LinkedIn has everyone — and that's exactly the problem. Every recruiter you compete with is searching the same pool with the same filters. Meanwhile, whole categories of great candidates barely maintain their LinkedIn but leave detailed footprints where their work actually lives.
Developers: GitHub and GitHub Pages
Developers keep their real resume where other developers look. Many host it on GitHub Pages — personal sites at github.io:
site:github.io ("software engineer" OR "software developer") resume
Two things worth knowing:
github.iois where the resumes live — these are personal pages people built to be found.- These pages are almost always HTML, not PDFs — so don't combine this x-ray with a
filetype:pdfrestriction, or you'll get nothing and wrongly conclude the well is dry.
Also worth a look: site:stackoverflow.com/users for profile pages of active answerers, and GitLab and Kaggle for their own communities (data folks especially, on Kaggle).
Designers: Behance and Dribbble
Design portfolios cluster on two sites, and both are spelling traps:
- Behance is
behance.net— not .com. - Dribbble has three b's —
dribbble.com.
Get either wrong in a site: search and you'll quietly get nothing. Spelled right:
site:behance.net "product designer" "Chicago"
Everyone else: the open portfolio web
Consultants, writers, academics, and senior professionals of every stripe maintain personal sites, university pages, and conference bios. A general resume x-ray catches them:
(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) "financial analyst" -jobs -sample -template -apply
That intitle:/inurl: pair is doing quiet magic — it demands "resume" appear in the page's title or address, not just its text, which is the difference between finding resumes and finding pages that mention resumes. The excludes strip out job postings and template mills.
Why bother?
Because response rates follow scarcity. A developer who gets three InMails a day ignores the fourth — but a thoughtful note referencing the actual project on their actual site? That gets read. Searching where others don't isn't just about finding hidden people; it's about arriving somewhere quieter.
Pick one non-LinkedIn site this week and run a single x-ray against it. That habit, more than any tool, is what separates sourcers from searchers.