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6/29/2006 If you're mobile and like ZoomInfo, how about this?Immediately after the Human Capital Institute's panel in Boston featuring CEOs of five different vendors of online tools talking about Web 2.0's applicability to e-recruiting on June 28 (perhaps I'll recap that event in a future post if enough of you ping me showing interest), I met some interesting folks not on the panel, too, including Julian Bourne, CEO and founder of ProxPro.
Launched just this month, ProxPro made a deal with Zoom Information to display ZoomInfo content (profiles and contact information about millions of individual professionals compiled from links/data spidered from the Web) in a user-friendly way on mobile devices. For $4.99/month, you can search on someone's name and company (current or past) and see the profile results without all the extra navigation, etc.
While I wish it had more of the search functionality of the main web interface, and it'd be great if ProxPro stopped propagating ZoomInfo's misleading stat of 28 million profiles (the implication is ZoomInfo has 28 million people searchable, but my anecdotal evidence is that over 10% are duplicates or separate pieces of the same person's history), these are relatively minor points. The only meaningful caveat, if you haven't used ZoomInfo, is to realize it skews to executive-level and public-facing roles (sales/marketing) who have web visibility, so if you're looking for the software engineer in the R&D lab who created the latest dev tool, browser plug-in or middleware component, it's unlikely you'll find him/her there.
Nevertheless, ProxPro seems like something handy for people on the go who are prepping for a meeting, who have a chance encounter, or pick up a name at a trade show and want to get some detail quickly before deciding how/whether to approach. And a bonus point for the company president (Julian's wife) graduating from my alma mater :)
The youth-oriented social networking portals like Facebook and MySpace are already making deals to facilitate mobile functionality of their tools given the high cellphone usage of their membership, but it's apparently a different story with the other business-oriented social networking portals who don't think there's critical mass among their user base. LinkedIn, Jigsaw, etc., are thinking about mobile solutions, but ProxPro and ZoomInfo are first out of the box, so kudos! I suspect it won't be long before the others join them.
6/16/2006 Diversity recruitment resources - new book, new blog & a portalI recently obtained a review copy of the second edition of The Diversity Recruitment Advertising Toolkit: A Directory of Media Targeting Minority Professionals. I love it when a publication actually lives up to its title. If you are looking for diversity outlets (the 650 listings are mostly publications, but plenty of job boards and career portals are thrown in), this is a great reference tool to get you started.
Also useful are the various checklists for diversity advertisers, things to avoid that can get you into legal hot water, and the various ways that editor Tracey de Morsella cross-indexes the listings are convenient.
I didn't have too much to recommend to her to improve the next edition:
1) A new section on diversity recruitment Internet sourcing methods (i.e., ways to proactively search for diverse candidates online) would be a nice enhancement / complement to the book. This has been deemed non-discriminatory as long as it is not the only audience/subset of methods that a company uses to source. My colleagues at Microsoft have innovated some interesting methods and I know of many other creative approaches that are on the way to becoming accepted best practices (check archives of the ERE diversity group, for example). 2) Some case studies to illustrate the effectiveness of diversity recruitment advertising. She says on the cover it's "an essential tool" but doesn't back it up with any stats. General stats would be good, but I think a few actual examples of recent campaigns done by companies of varying sizes, industries, etc., would really hammer it home and make the point.
The good news on the second point is that Tracey has addressed it pretty well on the diversity portal she has run for a few years called The Multicultural Advantage with resources like a searchable links directory by subcategory. Though geared to job seekers, it has a fairly robust section for diversity staffing, including articles, awards, resources, associations, and as I indicated, a collection of articles on the business case for diversity. The diversity events listings are current and professionally-geared ("Diversity Recruiting Datebook" sits in the right column of the diversity business case page) and should be of interest to both recruiters and job-seekers. Unfortunately, the diversity recruiting research page is dated (most reports are 2001-2002). All in all, though, it's worth a look. I'm surprised I didn't see a blog there, but that gives me an excuse to mention the new Beyond Diversity blog started by a mentor (of sorts) of mine, Frank McCarthy. I'll have more to say about Frank in a future blog post, but check out his website. BTW, Frank's a finalist for AOEP's new annual H. Michael Boyd Award (non-members can still register to attend the awards/networking reception happening next Tuesday near Boston at the $35 rate).
