by Glenn Gutmacher

Disclaimer:  I am not compensated by Broadlook, but my employer is a paying customer and I occasionally review pre-release versions of their products, which gives me a chance to inject feedback.  I'm happy to report they've incorporated a few of my suggestions...

Many of you are already familiar with Broadlook Technologies, a company that makes software that helps recruiting researchers and salespeople. Most of their offerings incorporate some form of data spidering -- targeted collection and parsing of information related to your search criteria. While the software tends to be on the pricey side and a bit hard to learn to use, once you do master their tools, the sourcing ROI is impressive: you should be able to do your job more exhaustively and efficiently. However, lately they have been making more user-friendly products (e.g., Diver) and doing a better job with video tutorials and other how-to training on the more complex products (e.g., Eclipse).

Just as importantly for the budget-conscious (and more to the point of this blogpost), Broadlook is starting to release more free products. Joining Contact Capture (formerly a fee-based product) and also worth a look is a new freebie called Broadlook Title Research. This is a handy jumpstarter when you have been handed a job requisition with a title that's clearly internal jargon for that company/department/client/hiring manager -- your gut tells you there must be a slew of alternative ways that the same skillset is referenced by candidates at other companies. Or if you recruit in a fast-moving industry where job titles evolve regularly, it's worth checking periodically for new job titles that may relate.

So for those of us constantly on the lookout for alternative job titles to help flesh out our search strings, Title Research (free download/install) should help. It's basically a four step process:

1. Enter the job title(s) that you know already, and hit search
2. It returns dozens, many of which may be irrelevant. But you can type keywords or partial root words in the Filter field to limit the results.
3. Click the right-pointing arrow to select desired results (you can also fix spellings)
4. Export the results as an OR substring, AND substring, or simply as text. This allows you to build a boolean expression quickly.

The example (in Title Research's built-in Help menu, select Help, then click the plus sign preceding "How to Use Title Research") takes you nicely through how to find Sourcer-related job titles and is easily adaptable to whatever you're searching for. The only things it doesn't indicate are that you can:

• click any column heading to sort the results by that field (click again to toggle between ascending or descending order), which can be helpful when scanning through the results to sort the job titles alphabetically. However, you will want to click the Hits column to display the most commonly-found job titles first.
• type a minus sign immediately before any keyword/partial word to eliminate any job title results containing those characters, functioning just like the NOT boolean. For example, I might type -vp -vice to get rid of VP-level people. Note that this Filter is super-powerful, so be careful: it even looks WITHIN words for your characters, so if you type -gram it will eliminate Programmer from your results! That's why -vp is enough to get rid of EVP, SVP, etc.

Broadlook claims to search against many different sources to compile its results (they won't tell me which), and it runs in real-time, but is remarkably fast. Even searching against several common, synonymous job titles took just over a minute to generate full results. Download from http://files.broadlook.com/download/tresearch and install as usual (it may still say trial version only, but it's the full version). The required registration screen will prompt you to get a license key from their website, which is a quick and also free.

However, I would still recommend checking a job aggregator resource like Indeed or SimplyHired, which searches jobs across all the major job boards, quite a few niche ones and even many individual corporate career websites. When you are viewing results, note that the left-column displays job titles that the site thinks relate to what you searched for. I find these are generally very good matches, and thus worth adding to your search string. You can use these results as a point of comparison with Broadlook Title Research. You'll get more job titles from Title Research so it's vital to use the filter to eliminate the noise results.