This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

The person you need will never see your job advert. They are not looking, and if they were looking somebody would have hired them already.

Posting and waiting stopped working

The advert has been live for six weeks and produced forty applications, of which none can do the job. You have paid for the premium listing and the boosted post, and the effect was more volume of the same thing. Everyone competent in your market is currently employed, reasonably content, and not reading job boards. Meanwhile the one person who could actually do it has a locked profile, no email on it, and no reason to reply to a stranger — and when you finally do reach them, their employer counters and you lose them in the last week.

What this course covers

Forty lessons along one route: from a blank page to a signed offer. Open source research first, because you cannot contact someone you cannot find: search strategy, how search engines work, boolean and x-ray, dorks and what they surface that ordinary search never returns, finding a person through social platforms, databases, a nickname or a photograph, and finding their email from a name, a nickname, a profile or a phone number. Then the sourcer's craft: the full operator set including intitle, inurl, inanchor and around, query builders, the iterative method, custom search engines, search hypotheses, social platforms through groups, events and posts, fifty-plus sites where people publish — developer communities, design portfolios, personal blogs — each with its own query syntax, the plugin toolkit, working out corporate email addresses, five ways to get a contact from a profile you cannot message, the permutator and validation, and cold outreach: connection requests, how many messages and in what form, personalising from the profile, and testing subject lines. Then the platform in depth: recognising fakes, growing a network deliberately, boolean inside the platform and how to get around its operator limits, x-ray by employer, tenure, language, certification and relocation intent, and the extraction and verification plugins. Then the process end to end: the job order, the hiring manager conversation, scanning a market for its real size and salary level, target list, long list, short list, the first contact and what motivates the person, and then the part everyone gets wrong — persuading someone who was not going to move, making the offer, and preparing them for the counter-offer before it arrives. Then judgement: criteria, CV reading, structured interviews, telling real experience from a rehearsed answer, tests and cases. Finally the losses you never see: journey stages, tone and frequency, satisfaction and time-to-response scores, and predicting a drop-off before it happens.

Why boolean appears three times

Once generally, once as a sourcer builds queries daily, and once inside a platform that limits its own operators and has to be worked around. They are three different jobs, taught in increasing depth, and the third one only makes sense after the first two. The wider research block was recorded for an audience beyond hiring — its first lesson covers use in marketing, sales and journalism, and the ethics of the practice — which is deliberate, since finding a specific person and their contact details does not change with your reason for looking.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 40 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: search strategy and hypotheses, the full operator set, ready query sets for different roles and different sites, dork references, email discovery and verification, the job order and scorecard, the market report, target, long and short list templates, the offer and counter-offer preparation, the assessment matrix, and the journey map

• One continuous route rather than a collection of search tricks

Where to start

Take the role you have been trying to fill and write down the five companies where that person is currently working. That list is where the search actually begins. Enrol now and start today.