6/12/2006 When normal methods fail, another way to cybersleuth a business addressSome of you might say this could have been handled just as easily by phone sourcing, but for those who like to dig into Internet sourcing, here's a research method I used that might be applicable occasionally when standard methods fail (and it's still free):
I got a voice mail last week from somebody at a venture capital (VC) firm, and I wanted to learn more about them before responding. When I went to their website, their staff list was plain enough to find, through spread across multiple pages (but still easily parsable, if you wanted, using a robot tool like Broadlook's Eclipse product). However, the only address listed on their website was in New York City, even though several staff had Boston-area phone numbers listed on their bio pages. I wanted to get that address. Unfortunately, the places I'd normally look (e.g., Argali meta-directory search tool) yielded nothing. I even keyword-searched for variations of the company name (boolean OR clause) plus Boston. Typing the area code-phone prefix combination on a search engine, I saw it corresponded to a Boston suburb town. So then I used the search engines for the company name combination plus that town name. The first search result took me to another VC incubator's website, where the target company was listed as a tenant. Mystery solved -- their local office was housed at the incubator's location, which explains why it didn't have its own business directory address/phone listing!
6/9/2006 Deep-dive on some favorite database sourcing tools with these cool custom search interfacesQ: I've seen some big public databases like Census data and birthday searches to find people information, but they're not as user-friendly or as flexible as I'd like. How can I do more pinpoint searching of what's available?
A: You can always count on ResearchZilla's founder to discover some cool research tools. Dave Carpe is a competitive intelligence guy, which isn't just limited to recruiting, but he's fond of applications to our kind of sourcing work. This post from last fall on his original research site, PassingNotes, is worth revisiting to answer your question.
It discusses some cool search tools created by Steve Morse, a programmer who obviously also likes search. Actually, the tools are more useful interfaces to existing databases that let you search them in more targeted ways. Recommended are the overlays to BirthDatabase and Private Eye for people information, but he's also got phone directory, census and other search interfaces.
And here's the best part, if you know how to do a little JavaScript, PHP, Perl or SQL: He has a One-Step Search Tool creator that lets you make these custom overlays yourself for most any public database. He has examples and a useful FAQ to get you started.
But even if you can't or don't have the time to do that, you can at least add favorites to your browser -- or better, make some bookmarklets -- for the interfaces he's created. Damn -- I have to find some time this weekend and get busy on this. Thanks, Steve!
P.S. Dave's post also mentioned Steve's zipcode search tool, which is also cool, but the nifty functionality of this other site, especially the zipcode range finder (e.g., useful for a Google numrange search) is still my fave in that category. Maybe Steve can top it?
6/5/2006 Learn from some top recruiting sourcers- webcast from HCISorry for the lack of notice, but tomorrow (June 6, 2006) at noon US Eastern Daylight Time is when I join my Microsoft colleague Shally Steckerl, along with other noted recruiting sourcers (links to company homepages) Jeremy Langhans, Phil Haynes and Laura Stoker on a panel moderated by Bill Craib on best sourcing methods, applied to real job requisition examples from a few different industries. It's called "Today's Top Search Strategies from the Best in the Biz" (I don't make up the session titles ;-) and is part of the Human Capital Institute's free webcast series on Strategic Sourcing & Recruitment. (Ok, you need to be at least a Community member of HCI, but that's a free signup, too.) Supposedly they're well over 500 people pre-registered, but I don't think it's closed, so click here to register if you're interested. And if you miss it, you can still sign up for the rest of the series (topics/panelists TBD) and I suspect they may record our session for later access.
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