How to Source Candidates on Medium

Wikipedia describes Medium as an online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams launched in August 2012. The platform is an example of social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is regularly regarded as a blog host.

Medium.com is one of my favorite sources of the best articles I have found on the internet. I already shared in my book that I read articles on Medium daily and nothing has changed after a year. It’s still one of my best sources of inspiration.

Sourcing

I was thinking of scraping all of medium.com; however, this will not get me actual data, and it will take time, and it could be quite costly. And maybe this would not be OK with GDPR.

So here is a simple solution for your x-ray search.

Basic string

When you create the string only with site: operator, you will target the whole site. That means that you will see all the articles and all pages that have the keywords you are trying to reach.

Example: site:medium.com (“User Experience Designer” OR “Interaction designer”)

You can use the basic string using site: operator and inurl: operator together with keywords.

Example: site:medium.com inurl:highlights (“User Experience Designer” OR “Interaction designer”)

The inurl:highlights will target only people who highlight some part of the text on Medium. But it will not show you the profiles that didn’t highlight anything.

There is still a way to target those people who didn’t highlight anything.

Because most people are following people from the same field, the best way is to target their followers.

If you are a UX designer, there is a high chance that other people following you are from the same field, that they are also UX designers or they are interested in that field.

Before you start to target the followers, you should understand how the URL on Medium.com is created.

Every username has a list of followers under /followers. The whole URL looks like this: https://medium.com/@username/followers; in my case, when my username is @jantegze, the domain will look like this one: https://medium.com/@jantegze/followers

But you are not going to target followers of only one person. That’s why you will need to use inurl: operator once again.

The search string will look like this:

Example: site:medium.com inurl:followers (“User Experience Designer” OR “Interaction designer”)

Targeting by joining date

If you would like to target people based on when they created their account on Medium you can do that with the string “Medium member since * year”

Example: site:medium.com “Medium member since * 2017”

Example: site:medium.com “Medium member since * (2016 OR 2017)”

Targeting based on claps

You can also find people based on what they recommended, in this case, if they clapped.

Example: site:medium.com inurl:has-recommended (“User Experience Designer” OR “Interaction designer”)

If you would like to find more about the person you are targeting, then click on Claps and see what they like https://medium.com/@jantegze/has-recommended

You can find who clapped on a certain article. Maybe you’re asking yourself now, “Why do I need that?” The answer is simple. When you find an article that is about some topic that is connected with your role, for example, accounting, there is a high chance that the people who clapped are in the same field and this is a way to discover new people.

Example: site:medium.com inurl:has-recommended

Example: site:medium.com inurl:has-recommended “Name of the article “

Targeting based on Groups

If you would like to find the articles from a specific group, you can use target these groups by just adding, “Also tagged NAME OF THE GROUP”

Example: site:medium.com “Also tagged Career Advice”

Example: site:medium.com “Also tagged Data science”

Example: site:medium.com “Also tagged Recruiting”

You can also use the URL you will find on Medium.com. For example, https://medium.com/tag/recruiting will show you the top articles in that area. If you would like to see the latest articles, click on Latest https://medium.com/tag/recruiting/latest

Conclusion

Medium.com is an invaluable source of new information and ideas from people across the globe. It is not only an excellent source of information about your potential candidates, but it’s a magnificent site where you can be inspired by others.

You can find exceptional candidates on Medium. If a user is active on that site and adding claps to the article, it will show you what that person is like and what his/her interests are. And thanks to these tricks you will learn about what they like and what they read before you approach them with your message.

And this will help you to create more personal messages and raise your chance of receiving answers. Other recruiters are not going to go the extra mile, but if you do you will find out that the extra mile is never crowded.

And, of course, if you are on Medium, you can follow me here: https://medium.com/@jantegze

Happy sourcing!