Need to Find DACH/German Language Candidates? Here's How, Using Xing
Anyone recruiting in the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) region, or hunting for German language candidates are probably wasting their efforts in looking on LinkedIn. That is because the most popular professional social network in DACH is Xing.com. You know what they say, fish where the fish hang out!
While LinkedIn is catching up on Xing (it boasts 3.7 million members in Germany, 540k members in Austria and 1.4 million in Switzerland) Xing is by far the most active and popular (Xing has 6.5 million members in the DACH region. It’s the 14th most visited site in Germany, compared to LinkedIn’s spot at 32).
To search Xing in any decent way, it is required to have a premium account (well worth the ‚¬6 a month for a pro account, if you’re a regular user). However, it’s possible to x-ray search Xing too and this is where the magic happens!
Steps to x-ray searching Xing:
1. Recognise patterns within Xing
If we just do the most basic site: search on Google (site:xing.com) we can see that there are a few URL (web address) patterns that are relevant and irrelevant. For example, there’s xing.com/jobs, /company etc. Most importantly, we can see that all profiles are under the URL www.xing.com/profile. This becomes the first line of our search.
site:xing.com/profile
2. Identify what you are looking for
When we are searching for potential candidates on Xing, we would be looking for people with a particular job title (or variants of), that possess particular skills. From our pattern identification earlier, we can see that profiles on Xing are indexed as “Firstname Lastname – Jobtitle – Employer” in the blue line of our results (the page’s title).
The most obvious thing that we’d love to get out of the Page Title is the prospect’s job title and employer. If we know our 5 closest competitors for this role and their job titles, we can search this by looking specifically in the title of the page (using intitle:).
For example, searching for a Project Manager at an automotive (car manufacturing) company. 5 core Automotive companies in Germany could be: Audi, BMW, Opel, Porsche and Volkswagen. We have to think of lots of ways to say “Project Manager” too, because no two employees write their job title in the same way!
intitle:(project OR pm OR Projektmanager OR Projekt OR projektleiter)
intitle:(manager OR leader OR coordinator OR “co-ordinator” OR Projektmanager OR projektleiter)
intitle:(Audi OR BMW OR Opel OR Porsche OR Volkswagen)
3. Narrow your search results with your specific skills and requirements
Say for your candidate search has a minimum of 3 requirements – in our example, we’d pick out Prince2 (a Project Management qualification), they must have a University Degree, and they must speak German.
For example:
(“prince-ii” OR prince2 OR “princeII” OR “prince 2”)
(university OR Universitaet)
(german OR Deutsch)
Search!
Your template for this search is:
site:xing.com/profile
intitle:(“job title” OR “job title 2”)
intitle:(“seniority level” OR “synonym 2”)
intitle:(“competitor company” OR “competitor company 2”)
(keyword OR “synonym 2” OR “synonym 3”) (“keyword 2” OR “synonym 2” OR “synonym 3”)
Happy hunting – or in German, “Glückliche Jagd” (well, at least according to Google Translate!) 😉