Advanced Online Recruiting Techniques

Top 10 Ways to Find Open Source Software Developers besides resume/CV search

by Glenn Gutmacher

Q: Do you have any recommendations for skill sites to find LAMP, PHP and Python developers? I found a few but nothing great.

A: You will increase your possibilities greatly if you realize that you are basically talking about open source developers (what you mentioned are some of their primary tools/platforms - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python). The ones who are skilled in this arena don't need to promote themselves much (open source is hot, though don't count Microsoft out yet ;-) so they don't have to post resumes, and if they do, may not include the obvious programmatic keywords in their online footprint to minimize communication overload ("Funny, you are the 35th recruiter to call me today!").

I'm not saying you shouldn't do standard resume/CV search strings, but there are other options if that doesn't turn up enough of what you need. Your question was a bit vague - LAMP/PHP/Python developers are plentiful - so by skill sites, I assume you mean places that will let you search by number of years of a particular programming skill? I don't know any free sites that offer that in the aggregate (an example of a big tech job board with this option is Dice, but requires a paid login). I imagine you have some other job requirements that would narrow the field (e.g, by industry vertical expertise, geography, etc.) which would help narrow your search string criteria.

In any case, here are my top 10 most fruitful categories of sources that will lead you to open source candidates (I'm open to suggestions of others that have worked for my blog readers - I'll dig up a prize for the best one), not necessarily in this order:

1) Niche industry news portals: like OnLamp where you can find out about open source development projects. You can find other such sites simply by adding the word "portal" to a keyword/phrase string (e.g., python portal) on any major search engine.

2) Speaker/panelist lists: Find them from open source developer conferences (e.g., this was last week). They may be over-qualified, but querying their names on search engines will lead you to like people.

3) Blogs: On that note, also check out their blogs, because their blogrolls will link to other qualified folks and their posts will talk about interesting projects/people (e.g., look at this post - and don't forget that the people who post reply comments are potential candidates!)

4) Certifications: search on some of the unique open source certification acronyms (can add it as keyword to resume/CV queries, too) like CMDEV for MySQL developers.

5) Training: On a related note, you could ping companies that offer such cert training to see if they'd promote your opportunities to their alumni (maybe this) or request their list to reach out yourself (you never know if you don't ask!).

6) Discussion lists/forums: This is a goldmine for your needs. Find the niche ones where these types of developers ask and answer technical questions, and you've got relevant talent. One of several ways to do this is to search on Google Groups. Use the "search for a group" search box halfway down the page, not the default "search groups" at the top. The latter will search for your keyword within all postings, whereas the former just searches the group name/description. (There are valuable uses for the default search, but not in the case.) For example, try this. Since you're looking for quality candidates, remember that large groups aren't necessarily better than small ones. Once you're perusing group posts, people's names, what they say, and usually companies and emails, are revealed so it's not hard to track them down. Tip: the ones who answer questions tend to be more knowledgeable, all else equal, than the ones who ask questions (on Google Groups, use the insubject:re command to limit results to those).

7) Company names/titles: You're going to start finding company names that these people work for - those are fabulous keywords to use on search engines, social networks, etc., in combination with the job titles associated with developers at those companies. If you're unsure what those job titles are, use a job aggregator like Indeed or SimplyHired and in the left-hand column of search results, it will show you the variations.

8) Competitions/Awards: Search for people or companies who have won things in this space. All else equal, award-winning software tends to be designed by better developers (high revenue software would be another nice way to search, but we're talking open source where the money trail is harder to come by). As an example string template geared to companies, you can use phrases like award winning, best of, etc., along with your open source keywords to find things like this (hat tip to this post by my former Microsoft sourcing colleague, Jim Stroud)

9) What-they-do keywords: I probably should have said this earlier, but think about what open source developers do (in addition to working on software/IT services for companies). For example, they create toolkits (that or SDK is a keyword), they use open source licensing (GPL is a keyword), they contribute modules or libraries, they work on open source platforms/operating systems with unique names (Debian, Eclipse, Ubuntu), etc. That should give you plenty of fodder for search strings and places to go.

10) Project Portals: Last but not least, you can go to the sites where open source software projects are hosted, which leads you to people, because the contributors (who are mostly volunteer) are typically listed publicly. The largest is http://sourceforge.net - start by using its default search with a few keywords, then click on the Members link next to any result. Instant contact list!

by Glenn Gutmacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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".

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.!