Mike Santoro Live on Shally's Alley - Power Automate Desktop

It is June 17th, and you are live on Shelly's Alley with a special episode on not just Power Automate Desktop from one of the most advanced users known to mankind, but also some secret sauce around LinkedIn X-Ray and some newly discovered, at least by Mike's own admission, commands for LinkedIn Recruiter that may even be undocumented. Is that true?

That's true. Yes, that's true. Yep.

Wow. Okay, so you're breaking news. I didn't know I was a news show, but here we go.

Oh yeah, this is breaking news. We're gonna share it, share it on your show. It's gonna be great.

Good to be here.

Thanks, Shelly.

All right, well, welcome to the show, Mike. Uh, everybody, this is Mike Santoro. He works for AllSearch Recruiting, and he is highly recommended by my most esteemed brother, Glenn Guttmacher. Glenn said, "Cheli, if you want to do anything about Power Automate Desktop," since I've been out of the scene for about, let's see, about 6 months or so, I stopped using it. I went all Mac now, so I don't have Power Automate Desktop anymore. I miss it, and I think a lot of things have happened since I abandoned it. Glenn was like, "You got to have Mike on the show." I begged and I pleaded, and Mike finally said, "Okay, fine, sure, I'll do it." So here we go. We got Mike Santoro live talking about Power Automate Desktop and a few other things. So Mike, first of all, just how did you get into this whole Power Automate Desktop thing? Are you, are you like me, like extremely lazy? Is that, is that the thing?

No, actually I was inspired, Shelly, by watching you and Glen about a year or so ago when you guys were on Shelly's Alley and you were showing how you were scraping Google and Bing and other things and then uploading them into SeekOut and So I basically, at that time, I had copied your process there, replicated what you had done. The code stopped working for me. Now, a couple months ago, I got back into it. I had to like redo the whole thing, but I took a method that I have shared on some of the Facebook groups, the connections range method, which I can get into because that's really what, what is the power behind it. And I use that method to basically X-ray for more LinkedIn profiles. And I found a couple other keys to Power Automate that make it a little bit easier. To, to get that. But that sounds really technical, and I don't want to discourage anyone for listening because it's really the method that you can replicate. You don't necessarily need to use Power Automate Desktop, right?

This works with anything. It's just the Power Automate was the platform that Glenn and I were experimenting with back then. And, uh, and yeah, please don't be scared off. It's actually a lot easier. When Glenn and I first started doing it It was, you know, it was learning. I mean, we're learning on, on screen and bumbling through making mistakes and trying to figure it out. And, um, it's just gotten a lot better. So if you remember those days and it kind of freaked you out a little bit, cause it's like, wow, that looks like a lot of work. Well, you know what? We did the work so you don't have to. And now Mike's going to share with us, uh, the shortcuts. So, um, definitely want to, you know, learn from you on that. Sorry, go ahead.

No, absolutely. So I really just wanted to say to start out that my goal is to share with the community, the talent source community, has given me so much. I've noticed that over the last few years, as I've gone to conferences and contributed and listened to people speak and read publications, that there's been a lot of sources that share on the tech side, like tech recruiting, IT recruiting. So my goal is always to kind of— I've been looking at all this. I'm like, I'm not a tech recruiter, IT recruiter. I recruit, you know, engineers and mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, construction management type professions, those kinds of things. So non-tech roles. So I'm trying to fill the gap for all the recruiters and sourcers out there that, you know, need some tips and tricks that aren't tech-associated, aren't IT-associated, that can really get value out of something right away. So all the things that I've shared and published already, that's kind of my primary goal. I'm trying to fill that void to help those kinds of recruiters. So hopefully simple.

Well, that's great. Yeah, it sounds like it. Now you had mentioned that you wanted to do some full-screen sharing on Power Automate. You want to just start with that, just walk us through the connecting discovery?

I was actually hoping, Shelly, that I could share a little bit more about the big news this week that really impacts the method that I want to talk about, the connections range method, which is, did you happen to see, Shelly, what Irina had published? Earlier in the week on the, the 570 million profiles without years of experience. Did you happen to see that?

No, I did not. I'm sorry, but it sounds like 570 million profiles is a pretty exaggerated, probably fake number.

So let me show you, let me show you this. It's pretty, it's pretty wild. So this really impacts the importance, I think, of the connections range method.

And I think— start with that. Yeah, what is the connections range method? Let's start there.

Yeah, so let me— so Let's, let me share my screen here, shall we? We can get into it here. So you guys can see my, my screen, shall we?

Yeah. Yep. You're full screen and then you and I are kind of in the bottom right there.

