point. Of course there are also regular search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, which have Web reach as wide as a country mile, but usually only get you an inch deep into a company's executive staff list.

But how about combining the power of both tools?

In his recent book, The Panic Free Job Search, career management expert Paul Hill talks about how those who are new to networking can get a leg up by using the power of search engines to tap into the farther reaches of LinkedIn that may not be accessible to the novice networker.

The true benefits of LinkedIn's searchability are hidden behind a paywall, or premium account, Hill explains. With these premium accounts, searches within LinkedIn for companies, contacts or job titles can yield up to 700 results. Those who do not have a premium account, however, are limited to just 100 results for each search within LinkedIn's site.

But for many job seekers on a budget who can't afford the $40 to $75 per month for a business-level or executive LinkedIn account, Hill has found an easy work-around to access the deeper recesses of LinkedIn. Simply use Google, or any other major search engine, to perform an "inurl" search using LinkedIn and various keywords in your searches. By "X-raying" the LinkedIn site with a Google search, Hill says, one can circumvent the need for a premium account to get access to more companies that might be hiring.

In his book, Hill offers a few suggestions about what strings to type into Google to get the best results, such as:  Get the tips and complete article