State of the Internet

I think by now most of us have come a long way towards integrating the multitude of uses for the Internet into our workflow. However, I imagine many wonder to this day if they are getting the most out of the Internet connection they have. For this month’s column, I am going to talk some about the many ways we can all benefit. As the field of choices becomes more crowded, the decisions become more difficult.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) – If you are still using index cards, excel or word, an old DOS database, an old windows shared database, or maybe even a contact manager, you are not maximizing your revenue potential. The trend in this software category over the last five years or so has been that many providers now offer a web-only solution. There is good reason for this. A web-based or web-enabled solution is an extremely cost-effective and flexible method for most of us to take advantage of shared data. Even if you are a solo operator, you might have more than one pc in your office, or you might travel from time to time. For those who have not investigated this marketplace in a while I know you would be surprised at how far these products have come to assist recruiters in any recruiting discipline to find the candidates they have more efficiently, streamline communications, organize their workflow, share information with other recruiters, and a dizzying array of add-ons. If you are not using one … take a few minutes out of your busy day and get one.

The Big Boards – One might assume due to the nature of my job that I don’t care for these services, which would be incorrect. Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, Dice, and the others … you will never (or rarely) hear me say a bad word about these services. First off, as a group, they are one of the biggest supporters of our industry. They sponsor almost every major event we are involved in and I will always be grateful to them for that. Sponsorship and support aside, yes, to this day I truly believe there is a place for a membership in the sourcing process of almost every recruiting firm. The big beef is that subscriptions are simply not paying off as much as they once were. That is true but really the same could be said for almost any recruiting or sourcing resource. The market is tight for quality candidates. What you really need to look at is ROI, or Return on Investment. Most smaller recruiting firms probably pay in the neighborhood of $6-$10k per year for these services. With the salaries and fees these days, that equates to less than one placement to pay for the service for the entire year. So, you have to think to yourself – can you make at least one placement per year using one of these services? My guess is yes. If you make more than one, you are way ahead of the game.

Passive Candidate Tools – Talk about a growth industry. It seems I am regularly getting emails touting a new service to help us all find the candidates we desperately need. It is beyond the scope of this piece to recommend or even talk specifically about these services, but I do want to point out that there are differences. Basically, it boils down to two major types. One is what I call name generators and the other is what I call resume generators. Popular services like ZoomInfo and AIRS SourcePoint are name generators. These companies expend vast resources on culling names and associated bios from a wide variety of sources, and then they compile that data into a proprietary database that you can search. Others you may have heard of include Talenthook, InfoGIST, Diver, ResumeFinder … these are products that offer you the ability to conduct what I call “open web searches” for resumes, although they may have the capability to search for names as well. There is no database. There is a big difference between names and resumes. Although both are raw leads and not bona fide candidates, most recruiters I know love those resumes as they can see the individuals location, work history, education, and learn a bit about them before they attempt contact. The cost for these run anywhere from under $1,000 to many thousands of dollars per year, but all have different features that set them apart from one another. I get many calls per year asking me my recommendations and although I don’t mind the discussions but the bottom line is which one is going to work best for the type of people you are trying to reach. Each of these offers a free trial of some sort and that is the best starting point for any evaluation. Many recruiters are using at least one or more of these.

Do-it-Yourself – There is an ever-increasing number of recruiters today that are taking the time and making the effort to learn how to search for names and resumes on the Internet themselves. Believe it or not, there are hundreds of millions of resumes of passive candidates on the Internet, and there are exponentially more names than that. More and more are added all the time … every day. Yes, it can be tedious and time-consuming. If you don’t have time for it then use one of the tools previously mentioned. It’s the old make/buy dilemma. Using a tool is expensive, but much more efficient from a time standpoint. Doing the searching yourself is less expensive but also less efficient. Even when using the tools you can often get more out of them if you have a basic understanding of the way search engines work, and how search strings are properly constructed. There are many venues out there for recruiters to learn the techniques needed for a productive Internet recruiting session. The good part is it’s not rocket science. Anyone can learn how to do this. It just takes a bit of proper training and a commitment to utilize the techniques you learn.

Social Networks – Sites like MySpace, FaceBook, and Friendster can be treasure troves of leads for candidates, but are surely underutilized. These are free to join and free to search. Many of you would be surprised to know the average age of a MySpace user is in the 35 range. This means there are many users actually older than me, an unusual occurrence. As plentiful as leads may be on these networks they are often difficult to utilize due to the fact that, unlike the business networks the social network users do not often have their names on their home pages. There are workarounds. One is to carefully read each page. Even though a user might not have his or her name on their site, I have noticed on many MySpace profiles there are often internal links to personal websites and/or personal email addresses in the body of the pages. If all else fails, they provide an internal messaging mechanism and you can try and contact your leads that way as well. There are simply too many users on these sites to ignore them as a bona fide sourcing resource.

Business Networks – Another high growth industry. It seems my inbox in often full of invitations for me to join a new network. I do join from time to time but feel enough is enough. I wonder what these newbies can possibly offer in the way of features that can set them apart from the established networks. LinkedIn and Spoke are probably the two best-known business networks. These resources are fast becoming one of the most popular ways to source new candidate leads and although free to join, so many recruiters I talk to are not members, some have never heard of it, and others who are members are not utilizing it to its potential. Even though my LinkedIn for Recruiters class is fairly new, it is already my most popular class, eclipsing my flagship Google class. I mention this as it is indicative of the fact that many recruiters looking for new ways to source candidates are looking to learn more about these networks, as they should.

Niche Sites – I think most of you would be surprised to know how many Internet sites cater to specific types of people … thousands. We call these niche sites. These types of sites should not be overlooked if you specialize in a specific type of recruiting. There are sites that cater to finance/accounting, retail, IT/MIS, those with security clearances, engineers, and these are just the tip of the iceberg. You can find out if there are niche sites for your specialty by searching for them in Google or one of the other search engines. Even though these sites are smaller than the big boards mentioned above, they are not necessarily less expensive. But they are much more targeted to the audience you are trying to reach. Many also double as “portals” providing interesting industry content to their site to entice the professionals in the door. It would be well worth your time and effort to investigate and evaluate services of this type that would cater to whatever specialty you have.

Job Distribution Services – Why post your jobs one by one when you can engage an Internet service to post your jobs to up to thousands of employment related sites with a few clicks. Services like Beyond.com (11,000 sites) and Hirenet.net (4,000 sites), just to name a couple of the dozens of sites available, can offer you vast coverage for your advertising dollar. Pricing varies widely. Simply do a search in Google or another search engine for “job distribution” and you will get back a list of many of these services.

Research – Internet sites like Harris and Hoovers can be invaluable research resources for making more placements. Although they are different than the names databases mentioned earlier in this article, they often do have company contact information, along with key personnel information. You can often use these services as a starting point for further research. They also categorize companies by their SIC codes, something I wish more services would do, so they are excellent sources for competitive intelligence when you are trying to locate competitors to you clients.

Job Aggregators – These can be very handy sites to know about. If you are ever seeking job order leads for a specific individual or maybe in a given city, visit Indeed.com or SimplyHired.com. These are the two larger and more popular services in this space. One doesn’t actually post jobs to these sites but they spider the major job sites, free employment sites, and employer sites and then use that data to populate their own database of Internet job postings. They also have helpful filters to eliminate unwanted data. They are free for anyone to use.

