Hands On Hacks To Enhance Your Diversity Sourcing Strategies

Diversity sourcing does not require a special toolkit or an entirely different search vocabulary. It works the same way as any other sourcing effort, built on a hypothesis, a set of terms, and criteria used to slice a search result down to the candidates a recruiter actually wants to see.

Several free, hands-on techniques show how to put that idea into practice:

• Using Google's advanced image search to X-ray LinkedIn, restricting results to profile photos by selecting "faces" under type of image, then layering in pronouns or terms like "African American" or "Hispanic or Latino" to slice a search toward a specific pillar of candidates.
• Running the same kind of search on Bing, which offers a visual search feature that lets a sourcer click directly on one face within a group photo to run a reverse image search on that person alone, something Google's reverse image tool cannot do without cropping first.
• Using bvsg.org to fire the same Boolean string at both Bing and Google simultaneously, returning two distinct sets of results side by side and effectively doubling output without opening extra browser tabs.
• X-raying Crunchbase, a database of tens of millions of company and people profiles, by searching site:crunchbase.com/person along with location, skill set, and gender terms pulled directly from how Crunchbase profiles are structured.
• Free list scraping without installing any browser extension, using a browser's built-in Inspect (or View Source) function to pull structured lists, such as rosters of colleges with strong female enrollment, directly from a webpage's code.

The reasoning behind indexing gets some attention too: why a keyword typed into a search engine sometimes turns up a profile that never mentions that word at all, and how browsing and engagement history feed into what a crawler surfaces.

Background points cover why diversity sourcing matters to a business in the first place, touching on productivity, creativity, retention, and market insight, along with a brief look at how Bing has been closing the market-share gap with Google over recent years and why running both in parallel is worth the extra effort for anyone building a diverse slate of candidates.