Advanced Online Recruiting Techniques

JOBehaviors.com- free candidate matching service using behavioral assessment by job type

Thu, 08 May 2008 16:41:21 GMT

I was recently approached by JOBehaviors' president Mark Tinney about his Web-based employment matching service. This company uses a compatibility assessment to determine which type of job is the best behavioral fit for you. Similarly, it allows companies to search and find candidates who score highly in the types of jobs they want to hire for. The science behind it is they do an in-depth job analysis done with people who have found long-term fulfillment and job satisfaction. Their research supposedly identified hundreds of behaviors that are critical for one's long-term happiness in each career and thus, theoretically, can identify the job that is the best behavioral fit.

They currently offer online assessments for various jobs in Healthcare, Banking, Childcare, Construction, Transportation, Retail, Insurance, and Sports/Sports Management), Call Centers, Education, and Sales, which (for what's offered online) tend to skew to blue collar or lower-paying professional jobs.

The assessment is an online survey that presents over 100 pairs of statements, but only takes about 15 minutes to complete. You need to choose which statement in each pair is most applicable to you (many statements recur, but as part of different pairings). This format must be considered valid, as a Microsoft-approved vendor recently had me do an online survey about my work style in preparation for a team meeting I'll be attending later this month, and it was in the same format.

I've always enjoyed golf and got pretty good at it (though haven't had much time to play in recent years since our boys were born), so I thought I'd take the Golf Career Candidate assessment. My rating was 1 out of 5, which means I'm not suited to that work. (Obviously, playing as an avocation and being a golf pro are two very different things!) The results interpretation presented after completing the survey says, in part, "Studies confirm that individuals scoring 2-stars or lower are unlikely to find long-term fulfillment or happiness in this line of work. While you are free to share your result and contact information through your JOBehaviors Account, our partners are most interested in discussing training and/or employment opportunities with 3, 4, or 5-star candidates." And then they encourage you to take the assessments for other jobs until you find the right one (of course!).

On the good side, I think it's fabulous that's it's free for job-seekers to take and see the results of their assessment (most companies in this space charge for the latter). This is especially true for suspicious jobseekers who might not otherwise be willing to dip their toe in the assessment waters for a specific company until they were well into the application process. Instead, this incents them because the results can be shared with various companies, but the user controls which ones (see FAQs). The costs are all on the employer side, though you can get a free demo account.

My concerns are that it's fairly easy for someone to trick the survey. One could tell pretty fast what the "good" answers should be in each pair, and start answering that way. I also suspect there are very few clients in each category, so until this gets to critical mass, there aren't many employers who will see someone's assessment. Lastly, it's concerning that the Services link in their main navigation is broken (I'm not talking some deep interior link here).

But hey, all businesses have to start somewhere, and they do have some raving client testimonials, so hopefully we'll see more employers hopping on board, as well as competitors adopting and building on this model.

How to quickly find related job titles for your search strings free

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:23:09 GMT

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:

Enter the job title(s) that you know already, and hit search
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.
Click the right-pointing arrow to select desired results (you can also fix spellings)
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.

Broadlook, cybersleuthing, internet recruiting, recruiting research, internet sourcing, sourcer tools

Internet Recruiters and ‘Old School’ Recruiters

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:11:12 GMT

HireAbility Connects the World's Recruiters and Parses the World's Resumes
Author Website: http://www.hireability.com/join

Editor's note: There's a not-very-subtle underlying sell in this guest blogpost, but I think the intended main message is worthwhile: There are sourcing methods and tools that people aren't using, both on the phone and online sides -- and one's success depends on tapping into both, depending on the requisition and other circumstances. The first step in knowing which ones to utilize is to have a basic understanding of all the proven ones, at a minimum.

In the late 90’s, the staffing industry witnessed a proliferation of job boards available on the internet. Since that time, this once nifty tool has turned into the crutch on which much of the staffing industry places their weight. Of course, there were (and still are) staffing professionals that shun the job boards in favor of what I’ll call "old school’ recruiting. As time and innovation have progressed, there has become a divide between these two groups.

A lot of the new folks in the industry don’t know what it’s like to really recruit; as in ‘headhunting’ (yes, this kind of recruiting works fine for corporate recruiters too!). This is what our industry was before the internet. These days, most recruiters are really sourcers, leaning entirely on sourcing job boards and databases for resumes. And the old school folks may not use job boards and may have no idea that Infogist, Zoominfo, Linkedin and a plethora of other tools out there even exist. In fact, I’ve heard many people tell me that using all this new fangled techno stuff is a waste of time that could have been spent cold calling someone.

I’m not faulting either of these groups necessarily. Both methods of runnning a recruiting desk have shown to be successful. But in my personal quest to improve our industry, I feel obligated to expose as many people as possible on the ideas, training and tools we have available to elevate us as an industry. As we’ve all heard, a high tide raises all boats.

So, I’m proposing a middle ground between the two extremes. The middle ground is this: If you live and breath job boards only, start looking into other methods of recruiting. It’s a small difference between what a $70k per year earner and a $200k earner do in a given year. My advise would be to sign up for an account with AccordingtoDanny and learn some of the small things you can do to really make a difference in your daily activities. Or pick up some of the products from billradin.com and read at your leisure on some of the same ‘old school’ ideas. Note: as the Director of Marketing for HireAbility, I can get you a discount on either of these as well as many other common training tools you may be considering. Trust me when I tell you that I’ve seen a few simple ‘old school’ ideas result in a recruiter earning triple the revenue. And yes, you’ll have to work a little harder for it, but you’ll retire 10 years sooner, too!

If you are the ‘old school’ recruiter who thinks using the internet as a crutch creates weak recruiters, I can assure you that this isn’t always the case. With Zoominfo, for instance, you can locate high level contacts who are 100% passive and 100% cold calls. You specify the job title and industry (or more info if you have it) and they tell you the person in that job and their contact info. It’s the ultimate tool for tracking down hard to find contacts.