Awesome. Awesome. So here we can see like there's 860 million. This is LinkedIn Recruiter. I just wanna show you a couple examples here of why we're getting into this and why it's important. There's 860 million profiles globally on LinkedIn. You click this button here, you can kind of see 861 million. What Irina did, which I think is big news to share, is that there are— she used this, this advanced operator, this hidden operator, years of experience, to exclude all the profiles that don't have years of experience. So there are 550 million LinkedIn profiles globally, 555 million to date.

Well, let's take that with a grain of salt. We don't know if that's true. We have no idea if it's— it's probably A lot less than that, but yeah, I don't want to stick to the number. I just realize there's a lot of duplicates and a lot of fake profiles and so on, right?

Oh, I'm not even talking about that. I'm not even talking about that. So like, there are, there are about 300 million profiles that actually have years of experience on the profile. So I— what I'm trying to, what I'm trying to point out here is that of all these profiles, there's about 65% or so, roughly. We're talking here with numbers that don't have years of experience on their profile. So like if you click into like this guy here, he doesn't have years of experience. He has education, he has summary, he's got a headline, he's got his name. Why this is so critical is because there is such a large percentage of people that have LinkedIn profiles that don't have much data on them.

Yeah, they're incomplete. I like to call them anemic profiles, anorexic profiles.

Yeah, yeah, like their job type, like they say have name, they have headline, they have They have some, some maybe some education, they might have a summary section in their profile. So this person has a pretty robust summary section, but no work experience here, no number ranges on years of experience. So you might get a few data points here if they have a headline. So what I'm trying to say here is that we need to stop looking at LinkedIn so much as a resume database. And realize it's a lot more like a directory. A lot of these profiles aren't filled out to where you can query them like you can a resume or in a resume database. So it at least shows us that we need to at least run searches both ways with just like with keyword dense queries where we're searching with, you know, and really getting tight with our searches and also keyword light searches so that we can capture some of these, um, and get some of these more. So, so that's where it comes in handy when we talk about X-Ray and the new things that we can— that the new operators like headline and in-anchor that we can use in X-Ray to search for headlines. It's going to make it a lot easier for us to find more people this way.

So I'm sure you're going to show us this, uh, in a minute here, but I wanted to interject and and see if I recall correctly the minimum requirements for profile. It's been a while since I created a profile, but I remember that you have to have an employer, but it doesn't have to have a date. So like company name is, is a mandatory field. Um, I believe education may also be a mandatory field, again, not dates. And the headline is created from your employer and job title, so that's not mandatory. It's like automatically by default create. You can edit it, but it's, it's by default created. So there's only like a handful of things— your, your name, your location, an employer, an education, and something in summary that are, that are required. And so a lot of people just basically, you know, let's face it, they do the minimum, right? They do what's required. And that's how you end up with so many profiles, as you're explaining, that have this missing information. So if you use a tool that does a search for years of experience, these profiles, these millions— we don't know how many, but certainly millions— just simply won't show up in SeekOut or in HireTool or on LinkedIn Recruiter when you're doing years of experience. So this is, just wanna drive home the point, Mike, that I think a lot of people may not be understanding what you're saying. The big deal here is that the comprehension of millions, an order of magnitude of millions of profiles are not findable when you limit your search to a year or 2 or 5 or whatever of experience. —but it's even more than that. So first of all, let's stop doing that. Yeah, great. Yeah, let's stop doing that. Now let's— now show us what to do.

Yeah, yeah. It's even more than that because what I'm saying— what I think Irina's article came up a little bit short because she said basically don't use the years of experience filter because that's going to eliminate all those profiles. What I'm saying is people that have these keyword light profiles, basically if you start adding any extra keywords into the search that aren't job titles, aren't headlines, aren't like their university or something, that's gonna automatically cut out about all those people, right? We need to be careful when we search beyond just, uh, company name, job title. We at least need to run two searches, one, one that's dense and one that's light, so that we can capture all those people. So for example, US, 180 million profiles, only 100 million— so it's like 65% have years of experience. So, you know, even if you're just looking at the US, it's like more than half only have years of experience. So why this is all important is because I think it just stresses the importance of running searches. And it just stopped looking at LinkedIn completely as a resume database. I think that's what's critical. We can get more candidates that other people aren't finding. We do some light searches. So here's—

there's gold in them there hills. Yeah, there's a lot of gold there.

