(For the sake of this article, CV’s and Resume’s will be referred to as CV’s for simplicity)
I’m going to presume that you already know how to Google search for CV’s in it’s simplest form so I’m not going to try and teach you how to suck eggs, but I stumbled across a helpful addition to my search recently (and I’m not talking about a semantic search engine). So my search was pretty simple to start off with:
(Java | J2EE) (Support | Admin*) (Texas | TX | Austin) (Resume | Resumé | CV | Vitae) -job -apply
The result of which was
Then it suddenly hit me that there was an easier way to filter CV’s. Asking Google to only return .doc’s, .pdf’s and .rtf’s. I’m not sure if many people have used this before, but I haven’t read about it previously so though I would share the love. Add this to the end of your search:
(filetype:doc | filetype:pdf | filetype:rtf)
So, the search became:
(Java | J2EE) (Support | Admin*) (Texas | TX | Austin) (Resume | Resumé | CV | Vitae) (filetype:doc | filetype:pdf | filetype:rtf)
You will notice I removed the -’s, as I figured there simply isn’t any need for them if I’m only looking at documents. And the results of which was:
Ultimately, Google is telling me it’s found circa 20,000 documents that contain my keywords and are potential CV’s. Although the likely hood of this figure being accurate, or even 10% of those documents being remotely relevant is extremely slim, it gave me a nice wad of CV’s to sieve through.
Please note: You should use this trick in addition to your regular Google search, as many people upload their CV’s to websites as part of the HTML so won’t be picked up in this search.
Let me know how you get on!
Aaron
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Hi Do you have any other threads on some of the search methods you use?
I tend to get limited results with google, however I do find a gem now and again.
I am always interested in new ways of sourcing candidates.
Many Thanks
Ben
Hi Ben,
I have many more methods and techniques I can share but haven’t got round to posting them yet! Do you have anything particular that you would like me to cover which I could put to the top of the list? I’ll definitely update before the end of the week.
Let me know how you get on with this though.
Aaron