If you've heard recruiters talk about "x-raying" and nodded along without quite knowing what they meant, this is for you.
The one-sentence version about x-ray search
X-ray sourcing is using a regular search engine — Google or Bing — to search inside another website.
That's it. No hacking, no premium tools, no logging in anywhere. You're simply asking Google to limit its results to one site.
The magic word: site:
Search engines have a built-in operator called site:. Type this into Google:
site:linkedin.com/in "staff accountant" "Baltimore"
and Google returns only pages from LinkedIn's public profile section that mention a staff accountant in Baltimore. You just searched LinkedIn without opening LinkedIn.
Why would you do that instead of searching LinkedIn directly?
A few honest reasons:
- LinkedIn's own search shows you what LinkedIn wants to show you. Its results are filtered, ranked, and rationed by your subscription level. Google just shows you what matches.
- No search limits. LinkedIn throttles how many searches and profile views you get, especially on free accounts. Google doesn't care.
- It works beyond LinkedIn. The same trick searches GitHub, personal portfolio sites, university pages, conference speaker lists — anywhere candidates leave footprints. Most of your competitors never look there.
- It's safe. You're reading public web pages in a browser, the same as any other Google search. Nothing touches your LinkedIn account. (More on that in our account safety explainer.)
What it looks like in practice
A working x-ray search usually combines three ingredients:
- Where to look —
site:linkedin.com/in - What they do —
"staff accountant" OR "senior accountant" - Where they are —
"Baltimore"
String them together and you have a search that finds real people, for free, in about ten seconds.
The honest catch
X-raying is a craft. Quote marks, ORs, and location terms have rules, and small mistakes quietly ruin results — the search looks fine but returns garbage, and you conclude the technique doesn't work. It does work; it's just picky. The next few posts break the rules down one at a time, coming soon...