Exactly. So here, so to show you the real method here that I wanted to share that goes into the Power Automate Desktop, it's let's look at a LinkedIn profile, a public LinkedIn profile page. So I got one here copied of a registered nurse in Philadelphia. This is what it looks like when you're not logged into LinkedIn. This is what this person's profile looks like. This is what— so it has a lot of data on it, has all their work experience, it has their location, right? This is what's publicly indexed in Google, right? Exactly. Or Bing or the other ones. What I want you to notice here is this is the pattern that I found when you look at the location that somebody lives. This one, for example, is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, 157 connections. So whenever we've done searches on Google for X-Ray, we've always like typically recommended, you know, some people use the around function to tie this to connections. Some people will use, um, I mean, you could use an asterisk in here. There's a lot of things you could do, but if you do that, you're only going to get one query where you're limited to 300 or so results.

This is because Google limits you to 300 results.

Yes, the time of that is over, Shelly, because with the connections range method, we can actually take a search and use this, the same exact search, but change the variation of the connections into different ranges. And now we can get massive amount of results. So for example, if we take a query here, I've got one queued up here, like I've got site:linkedin.com. I've got intitle:registered nurse or inanchor:registered nurse. Now, inanchor is a way that you can search for, um, tags inside of any other things. I just published this on Arena's blog, so if you want to go back there to Boolean strings, you can see that a detail.

Yeah, it's, it's a real easy explanation, guys. The, the inanchor command is a Google command, also exists in other places, but it's essentially looking for the hashtag inside of HTML. So it's an in-page link. It's a link, it's a hyperlink inside of a page to another section in the page. So think of it like you're, you're in the page and there's like headline, headline, headline, or title, title, title. It's looking for those tags that are, that are inside of that one page, not a hyperlink that sends you to another page. That's, that's what this does, right?

So we can get, we can get title, we can get location. There's other things. It's all documented I tried to map it out for everybody, but I'm looking here is basically I'm saying I want people that have— we can use in title to look for their, their current job title or in anchor to look for their headline. So this is going to search for people on Google that have in title registered nurse in their current title or in their headline. And then I'm adding that phrase that I just showed you, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. I'm saying 2 connections because that's one way that you can run the search. So I can run the search that way and into 2 connections. Here's the critical thing, and you'll see here in highlighted in red, this will give me only results of people that have exactly 2 connections, Shelley. And this is going to give me, you know, 200 or so results. Now what's cool about what you could do with the connections range method is I can say I can use the, the range operator here with 2 dots, and now I can go connections 2 through 15, let's say, and hit enter. And now I'm going to get more results that are going to include 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, right?

Yes. So 2 through 15.

So the connection range method is powerful because I could take the same exact search now and I can continue to change the numeric range here. And now each time I change it, I can scrape 100, 200 results, 100, 200 results. You could take the range all the way from like 2 connections all the way through 500 connections And then you can take out the word connections because some people don't have that. And then you can— so I'll show you an example.

So I did— wait, wait, timeout, timeout, timeout. Hold a second. So this is freaking brilliant, but I just want to explain. So why you stop at 500 is because LinkedIn doesn't publish anything beyond 500. So that's not because it's some kind of max. It's just what's, what's visibly published. Also, I had a question. Can you do one connection?

Yes, you can do that. You could run one connection as well, but you have to change.

So you just start with one word to 1, 2 to 15, then 16 to 30, then 31 to 60, or whatever, and so on.

Because it's plural. I keep it— I keep the range starting at 2 for this example because you have to keep this plural. If you just had one connection, this word would actually be connection without the s. So we can run— we could— we run that one separately. But here's— let me show you what happens. It took me literally to do this search I wanted to see how long it would take me manually because I'm going to show you how to do it through Power Automate Desktop. But I think it's just as powerful, if not more powerful and more effective, to do it manually in this connection range method. So I'll show you both ways and you can kind of compare and decide for yourself, Shelly. But here's what we have here. So I took— here's the connections range method. Literally took me 29 minutes to execute this manually, Shelly. You'll see on the right-hand side here, I've got 2 connections. This will go up. 3 connections, 4 connections, 5 connections. Using the range method, I got not 300 results for this query, I got 3,567 unique results for this query.

Up to the 500 connections?

Well, no, even beyond that because, uh, that's up to the 500 connections, but we could split that up. The 500+ connections, um, you can get 500+ connections by doing— by putting an asterisk. So if you do Um, no, wrong, wrong one here.

Yeah, just replace the range, the num_range with an asterisk.

Yeah, so if you, if you change this to 500 with an asterisk, then you'll get the 500+ connections. But now this one, depending on the sample size, you can break up even further, Shelly. So people say, well, what do you do once you get to 500? Well, you could break this up even further as long as you have another number range on a profile. So think about it, what other number ranges are on profiles? Well, I don't know the year, but years of experience or years at a certain company from 2005 to 2007. So we can just go here and go 2000 and click enter, and now we have 6 results. Let's scrape those. Then we can go 2001, enter.