Researcher – After reading through this article one might wonder how in the world could anyone take full advantage of all the resources mentioned and still have time to do anything else. One way successful recruiters (a/k/a big billers) make more placements is to invest in a full time researcher. I know more than one that has two of them. These are individuals that are well versed in Internet and Telephone technologies that take on internal assignments to source candidate leads, call into companies to obtain marketing leads, locate relevant new items about customers, create lists of competitors, and generally whatever needs to be done to get you closer to closing your next placement.

In closing – you already have the connection to the Internet. Use it but use it wisely. Have a great month.

Tip – Google Maps

Many times when we are sourcing passive candidates on the Internet we get good leads, but many of them don’t have any contact information. This is especially true when we are sourcing from some of the business networks. We can check Google, Zabasearch, WhitePages.com, Switchboard.com, ZoomInfo, and/or some of the other lookup sites but sometimes come up dry. Then, we have to think about calling them at work. Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/) is a great place to look up phone numbers for work locations. Once on the site, click the tab that says “Find Businesses,” then type in the business name and location. Being Google Maps, of course, they give you a map of the location but you really don’t care much about that. Over on the left side of the page are listings that give the main telephone number for the requested business. Put this in your favorites and use it whenever you have a work location but not an email address or home phone number.

Mark E. Berger, C.P.C., AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting and staffing since 1979. He is currently the proprietor of Swat Recruiting (www.swatrecruiting.com), a firm supporting the technology needs of the recruiting and staffing industry. He was an early proponent of using the Internet for candidate sourcing, starting in the early 1990s, and has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and sourcing since that time. He has become an expert on recruiting and sourcing products and services available to the recruiting industry and also has a high level of expertise in recruiter databases (ATS’s). Mark has authored the Internet Recruiting column appearing monthly in The Fordyce Letter for the last ten years and is a frequent contributor to several recruiting industry publications. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Mid-America Association of Personnel Services.

LinkedIn – To Pay or Not To Pay

As LinkedIn continues to gain steam in the recruiting com-munity as a bonafide tool to locate both active and passive candidates for our open assignments, I thought it might be helpful to try and clarify exactly what benefits one would receive from a paid membership. Although some recruiters do have a paid membership, I think the vast majority of recruiters are using the basic, free membership.

Most people know there are three memberships available to most recruiters. Here they are, along with the costs:

- Personal = free

- Business = $19.99 per month or $199.50 per year

- Business Plus = $50 per month or $500 per year

So, the big question is what do you get for your money if you decide to consider one of the paid memberships? Probably the biggest differentiator is that of InMails. For those who don’t know, an InMail is an internal LinkedIn messaging system where members can send emails to one another. One advantage to using an InMail is that you do not have to take that extra step of locating contact information for the person you are trying to reach (we all know under most circumstances the LI profiles do not contain any contact information). Aside from that advantage, the use of an InMail as opposed to a regular email message is that your InMail is more likely to be read and also more likely to receive a response. With your InMail, you have some built-in credibility with that potential contact; he or she can easily look you up and learn a bit about you prior to replying to your message.

With all three memberships you can receive InMails. The Business level lets you send up to three InMails a month and the Business Plus membership lets you send up to 10. If you do not get a reply to your message within a seven-day period, you get a credit on the eighth day. If your contact responds after the eighth day, that InMail is free.

Introductions: All three levels allow you to receive an unlimited number of requests for introductions but differ in the allowance to send requests for introduction. Introduction Requests are when you locate a possible contact outside of your network and would like to be introduced to that contact by a mutual LinkedIn contact. The Personal membership allows you to send up to five Introduction Requests at a time, the Business allows up to 15, and the Business Plus allows up to 25.

OpenLink Network Member-ship: This is a service that is not available to the Personal (free) membership level but is included with the other two levels, and is optional. The purpose of the OpenLink Network is to allow unfettered communication among paid members without having to use your allotment of InMails. You are also allowed to limit your searches to other OpenLink Network members so you know who you can easily contact.

More Results: For either Business or Business Plus account holders, you will receive more results for your searches. The Personal level only lets you see results in your network. The other two allow you to get blinded results of those non-network individuals that match your criteria, then allows you to send an InMail to them in the hopes of a connection.

Reference Searches: Another great benefit only available to premium members. These specialized searches allow you to enter a company name and a date range and get a list of contacts that worked for that company during the given time frame. This is used to conduct a “back-door” reference check on a contact/candidate prior to moving forward with that person.

That pretty much sums up the major differences in the types of accounts. For the premium memberships they also offer expedited customer service, promising a response within one business day, something not available for the basic level. They also have one more level of membership, their Enterprise Corporate Solutions. This level is only available to corporate recruiters and can be in the thousands of dollars per year.

As of this writing, LinkedIn had approximately 18 million members, an impressive number. But more impressive is that the membership is growing at a pace of about a million new members each month. More and more recruiters will realize the value of this resource. As you can see, there can be some distinct benefits in considering one of the premium memberships. If you are not a member yet, or if you would like more information about upgrading your existing account, you can visit the LinkedIn website at www.linkedin.com.

Zuula.com

I recently learned about Zuula from my friend and colleague Shally Steckerl when I attended one of his training classes (his LinkedIn for Gurus class, to be exact). I suppose Zuula could be categorized as a meta-search engine as it doesn’t have its own database of websites for you to search but allows you to search multiple search engines simultaneously as some of the other meta search engines (mamma.com, dogpile.com) do. It has a nice, clean interface with a simple text box for queries. As of this writing, by typing in your search parameters one time, you can search the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Live) and some of the lesser-known search engines (Gigablast, Exalead, Alexa, Accoona, and Mojeek) at the same time.

Zuula also has an advanced search feature that allows you to easily build your search using ANDs, ORs, NOTs, phrases, and sites, even if you are not familiar with Boolean terminology.

Visit Zuula the next time you want to search the Internet for almost anything. You will notice each search engine returns results that are different than the other. One thing Shally and I both recommend in our classes is to use a mix of search engines when conducting almost any search in order to be as thorough as you can and get the most results for your efforts.

Tip
Google “Fill in the Blank Search”

You can get Google to answer simple questions for you by using the asterisk. It is very simple. You ask a question and put the asterisk in the part of the sentence or question that you want filled in.

For example, if I typed in “The CEO of Oracle Corp. is *” the first hit is a page with the statement, “Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation…”

If you are traveling, another example might be to type in “The weather for Atlanta is *” and get a number of pages with the weather forecasts for the Atlanta area.

Give the method a try whenever you have a question for Google.

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M.E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products and services available on the Internet, and how they add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is www.swatrecruiting.com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

Let’s see . . . we all have our database running. Maybe a browser tab or two, or three. Of course, our Outlook is going. Plus a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet. Our accounting/checkbook program also runs on a regular basis. No wonder it feels sometimes like our PC is running a bit slow.

Computer performance depends on a number of things, but for the most part, you are dealing with processor speed and RAM (memory). Hard-drive speed is also a factor as well, but less so in most circumstances. Even in this day and age of fast computer chips and mega-ram installations, that hourglass can be frustrating. Running all these programs I just mentioned is an obvious resource drain, however, one we really can’t do anything about. This is why we have these PCs – to multi-task and be productive. Luckily, there are a number of things you can do yourself to at least make sure you are doing what you can to enhance your computing experience.

