Q: Hi Glenn, I need to write a Boolean Search String for an IT AUDITOR req. I have never recruited for this before so I am starting from scratch. I have a solid idea on how to approach this search but my search string just doesn’t seem to narrow it enough for me. Also how I would find the best places to identify them on the internet?

A: The good news is that the job description you supplied contained plenty of information. The key is to sift relevant keywords out of it, and combine the similar ones into boolean OR clauses. Certification acronyms are great, too. Then add the resume narrowing-specific boolean clauses before and after your keywords, and you have your strings! Of course, no one string will do it for you, so you need to try variations that widen or narrow results until you hit the magic sweetspot under 200 total results. Even then, you may need a few relevant strings per search engine.

To that point, yes, you must use multiple search engines, because the overlap between them is low. (Don't believe me? Try a comparison search on Thumbshots.) At least use the big three. Here is an example string analogous for each that seems to yield solid results:

MSN:

(intitle:resume | inurl:resume) prefer:resume audit (COSO | COBIT | "control framework" | "control theory" | "control design") (MIS | CIA | CISA | CPA) -job -jobs -careers

Google:

(intitle:~CV OR inurl:~CV) audit (legal OR regulatory OR standards OR policies) (COSO OR COBIT OR "control framework" OR "control theory" OR "control design") (MIS OR CIA OR CISA OR CPA) -eoe -opening -post -preferred -reply -send -submit -your

Yahoo!:

(intitle:CV OR inurl:CV OR intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) audit (legal OR regulatory OR standards OR policies) (COSO OR COBIT OR "control framework" OR "control theory" OR "control design") (MIS OR CIA OR CISA OR CPA) -careers -eoe -job -jobs -opening -post -preferred -reply -send -submit -your

As to "best places" to identify these candidates, you also want to find the online communities where they hang out. The good ones probably won't have resumes floating online, so your goal there is just name-gen: find some names and contact info, and then contact them to obtain resumes and/or network for more names. (That's phone sourcing -- a whole other topic!)

You would probably want to search for professional communities online, too, using some of the relevant keywords above, preceded by:  (association OR "user group" OR conference)

Niche job boards might exist for these roles as well, which often have content revolving around them. Same deal as above, except you'd precede with ("job board" OR "career site")

And do searches of the social networking portals like LinkedIn. In that case, it's typically more effective to list a variety of job titles and potential target company names in the search criteria fields. To find these, do a search for job postings on a job aggregator like Indeed, SimplyHired, RSSJobs, etc., and see what variant job titles emerge (more terms to add to the "it auditor" OR ... clause in your boolean string) as well as which companies are posting for such roles (more terms to add to your existing list of competitors for that OR clause).

That's not nearly everything you could be doing, but it should be enough of a start to get you results quickly. And isn't that the goal of sourcing? Find just enough names for the pipeline, but then move on to spend more time cultivating the prospects into candidates!

cybersleuthing, Internet Recruiting

Q: Would you mind posting your notes from the sourcing training you did for IHRCA on 5/18/06?

A: Thank you to the several people who requested this. First, let me give a shout to IHRCA, a Boston-area association primarily for contract recruiters and known for the quality of the networking and peer assistance, for inviting me to speak, and to attorney Bob Shay and everybody at Morse Barnes-Brown & Pendleton for hosting the session in their main conference room with the tasty snacks (bigger than IHRCA's typical meeting space, but still not enough for everybody who wanted to attend).

The good news is that this is what I showed, and in a more logical order, plus some extras. And I've been asked to do an encore presentation (subject to some modification/customization) for the 495-128 HR Collaborative in September (details TBA) and they have agreed to open it up to the greater recruiting community in a large meeting space TBD.

The only thing missing below are the bookmarklets. They are like favorites/bookmarks on steroids. They don't just simply take you to a website -- they DO something beyond that, such that when you "arrive", search results have already been generated, information has been parsed, etc. It's because they have JavaScripts embedded in them. Bookmarklets are vital to sourcing productivity, and so it is a key component to "Internet Sourcing at Lightspeed." Talk to your favorite e-sourcers: everyone's got their favorites, with new ones being developed all the time.

Ok, here we go:

My favorite blogs' headlines rotate on my screen during idle time thanks to the MSN Screensaver (bookmarklet #01) -- a tip from Shally's blog, FYI.

Finding blog posts about a particular topic is much easier on Google with bookmarklet #02 -- it has the boolean clause (inurl:~blog OR intitle:~blog) already built in, so all you need to do is type your keywords -- e.g. "java beans" python -- at the prompt!  (Or here if you lack the bookmarklet.)

But I know most recruiters prefer resumes when available, so you can run bookmarklet #03 to pull up resumes on MSN using the (intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) command, plus the NOT terms (-jobs, -careers, etc.) already included to eliminate job postings for "clean" results. For example, try:

"financial analyst" "series 7" (212 OR 718 OR 914)

to find those licensed analysts in the NYC area!

And to keep those resumes coming to you, try bookmarklet #04 to make it an RSS feed (or you could have just clicked the orange RSS button at the bottom of your search results).

Google's alternative to receiving continuous results is favorite #07, Alerts, where you input a boolean string (curiously, not tied to Google's 32-keyword limit, but rather a 250-character max. length string) and get results on an ongoing basis.

Perfect Keyboard (favorite #08) is a low-cost way to quickly generate unlimited template letters, favorite strings, etc., in any application or web window, using any shortcut you like. Start with the free trial (no, they don't pay me anything either way).