Or you can do 2000 dot dot 2010. You could do that too, right?

Yeah, you could do 2000 dot dot 2010, and now we got more results. There's 100 results. So basically we could scrape— we can get a lot of these, and I want to show you. So On LinkedIn Recruiter, if I did the exact same search on LinkedIn Recruiter and I put registered nurse in the title or, and this is an advanced operator that Aaron Lutz found, so I'm giving him credit for it, but he found that you can take the headline operator, put it into the job title field, and now you can search headlines. So similarly to the in anchor with Google, what I'm showing you is that if I ran this search in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the same exact criteria, currently there, with the, with registered nurse as a job title or in the headline, I'm getting 7,000 results. And through the connection range method for free with 29 minutes of manual input, I got 3,567 results.

Well, unfortunately, so I appreciate that, but unfortunately that doesn't map right because when you're inside a LinkedIn recruiter, um, and you're using geography, it's actually expanding the search outside of that. And when you're using the search on Google, it's matching the keywords exactly. So that's why you get 7,000. They're pulling up locations other than Philadelphia inside of LinkedIn. That's why you get extra stuff. But really, if you were to compare it apples to apples, I bet you anything that the search that you did here on this page is actually giving you more results than LinkedIn because there's a very large population of people that don't allow their profiles to be indexed inside of LinkedIn and they don't come up in recruiter search. So you're probably getting more. Um, it just looks like it's less because of the geography, the way that it's calculated.

Now here's where this gets really special. I think you're right on that, Shelly. Here's where this gets really special.

Oh no, what a cliffhanger. Are you still there?

You could take SeekOut's freemium version, which is their Chrome extension called Sourcing Assistant. This is the best-kept secret in sourcing, guys. You could take this, basically create a new project, upload candidates, upload the CSV with only the URLs to the profiles, and SeekOut will map it out. And once you have to give you the rest, once you—

what's that? Yeah. So you just need the URL and SeekOut will give you the name, company, all the other, like filled out.

It will give you— SeekOut will give you everything else. And this is a version, this is in their paid version. Why this is great, Shelly, is because you'd have now the premium version of SeekOut is like a skeleton. SeekOut is an incredible product. And it is like, it is like the fighter jet of of recruiting and talent sourcing. I mean, it is amazing. It has incredible filters and everything, right? But that is on the paid version. On the premium version, it's much more of a skeleton. It just kind of houses your candidates that you can input, that you upload. But I uploaded a big, you know, 3,600 people here that are all registered nurses in Philadelphia. But here's the great thing. You could use the search box. You could use the search box here. Now you could use SeekOut's advanced Boolean, Shelly, to find, to really narrow this down to whatever you want. So like if you wanted to find, um, you know, people that have current title, um, emergency, you could use like the advanced operator to narrow this down to people that have like an emergency room nurse, cardiac or whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so I guess what I'm saying is like you can almost replace LinkedIn Recruiter for free using the Connections Range method or Power Automate Desktop and SeekOut's premium product here.

Man, I would say you can better than replace, you can do better because I'm telling you, there's a lot of profiles inside of LinkedIn Recruiter that you just cannot find because of that person's privacy settings. So I think this is, it can be better than LinkedIn. Now, Glenn turned me on to this extension that I see that you have there, uh, that looks like a Pokémon ball. That actually works on this, on this search as well, because I've done that before. Yes, that's exactly what I used.

If, yeah, if we're talking about how, Mike, how did you scrape all these and get them into a Google Sheet? So what I did, Glenn, is simply, yeah, I simply went here and I clicked on the Pokémon ball, which is the Instant Data Scraper. What's cool about Instant Data Scraper people might not know, so I, and I comboed it with, this is called Infinite Scroll for Google, which is the same as AutoPagerizer, but you don't even need that, you do need that, but essentially click on Infinite Scroll here, and when you start to scrape these, it'll scrape 98. When you do then, it'll scrape all the pages because it'll keep loading with the Infinite Scroll or AutoPagerizer, whichever whichever one you choose to use. I have 300 results. That was quick. But the other thing is, once you go to another range— so if I went here and I just adjust the range here, now I'm going to adjust it to— I'm doing the wrong tab that I was going to show something else on. But once you adjust the range and do it again, it will just— it will automatically— it won't duplicate. It'll like automatically dedupe your results. So you can just keep doing this and keep iterating and automatically dedupe. And then all you have to do is copy and paste it into your spreadsheet.

Yeah, this is actually— I— this is what I do now because I don't have a Windows computer, so I'm using that method and it'll append any new ones. And then you just do it again on the next iteration, as you call it, where, right, instead of 2000 to 2010, it's 2010 to 2015 or whatever. Um, so that's the, you know, that's the no Windows version. I see you're pulling up Power Automate now, so you're going to show us how to do it with Windows then.