These tips are for those running Windows XP OS. I had a Vista machine for a while, but since I couldn’t figure out how to do anything on it and I didn’t need another doorstop, I got rid of it pretty quick.

To get an idea of what is going on inside your PC, one easy way to look is to right-click on the Task Bar (the lowest bar on your screen). Click the link to Task Manager, then click the Processes tab. Most will be amazed at how many processes (programs) are actually running on the PC. While each PC is different and most of these processes are required to run on the basis of the programs you have installed, at least by doing this you know what you are up against.

Typically, you would not want to end any of these processes from this window, but for those individuals particularly interested in an entry that they do not recognize, Google is a great place to get information on almost all of these. Just put the process in the Google text box and search. You will get a number of entries telling you what it is, and how to stop it if it should be stopped.

Getting past that, here are some easier ways. I always like to start with my Outlook program. We all receive and delete many messages, and this can impact performance. Simply go through your mail file and delete all the messages that you do not need; then empty your deleted items folder by right-clicking on the Deleted Items entry. Once you have done that, close your Outlook program, go into your Control Panel, click on the Mail icon, then click on the mail storage file you are using, then click Properties. Once in that box, click on Compact Now. This could take a few minutes, so be patient.

Next, go back into Control Panel and click on the icon for Add or Remove Programs. This will take a minute to load. Scan this list for unused or unnecessary programs. Again, you might be surprised at some of the entries in this list. Many times, when one buys a new PC, it comes preloaded with many programs you never even think to use. If you click once on any entry, it will let you know your usage history with that program. It will say something like Occasionally, or Rarely. One by one, go ahead and delete the programs you do not use. Just put a checkbox next to those entries you want to delete and hit OK.

Next is another easy one. Open My Computer. Right-click on the icon next to your C Drive. Click Properties. On the General tab there is a button for Disk Cleanup. Click this once. This will take a few minutes to populate the list. You now have a list of all the items on your hard drive taking up space unnecessarily that you can safely delete.

From here you will want to defrag your hard drive. This is easy. Close all programs. Go to Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools, then click on Disk Defragmenter. Choose the drive you want to defrag, then click the defrag button. Depending on the level of fragmentation, this could take a few minutes so, again, be patient. Best not to have any other programs running when you’re running this one.

Another easy task that doesn’t do a lot for performance, per se, but will make your PC feel a bit peppier is to right-click on My Computer, then click on Properties. Click on the Advanced tab, then click the Settings button under Performance. On the Visual Effects tab, check the box Adjust for Best Performance. This is a tweak for your visual effects and nothing more, but you will likely notice a bit of a difference using the new settings.

Spyware/Adware

Whoever invented this nuisance should be lined up and shot, or at least whipped. What a pain, and completely useless for most of us. Unchecked, spyware and adware can significantly impact performance. Gladly, with some diligence on our part, the effects of these secretively installed programs can be kept at a minimum. Obviously, you will need some type of anti-spyware program. There are many on the market, and while it is not my intention to recommend one over another, I use a free program, AVG Anti-Spyware, with good results. These things crop up regularly, so it is a good idea to do a scan at least every couple of days.

Not for the fainthearted.

Here are two more areas to check. I do not advise anyone except those with an advanced knowledge of computers to change these settings. However, it might be advisable to go through these with someone knowledgeable about these things and see if you are unnecessarily starting and running services you do not need.

msconfig – Go to Start/Run, then type this in the box. When loaded, go to the Start Up tab and look at all the items with a check mark in the first column.

services.msc – Go to Start/Run, then type this in the box. When loaded, look through this list and note all the services (most of which you have probably never heard of) and see all the ones that have the word Started in the Status column.

Undoubtedly, your PC is running many smaller and/or insignificant programs that were either installed before you purchased it or maybe even installed along with other programs you installed. Again, don’t stop services randomly. Your PC needs many of these programs to run properly, but with the right guidance you can potentially stop a number of the unnecessary ones. Individually, most of these would not have much of an impact on performance, but collectively, you may be able to gain a bit of pep with some diligence here.

In closing, the performance of all PCs degrades over a period of time. They are great when new but then begin the downhill slide to a mediocre state of performance. If this frustrates you, then try some of these fairly simple ways to get a bit more pep out of your system when you need it.

www.wink.com

Recently I was referred to a neat site that I thought I would share with all of you, Wink.com. Wink is a people search site that searches over 290 million people across a number of business/social networks and the Web in general. You can search for people using a name, location, school, work, interests, and other criteria as well. I did a search on myself and got back seven results – not the 300 or so I get when I search Google direct, but a good starting point. It picked up my LinkedIn account, some of my Fordyce Letter material, and a few other hits as well. A free service that could easily be added to your search process when seeking a particular person.

TIP

Link Technique

This is an oldie but, for sure, a goodie. I have talked about this technique in the past but not in quite some time. It is one of the most basic techniques we use to find both résumés and names using the search engines. This command comes in two flavors; one is simply “link,” which searches for documents on the Internet that are linked to the single page after the command. The other flavor is “linkdomain,” which I like better and searches for documents linked to any page in the website after the command. This technique has often been referred to as a flip search over the years. I am not sure if this technique is fully supported in Google. Yahoo.com search is my engine of choice when using this method. I tried this search on Yahoo:

linkdomain:www.oracle.com software engineer resume

In the string above, I am telling the search engine to search the Internet for documents that have an internal link (hyperlink) to any page on the www.oracle.com site. I also am requiring that the keywords software, engineer, and r̩sum̩ appear somewhere on each result. We make an assumption here that if a document is linked back to the Oracle site, and also has the keywords requested, we may get r̩sum̩s of passive candidates with some type of association with Oracle Рmaybe a current/past employee, possibly a trainee, a vendor, any number of possibilities.

In running this example, I got back 2,780 results Рreally too many to go through Рbut as I was perusing the first few pages, I can say the vast majority of results I saw were bona fide r̩sum̩s of technical people with an Oracle background. In your office, you use the site and keywords of your choice and see what you get.

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M.E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products and services available on the Internet, and how they add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is www.swatrecruiting.com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

Tips Galore

With the holiday past and not a lot of free time at this time of year, I am offering my annual column of tips from about the last 14 months or so. Enjoy . . .

TIP – Job Leads

I have recently given a couple of classes on finding job leads on the Internet. Thankfully, due to some great Internet resources, this activity is not nearly as technically oriented or time consuming as finding résumés. Although you can use Google or other search engines to locate job leads, it is not very productive compared to other methods. There are a number of FREE sites available to all of us called job aggregators that cull job leads from company websites, national career boards, niche sites, university and government sites, agency sites, free job sites, and other places as well. A few of the larger and well-known sites are:

Indeed – www.indeed.com
SimplyHired – www.simplyhired.com
Jobster – www.jobster.com
GoogleBase – www.googlebase.com (click on Jobs link)
The Ladders – www.theladders.com

Just to name a very few. Aside from being free, these sites are very simple to use. Usually, you just type in a job title or other keywords and a location if applicable, click the search button, and you are presented with a search engine style results queue with clickable results that take you to the actual job posting. Most of the services offer additional filters for further screening and an advanced search page. Next time you have that perfect candidate and no job order, give one or more of these sites a try.