Or perhaps Infogist is right for you. Imagine a single software tool (so you only have to go through the learning curve for one thing, not several) that can search almost every available database of candidates and bring them to your desk. The candidates are passive as well as active and can come from 1400+ different locations, so there’s a great chance you’ll be the only recruiter talking to them.

And you can’t overlook the online networking tools on the market. Linkedin has over 10 million registered users. Look me up and you’ll see all the people I know and who they know, etc. It’s like a huge virtual cocktail party except you don’t have to print and bring business cards. Can you imagine 10 million business professionals at the same cocktail party carrying lists of every person they know? How could you not go to that party? I could go on and on, but trust me when I tell you that there are some really great tools just waiting to be had. Feel free to contact me for more information on any of these tools, or register an account with HireAbility to recieve free trials and member discounts on many of the ones I mentioned above.

I call on all the ‘old school’ recruiters whom I admire so much to reach out and learn some of the new tricks. And if you’re in a position to do so, learn from some of the new folks out there. And for all of you who source job boards for candidates, do yourself a favor and check out some of the resources above for learning the art of direct recruiting. It’ll make you feel better about what you do, you’ll make more money and most importantly: you’ll have a lot more fun!

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

How to Find Manager Candidates Online Based on Number of Direct Reports: Very Creative & Effective Sourcing Method Using Google

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 04:35:59 GMT

How to Find Manager Candidates Online Based on Number of Direct Reports: Very Creative & Effective Sourcing Method Using Google

by Glenn Gutmacher

Q: I am trying to source for software development managers who have supervised at least 25 direct reports. Is there a way to efficiently target them in an Internet search?

A: The most elegant solution I can think of utilizes Google's numrange command, which lets you find any number in a range, in the format lowvalue..highvalue (note there are no spaces on either side of the two dots). I explained another powerful way to find candidates via their certifications using this command in a previous post, which occurred to me long after Shally first explained to me how to use it on zipcode search in early 2006 for finding resumes geographically (revisited by Tim O'Connor), but this application is different enough from both of those to merit a separate treatment.

If you think about what's in a resume or profile of somebody like this, it probably says something like:

"managed virtual team of 25 professionals", "managed cross functional team comprised of 25", "Managed geographically distributed team with 25", "managed and developed the development team of 25", "managed and trained global project team consisting of 25", etc.

Note the pattern (as all good sourcers do!). There are words between "managed" and "team", and again between "team" and the number, which you can manage in one move with the * (wildcard). This represents a placeholder for any other word or words, so assuming you were ok with people up to 100 direct reports, it would yield this string:

"managed * team * 25..100"

which simply and elegantly finds them all! However, if it's "managed team..." (no words in between), then you also need this:

"managed team * 25..100"

But don't try to get too efficient, because

"managed * 25..100"

generates a lot of irrelevant results having nothing to do with one's employees.

Of course, there are other variations like "managed 25 direct reports", "managed multinational 25 person staff", "managed a 25 person organization", etc., so you should account for those if the above doesn't generate enough results for your pipeline, a la "25..100 direct reports" and "managed 25..100 person". However, *don't* try putting them in an OR statement. If you search for something like:

("managed 25..100 person" OR "managed * 25..100 person") "software development"

it basically negates the numrange criterion. You might get a few good results at the beginning (first 5), but after that, it's only searching for "software development". This seems like a bug in Google to me, but it's not hard to tell when there's a problem, because the results count summary atop the first page changes from something like "results 1-100 of 439" to "results 1-100 of 63,700,000". The latter should always trigger your radar that there's something wrong with your search string.

Last but not least, don't expect much from (present tense of the verb)

"manage 25..100 person" "software development"

which generates only a few results. When you're searching within a phrase, realize it's doing an exact search -- don't expect it to find various forms of the root word. Since "managed" appears to be how most people reference it in their resumes/bios, you need to search on the past tense phrasing.

Glenn Gutmacher is a senior Recruiting Researcher at Microsoft Corporation and founder of Recruiting-Online.com, creator of the Advanced Online Recruiting Techniques self-paced sourcing course.

Marriage Announcement and Passive Sourcing

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:42:25 GMT

Below is a creative way to source online. I would also encourage people interested in this method to look at the announcements of who's been promoted in the People / Who's Who / Moves section of most major newspapers. Anyone who has just secured a new job means their previous company (which is also listed in the newspaper item) may have a hole that a recruiter needs to fill (or multiple holes!).

-- Glenn Gutmacher

Wedding Announcement Sourcing
by Rithesh Nair: http://researchersecrets.com/2007/11/20/marriage-announcement-and-passive-sourcing.aspx

Spreading the joy is always a fun. Even before the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1447, weddings in the United Kingdom were commonly proclaimed by a town crier and then came the newspapers announcements.

Every Sunday, the New York Times' Sunday Style section lists at least 3-4 pages of people who were married or engaged or going to be. It has its own wedding/celebrations page.
Cha- ching!
National papers like this have an entire section for online wedding directory and in print on Sundays (or check out Wednesday's for the Washington Post).

How is this important to sourcing? Here's a small list of selected details I picked from last Sunday’s New York Times (I left out their names):

    Account Director at Hawkins International
    Sales Director at Quickcomm
    VP Marketing FibroGen
    VP Media buying JP Morgan
    Sr. VP for Finance
    Project Manager with AIG
    Search Analyst at the American Institutes
    Sales Associate Goldman Sachs
    Director Private banking Citi Group
    MD and Counsel for AIG
    Marketing Manager for American Express
    Senior Analyst at Fortress Investment Group
    Consultant in the Health care for Navigant Consulting

Each list announcement has the bride's and groom's name, what they do, the company they work for, and where the live. What more you could ask for? All you have to find is their E-mail id or phone number which is so easy.