Yeah, I want to— so, so basically what I did was— one of the things that frustrated me about Google, what— or, or like using Bing or some another search engine was that you couldn't use the connect— the range method, right? So Google is the only, the only, um, place where you can use a range method like 1 to 20 connections, right? Other, you know, Bing doesn't have that. So I said, well, what if I just searched 1 connection, 2 connections, 3 connections, 4 connections, and just keep replicating that 500 times? And did 500 separate searches and scraped every page. Now, honestly, I don't think it's that helpful with Bing because you don't have an anchor with Bing and you don't have— there's just so many things. You have the proximity operator. There's just so many things that are more valuable with Google.

An anchor in Bing is a link. It's just L-I-N-K, link. It's the same thing.

There you go. It just doesn't work as well. So basically, I created a Google one. So this is— it looks complicated and it basically is very similar to what you did last year, except when I got to my loop here, I'm looping from 1 to 500, and there is an increase variable component here. So this is where the magic happens in this, Shelly, that's maybe a little bit different than what you had created before, is I can actually take the, um, that basically the 1 connection, 2 connection, 3 connection, 4 connection, and basically every time it goes through the loop, it's going to increase that number by 1. So I get— I can get it to run 500 times. So I'll just do a quick run through here. You can see what it's— what it's going to do, but it's very similar to what you saw before. So this is basically going to ask me, you know, the prompt that's going to ask me to put my string in. So I'm going to put it in without the number range because I have the number ranges inserted as a variable. And if I copy this, shall we, and I'm going to put it into— where'd it go? Where'd it go? Here it is. I put it into here. I'm going to leave a space because then it's going to insert two connections with a closed quote. Click OK. Now it's going to ask me for the name of my Excel file. I'm just going to call this, um, uh, RN, RN4 for like registered nurses. I'll click OK. Now it's going to launch Chrome. It's, it's going to input the, um No, it's not, not running for some reason.

Um, so yeah, it launches a Chrome window, then it imports that, that URL, and then starts incrementing the variable, runs it again. Right, right.

So that variable, I think maybe, maybe because we're on this, it's, it's having some problems with it. But, um, but yeah, it would launch, it will launch Chrome, it will insert the, it will insert that string, and then it's going to then continue to loop it Let's try it again here. Let's see if it'll work here. Uh, to test. I'm not sure why I'm getting an error message here, so want want on that. But, um, yeah, I think it's—

I'll tell you why Glenn and I ran into this before. It's because if you've got multiple instances of Chrome, it doesn't know which one to pick.

So you've got to only have the one Where, um, yeah, I think, I think it's because we're doing the stream right now, but if you take my word for it, it'll basically run each one of those through the loop, 1 through 500. Um, and I basically have it, I have it so that it uses like the end key to do the auto scroll. So it's going to give the end key, wait 2 seconds, end key, wait 2 seconds, end key, which is going to basically go to the bottom of the page, bottom of the page, bottom of the page. So let the auto scroll kick in, auto pagerizer. It's going to extract the data. It's going to open up an Excel spreadsheet. It's going to load the Excel spreadsheet. So lo and behold, when you do that, and I ran it last night, it took about 4 or 5 hours and I got similar results to the connection range method. I got, I got all the way up to close to the same number, 3,000 and 3,300. But here's the reason why I think this method is— it's good if you like automation, but it's a little less efficient than— or effective, I should say— than the connection range method. Because what happens is each time it loops through and does a single range, it will— if there's no results, this is what happens, uh, Shelly. When there's no results, it'll actually— Google will modify the search and it'll take out your quotes.

Yeah. Okay. So you know how to fix that? Well, I'll tell you right here, right now, how to fix it right here, right now. Use the verbatim. Okay. That, that gets rid of it. It'll show you zero results. It won't try to get to like what you're talking about is like Google trying to guess like, oh, did you really mean this other thing? Because, you know, we make money when people click on ads, so we're never going to show you zero results. 'cause then that means we don't have any information and nobody's gonna wanna come back and click on stuff that pays us money. So we're gonna show you something. But if you use verbatim, it can be injected into the URL so that the search doesn't iterate the guessing, then you'll have a blank page, which will not, yeah, and then it'll go to the next iteration.

And you're talking about this right here, Shelly. So you go to— That's right. For those that don't know, you go to Tools, All Results, Verbatim Mode. And, and then it should— yeah, I mean, I haven't tested verbatim mode out with all the in-anchors and stuff.