TIP – Resume Advance

I have written before about résumé distribution services and will again in the future, I am sure. These are normally free for recruiters, and they charge the candidate to distribute their résumé to thousands of recruiters across the country. Resume Advance is a service I just recently learned about. You can visit their website at www.resumeadvance.com, sign up for free, and then select whatever criteria you wish in order to start receiving free résumés. There is also a more comprehensive list of free résumé distribution services on my website at www.swatrecruiting.com.

TIP – Define

The tip this month is an easy one but one that everyone can make use of from time to time. The “define” command is used to find out the meaning/definition of a term or acronym. Go to Google at www.google.com and type in:

define:MVS

You will be presented with a page with links to numerous Web pages with a definition of the computer operating system MVS. Substitute for MVS the acronym or other word of your choice, and you can have any definition you need at any time.

TIP – Invisible Web – aka Deep Web

I am asked about this all the time. Most of you know that the traditional Internet search engines search for Web pages. That is great when we are looking for Web pages, but what if we are looking for specialized Web-based databases that contain information we can use? This requires the use of specialized search engines that do a great job of navigating the portion of the Internet not accessible from the standard search engines. Here are a few Web-based tools you can use to look for whatever you like.

http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ – A project by the University of Michigan that is mainly for academically oriented resources.

http://www.findarticles.com/ – An excellent collection of over 10 million articles on almost every topic you can think of.

http://www.libraryspot.com/ – List, lists, and more lists.

http://www.firstgov.gov/ – The U.S. government’s official Web portal. More information than you could ever think about using. State government info as well.

http://www2.library.ucla.edu/search/eresources.cfm – A proprietary Web database from UCLA. Much information not found anywhere else.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. For more information about the invisible Web, there is a wonderful resource available at About.com. Try:

websearch.about.com/od/invisibleweb/a/invisibleweb.htm

You might be surprised at what you can find at some of these sites.

TIP – Keyboard Tip

If you ever have the need to utilize international currency symbols but do not have the symbols on your keyboard, here are some shortcuts for you.

Hold down the Alt key, then use the numeric keypad to enter:

0128 for Euros (€)
0163 for pounds (£)
0165 for yen (Â¥)

Then release the Alt key and your character appears.

TIP – Passive Candidates from Active Candidate Boards

I know that many of you are using the major résumé/job-posting boards for candidates. Although it is not paying off as much as it once was, I think it remains a legitimate part of the candidate sourcing process for most of us. Here is one way to extract passive candidates from these services. Use the keyword “references.” Many candidates list references down at the bottom of their résumé. Often these are managers or coworkers who have the same basic skill set as the active candidate in question. To find passive candidates with Java skills, simply type into the search box:

java references

You will get résumés of active candidates with Java on the résumé, but you will also get those résumés that have a list of references at the bottom of the document. Call these people to pitch your opportunity. This is not foolproof, as many candidates also have the phrase “references on request” or something similar and you will pick up those résumés as well, but you may as well make the best use of these pricey services and get as much out of them as you can.

TIP – Bookmarklets.com

For this tip, I am going to steal a tip from a class by Lisa at AIRS. Throughout the day we were given tidbits of information not actually part of the class outline that could be of help to us all. One of the sites mentioned was Bookmarklets.com. This is a site with what they call “power tools for surfing.” These bookmarklets are mini programs that you can use to extract specialized data from a Web page (such as when it was posted), navigate pages in new ways, modify page views, and really too many to mention. Best just to visit this site and see what would work for you. There are over 150 bookmarklets on this site, and they are all free to use. Visit www.bookmarklets.com.

TIP – Nanpa.com

Many times when we are searching for résumés on the Internet in a specific geographic region, we use area codes as keywords. For example, if I were searching for résumés in the St. Louis area, part of my search string might be (missouri OR MO) (314 OR 636) plus other résumé words and keywords. When I started in recruiting, I could almost name the area code for every area, as there just weren’t that many. Nowadays, that task is impossible. There is a site for NANPA, which is the North American Numbering Plan Administration, where you can go and look up the area codes for anywhere you like. It is simply www.nanpa.com. Keep this address in your favorites and use it whenever you need to.

TIP РFind R̩sum̩s on Live.com

I thought I would steal a tip from Shally’s Live.com Cheat Sheet. It is easy to locate the résumés of passive candidates on this search engine if you know what you are doing.

Go to www.live.com and type into the text box:

inbody:present inbody:resume java developer -job -jobs -send -submit -you

Most résumés contain the phrase “xxx to present.” Knowing this, I ran the search and got back over 11,000 results. I am sure not every one of those was a résumé, but many were. To cull out more relevant résumé documents, we would add some additional keywords relating to the skills of our assignment, and also maybe put in some keywords reflecting a geographic area (city, state).

Give this a try. Just copy the string above and then substitute my Java and Developer keywords for the keywords from your assignment. Thanks to Shally for this tip.

TIP – *@ Search

This search has at least a couple of solid uses. One might be when you are looking for an email address when targeting a particular employer. In the search engine of your choice, type in:

*@oracle.com oracle design java

In place of the oracle.com, substitute whatever company you would like to target, and also replace my keywords with those more useful for your search. This technique is also helpful if you want to locate the home email addresses of passive candidates. Messages to these addresses are unlikely to be held up or deleted in a corporate spam or junk mail filter. Basically the same but use:

(*@gmail.com OR *@aol.com OR *@comcast.net) oracle design java

Or you can use any common email address you can think of. Others might include yahoo, hotmail, or any of the other email address providers.

TIP – Melissa Data

This is a site that offers many free lookups that we can all use in our daily recruiting and/or sourcing duties. They offer lookups for Zip Codes (by county and city), Telephone Numbers, Addresses, IP Location, SIC Codes (including counts of businesses based on type or SIC code by state), Radius Searches (including zip and area codes), and much more. They do have some fee-based services of course, but most of the lookups are free of charge. I often use them to look up zip codes when trying to source candidates in a specific geographic area. Visit the Lookup page of this site by going to http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/index.htm.

TIP – SearchAllInOne.com

Here is an interesting site that basically is an interface to literally dozens of search engines, many that I am sure you have never heard of. I know I hadn’t. Of course they offer access to all the big search engines, but also allow all-in-one access to many specialized search engines for sports, news, science, encyclopedias, government, financial, education, meta search engines, and directories (which are compiled by humans, not spiders). If you need an answer to almost any question in any category, visit this site. In this case, it is true that a picture (website) is worth a thousand words. Take a look at http://www.searchallinone.com/search.html.

TIP – from Shally

I thought it might be appropriate to steal another tip from Shally’s book for this tip. There are so many in there, I am hoping no one will mind my offering this one to the masses. In his section titled “Results in Ten Minutes or Less,” Shally offers many examples of search strings for different types of passive candidates. Here is one of his tips for sales recruiters:

contact sales.manager IKON 770

In the example above, he is looking for sales managers (the dot between sales and manager forces the search engine to look for that exact phrase) from the IKON office-supply company. The 770 is to find people in the Chicago area. He also uses the contact keyword in hopes that the names he garners will have some way to contact the person on the page. To use this in your office, simply swap out the company and the area code and use other keywords that suit your needs.

TIP – MySpace.com

Unless you live in a cave, you have probably heard about the social networking site MySpace. Its membership is now in the tens of millions and growing by millions each month. There is a common misconception that MySpace is the exclusive domain of teenagers. It makes sense to think that, as most of the time when you hear about MySpace, it is in the context of younger people. I have three young children who are all members, but so am I. Actually, you might be surprised to know that the average age of a user is mid-thirties. It is fast becoming a great way to get leads for passive candidates on the Internet. Although you can go directly to the MySpace website and search the membership from there, we have better luck using one of the lesser-known search engine techniques – the “site” search method. Try this:

Go to www.google.com (or any other search engine that supports the site).
Type in: site:www.myspace.com “graphic artist”.
Click the search button.

