By Glenn Gutmacher

Q: Hi Glenn. Wondering if you could give me a few pointers on searching. I have been trying a few search strings to source Transmission Line Design Engineers with PLSCADD, PLSTOWER, or PLSPOLE software skills. Have not been having much luck. Would you be able to suggest a few strings that we could use to target resumes/CV's?

A: I will assume you have determined various synonyms that people may use for your keywords (e.g., try Acronyma on your acronyms, or Wikipedia for other terminology) and turned those into Boolean OR clauses to expand your strings, e.g., on Google:

~cv (Transmission OR Power OR DPL OR relatedkeyword3 OR relatedkeyword4) (Engineer OR jobtitle2) (PLSCADD OR PLSTOWER OR PLSPOLE OR "Power Line System" OR keyword5) -you

You will get some job postings mixed in with the resumes, but that's not bad, either, especially for a low-yield resume niche like this. Use that information to target the specific competitors that posted them. When you call into the company, now you know the exact job titles of the people who hold those roles! You can get more job titles/descriptions by searching against your keywords on a job aggregator like Indeed or SimplyHired.

Another reason for the lack of resumes is that these folks are in such demand that they don't need their resumes posted. That doesn't mean you can't find them online, however. Look in the virtual communities where they hang out online (e.g., industry-specific discussion lists, forums, trade association member profiles). You can even search alumni directories or the web in general for pages where people list their new jobs. Some basic template strings for that, to which you can add geographic/location terms, company names, job titles, or other narrowing keywords, are:

(he OR she) engineer "transmission line design"

intitle:alumni (he OR she) engineer (transmission OR power)

Note that the above syntax works on most major search engines – and you will get different results depending on which you use -- so run these on Exalead, Google, Live, Yahoo, etc., for more comprehensive results!

Though these online traces will lack resumes (a bio is the most you'll find; a name + email is the least), you can be fairly certain of their qualifications/relevance. Do an outreach campaign (phone and/or email) and you will get a decent number of resumes. Even better, ask them to name the top people they've ever worked with, and focus on them!

by Glenn Gutmacher

Q: I'm writing an article on how to improve one's recruiting research / sourcing skills. What do you recommend?

A: This probably deserves to be a book, not an article! I think fundamental, wide-ranging, basic sourcing training is useful if you've never taken it. There are plenty of vendors on the Internet sourcing side, and phone sourcing side, and some offering both. (Note to those who haven't researched alternatives to the heavily-marketed vendors -- it doesn't have to cost four figures to get robust training.)

Training is an ongoing process. You may get the best info in snippets, both on-the-job and from outside learning. The key for my learning is to absorb and process the info in such a way that I could teach it to someone else. For me, that is a formal process: I take detailed notes at every meeting, synthesize what I learn, and usually find something worthwhile to post on my employer's staffing intranet. It may even end up in an internal group training. If it's not proprietary, I often find a way to work it into my presentations at industry conferences to share at a broader level. Strong sourcers should be secure enough about their ability to learn and keep their skills sharp – and eager to raise the knowledge level of their profession overall -- to blog and otherwise share their latest favorite tools and tricks. I think I'm altruistic by nature, but I find that the more I share, the more I get, too.

But it's whatever works for you. You could just try applying one thing you learn to a current open requisition to see if it "sticks." Not every sourcing method or resource applies to every req, of course, but it's good to add to your bag of tricks! Simply by trying the technique, regardless of the quality of results, you'll probably learn it well enough to know how and where to use it in the future. If you don't seem to be making enough headway on a particular sourcing project (or even if you are, but have a nagging feeling there might be a better way to do what you're doing), outline what you've tried to some respected peers and ask them what else they'd recommend.

If you see sourcing as a career path (or a key component of it), then it makes sense to enlist multiple mentors, though they need not be formal ones. I like the personal "board of directors" approach that an increasing number of career coaches recommend, where you seek out people who each fill different expertise niche gaps that complement you. Remember that recruiting research skills are applicable to different fields, including journalism, competitive intelligence, marketing research, library science, etc., so don't hesitate to pull from people working in those arenas.

I think Jason Davis's recent "best recruiting tip" contest had some great suggestions that are easily adaptable to research. For example, to really understand your business: The better you know the subject matter of the prospects you're sourcing, the better you can understand their motivations, where they're likely to hang out online, how to carry on an intelligent conversation when you get them on the phone, how to determine which new trends, tools, competitors and other things you hear about are relevant to your searches and which aren't, etc. That ultimately results in more targeted time-efficiency and higher-quality finds than using broad, blitzkrieg mass-email campaigns that piss off far more people than they turn up… and you will need to back to those wells again, so don't piss in them.

Last but not least, don't be afraid to acknowledge your limitations: If you don't have time to do task X from project Y, tell your (internal) customer and offer to help find someone else who can do the work (even if it need be an outside vendor). Much sourcing work is time-sensitive (e.g., a pending competitor layoff or merger), and late could be worse than never if they're waiting and expecting it from you. As another example, if your strength is online research, don't take on the majority of the phone sourcing. Do what's going to yield the most efficient results. But use the opportunity to learn from what you outsource – maybe you can do a post-mortem with the suppliers to find out how they got what they got, and you can more confidently take on more of that work next time. When you under-promise and over-deliver, you can't help but garner more satisfied customers.

Rob McIntosh, who used to be up the reporting chain for me before he left Microsoft, posed an interesting question/complaint in his new group on RecruitingBlogs about what it would take to address the info overload in the recruiting blogosphere. My thoughts evolved into this blog post:

Rob, interesting idea, but this site and others like it (e.g., the one Jason Davis left behind, Jason's former partner Michael Kelemen's RecruitingBloggers, Michael Specht's HRblogs, as well as big recruiting blog directories like RecruitingFly that could easily morph into another aggregator) are not the answer.

It's become so easy with mashups and other free widgets/gadgets that require no JavaScript/programming knowledge at all to create amalgamations of recruiting blogs (e.g., Jim Stroud's TheDayInRecruiting and all posts from Shally's list of favorite blogs now available as a feed - see his recent ERE (re-)post about this) -- and that's just citing two former Microsoft colleagues of yours! -- that I suspect the number of aggregators will increase before it decreases. So that's not the answer, either.

As you said, social networking technology is evolving. What you want is something PERSONALIZED that sifts through individual blog post content (not merely following your favorite blogs) that is of likely interest to you. And, as you said, it must also filter out duplicate postings that may be trackbacks, etc. Handling dupes is a lot easier than successful personalization (the mantra of many Web companies for years now, well beyond recruiting).

Ning (which you suggested) may well be the right vehicle, but it's not enough. It also takes human cooperation and a number of other factors (e.g., why Betamax lost to VHS, why Netscape lost to MSIE, why Friendster lost to MySpace) to lead to a product "winner." I think the solution (v1, anyway) is something adapted from Amazon.com's book recommendations ("people who liked this post also liked...") but that functionality is only successful because the overall high user volume allows for decent sample sizes even for individual niche titles. So it would be nice for MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and major search engines to jump-start this, even if they team up with a company already offering this functionality (hint).

Sorry that this blog post is going to appear in multiple places, which is something you cited as contributing to your info overload! Actually, I can't apologize for that, because seeing something linked from multiple places is part of what gets some editorial or other content on one's radar (why it's one factor in search engine rankings, after all). And that leads to organic pass-along forwarding, which is what viral marketing is all about and fosters the community discussion. That process will never disappear. People will always depend on their friends and "loose connections" for referrals -- whether it be blog content or a candidate leading to their next hire.