And the— so it's a URL, so you'll find it in the— if you deconstruct the URL, you'll find it right there.

Okay, so, so that might be an alternative. But what the point I was getting at basically is some of this 3,300 aren't all in Philadelphia. Some of them are in surrounding towns. They don't specifically have the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Not all of them. Most of them do, but not all of them. So So here's the thing, you've got a couple of options here. Basically, the method is the method. The options are you can do it manually. It took me about almost 30 minutes, about 30 minutes to do it manually. Or you can have it run through either Power Automate Desktop or another scraper similar to that, like webscraper.io. You can do that with a dynamic URL. You could do it through that and, and probably get close to it. But here's the other problem though, Shelly, is that when you do the— when you do the Power Automate, eventually you're going to run into the CAPTCHA up here. So where it'll, you know, it'll want you to select the, the sidewalks or the, um, the different tractors or those stoplights or whatever.

Here's what I found.

Most of the time it'll just accept a click, but eventually it will want you to actually select it. So I actually have the Automate Desktop programmed to go to a certain part of the screen and it's going to send a click, send a mouse click to basically this part of the screen where the CAPTCHA would show up. And that's going to get you through maybe like 1,000 results or so, but eventually if you're not monitoring the computer, it's not going to get you the results that you want. You're going to have to like actually click through those, the CAPTCHA. So again, for all those reasons, it takes a long time and you got the CAPTCHA issue. I think it's just more efficient and easier to do the range method. And it gets you the same effectiveness.

I'm sorry, but I got to laugh, and you don't need Power Automate Desktop, which I'm a huge fan of, don't get me wrong. But now that I'm on a Mac system, I could use Power Automate, I have to run parallels or something like that. I'm giggling because you're showing me exactly what I'm doing now, and I was excited to see the Power Automate Desktop versions, Thank you for that. Um, but I'm so glad that like you arrived at the same conclusion because it just totally validates the fact that I was like, man, I wish I had pad because I think I probably could do better with pad. I might actually be able to like— and nope, you just showed me that I'm really not missing out on anything.

I do want to say though, I mean, if you have another computer lying around that you can set up that's not going to interfere with your, with your typical work computer, if you have another computer that you could run this on kind of like in the background and monitor it so that you can you know, hit the CAPTCHAs when they come up. Um, yeah, yeah, then I think it could work and you could still get other work done because it really ties up your computer otherwise. That's why I'm like, you know, I don't know if I want my computer to be tied up for 4 hours, 5 hours to run that.

You know, it's not as good to explain, Mike, what that means is for those that are listening, when you're running Power Automate and it's iterating the searches, you really can't be using the browser because if you go use the browser, it breaks the, the sequence or whatever. So you kind of have to like do it when you're done for the day and let it run overnight or just run it as a separate process. But you know what? I do want to say kudos on a couple of things that I saw you do with Power Automate that are maybe not new to Power Automate, but certainly new to me. One of them was that you actually use the end key. You send the signal of the end key as a Page Down. I had done that a completely different way, which was more complicated. So I really love your very simple— he was— send the End key and that scrolls to the bottom. And the other thing that I really like about the way that you showed this is how you can, um, essentially launch a new Excel file as an interface. So before, I, I had to program— well, I programmed it where I was telling it what Excel file to go to. So I create an Excel file and then I put the name of that file into Power Automate so that it stores the data there. But what you're doing is smarter and faster because it just— a prompt, you create a prompt that comes up and it says, what do you want to call this file? And you give it a name and essentially creates a brand new file for you, which is a lot less work. So you saved me a bunch of time right there in those two things.

And here's the other thing, it closes the browser each time too and then relaunches the browser. So each time you run a loop, it would close the browser, relaunch the browser, and that automatically like saves you a lot of issues. You don't have to click anywhere on the screen. And yeah, essentially it is, it is doing everything that you did in last year. You know, you're going to find the first free row in the Excel spreadsheet, it's going to paste the results in, it's going to save the spreadsheet at the very end of that loop and close the browser, and it's going to redo it again. Every time it's going to do that 500 times. And then the bottom here is basically getting some of those extra ones like the one connection because you have to do that separately, right? Or getting— there's one that's like the zero connections, basically, if you don't have any connections. So it will go through that, you know, and it works. But I don't know if it's the best way, you know, when I'm looking at, you know, I don't know if that's the best way for most people. I think the best way for most people would be just to use the range.

Use the range on a regular Google search and then Instant Data Scraper to just grab it and then just do that with the auto-pagerize. Well, I use auto-pagerize. You use— what was it called?

Um, this one's— if you're using Google, it's Infinite Scroll for Google. Infinite Scroll for Google. Yeah, it works just with Google.