I got over 3,000 results using the string above. Not résumés, but profiles of people of all ages, many who were graphic artists. Since that is a lot of hits to go through, to pare down the results, I would maybe add some other skills keywords to the string or even some geography keywords to find people in a specific locale.

Do try this in your office. Simply replace the “graphic artist” with keywords of your choice. Be sure to use the quote marks if you are using a keyword phrase and omit them for individual keywords.

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M. E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is www.swatrecruiting.com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

Power Tools for Power Searching

The recruiter community is continuously bombarded with calls and emails from industry vendors offering quick and easy ways to locate résumés and leads for passive candidates on the Internet. As most of my readers know, I often teach classes on how to locate these resources using the search engines. However, for those who do not have the time, the patience, or the inclination to perform this function themselves, the tools and services available to recruiters can be very attractive. As the marketplace for sourcing tools and services expands in response to the demand, so does the confusion. Part of the confusion stems from the wide range of pricing and the differences in the actual service you get for your money.

There are basically two types of services: those that offer you the ability to search a proprietary database of screened profiles and those that offer a front-end to an actual Web search. Although there is something out there for everyone, the question becomes – where do you start? Here are a few options for you to review. I have omitted any pricing information because this often changes rapidly, most pricing plans are based on usage, and most vendors offer heavy discounts for member of certain groups. In no particular order . . .

ZoomInfo. Zoom has been around for many years, starting out as Eliyon. They have a huge proprietary database of over 37 million contacts and 3.8 million companies. They populate their Web-based database themselves from a wide variety of sources and it is verified on a regular basis. They have a free names lookup service on their homepage but also offer two pay services: ZoomExec (access to 1.4 million executive-level contacts) and PowerSearch (full search capability against their entire data-base). This service offers nam (profiles) only. Many have full or partial biographies and also Web and news references. Email addresses and phone numbers are also normally included. Check them out at www.zoominfo.com.

SourcePoint (AIRS). The service that offers both comprehensive name and résumé generation capability. They offer one, the other, or both, via a modular (a la carte) service. Their service searches the Web for names and résumés, searches business networks, the pay boards (if you are a subscriber), your own ATS, and your own desktop/pc. This very flexible, comprehensive offering has built-in CRM software and many other features. More information at the AIRS website, www.airscorp.com.

Platinum Recruiter by Info-GIST. A very popular tool used for résumé generation only. This installed program has many features and too many to cover in this synopsis. It searches for your keywords in over 400 free résumé sources but also searches pay résumé sources (if you are a subscriber), can search Canadian and European résumé sources, and has a flip search feature as well. Can also perform desktop searches. More info available at their website, www.infogist.com.

TalentHook. An early player in the résumé-generation field. It is an installed program with an easy-to-use interface. You can perform a freestanding search or create a client folder and link a search to a company and/or assignment. You can perform a Web search, college search, free résumé board, pay résumé board (if you are a subscriber), flip searches, and desktop searches. Their open Web search searches dozens of search engines, communities, and ISPs automatically. Learn more at www.talenthook.com.

ResumeFinder by eGrabber. A new entry in eGrabber’s long history of providing data-capture tools to the recruiting industry, it is the least expensive tool in this space. This product differs from the others in that it installs as a toolbar in IE. It is a very simple program that comes with a number of professionally developed search strings (by yours truly) that you can use as is or is completely customizable to support any search string that works best for you. You simply type in keywords, locations, and/or a free résumé site or two (or as many as you like) and hit Find. It searches Google using multiple search strings simultaneously and opens up a separate tab for each string run. For more information, visit www.eGrabber.com.

SGA Executive Tracker by Sheila Greco Associates. Don’t think that because this product is lesser known, it is lesser quality. This Web-based proprietary names database is maintained solely by Greco’s own research staff and is 100% telephone-verified, making it one of the most reliable names databases out there. It’s heavy in top and mid-management executives. A nice touch is SIC code searching, which many others don’t have. For more information, visit www.sgaexecutivetracker.com.

Diver by Broadlook. Another fairly new product, Diver is another very simple, easy-to-use interface that allows easy access to passive candidate leads and résumés from Google, Live, Yahoo, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb. This product lets you use your own search strings or has a number of examples for you to use as well. You run your searches, but then Diver parses the search results into a grid contained in the program. From the grid you can easily view one result after another without all the usual clicking back and forth. The program also contains very nice specialty searches for companies, lists, member directories, people, trade shows, org charts, and associations. More information at the website, www.broadlook.com.

Because of space limitations, I have not provided every feature available and encourage interested parties to contact the vendors directly for more complete information, a demo, and often a free trial. Please know I have not listed every player (SearchExpo and D&B come to mind) in this marketplace. I have offered a few with which I am personally familiar and know provide good results for their users. Full reviews on most of these products will be in The Fordyce Letter archives, as I have written about each of them at least once in this column, but never in a list format as above. Something for everyone out there.

News from HireAbility

I wanted to share with everyone some news from HireAbility, a recruiter group I have supported in the past and I am sure will support in the future. “A New Era in Recruiter Social Networking,” per their email announcement, addresses some major changes affecting their recruiter network, one that I have written about in this column before.

One of the major changes is that they have expanded the features and availability of the Talent Trader networking platform by adding Web 2.0 technologies and opening the membership to the recruiting community with a new basic membership option offered at no charge. At this new membership level, all staffing professionals will have access to the network and will have the ability to contribute their own content and develop their own recruiting communities based around discussion groups defined by the members themselves.

They also announced a big change in their pricing model. They have eliminated transactional fees for placements among members, unheard of in this industry. Craig Silverman, their EVP of sales and marketing, told me that HireAbility is trying to initiate an overhaul in the ways recruiters and staffing professionals network together in a “split placement” scenario. They are doing this by offering their members a fully secure way to share candidate and job order information under a subscription-based model that no longer includes fees for split placements.

To me, still one of the best reasons to take a close look at their membership is the outstanding discounts for members from a wide variety of recruiting industry vendors. These discounts are sometimes 50% or more off retail pricing, and often the annual savings from just one of these services can actually pay for an entire year of HireAbility membership fees.

For more information on HireAbility’s Recruiter Network and Talent Trader memberships, visit the website at www.hire-ability.com/rn or call (603) 432-6653.

StaffBytes.com

I recently became aware of a neat recruiting site I thought I would share with everyone, StaffBytes.com. This is a fairly new site and definitely a work in progress, but there’s lots of great content already. Basically, it is a news-oriented site dedicated specifically to the recruitment industry. The content takes the form of step-by-step techniques, instructional videos, site reviews, expert tips, demonstrations, and more. They will also be highlighting websites, and products and services of interest to the recruitment community.

The homepage of the site is set up in a blog-type format, with features posted and comments welcomed. There are many other pages in the site as well, with information about free résumé sites, job boards, communities, blogs, names searching, sourcing, search engines, and many other topics as well.

As of this writing, the site is free to take a look at and enjoy. I would encourage anyone with a spare few minutes to visit www.staffbytes.com.