Cha- Ching, again!

If you're doing a Google Search, you'll get thousands of results for a Financial Analyst in New York or New Jersey. Marriage Announcements not bad at all! All you have do is to find people who are celebrating, and maybe you can add more joy with a new job.

So now the question is: how ethical is it to reach out to these passive candidates?

p.s: It’s a goldmine if you are looking for people working in law firms.

So won't you check you local newspapers for wedding announcement this week?

Stay tuned..........

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching entry-level jobs and other career opportunities.

How to Perfect Shally's Google hack on Jigsaw to eliminate all noise results

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:44:34 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

Over the past year, Shally Steckerl has come up with several creative (and legal) hacks to leverage the content spidered by the major search engines on the public versions of recruiting-rich candidate portals, notably LinkedIn (the large professional social network) and Jigsaw (the large business card exchange network). What's nice is that these free hacks don't require you to belong to either portal in order to tap the information.

Shally's recent post lists the basic Jigsaw hack. But if you run it as is, you'll probably notice many irrelevant (noise) results with the string, which is, by the way:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's CompanyName

You should eliminate the directory-type pages on Jigsaw which are not the pseudo (i.e., semi-blinded; read Shally's post if you don't know what I mean) business cards. (This step is just as important if you adapt the above Google hack to find LinkedIn profile results. I highly recommend you check out Shally's LinkedIn cheatsheet for the clean version, which works fabulously.)

So this tweak fixes the Google string to hack Jigsaw in that respect:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's CompanyName -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

Now let's use an actual example (Virtual Iron, a software company), which will illustrate a couple of further useful string tweaks:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's Virtual.Iron -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

The above still generates a number of business card results that are not people at the company, but rather contain the body text "Contacts with similar titles as [profilee's name]" followed by the name of someone else who is at Virtual Iron (or whatever target company you wanted) but there's no link to him/her. Some of you may find that valuable, but those names are almost always for people whose own business card pages will be among the results you obtained.

So in order to get really pure results (i.e., just the Virtual Iron personnel's business cards), you should use this template (again, substitute your target company for Virtual Iron):

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's "co-workers at virtual iron" -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

Notice that I did *not* type dots between words in the revised clause (which I kept in the rest of the string to be consistent with Shally's original post). Why? Because you can actually lose valid results if you don't use quotation marks. I don't know why that is, since these are supposed to be equivalent ways to indicate a phrase in Google, but notice what happens if you do the following string instead:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's co-workers.at.virtual.iron -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

You lose Steve Noyes (which is a Virtual Iron employee result in Jigsaw at the time Google last spidered that part of the site) from the results!

P.S. Many people have asked why LinkedIn and Jigsaw are giving free access to their people content via the search engines. It's also being done by Spoke and a number of other portals, by the way. They let the search engines spider a fairly robust public version of their people content on purpose because it generates a lot of click-through traffic back to their websites. That lets them generate new member registrations, additional advertising revenue through increased page views, etc. In their view, the pros outweigh the cons because it's still a relatively small percentage of their potential audience who knows how to hack this way!

cybersleuthing, internet recruiting, sourcing

Top 10 List: How to Create A Recruiting Research Function

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:55:39 GMT

Top 10 List: How to Create A Recruiting Research Function

by Glenn Gutmacher

Q: I have read your blog before and come across your name on recruiting industry-related communications. I would be very interested to hear about your experience in recruiting research and your thoughts on how to set up such a function in a corporate recruiting department. Is this a conversation you would be willing to have? Do you have the time available for it? I would very much appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. Thanks!

A: The short answer is (not in any particular order):

1. Make sure everyone’s properly trained (FYI, it’s an ongoing process, but some things can – and should -- be taught by internal subject matter experts) and give them the tools/resources to succeed. (FYI, there are very comprehensive and far less expensive ways to learn advanced online recruiting techniques than AIRS.)

2. Make sure the systems are flexible but rock solid. For example, an ATS that can’t act like a CRM doesn’t help sourcers much. And sourcers shouldn’t have to spend hours trying to track what happened to their submitted leads in order to compile reports. Ideally, status can be gauged quickly in real-time, because you can’t improve what you can’t capture.

3. Since you’re starting a new team, make sure you hire to fill the gaps (e.g., they have industry/function knowledge that map to where you expect the priority hiring needs / sourcing pipeline challenges will be).

4. This also applies to skillsets: Some companies even separate Internet sourcers from phone sourcers. Play to the strengths of the sourcers.

5. It’s best if your sourcers are part of the initial recruiter meetings with hiring managers; if not, make sure they have the opportunity to get their questions answered by the end-customer.

6. Don’t be afraid to say no: some customers/internal partners’ needs may not make sense for your team to take on, or at least need to be thought out a bit more.

7. On that note, have a service level agreement (SLA) that specifies what you do by when, and what you require from the customer, which both sides review and sign before each project. If they fail to deliver on their end at any point along the way, your work stops until rectified.

8. Make sure everyone with the same role has consistent, clear metrics (e.g., though sourcers can’t directly impact hires, many companies still measure # of hires; but if you want to offer extra incentives for filling higher comp and/or limited talent supply roles, make sure the formulas are clear).

9. If you have ongoing volume hiring needs that relate to fairly available skillsets, compartmentalize that to more junior people (a lot of that can be automated, and the rest handled with well-documented processes) or even consider a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) vendor for the initial pipelining

10. You’re obviously doing this, but many others don’t: Don’t hesitate to ask around (internally and externally), among employers, recruiting vendors, posts to the recruiting industry boards, etc., for suggestions of who’s doing it well. You’ll start hearing the same names repeated; begin with them, even if it’s not the same industry or size as your company. Many sourcing best practices are not money-dependent and, even when they are, can be adapted to different budgets (e.g., scale it by trying phase 1 or a pilot, then you have ammo to justify expanding the program later).

