After publishing our blog on how to zero in on phone numbers, we had a few requests for how to do it accurately for US numbers. So here’s how to X-Ray for phone numbers, that are publicly available on LinkedIn, in the 10 biggest US cities (with San Francisco thrown in for good measure).
This technique works really well when looking for Salespeople, or if you’re looking to add Recruiters to your team then you’re also on to a winner. You can always try this technique outside of LinkedIn by incorporating into your X-Ray searches.
All you need do is copy these into the SourceBreaker LinkedIn Search Engine, along with the rest of your search keywords and hit Search.
When X-Raying through Google, it will allow you to search number ranges by placing two periods / full stops between the first and last numbers in the range (no spaces). To search between 1 and 100, you type 1..100. Pretty straight forward so far.
What we’re doing here is utilising that technique to focus on phone numbers. So all you need to do is identify the number ranges for the area you’re looking at and include them in your search.
New York
US phone numbers are normally written in the format – 123-456-7890 with the area code at the front, such as 212.
The second set of numbers is almost always found in a three, so we can be pretty sure it’ll be between 100 and 999.
By doing a search with these numbers next to each other, it’s highly likely we’re going to return candidates with phone numbers. Here’s how we’ll start building our search…
“212 100..999”
The reason we have quotation marks around the numbers is to ensure that they are found together on the profile – if they’re a phone number they always will be. If you want to use a different NY area code, just trade out the 212 for whichever code you want to try.
Now we can start adding the rest of our search terms, as well as New York. Here’s a couple of examples – the first is a straightforward Boolean search which will provide mostly accurate results, the other using the new X-Ray technique we discovered provides fewer but incredibly accurate results. (If you somehow haven’t heard of that yet, you can read more about it here).
Top 10 – Phone numbers for major US cities
As promised, here’s the rest of them. Just add your specific search terms at the end of this and hit Search.
Los Angeles – “213 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:Los*Angeles
Chicago – “312 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:Chicago
Houston – “281 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:Houston
Philadelphia – “215 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:Philadelphia
Phoenix – “480 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:Phoenix
San Antonio – “210 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:San*Antonio
San Diego – “619 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:San*Diego
Dallas – “214 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:Dallas
San Jose – “408 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:San*Jose
San Francisco – “415 100..999” more:pagemap:person-location:San*Francisco