News from Sendouts

Sendouts Pro 6.0, the venerable applicant tracking system provider, now includes integrated back-office functionality through its integration partnership with StaffMetric, the industry’s leading staffing-specific time and attendance Web-based service solution. This integration enables Sendouts users to track and manage timesheets and synchronize with popular back-office applications such as QuickBooks, Peachtree, and ADP for billing and payroll processing.

Anyone who would like additional information on the advanced Sendouts Pro 6.0 can contact them via voice toll-free at (977) 309-5222, ext. 114, or visit www.sendouts.com.

Tip
MySpace.com

Unless you live in a cave, you have probably heard about the social networking site MySpace. Its membership is now in the tens of millions and growing by millions each month. There is a common misconception that MySpace is the exclusive domain of teenagers. It makes sense to think that, as usually when you hear about MySpace, it is in the context of younger people. I have three young children who are all members, but so am I. Actually, you might be surprised to know that the average age of users is mid-30s. It is fast becoming a great way to get leads for passive candidates on the Internet. Although you can go directly to the MySpace website and search the membership from theirs, we have had better luck using one of the lesser-known search engine techniques – the “site” search method. Try this:

Go to www.google.com (or any other search engine that supports the site).

Type in: site:www.myspace.com “graphic artist.”

Click the search button.

I got over 3,000 results using the string above. Not résumés, but profiles of people of all ages, many who were graphic artists. Since that is a lot of hits to go through, to pare down the results I would maybe add some other skills keywords to the string or even some geography keywords to find people in a specific locale.

Do try this in your office: simply replace “graphic artist” with keywords of your choice. Be sure to use the quote marks if you are using a keyword phrase and omit them for individual keywords.

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M. E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II traininxg and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is www.swatrecruiting.com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

Electronic Recruiting 101
2007 Edition
By Shally Steckerl

I have been wanting to review this book for quite some time and am very pleased I was finally able to do so. Electronic Recruiting 101, by my friend and associate Shally Steckerl, chief cybersleuth of JobMachine, is to be considered the “bible” of all recruitment sourcing or researching books. There is so much information packed into this book, it is difficult for me to even know where to begin. This 228-page tome has everything and anything you ever wanted to know about the world of electronic recruiting.

Unlike most authors, who jump right into the technical aspects of electronic recruiting, Shally starts at the beginning, taking a proper requisition and then talking a bit about the hiring process itself. So many sourcers and researchers do not understand that every search starts with the requisition and goes from there. He talks about the talent landscape, the difference between prospects, candidates, and applicants, and recruitment scalability. He does a great job, as many authors before him have tried to do, in explaining the difference between passive and active candidates. Then he takes that a step further by offering much-needed ideas on how to make that initial approach.

Other topics he touches on include email issues, job postings, interviewing, candidate testing, applicant tracking systems, RPOs and BPOs, international recruiting, diversity recruiting, CRMs, relocation issues, how to hire sourcers, and recruiting metrics.

He has a great section on research fundamentals, a must-read section before you begin the research process. This covers finding top-level executives, résumé sourcing, search engine rules, using multiple search engines, building Boolean strings, and using search engines, and then offers many examples of strings he has personally used with success in his searches. He talks about meta-search engines, searching communities, weblogs, blogs, ISPs, newsgroups, social networks, and also using RSS feeds. He goes into the pros and cons of referral networking, talks about domain searching and link searching, and offers a number of international sourcing techniques. He also offers some information on using spiders and robots to make your life a little easier. Shally follows that up with a section on software and recruiting tools, computer tips, and research tips.

To tie it all together, his last section on references offers a terms glossary, an Internet history, guidelines on Net etiquette, reference tools, and a bit on working with other recruiters. He offers a list of Internet recruiting trainers for those who feel they need a bit more, then a number of industry-specific site listings and another list of industry-specific job sites.

This book should be “standard issue” for any researcher, sourcer, or recruiter’s desk. Published by none other than The Fordyce Letter, this book retails for $295 and can be ordered directly from the TFL website (www.fordyceletter.com).

HireDesk ATS
By Talent Technology

I am very pleased to be able to offer The Fordyce Letter readers this ATS review this month, as I discovered what a great option this could be for those seeking a powerful and very flexible solution. I had been hearing about HireDesk for a number of years and had been asked about it many times, so it was high time to take a closer look.

This product is geared toward small and medium-sized recruiting and staffing firms but has all the bells and whistles of the products the larger firms use and pay a lot of money for. It is a 100% Web-based system accessed easily by any Internet browser from any location, all for a very competitive pricing schedule.

The program opens up to a “recruiters dashboard” with a snapshot of all your activity – candidates, lists, jobs, clients, activities, and emails. Your home page is completely customizable, offering you the ability to pick and choose the features that are important to you. On the left side of the screen is a familiar Windows Explorer navigation tool that offers a “tree” view, allowing you to get to anywhere in the database from anywhere in the database. Very intuitive. Overall, one of the strong points I noticed was that they seem to have one of the most flexible/configurable interfaces in the business. You can not only configure the home page but also actually pick and choose the individual data fields you would like to see on each screen that you use.

Their product supports a number of recruiting revenue streams and workflows, including temp, perm, retained, client specific/recruiter specific. These workflows can drive metrics in different ways, depending on the metrics created for each specific workflow. Clients may have the need to post jobs to multiple “branded” websites. Talent portals are very easily integrated into your website – again, highly configurable.

They offer what is known as a Conceptual Search. In addition to the standard field (all data fields are searchable) and résumé searching, Conceptual Search allows you to automatically rank candidates against entire job orders, or compare against other résumés. The system will display the most relevant matches at the top of the list.

Their database is fully integrated with an included service that allows you to post your open job orders automatically to your website. Candidates then apply to a specific job, and those submissions are held for your approval before being permanently added to the database. Another feature I really like is Net Interviews – you can easily create custom, job-specific assessments that can be completed via an application process on your company website, sent via email, or via a recruiter interface on behalf of the candidate. Choose from a library, or create your own. Then you can rank candidates on the basis of results. The assessments are “branded” with your company logo and can be sent as part of a candidate profile to clients.

They are one of the very few ATS vendors I know that offer a completely customizable reporting function. This feature allows you to easily create custom reports on any information within the program. Reports have the ability to do drilldowns, sorting, calculations, statistics, charts, graphs, and much more.

As I mentioned before, their pricing seems very competitive. They offer a range of $65 to $99 per user per month based on features and setup. This is a range below that of many of their competitors offering similar features.

Anyone with an interest in more information on this great resource can visit the website at www.talenttech.com, or you can contact Alan Nappier, regional sales director, via email at anappier@talenttech.com or via voice at 1-866-747-3375.

WinTheView
Candidate Interview Preparation

I recently had a walk-through with what I think is a very interesting and innovative new service for the recruitment industry. WinTheView, a service developed by recruiters for recruiters, is a Web-enabled interview strategy by Digital Career Services. Basically, recruiters arrange for their candidates to go through an Internet-based interview preparation process that assures that candidates are able to communicate interest in the position, communicate to the client their fit for the job requirements and why they are the best candidate for the position, and have the opportunity to ask company, industry, position, and interview specific questions. Although this is a fairly new service, WinTheView has been available in an offline version and at least several hundred candidates have used it successfully, increasing the placement-to-send-out ratio dramatically.