If you're looking for techies or scientists especially, you need to search the newsgroups that comprise what's called Usenet, the now-million-plus discussion groups which predate the web. Bookmarklet #10 is to find newsgroup postings by authors affiliated with the company whose web page you're on. Yes, you could go to Google Groups and do an author: search, but this is much faster! Once you know the name or email of a particular author, use the more narrow bookmarklet #11 to see their posting history -- potentially including some embarrassing ones!  There's value in MSN and Yahoo! Groups, too (e.g., using their online personals sites to source diversity candidates is another goodie that Jim Stroud has blogged about recently).

When you're looking for sites related to a topic, thematic search is a great way to go. Bookmarklets #12 (Microsoft Research Asia's SRC) and #13 (Vivisimo) are great examples of this kind of search engine. Again, the bookmarklets just prompt you for the search terms and take you to the results.

Continuing on that theme, Acronyma, Wikipedia and Word IQ (bookmarklets #14-16) explain abbreviations and terms in varying degrees of depth, but all are useful, especially if it's a new area for you (recruiters aren't expected to know every tech jargon term in the fields they recruit for off the top of their heads, but they should be able to find the info quickly!).

LinkedIn is currently the leading social network for professional networking, so sourcing with it is essential. It deserves more than just bookmarklet #17, but that will prompt you for current job title, company and/or other keywords and conveniently show the results. The larger your network, the more results you can see, though any paid tier will allow you to make connections to people outside your 3 degrees. Shally just presented a webcast for LinkedIn on this -- maybe they'll share his slides if you ask Brendon (bcassidy[at]linkedin[dot]com) nicely.

Argali (bookmarklet #20) is an app you must download to run, but the free version is robust. Useful for finding phones of any person or business, and typically more successful because it searches five major directories simultaneously and de-dupes the results.

Zipmath's zipcodes in a mileage radius (#21) is great when you're trying to find the low and high values for a metro area that you'd like to use as geographic-limiting criteria in a search (e.g., Google supports that numrange command: just type two dots between the values, without spaces).

Anagram (#22) is a nifty program for accurately parsing contact information you might find in a document, web page, email message, etc. You can save your new contact records to Excel, Outlook, SalesForce.com, Jigsaw, etc. Before your free trial runs out, also review Contact Capture (#23) which is not always as accurate as Anagram, but it can parse a near-unlimited number of contacts in one move and export to just about everything, too. #24 and #25 are sample sites to try out Anagram and Contact Capture.

If all you know is someone's website, and you're curious to get contact information but they're not sharing it there, try DomainTools (#26 will prompt you for the domain name to search on), while #27 will conveniently pull up Domain Tools results for the site you're currently on.

Copernic Agent (#30) is a useful spider, searching multiple engines simultaneously, and giving you the ability to de-dupe and search within the results for additional keywords, and easily share the final output (export or email them around). A more expensive tool is InfoGIST (#31), but it will automatically parse resumes from the web, hundreds of free sites, and almost any others you have logins for. There's other functionality I don't have time to describe, but check places like ERExchange's groups, where online discussions have reviewed products in these categories.

Finally, when you're ready to send a targeted email campaign to some of the people you've sourced, one inexpensive but powerful automated tool is WorldMerge (#32) which allows for personalized field values, HTML or plain text messages, etc.

Happy sourcing!

cybersleuthing, Internet Recruiting

Q: There are so many recruiting/HR blogs, but I need to focus on my niche of the industry. Where do I go?

A: If you meant sourcing, it's rare that this is broken out from Recruiting blogs on any categorized list (blogroll) -- one of my pet peeves. But you also need to maintain the big picture on the recruiting/staffing/talent industry so you shouldn't ignore the pundits who seem to know what they're talking about (exactly who those are will depend on your perspective/opinion, and will change over time).

Anyway, here's how to find the few you will want to scan to keep up on industry buzz, as well as find the specific blogs subcategory whose blogs you'd want to follow more closely.  Three great lists of recruiting blogs and posts are:

1) The Recruiting.com portal, which features recent posts from various industry blogs as its main content, but did you know about its Big Bad Blogroll, a/k/a Ultimate Recruiting Blogroll – a comprehensive listing of most all recruiting-related blogs with subcategories?

3) RecruitingAnimal's Blogroll is also comprehensive and very similar to Recruiting.com's (those of you who know the folks behind the two sites can guess why).

There are others trying to be mega-blogrolls with selected postings for the HR industry (e.g., HRmegablog) but those tend to give recruiting short shrift so I'd pass on those for now if talent search is your focus.

Of course, the quality and relevance of posts day-to-day on any given blog varies, and so you may be able to scan/filter based on headlines. Use RSS feeds and download the MSN Screensaver (which cycles through the most recent posts on each of your favorite blogs during idle time) to deliver desirable blog posts to you.  Either method lets you see the headlines and you can click on those you're interested in.

Finally, regarding my gripe that the sets of subcategories used on the three sites' blogrolls are not as complete/finely gradated as I'd like: I admit it's hard to draw firm black and white lines since many blogs' content cuts across categories. In such cases, I think it's ok to double (or triple) list certain blogs that consistently cover multiple topics. If all the sites took a more databased approach to the categorization (as site #2 apparently has) and took it to the next level, it'd be more feasible to maintain such a system.

cybersleuthing, Internet Recruiting