I’d love to answer this in more depth, but I don’t have time and it might extend into territory that my employer would prefer I not discuss. But it’s really something an experienced recruiting consultant should work with you on. Talk to the experts whose teachings you respect. If you need to find some, read articles about sourcing on industry portals like ERE and see which authors’/consultants’ viewpoints make sense to you (e.g., Shally’s article dealt with this question directly). Seek out the practitioners invited to speak at industry conferences who regularly deal with this kind of question (e.g., click the Speaker Bios link at SourceCon). You can also try benchmarking with peer organizations. You’d be surprised how many companies are willing to discuss at least some aspects of this – also check out the relevant best practice studies conducted by RecruitingRoundtable, APQC, etc., if you can get access.

A gentle way to introduce yourself to the sourcing industry's power tools suite

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:22:39 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

Those who know of my sourcing methods also know that Broadlook Technologies' product suite is among my often-used tools. The problem, however, is that most recruiters don't have the time to deal with the learning curve associated with using these powerful products properly. Broadlook's own team will readily admit most of their products can be complex to master.

Fortunately, they recently came out with Broadlook Diver, a "lite" version of their spidering tools that works on several major search engines. So you can run the same kinds of targeted searches you normally would, but Diver parses lots of active and passive prospect results quickly, which can be exported into Excel just like all their other tools. But (like most of Broadlook's other tools), Diver isn't cheap, so they need to prove it's useful.

So my fellow sourcing guru, Shally Steckerl, has taken on the task of explaining how to use Diver in a webinar on October 25. Though it's not free, I'd say this is a win-win worth a look. Diver's got a lot in common with ResumeGrabber from eGrabber, so it would be worth comparing.

Attendees get a:

free copy (full version, not trial) of Contact Capture (worth $209), which is like Anagram except it can parse multiple contacts at once. FYI, Broadlook added a new demo for Contact Capture showing real data you can grab.
free 14-day full trial of Diver (double the time you can normally get off Broadlook's website)
discount of $150 off Diver after the trial
set of custom search strings created by Shally that you can import directly into Diver. (Jim Stroud kindly gave Broadlook some strings for the initial product launch, but Shally has added many more.)

And no, I don't earn anything from this. When I hear of something good in sourcing, I tell you.

Bookmark Management Tools and Social Bookmarking for productivity and/or search purposes

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:29:35 GMT

Q: I have a lot of websites stored in my browser that I'd like to be able to access them from other computers, share them with colleagues, and maybe even see what they're bookmarking. Are there any free tools that store all or some of your bookmarks / favorites online?

A: Yes, there are many. It's important to view this topic both from a productivity perspective as well as a search perspective.

1) As a productivity tool:

All the major search engines offer this, by the way:

Google Bookmarks - http://www.google.com/bookmarks
Windows Live Favorites - http://get.live.com/favorites/overview
Yahoo! Bookmarks - http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/

But there are many independent ones (e.g., www.myvmarks.com). For a comprehensive list of these bookmark management tools, see http://www.allyourfavorites.com/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Web_Applications/Bookmark_Managers/directory.htm

In addition to using the default folder-based system built into traditional web browsers to get to your favorites/bookmarks, the advantage of some of these online tools is that you can find certain saved website links more quickly later by tagging them (assigning category keywords/phrases to each site that are logical groupings for you) initially when you add or import them.

2) As a search tool:

If you'd like to SHARE your bookmarks with others, and review their favorites? This category -- bookmarking tools with social networking capability -- is expanding rapidly, with hundreds of choices.

You may choose to use some of these not as bookmarking tools for yourself, but as search tools to see what sites others are bookmarking based on desired keyword tags, etc. This can help lead you to narrow niche portals, hot blogs from insiders or other experts, directories and other useful sites. Start with these:

Huge, annotated list - http://forum.vbulletinsetup.com/f7/over-500-social-networking-sites-can-3548.html
Not quite as large, but logically grouped to help you choose the kind you want - http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/01/all-social-that-can-bookmark.html

To learn more about the concept, see http://www.allyourfavorites.com/Bookmark_%28computers%29/encyclopedia.htm (or http://www.allyourfavorites.com/Bookmark_manager/encyclopedia.htm - I think these two URLs are the same content).

Experience.com provides information on internships and entry level jobs.

AOEP's half-day recruiter bootcamp is just $50 - I'm there

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:25:56 GMT

AOEP Increases Slots for Half-Day Recruiter Bootcamp at Bentley College, Waltham, MA 9/26/07

by Glenn Gutmacher

I signed up to present the Internet sourcing session at the Association of Employment Professionals first annual Recruiter Bootcamp. As with the last several events that this Boston area-focused non-profit has held, it was oversold (over 150 have pre-registered, coming from as far as Maine).

I wasn't going to promote it because I was told it was sold out. But when they oversold, AOEP got the host site, Bentley College, to add additional classroom space and now they have room for 200. AOEP will still offer registration at just $50 (yes, that's a two-digit dollar amount) per person for the half-day program (including breakfast).

The content and speakers are best-in-class. And as a non-profit, all-volunteer organization, AOEP provide this to the employment community at substantially below-market costs.

It will be held at Bentley College this Wednesday, 9/26/07 from 8:00AM - 12:30 PM. Seating is limited to pre-paid registrants. To pre-register, go to www.aoep.com/chapters/ma/events/form-mass.php or you can print out the registration form and fax it to 617-507-7702. If you have a recent credit card that expires in 2010 or later, you may find it more efficient to simply fax your order. Contact Mike Vangel at 781-895-4040 if questions.

Doors open and Continental breakfast served at 8:00AM. Sessions begin @ 8:30 sharp. Each presentation is 60 minutes long, most will be presented twice. There are three session timeslots in total so you can pick your favorites:

Optimizing Your Interviewing Skills - Patricia Hunt Sinacole

Patricia is an expert on interview techniques and is a regular columnist in the Boston Globe. She will share valuable insight's from a recruiter's perspective on how to maximize the candidate interview process. Interactive format.