The process results in a printed and bound document (pdf) that candidates take with them to the client interview. This document can also be presented to the client by the recruiter. I can see where this would differentiate candidates from other contenders by showing a high degree of interview preparation. It would also undoubtedly raise the confidence level of the candidates. From the client side, it shows candidate motivation and enthusiasm.

The WinTheView people say that hiring managers are very enthusiastic about the process and are complimentary of the candidates that show the enthusiasm, commitment, and motivation to prepare so thoroughly for an interview.

Recruiters can sign up for a monthly fee that allows an unlimited number of candidates to go through the process. For more information on this service, anyone with any interest can visit the WinTheView website at www.wintheview.com or contact Ken Diamond, founder of Wintheview.com, via email at kjdiamond@wintheview.com or via voice at (866) 941-0700.

Sourcers Guild

There is a fairly new group in town, the Sourcers Guild, dedicated to the art of names sourcing. At present they are a Yahoo group with a daily message containing posts from recruiters across the country asking questions about and offering answers to a wide array of issues relating to this topic. For those who don’t know, names sourcing is the activity of finding people with specific titles within specific organizations. This can be accomplished both via the Internet and by telephone.

Names sourcers who belong to this guild are highly professional and dedicated members of their industry. In this group you can learn how to conduct names sourcing and also locate someone to conduct a names sourcing project for you.

Members of the Sourcers Guild receive:

- discounts on training and educational materials
- cost savings in other group membership opportunities
- referrals from industry looking for names sourcers to perform projects
- access to posted sourcing assignments in the Database section of this site

If you’d like more information about becoming a member of this group, contact the Guild Guide, or moderator, Maureen Sharib, via email at Maureen@techtrak.com or via voice at (513) 899-9628.

Tip

I thought it might be appropriate to steal a tip from Shally’s book for this month’s tip. There are so many in there, I am hoping no one will mind my offering this one to the masses. In his section titled Results in Ten Minutes or Less, Shally offers many examples of search strings for different types of passive candidates. Here is one of his tips for sales recruiters:

contact sales.manager IKON 770

In the example above, he is looking for sales managers (the dot between sales and manager forces the search engine to look for that exact phrase) from the IKON office supply company. The 770 is to find people in the Chicago area. He also uses the contact keyword in the hope that the names he garners will have some way to contact the person on the page. To use this in your office, simply swap out the company and the area code and use other keywords that suit your needs.

Good luck!!

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M. E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is www.swatrecruiting.com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

DIVER by Broadlook

Looks like the people at Broadlook Technologies have another winner on their hands. I was happy to be able to download and test drive their latest offering to the recruiter community, Diver. Broadlook, a company whose products have appeared in this column many times over the years, continues to serve this community by offering products and services that make us more and more productive.

Diver, simply put, is a search engine interface. You still run your own searches in Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, and/or AltaVista, but your results are all parsed for you into a grid. Once in the grid, the results are easily accessible by double-clicking on the line entry. The actual results page is visible from within the program. This feature saves any sourcer all the time it normally takes to click on one result at a time, review the result, then click back to the main results page – literally hours if you do a lot of this type of work. Once you have the results from a search in the Diver grid, you can filter the results and keep only those that have some type of contact information, then export your results to any number of destinations, including documents, contact managers, and even ATS’s.

Aside from locating résumés on the search engines, Diver has another service I wanted to mention. They have built-in strings for specialty searches that make it easy for you to find information on companies, lists, member directories, persons, trade shows, org charts, and associations. All you have to do is add a name or keyword or two and Diver does the rest.

Diver is a very simple program and easy to learn and use – my favorite kind. You have your projects on the left, complete with a number of examples you can use in your future searches, the search engine results page is on the upper right, and the grid is on the bottom of the screen. It allows you to take advantage of search strings offered by industry experts, or you can build your own searches and save them in project folders – as many as you like. Anyone who has ever had AIRS training or any other advanced search string training should take a look at this product. Diver can take what someone learns with search string training and take productivity to the next level.

Diver retails for $1,995 per year on an annual subscription but is heavily discounted for existing Broadlook customers. Aside from their free three-day trial, a first for Broadlook, they are also offering a free copy of Diver for each copy purchased. This is a Fordyce Letter subscriber special good until November 14. They are OK with people getting together and pooling resources to get their copies. For instructions to get your three-day trial, visit this Web page: www.broadlook.com/fordyce.

Anyone with an interest in finding out more about this great product can visit the Broadlook Technologies website at www. broadlook.com or contact Brian Galovits, Broadlook’s Director of Client Relations, via email at BGalovits@broadlook. com or via voice at (262) 754-8080 x227.

Sheeee’s Back

- Barbara Ling, That Is

I am happy to be writing about Barbara again as one whose name has appeared in this column many times over the years. I first met Barbara back in my early days as the TFL columnist and remember reviewing her watershed book, The Internet Recruiting Edge, back in the late nineties. I can still recall what a good review the book received. I am happy to report that her new material is just as good, if not better. After an absence of four years, Barbara Ling, one of the original pioneers of Internet recruiting, has returned to the scene with brand-new resources for today’s recruiter.

Barbara has always been and continues to be well known for demystifying the most difficult of technical activities by translating them into simple lessons that any recruiter can implement. Boolean searching, networking with passive candidates, teaching recruiters the easy way to market to their targeted population – she accomplishes the above with humor, plain speaking, and an uncanny knack of dispelling any online confusion.

Currently, Barbara offers several recruiting services mostly relating to recruitment technology and candidate sourcing, areas that all regular readers of this column know are close to my heart. These include emailed seminars for those recruiters who don’t want to leave their offices (offering the added bonus of one-on-one interaction with her) at www.risetrends.com/eseminars.html, a RISE private recruiter knowledgebase at www.risetrends. com/membership.html, simple one-page solution sheets for common recruiting goals at www.risetrends.com/solutionsheets.html, and SEO-friendly website templates at www.rise trends.com/sample/sample.html.

TIP

SearchAllinOne.com

Here is an interesting site that basically is an interface to literally dozens of search engines, many that I am sure you have never heard of. I know I hadn’t. Of course they offer access to all of the big search engines but also allow all-in-one access to many specialized search engines for sports, news, science, encyclopedias, government, financial, education, meta search engines, and directories (which are compiled by humans, not spiders). If you need an answer to almost any question in any category, visit this site. In this case it is true that a picture (website) is worth a thousand words. Take a look at http://www.searchallinone.com/search.html.

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M. E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is www.swatrecruiting.com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

ResumeFinder
by eGrabber

Those of you who attended the Fordyce Forum last June are already familiar with this venerable provider of products to the recruiting industry, eGrabber. I have reviewed their Resume-Grabber, AddressGrabber, and ListGrabber products in this column a number of times over the last 10 years. This month I am pleased to write about a new offering for our industry, Resume-Finder, a tool that can help us all quickly and easily cull résumés of passive candidates from the Google search engine.

Although ResumeFinder is an installed program, one aspect I really like is that it integrates with Internet Explorer (7) and resides in your browser as a “toolbar.” It can be accessed anytime you have a browser window open. Once it’s installed, you simply type in a few keywords, hit the Find button, and the ResumeFinder starts feeding the installed search strings (co-developed by yours truly) into the Google search engine and creates a new IE “tab” for each string. Although ResumeFinder comes with a number of professionally developed search strings, users can also add search strings of their choice to the search methodology and the program will feed those user-developed strings into Google and create a new tab for those as well.

