Smarter Sourcing with the Free Tech Stack

Building a sourcing pipeline does not require an expensive subscription. A full workflow for finding and organizing candidates can be assembled from a Google search bar, a free Chrome extension, and a spreadsheet.

The foundation is Boolean logic: spaces or plus signs require both terms, an OR (written as a vertical pipe) allows either or both, and a minus sign excludes a term. Quotation marks stop Google from stemming words, so a search for "Java" will not return results meant for JavaScript. Parentheses group multiple options into a single search term.

From there, X-ray search commands turn Google into a candidate database:

• site:linkedin.com/in restricts results to individual LinkedIn profiles rather than company pages or posts.
• intitle: targets words in a page's title, which for LinkedIn includes a person's name, job title, and often employer, making it useful for isolating specific role titles.
• The AROUND function (always capitalized) performs proximity searches, letting a city name sit near the word "connections" to approximate a geographic filter without paying for LinkedIn Recruiter.
• filetype: surfaces publicly posted PDFs, including resumes people have shared on the open web.
• inurl: is useful for social platforms like Instagram or TikTok, filtering out posts and photos to isolate profile pages.

Once a search string is built and pasted into Google, a free data-scraping extension can pull every LinkedIn URL, name, and title from the results page by page, exporting as a spreadsheet. From there, a simple split formula separates a scraped webpage title into clean columns for name, job title, company, and location, turning a messy export into a usable candidate list while keeping the raw data as a reference.

Other sites, including ZoomInfo and GitHub, can be X-rayed using the same site-restriction logic, extending the same free approach well beyond LinkedIn.