Before the job boards charged for it, sourcers found resumes the free way: on the open web, with a search engine. The technique still works — arguably better than ever — and it costs nothing.
The core insight: anchor on the word "resume"
People name their resume pages and files predictably: the word "resume" (or "CV") shows up in the page title or the URL itself. That's the anchor:
(intitle:resume OR intitle:cv OR inurl:resume OR inurl:cv)
intitle: means the word must appear in the page's title; inurl: means in its address. Demanding one of those is the difference between pages that are resumes and pages that merely mention resumes — which is most of the internet, thanks to job postings.
Then subtract the noise
Every resume search fights three polluters: job postings, resume-template sites, and "sample resume" articles. Kill them with excludes:
-jobs -job -sample -template -apply
A note on -apply: postings that dodge -jobs (some say "career" or "position" instead) almost always still say "apply." It's the cleanup hitter of the exclude list.
Put it together
(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) ("staff accountant" OR "senior accountant")
("Baltimore" OR "410" OR "443" OR "667") -jobs -job -sample -template -apply
Reading it in English: a resume page, for an accountant, in the Baltimore area (city name or local area code — see the area-code trick), that isn't a posting or a template.
Optional: documents only
Adding (filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc OR filetype:docx) limits results to actual document files — real uploaded resumes. Use it deliberately: it raises quality but shrinks the pool, and on some sites (like GitHub Pages, where resumes are HTML) it shrinks the pool to zero.
Keep it under the limit
One caution before you stack every trick at once: Google reads roughly the first 32 words of a query and ignores the rest. The example above is comfortably under. Add three more titles, a second metro, and six more excludes, and parts of your search silently stop existing. Tight beats thorough.
What to expect
Open-web resumes skew toward people who want to be found — which is exactly who answers the phone. You'll wade through some stale pages (people leave old resumes up for years; check dates). But you'll also find candidates no job-board subscriber has ever seen, at the unbeatable price of free.