Internet Sourcing At Light Speed - Glenn Gutmacher

Glenn is AOEP's 2007 H. Michael Boyd Award winner for Excellence in Employment, founder of Recruiting-Online.com, a bonafide Sourcing Sleuth, and a Recruiting Researcher at Microsoft.

Making Staffing Metrics Meaningful To Your Organization- Dan Kilgore

Dan is the Director of Talent Acquisition for Getronics North America. He has presented on Staffing Metrics nationally to ERE conferences, and locally to NEHRA and AOEP.

Best Practices In College Recruiting - Panel discussion featuring AOEP "Excellence in Employment" Award Winner, Cindy Gallerani, EMC For Best Practices In College Recruiting.

A very special thanks to event sponsor, Talent Retriever: "Delivering hire results".

P.S. If you miss me at this event, note that I will be presenting in October at the New Jersey Metro EMA Chapter meeting and the 495-128 HR Collaborative near Boston (both are inexpensive), as well as the Recruiting Excellence 2007 conference in Boston, and then in November at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Orlando, FL. More details at those websites and in a future blogpost.

How to convert a vertical list of source prospect data for mass-email

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:53:32 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

Q: I have a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with thousands of names of potential candidates. I don't intend to blind e-mail them, but I do want to process them all over time. The entries are all in a single column, and look like this:

name1

company1

e-mail address1

ID number1

name2

company2

e-mail address2

ID number2

etc.

I can't find anyone who can tell me how to "rotate" this spreadsheet so that I'll end up with 4 columns that look like this:

name1 company1 e-mail address1 ID number1

name2 company2 e-mail address2 ID number2

A: I'm glad you don't plan to mass-email that many, which can get you in trouble with the US federal CAN-SPAM Act. But I do agree you need to change the vertical orientation to horizontal as you indicated in order to send even small batches of messages in any email processing program.

Fortunately, lists like this are easily fixable. The key to doing this simply is the INDIRECT function, which didn't exist with earlier versions of Excel. (If you have Microsoft Office 2007, then you're all set.)

Assuming your list is in column A, with the first name in cell A1, first company in cell A2, etc., put the following in the cells indicated (values beginning with an equals sign are formulas):

cell b1: =INDIRECT("A"&F1)

cell c1: =INDIRECT("A"&F1+1)

cell d1: =INDIRECT("A"&F1+2)

cell e1: =INDIRECT("A"&F1+3)

cell f1: 1

cell b2: =INDIRECT("A"&F2)

cell c2: =INDIRECT("A"&F2+1)

cell d2: =INDIRECT("A"&F2+2)

cell e2: =INDIRECT("A"&F2+3)

cell f2: =F1+4

The cells in B2 through F2 can be copied in one move all the way down (starting with corresponding columns in row 3 down thousands of rows as desired). This will instantly "rotate" (display) the data from column A as you desired.

If you don't want the (now) extraneous data in column A and F, don't delete them or everything in columns B-E will be messed up! Instead, click column headings B-E to highlight the content all the way down, and copy (Ctrl+C). Launch a new blank worksheet in the same file (or a completely new spreadsheet file) and press Paste --> Paste special (not the regular Ctrl+V paste). Select the radio button preceding Values and click OK.

You now have all the records in rows, with the formulas replaced by plain values, and won't be messed up if you sort, move them around, etc.!

Thanks for the question, which was different than the usual sourcing inquiries I receive! If you have an e-sourcing challenge, feel free to send it to me (blog [at} recruiting-online {dot] com for possible inclusion.

E-Sourcing 201: Make the Google Filter work for you, not against, plus Bookmarklets tips

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:40:57 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

Q: Why does this simple string get no results on Google?
site:www.ecrm-online.com online

A: Two things are going on in this great example, which is instructive for search methods in general. Thanks, Shally, for showing me these two things a few years back:

1) When you do a site: command search, it's usually better to use the root domain (i.e., without the leading www.). So the string site:ecrm-online.com online should yield more results. Curiously, it does not in this case, so...

2) You have to remember to click the link at the bottom of the search results (or for searches that yield multiple pages of results, at the bottom of the last page of search results page) that says "In order to show you the most relevant results...you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

When you click that, you'll see lots of results (49 for the site:www.ecrm... string and 71 for the site:ecrm... version)! Another way to see these "omitted results" is to add the parameter &filter=0 to the end of your search URL (the default is for the filter to be ON, or &filter=1, not usually displayed in Google strings). In fact, while you're at it, you might as well append the parameter &num=100 to the string, too. This shows 100 results per page, vs. the default 10, making it faster to scan your results. Here's the result.

Of course, people who have taken my online course or one of my sourcing seminars over the last few years already know you can create a bookmarklet to embed one or both of these parameters automatically!

Now before people start piling onto me, let me clarify:

A) You CAN set your Google results to show 100/page by clicking the small "preferences" link next to the search box. However, as with most cookie-based things, those preferences sometimes get unset or if someone sends you a search results URL, preferences won't carry over.

B) Many times you DON'T want filter=0 because Google uses the filter to eliminate duplicates. On searches other than the types described in this blogpost, you will find filter=0 generates many results of the same exact content posted to different websites. So it can save you time to keep the filter on (&filter=1).

Another place you see filter=0 make a big difference in search results is on the Google search hack for LinkedIn profiles. If you have Shally's LinkedIn Cheatsheet for Recruiters, you know what I'm talking about, but don't ask me to show that one here (it's copyrighted material).

Last but not least, remember to run your search on other major search engines that support the site: command (Live, Yahoo, etc.) because the results are often quite different, overlapping surprisingly little, as I've demonstrated (see Thumbshots reference in previous blog posts like this one).