Yeah. Um, and folks, you're getting data that you're not going to get from LinkedIn Recruiter. I'm— I want to reinforce that. You know, Mike's not not showing you how much that matters, but it really does. I mean, there are a lot of profiles that don't want to be— people who don't want to be found inside of even LinkedIn Recruiter. You see right there, it says LinkedIn member on that one in the top there. Publicly, that person would have their name shared. They just don't share their information inside of LinkedIn, but their profile is set to be public on, you know, whatever search. Um, so curious, I want to challenge you to come up with a way to do this with Bing, only because, um, well, when Glenn and I were experimenting with this, after we struggled with Google for a while— I don't know if you saw this— we ended up switching to Bing for the very simple reason that Bing had parsed out the profiles into a semi-organized HTML tagging system, right, where it displayed it on screen. So I'm wondering if there's an advantage to solving it on Bing to be able to capture More organized data? I don't know. Yeah.

I mean, if you have a data provider like, like SeekOut, or there's others where you can basically upload just the URLs and get this data, then you don't necessarily need it. Never mind. Yeah.

Scratch that.

It gives you the ability to parse it too.

Yeah. That's, that's beautiful. That's beautiful.

So there's, so there's a couple, two other things I wanted to share with the audience before we go. I want to just, again, add value because I feel like this, this whole thing can be like a little bit much for some people, but I think the, the cool thing that we— so this is a new discovery, Shelly. We talked about, uh, hidden operators. If, if you have LinkedIn Recruiter, another hidden operator that you can put into the job titles field that again literally just showed up this week, we just found this week, is summary, where you could actually search the summary section of a profile. And that one works as an all-in operator. So I'm going to show you what, what I'm talking about here. If I took a string like, if I took summary and I did, let's say, emergency, then I did in title registered nurse or headline registered nurse. I took this string here, Sally, and I put it in here. We should get people that have the word emergency in their summary section. And it's pretty cool. It's very powerful.

So this has been around for a very long time. It's used in SeekOut. I don't know if you guys remember that, right? Yeah, that's what, that's where it's getting it from. It's the same. They're taking advantage of the same command. Or I could just say like, um, summary, a little hint, just a little hint for you. Any one of the commands that you can do inside of, um, SeekOut as, as special commands, they have an equivalent on LinkedIn. Just something to think about as you start. Yeah, we've been trying to find—

we've been trying to find the positions description one. We can't— I can't find that one, but, uh, the equivalent to that. But I can put the Summary one does work and it works as an all-in. So if you put a phrase in here, it'll look for the word separately, but that's a really powerful thing to use in LinkedIn Recruiter. If you've not known about it or not tried it, because you can query for words that are just in the summary section rather than the entire profile. So you can find more, you know, narrow down your searches. And then the last thing I wanted to show is even if you don't have LinkedIn Recruiter, shall I wanted to show my A string, which is how to find people that are A players. And I'll, I'll share with your audience, it's, it's based on recommendations, right? So some have already shared that you could use the word, the phrase recommendations received to find only profiles that have recommendations. But we could use the number range method again here to find people that have been recommended and find not just people that have 1 recommendation, but people that have 5 or 10 or 20 recommendations. No, I took this— look at this, because if we go here and I'll show you where this comes from, shall we? Profile, we scroll to the bottom, there's a little phrase on here that says 2 people have recommended Katie. Yep.

So we could take this phrase, 2 people have recommended, right?

Put a number range in here, 5 to 75 people, whatever minimum number you want. You could then insert that into um, you know, 3 to 75 people have recommended, hit enter, and now you're going to get only profiles of people that have at least that number of recommendations. So if I go to this profile here and I scroll to the bottom, you'll see they have 7 recommendations. So if you want to say, I need to find people that are really good and I have a huge sample size, you could use this string here to narrow down your choices. Narrow down your choices to only people that have a significant amount of whatever significant is for your, for your industry, a significant amount of recommendations. That is really awesome. You could plug that into your search and find people that have multiple. And you can't do this on LinkedIn Recruiter, shall we? There's no search field in LinkedIn Recruiter to search for recommendations. So this is something that you can do outside of LinkedIn Recruiter.

Telling you, man, it's like back in the old day when Glen and I would find stuff that you couldn't do with a proper tool, we would figure out ways to do it, to do something better without it. Hey, I'm curious, could you try running that without the in?

Running this without the in?

Yeah. And the reason I'm asking for that is because the fact that you have the people have recommended, that, that essentially narrows it down to a profile.

Probably will. Yes, it probably will be about the same. That was pretty close to the same, 1200. Yeah, about the same.

