How can you find candidates for top-level jobs? The same way you find everything else

Yet another use for Google: Here’s some help for using everyone’s favorite search tool to find passive candidates for executive positions.
Basically, you want to search for an appropriate job and the city you’re in, while filtering out job postings and other unwanted results. For example, you can run a search that looks like this:
“financial analyst” + Philadelphia -jobs -“submit resume” -“apply online”
Putting “-” before a terms indicates you want to exclude results with that word or phrase. That way, you can knock off any words that would commonly appear in an ad for an open position.
Odds are some job ads will still slip through. But you’ll mostly be left with pages about people. A lot of the results will be biographies of employees on corporate Web sites. Others will be press releases or magazine articles where those people are mentioned. Some might be details about scheduled public appearances.
Whatever they are, in our example, they’ll give you the names of a lot of financial analysts based in Philadelphia. Often, especially with the company biography pages, there will be an e-mail address or a phone number listed already. If not, type the person’s name into Google, and you’ll likely be able to find some contact info.
You can also put some of the people’s names back into Google to find more information about them and decide if you want to get in touch.