And yes, there are bookmarklets to run your search string on any or all of the other engines automatically. Or if you have Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 as your web browser, then you have that capability built-in and expandable for free.

These LinkedIn Questions and Answers feeds are better than LinkedIn's version

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:53:40 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

There's quite a bit of buzz about LinkedIn's Answers section which allows people to pose questions and read answers in various business topic areas. Some people leverage it for help from the communal intelligence of LI's membership, while others see it as a branding platform for their expertise, among other uses.

I just learned of a better way to keep up on the Q&A in your favorite categories than what LI itself offers. LI gives you a feed link to receive the questions in your RSS reader, but it's ONLY for the questions (e.g., from the Hiring/Human Resources main Answers page, it's this link). But if you want to see the questions AND answers, then use this free RSS mashup by the folks over at Edgehunt.

You'll see they have links to all the major RSS readers for each LinkedIn Q&A category (such as this for Hiring/Human Resources), or an aggregated feed for all categories if you're really obsessed.

Some enhancements that Steven says are coming down the pike include: search function, alerting and 'you responded to' rss feed (automatically recognizes and feeds you with all Q&A to which you responded). If you have suggestions to improve the mashup, please contact Steven at chriss {at] edgehunt [dot} com

P.S. If you're using the RSS reader built into the Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 web browser (or would like to -- try it), it will display links to the Q&A for each subcategory (e.g., HRH_CMP for compensation/benefits, HRH_PPO for personnel policies, and HRH_SFF for staffing/recruiting), too. To add the feed, just click the little orange RSS icon (near top right of your browser between the home and printer icon)s when you're at a feed URL like the one in the previous paragraph and it will be added to your Favorites Center, which you see when clicking the star icon at top left of your browser. Or go there using the traditional browser text menu along the very top: View --> Explorer Bar --> Feeds

Monster hacked for 1.6 million resumes, and then...

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:25:48 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

Thanks to my fellow sourcer Ron Bloch over at Dynamic Research for forwarding this item:

Based on the name of the Trojan involved, Monster was clearly the target in this major breach.

And once they had the resumes, out went the phishing emails nicely mimicking Monster branding with a malware link! One of the commenters on the above post said it was probably connected to these.

And if that wasn't bad enough, Chris Power, Monster's CFO of global operations, resigned on Friday.

It's almost enough to make me feel sad for the company that's made untold millions off the recruiting industry. Or maybe I should respect founder Jeff Taylor more for great timing in leaving the company.

Jigsaw vs LinkedIn vs Spoke vs ZoomInfo, part 2

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:58:08 GMT

Let me quickly add thoughts about the last three, since they have been covered in depth on various industry lists, and all of them were discussed in another post on this very blog two years ago, but then move to more detail about Jigsaw. Spoke does not have the informational depth or quality of LinkedIn, because it's web-spidered data, whereas LinkedIn's are profiles created by actual people. ZoomInfo uses spidering, but its depth is stronger than Spoke thanks to their data-processing algorithms. Each of these sites have their value, but it depends in part on the types of passive prospects you seek. The more publicly-visible someone is (think executives and marketing roles), the more likely you will find a critical mass of info on the spidering-based services. Otherwise, LinkedIn or Jigsaw will probably work better.

What may not be clear from the two posts about Jigsaw.com below is that you can also use its functionality for free. It's called the
"PLAY" (rather than "PAY") option when you first register. The catches are:

- you need to input your credit card as insurance against possible future charges, should you convert to PAY status (though I can verify I've never been charged on it for 2+ years)

- you must add the professional contact info of 25 contacts each month to the system (who are not already in there) or you can add more (e.g., 75 would cover you for 3 months).

- again, it must be professional contact info -- if you try to add the contact's AOL or Comcast home email, the entry will be rejected.

You can then retrieve the contact info of as many contacts as you put in. And you don't actually give up the corresponding points from your account until you have run your search, clicked on the blinded version of the business card (it shows company, job title and location, but not name, phone or email) and then agreed to redeem points.

As Jigsaw puts it, "Most members add contacts that are correct but have little business value to them. They then get contacts of extreme value for their business purposes. The contacts that they add to Jigsaw can then give great value to another user and their purpose."

Here are two of many methods used by recruiters on Jigsaw. Your ethics will determine which ones you feel comfortable employing:

1. Whenever you receive a resume from a candidate that you don't have an immediate need for, ask if you can share their information with others who may have opportunities. If they say yes, many recruiters say you have the mandate to post them on Jigsaw.

2. If you're generally ok with #1, but don't feel comfortable inputting their primary work contact info, realize that many people now have web domains for their freelance, etc., pursuits (e.g., a personal website at www.joesmith.com) and you could list joseph@joesmith.com and whatever phone # is on the website as an acceptable Jigsaw record.

Yes, occasionally you will come across some obsolete contact info when you redeem points for someone, but then you can report it to Jigsaw, and once your challenge is validated, you get your points back. All in all, it's a pretty good system!

P.S. Jigsaw had an incentive program where you could actually sell your extra points to others for cash, but that was terminated last month. The site reports a new incentive program will be introduced soon.

Valid reasons to attend SourceCon (only a few are mine)

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:22:43 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

Thanks in part to the 3-stage sourcing challenge, there's been a lot of buzz about this first all-sourcing industry conference (now just under a month away, but I've been pleasantly surprised to see how cheap the round-trip airline rates to Atlanta still are that week). However, other than the impressive list of speakers and topics, I wasn't sure if people on the outside were convinced enough of its value to actually take the leap to register (first-time events often suffer a stigma until proven)

But I finally received a few emails this week that I think will convince you:

1) Shally sent an email to his network with the best set of substantive reasons I've seen thus far for industry people to attend. I took the liberty of posting the email on my website here, since I can't find it on Shally's or on SourceCon's. (Let's see if I get in trouble for that. ;-)

2) They sponsored Jim Stroud's "History of Sourcing", creatively presented in a timeline format: http://jimstroud.com/thehistoryofsourcing.html which goes way back and includes a great friend who I consider the true pioneer of recruiting research (see 1974).