Well, hold on a second though. Just that, I mean, as a point of fact, 1,200 is not really 1,200. We don't actually know. Right, right, right. It's probably a significantly lower number.

And this has been— you can see in red here how it highlights that part of the profile. So it's, it is, uh, these are all profiles that you used.

Yeah, yeah.

It's incredible string you could use to really find people that have, yeah, that are competent, that have recommendations. So that have the recommendations.

Yeah. They've been there for long enough to have somebody say something nice about them.

Yeah. So that's what I got, shall we?

Man, this was so much fun. I'm, you know, so excited about like being, you know, I'm back into like discovery mode because now you got my creative juices flowing. I'm like, hey, what if you do it without the end? Like, I haven't thought about that kind of stuff in a while. Well, you called it lateral thinking, right? Recently. Yeah, exactly.

You called it lateral thinking? Yeah. So I think that's kind of one of my strengths. It's, I just, I constantly, I'm constantly thinking, experimenting, iterating. You know, I don't think that something is not gonna work until I could prove it not to work. So I constantly try different things. I'll be speaking next month at SOSU and I'm gonna be doing a talk on Facebook sourcing with X-Ray and it's gonna be pretty awesome. So if you're gonna, if you're, it'll be SOSU Hack, it'll be at the end of July. Really looking forward to sharing that. I've got a lot of cool things queued up for that, powerful ways that I've found to use X-Ray to search LinkedIn, to search Facebook that I haven't seen anybody else do. So I think it'll be really helpful.

And here's the thing, I'll just give a teaser.

Yeah, I'll just give a teaser though. I'll give a teaser, right? If I just showed on LinkedIn that a majority of the profiles only have, let's say, headlines, only have job titles, only have names, And, you know, there's a lot of LinkedIn, Facebook profiles that only have that data too. That's right. So if a majority of the profiles on LinkedIn only have that data, then why wouldn't—

more than majority, a vast majority.

Yeah. Then why wouldn't we look on Facebook for— why would we use Facebook to search that same way?

Yeah, I was telling you, I gave up on Facebook because, um, well, it's a long story. If anybody's following the show, you know, kind of the battle that I had with Facebook. But, uh, but that's my own personal, like, pain and my cross to bear. I'd love to see that. I just, I guess I have a personal vendetta against them at this point. But there was a question from the audience there. Can you put that in LinkedIn Recruiter or only Google? To your point a couple of points ago, that was specifically the command summary and the extra commands that you showed. I believe that's just for LinkedIn Recruiter summary and headline.

Right. But you can use inanchor, the inanchor tag, right, in, in Google to find headlines and many other things. Uh, there's a, there's other fields, it's, it's outlined in the article that explain it a little bit more, like location. Um, yeah, there's, there's other things that inanchor will search, but it does primarily search. The most noteworthy is that it could search headlines.

So I think it might also on Google inanchor and on LinkedIn Recruiter, it's summary and headline.

Its summary and headline into the job title field of LinkedIn Recruiter. It might actually also work in like Sales Navigator. I haven't tested it there or found someone to test it for me, but I think, I think that they might also work in Sales Nav, maybe Recruiter Lite. I'm not sure, but I'm actually— but I just got LinkedIn Recruiter. Like, I joined AllSearch, which is a phenomenal company. I joined this company in December, and that's the first time I had LinkedIn Recruiter. I always use Sales Nav or Recruiter Lite with my past companies, so So it's exciting that you could use these advanced operators in LinkedIn Recruiter, but I think it's even more exciting when you could use it without it and you could use it with X-Ray and you can get the same results or even better results. So X-Ray is free. The freemium version of SeekOut is free. So it is, I mean, anybody that's watching has access to those for free and can get a lot of value out of it.

That's fantastic. Uh, folks, please tip, tip Mike on your way out, and, uh, and also tip Glenn on your way out here. Uh, Glenn's absolutely fantastic summarizations. I, I've often said Glenn can, can say what I said better, pretty much. And then I think he did that for you too there, Mike. Some really good summarizations. So thank you. Check out his notes on the Facebook group. Thank you so much for showing us some of your secrets here. And I wish you, you know, could come back on the show another time. This was so much fun.

It'll be my pleasure, Shai. I have so much respect for you. Thank you for everything you've done for the community and shared. I mean, I've learned so much from you. It's a pleasure just to give a little bit back.

So thank you. Oh man, thank you. It's, it's all about, it's all about you guys to keep this thing going. So cool. Well, have a great weekend, everybody. For those of you that have Monday off, enjoy the holiday. Um, and, uh, otherwise, uh, well, just Have a wonderful weekend and big ups to everybody. Take care. Thanks, guys. Take care. Bye-bye.