Like the FBI – OSINT in IT recruitment – workshop summary

What does the FBI have to do with IT recruitment? How do you reach the recesses of the Internet to learn more about candidates? And what exactly is OSINT? Answers to these questions will bring you closer to being a specialist in the world of sourcing.

In the HR environment it is often discussed whether artificial intelligence and chatbots completely take over the job of recruiters. The fact is that before any takeover of responsibilities takes place, the potential of not only human touch but also the Internet – OSINT – should be fully exploited.

Currently, new tools appear on the market to support the work of the recruiter. They tempt with their usefulness in terms of optimizing work time, increasing recruitment efficiency and seem to say: we reach where Google does not reach :). However, like everywhere else, there is a small but here. Such tools cost a lot of money and not every company can afford to spend tens of thousands of PLN to support the recruitment process. Then what?

In order to answer this question and prove that spending a lot of money on the above-mentioned tools is not necessary, we decided to prepare and lead the workshop with OSINT in IT recruitment at the Infobroker Workshop III. Does that sound complicated? We are called Recruitment Geeks for a reason.

What exactly is OSINT?

Michael Bazzell, one of the most recognizable people connected to OSINT, in his book “Open Source Intelligence Techniques: Resources for Searching and Analyzing Online Information”, defined OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) in his book as follows:

“Officially, it is defined as any intelligence produced from publicly available information that is collected, exploited, and disseminated in a timely manner to an appropriate audience for the purpose of addressing a specific intelligence request. (…)For most people, it is publicly available content obtained from the internet”.

As follows from the citation above, OSINT is officially defined as data intelligence from publicly available sources and processed (collected, used and disseminated) in accordance with a previously defined need (e.g. order). However, it is important to remember that the definition of OSINT differs between industries; FBI employees will perceive and define such activities in a completely different way than recruiters. For most people, however, OSINT boils down to obtaining information from publicly available sources. But how can we use OSINT in IT recruitment?

OSINT in IT recruitment

As obtaining information about people is the basis of each recruiter’s job, during the workshop we focused on showing how to obtain information about people, companies and the market from public sources (with the greatest emphasis on information about people).

Among the issues raised was – somewhat forgotten among recruiters and often treated with care, but very effective – X-Ray search with all its queries and operators.

Remembering about Boolean operators, we are able to do X-ray search on:

• Github  to find active users or obtain resumes;
• Facebook to identify programmers of a particular technology, working in a particular company and location;
• Google Docs (especially useful when looking for a resume);
• unprotected WordPress sites to obtain e-mail address or a resume.

We discussed ways to reach content from websites, which pages have been removed and access has been blocked by the author, as well as a tool that allows the analysis of content from Facebook profiles (even if the author has blocked visibility to the level “Friends”).

What about getting emails of potential candidates?

The presentation included 3 main ways to obtain an email from Github and an example of using aggregators of information about people as a substrate for further searches (if, for example, Github fails). And all this has been equipped with plug-ins enabling quick extraction of event participants or group members and their subsequent analysis, as well as searching for people on various platforms (e.g. Facebook, YouTube czy Twitter).

But … is it even needed?

You can now ask yourself whether it is really worth using all these ways when the daily work of recruiters is largely based on Linkedin and related websites. LinkedIn is certainly the fastest way and starting point for your search. Incorporating the mentioned methods of targeting potential candidates and obtaining information about them into your work is a very useful alternative. Especially when we work on positions where LinkedIn alone is unfortunately not always enough (and these often get to our team).

And so it was at the workshop. If you are interested in practical advice, our tricks and a step-by-step explanation of how to do it properly, we will soon start a series of practical articles on OSINT in IT recruitment!

Still have some questions?

Or check out our blog and plenty of case studies we’ve prepared based on working with our partners.

Gabriela Flis

IT Recruiter