3) The mass email from SourceCon this week is a Q&A formatted mini-interview with me about why I'm presenting there and what I think people will get out of it. Once again, I took the liberty of posting the email on my website here, since I can't find it elsewhere.

The only press/promotion kind of stuff you see on their site (if you click "Latest News") is about their Sourcing Challenge. I understand they're trying to create a secretive feel to the whole thing, but if you're going to mass-email thousands in the industry, what do you get out of not posting it to your website?

P.S. I have no financial incentives related to SourceCon (other than them paying my travel expenses and registration), but I personally would love to see a recruiting industry conference purely about sourcing succeed. Wouldn't you?

The Future of Work- insights from special BusinessWeek issue

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:57:42 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

A wide-ranging, fairly thorough, thought-provoking and very readable treatment of the "future of work" theme is what the latest issue of BusinessWeek magazine (dated Aug. 20, 2007 but already available online for free to non-subscribers) is devoted to:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/07_34/B40470734futurework.htm

The concept of collective intelligence and collaboration, among other work evolutions are explored: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047438.htm and particularly in this article: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047426.htm

"How to keep your job onshore" nicely explains some things you can do, with real-life examples:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047417.htm

A few articles on creating your personal brand: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047419.htm

How to make workplaces healthier: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047427.htm

Why airports are becoming more than just shipping and travel hubs: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047434.htm

And quite a bit more worth reading, plus a few thematically-related online slide shows that BW has become known for, for all you visual learners.

Hey recruiting sourcers, I'm ready to give you a million

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:43:06 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

No, this isn't another one of those sourcing challenge contests, but my happy announcement that I've exceeded 1 million contacts at 2nd degree in my LinkedIn network. Why am I not touting the 6 million in my total network, instead? Because 2nd degree means that when you connect with me directly, they instantly become part of your viewable/searchable 3rd degree network. And in this business, I find both sides do better with more sharing.

So if you haven't already (or if you are, feel free to tell a friend), use

www.linkedin.com/inviteMany (so you can invite some other highly-networked folks into your network at the same time -- see below) and type my email in the format firstname.lastname@microsoft.com (yes, that's Glenn.Gutmacher, but I'm trying to avoid the spambots). Now you should have more people showing up under the "Your Network" tab in your search results, and hopefully fewer "blinded" profiles under the "LinkedIn network" tab.

I was close to the 2nd degree million figure last week but easily jumped it over the weekend thanks to Paul DeBettignies (a/k/a MN Headhunter) who made me "Person of the Day" on Friday, a feature of his "Recruiters On LinkedIn" network on RecruitingBlogs.com. I also want to give props to a few people in particular who have generously shared their advice on LinkedIn to utilize it more effectively (some directly, some indirectly) which has also helped me to dramatically grow my network in the process, though I continue to pick up tips about LinkedIn every day from the voluminous (and growing) range of resources available:

- Dave Mendoza (known for the SixDegreesFromDave blog and as the LinkedIn meganetworker, whose fame in that regard even helped secure him work as a contract sourcer FOR them)

- Shally Steckerl (my former boss at Microsoft, now training and consulting more than full-time as JobMachine Inc., who helps people in more ways than he'll ever know, and with whom I was happy to collaborate on creating a popular LinkedIn cheatsheet last year)

- Vincent Wright (the guru of LinkedIn networking groups - you'd probably learn almost all you need to know just by looking over his shoulder for a day)

- Joe Bartling and Chris Mayaud (author of the first e-book and blog about LinkedIn, respectively, that I found truly useful),

- Ray van den Bel (has been very active lately, e.g., see his Open Networkers group)

- the Broadlook team (who will share a lot if you buy at least one of their products)

This is not to snub other gurus I've learned from in other aspects of sourcing, but in terms of LinkedIn, the above are my standouts. However, Otis Collier's free LinkedIn how-to video is worth a look, too!

Find physician jobs on The Recruiter.com.

Passive Sourcing 201: How do I find Process Improvement business ops prospects?

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 15:11:54 GMT

by Glenn Gutmacher

Send your sourcing questions to me [questions at recruiting-online dot com] for possible inclusion in future blog posts. All personally-identifying information will be removed. Answers are free to selected questioners.

Q: I'm looking for business operations people who are experts in process improvement, preferably from consulting firms in the San Francisco Bay area. How can I find them?

A: Start by looking for synonyms around your key terms. Review your company's information on what's expected in the job, search online directories like Wikipedia, and review job descriptions by your target competitors. This will likely pull up synonyms to "process improvement" like "performance measurement", "planning process", etc. All of those can become part of a boolean OR clause in any search strings for resumes, bios, or directory/conference/association name lists you wish to run.

Speaking of associations, there may be some niche ones related to process improvement and/or business operations. Try variants of this string on your favorite major search engines (results overlap between engines is surprisingly low, so use more than one!):

"process improvement" association

The above finds associations, which will have conference presenters, member lists, local chapter boards of directors, etc., on their sites -- a great start for names!

Continuing in this vein, there may be some niche job boards for business operations/process improvement, and you can post your job there. Try this search on any major search engine to find them:

"process improvement" "job board"

The other nice thing about the above is it will also pull up individual companies' own job listing pages, so you add to your competitor target list, too! Speaking of competitors, realize that the major consulting firms have long histories, so if you're willing to hire corporate alumni of major consulting firms, realize that Accenture used to be "Arthur Andersen" and BearingPoint was KPMG, so that gives you a few more company name keywords for your searches. PriceWaterhouse also goes by the "PWC Global" moniker. Some people spell the newfangled company names as one word, while other use two. Therefore, try CapGemini as well as "Cap Gemini" and BearingPoint as well as "Bearing Point".

If you search for your keywords on a job posting aggregator like Indeed or SimplyHired, you will find the original job boards where the relevant openings were posted, and discover more niche boards that way. You'll also find individual competitor names, too.

Last but not least, since you said you prefer the Bay Area, you can add geographic elements to your search strings (e.g., "Bay Area" OR "San Francisco") to find the local associations and chapters of (inter)national ones, which also help narrow the total size of your results to a more scanable number.

There are more ways to pull up names, of course -- we haven't even touched the social networks, user groups or blog search -- but I suspect the above will give you enough of a call down list to generate the candidate pipeline flow you need.

Search for Austin jobs at itzbig.

Getting to Resume Search Nirvana: Use the Positive Find Elimination test

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:36:47 GMT

Getting to Resume Search Nirvana: Use the Positive Find Elimination test

by Glenn Gutmacher

In a blog post almost two years ago, Tim O'Connor (now a leading sourcer at CapGemini) lamented the irrelevant results mixed in when searching for resumes by area code, using this example:

(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) java (maine OR me) 207

He opined whether using the following template (for Google) would improve things by getting rid of resumes with street addresses led by 207, etc.:

(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) java c (maine OR me) *207*-*-*

The search algorithms change over time, of course, and so while that template may have helped then, it doesn't now. Thus his question is worth revisiting.

You want to eliminate not only apartment/suite numbers matching your area code, but things like house numbers, sites that blind resumes (e.g., just show "Area Code: 207"), etc.

The way to test if your work-around is a solution is to do a narrow test search for the positive case, i.e., try to find the thing you want to eliminate with other narrow criteria so you only get a few results. This way, you can quickly scan to see if your fix is successful. I call this the Positive Find Elimination test.

For example, I would try

(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) java 207.*.street

then

(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) java 207.*.st

and see if/how the results differ. This usually reveals a way you can tweak your search (e.g., additional boolean NOT criteria) to just get to the results you want.

Since 207.*.street yields different results than 207.*.st , you must account for both in searches (hardly anybody uses Av for Avenue, so Ave is the only alternative needed). Similarly, very few resumes include the Ste abbreviation for Suite, so 1 James Rd., Suite 207 is sufficient for that NOT-type search. Ditto for Cir as an unnecessary abbreviation for Circle.

Again, before I receive complaint emails, let me clarify: I know the word "Ste" appears on web pages. But if you're searching for individual RESUMES, the number of appearances of Ste (or even Suite, for that matter) is insignificant. The context of your search matters, so when you run the Positive Find Elimination test, make sure to run the same kind of search as your desired search.

Unfortunately, Google doesn't let you eliminate the number in a list (e.g., 207 208 ...) with -207.208, nor does it distinguish between #207 and 207 (see for yourself), so there's no point in trying to eliminate results with content formatted in those ways. Ditto for the unability to rid of 207 results where it's the local phone prefix (e.g., 339-207-5555).

Also, using Dr as an abbreviation for Drive is problematic, because it also tends to include people whose resumes have your desired area code number in it, but used in a different way, and within a few words is Dr., as in the Doctor abbreviation (yes, Dr is the same as Dr. in Google). You might actually eliminate good results using that, so just stick with Drive, to be safe (the number of extraneous results added is trivial).

Another common thing you may encounter is page number references, so we'll eliminate those as well. This yields the following template (substitute your desired state/province name, abbreviation and area code for those values below, as well as any skill terms):

(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) java (maine OR me) 207 -area.code.207 -page.207 -pp.207 -207.*.st -207.*.street -207.*.rd -207.*.road -207.*.ave -207.*.avenue -207.*.drive -207.*.circle -site:free-for-recruiters.com

The last NOT term is to eliminate results from free-for-recruiters.com, which blinds resume results. But after using the above template to eliminate all the other false results, that will be relatively few to sift through!

If you encounter other extraneous terms in your results (e.g., highway/hwy, another blinded job board, etc.), you can similarly use the Positive Find Elimination test to figure out how to eliminate them.

Using Google Alerts, you can set multiple searches for each state/area code combination you want. You may need to create additional strings if you're adding more than a few skill and/or job title keywords, anyway, since this template is close to Google's 32 keyword/string limit.

Remember, this search string template is geared to Google, in keeping with Tim's original post. Obviously, it is not the only way to find resumes on Google, nor is Google the only place you should search for resumes, so adapt this template accordingly. As I've said before (here, here and here), the results overlap between the search engines is surprisingly and extremely low. In other words, the same search on different search engines pulls up entirely different candidates! You are shooting yourself in the foot to only search one engine.

Even if you search PageBites for resumes, which pulls resumes off the web using Google (PageBites created a Google API), it yields completely different results than the above Google template. For example, try my string template versus java struts (keywords) and Dallas, TX 75201 USA (default searches 50 mi. radius) on PageBites. Unfortunately, some of PageBites' resumes are not in the Dallas area (e.g., it pulls a French postal code, a past employer location, etc.) and it includes some blinded-type results (e.g., Rent-A-Coder.com) which you can't eliminate. You would think, since my template only used the intitle: OR inurl: resume search method, that PageBites would find all of my results, plus quite a few others...but not so!

P.S. I'll have more to say on things like this during my sessions at SourceCon and Kennedy this fall. Are you going?

Photo Album: Affiliations

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 03:02:05 GMT

Affiliations

RecruitingBloggers.com

Microsoft

JobMachine.net

Blog list: Dormant blogroll

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:10:29 GMT

Dormant blogroll

The Sourcerer's Apprentice - Bret Hollander
blog reincarnation of a pioneer e-recruiting newsletter

Blog list: Blogroll

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:54:29 GMT

Custom List: Key links

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 16:39:31 GMT

Key links

Subscribe to feed of Advanced Online Recruiting Techniques
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actual sourcing methods, resources and other content
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can limit results geographically, too
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