ResumeFinder also allows limiting your search results to specific locations. The location settings are user configurable and are populated with individual states, but users can also add specific cities or regions (using zip code ranges for the number range command) and save any new entries to the list.

The program also allows “site” searches, a very popular résumé-generating method I often teach in my classes. The “portal” list is populated with many of the more popular Internet communities and ISPs (aol.com, fortunecity. com, geocities.com, etc.) and networks (linkedin.com), but again, this list is user configurable, and users can add sites to the list whenever they find one that they would like to include in their search methodology.

Their options (setup) feature allows users to limit their results to pages that were updated at any time, or you can even limit your results to those pages that were updated in the last three months, in the hope that these pages contain more current information.

In closing, just as their ResumeGrabber product was standard issue for any Internet recruiter 10 years ago in the industry’s infancy, Resume-Finder should be on every recruiting desktop. This product allows any recruiter to take advantage of the millions of free résumés that can be found using the Google search engine by just typing in a keyword or two. Very little in the way of training is required for this product.

This product retails for a very reasonable $350. In their tradition of supporting The Fordyce Letter subscribers and other recruiting groups around the country, they have offered TFL subscribers a $100 discount off their normal retail pricing and have developed a landing page specifically for this audience. For more information, a demo, or a free three-day trial, visit the site at http://www.eGrabber.com/ fordyce/. To purchase this product, click the Buy Online link at the top of the landing page, then click the link next to the ResumeFinder entry. Go to the Shopping Cart and enter the coupon code: FORDYCESPL. On checkout, your discount will be calculated automatically on purchases made before Thanksgiving Day (11/22/07).

eSkill

eSkill is a relative newcomer to the skills-assessment market-place, having launched in 2003. However, it is the first assessment product that intelligently customizes each skills test to fit each job requirement, by picking individual questions based on the subjects and skill levels required.

For instance, an employer needs a candidate with skills in English language, basic computer knowledge, and typing speed. Logging into their eSkill account, the employer can select these skills from eSkill’s menus and generate a seamless test covering all three subjects. Clients can create tests of any length for prescreening or in-house proctored testing, and adjust the relative difficulty level as appropriate.

Serious hiring managers can pick their own ideal questions from the eSkill database with powerful search tools. The optional Editor provides an easy authoring tool for clients who wish to add their own proprietary test content to their service.

Compared to off-the-shelf, single-subject tests, an eSkill customized test will be more thorough, time efficient, and legally defensible due to job relevance.

eSkill has hundreds of organizations across five continents as clients, including Federal Express, Lehman Brothers, Winn-Dixie, PepsiCo, Sapphire Technologies, and Accenture. Many have submitted testimonials that can be seen on their websites. Recruiters have noted a 30% in-crease in placements that included an eSkill test score with their initial referral.

eSkill offers both pay-per-test and unlimited testing plans for both small businesses and large. For more information, visit their website at www.eskill.com or you can contact them via voice at (866) 537-5455 or via email at info@eskillc.com.

Microquest

Diversity Passive Candidates

I recently received an email from Microquest and hadn’t seen much in the way of a firm specializing in diversity passive candidates, so I thought I would let subscribers know of this service. I did not have access to the materials for this article. Microquest is a research firm that has been publishing directories since 1990. They provide databases of scrubbed passive candidates presented in print directories and on CD. The CDs are searchable and exportable. Customers receive updates throughout the one-year site license.

Their diversity line focuses on senior women and minority executives at Fortune 1000-class companies. They have identified virtually all “diverse” board members at Fortune companies as well as executives at the director, VP, and C-level. Used by national search firms and leading boutique diversity recruiters, they have helped to place more than 40 board positions since 1994.

They also have a technology track that identifies all the major technology companies in the different segments and identifies individuals from CEO down to staff-level engineers with hundreds of entries at the major companies. They claim their information is accurate to approximately 90%, with rosters highly organized by rank and function.

Their data is generated by an in-house research group that classifies, dates, and hand-enters every entry. People are identified from a wide array of public sources, including hundreds of magazines and journals, IEEE abstracts, press releases, SEC filings, websites, and Internet search programs. As records age they are automatically reviewed and reverified by telephone. As of this writing their data does not include email addresses, but they have plans to add that information later this year.

Anyone with an interest in this type of resource can visit their website for more information at www.mqc.com, or you can contact Lorraine Ross, Microquest President, via email at lorraine@mqc.com or via voice at (415) 209-6540.

Tip

www.wisenut.com

It seems like every time we turn around, there is another search engine up and running. It would be a full-time job for any recruiter or sourcer/researcher to actually use all of them in our daily affairs, so we have to pick and choose which ones are best for us. I have always been a big promoter of, at the very least, using the top three engines, Google, Yahoo, and Live. These are the largest and most productive for us when it comes to résumé and name-generation. However, we are leaving a lot of information on the table if we don’t at least check out some of the others from time to time to see if they generate information to help us fill our job orders.

Here is one to look at – the typical “David vs. Goliath” scenario. Even though Yahoo and Live are in the top three, it is Google that everyone goes after. One thing I like about Wisenut is that it uses search technology similar to Google’s Page Ranking and Relevancy settings automatically to give you results more targeted to your search requests. Another nice feature is that it automatically categorizes your results into folders of related content. This feature allows a quick snapshot of your results so you can go directly to those folders that look like the best matches.

Something REALLY NICE is the ability to use their “Sneak-a-Peek” feature, which lets you take a look at the results page without having to leave the Wisenut results page. I wish all of them would do this, as it alleviates a lot of clicking to look at results.

This engine claims to have indexed over 850 million Web pages. Not quite the one billion plus that Google claims, but surely a healthy chunk.

A Google-killer? Probably not, but this engine has some innovative features that deserve a look. Check it out at www.wisenut. com.

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M. E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His web-site is www.swatrecruiting. com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

LinkedIn Tips
by Bill Vick

I recently received an email from Bill Vick, industry icon, LinkedIn expert, and all-around nice guy who wanted to share some information with me about LinkedIn, a great service I have written about in this column before.

Bill tells me he has had discussions with recruiters all over the country about their successes and the many ways LinkedIn has benefited the industry. During those discussions many questions were asked, and Bill has put together a few LinkedIn tips that he has agreed to share with The Fordyce Letter subscribers. Follow these tips to enhance your LinkedIn experience.

1. It’s often more important to be found than to find. It’s also very important that, when you are found on LinkedIn, your LinkedIn Profile page is up-to-date. So take the time to make sure your profile is complete, is regularly updated, and reflects who you are and what you are currently doing. And don’t forget to sprinkle your profile with the keywords that somebody looking for you might use when search-ing for you.

2. Remember, you are your brand. Google your own name, strive for consistency in your online image, and try to have the same message whether some-body finds you on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, or any of the other networking sites. By the way, if you don’t find yourself on Google, or your name is not as prominent (i.e., front page of Google) as you would like, it could be time to think about promoting yourself better online.

3. Gain visibility and branding by participating in the new LinkedIn Answers. You can ask questions of your own network, or the entire LinkedIn network, as well as offering answers where your special knowledge and information will help others – and in the process add to your visibility. It’s not only good karma to help but also gives you the stamp of expertise and special knowledge. It’s essential to be genuine in framing the question. If you try and game the system by framing a blatant self-promotion as if it were a genuine question, you won’t have to wait long for someone in the network to flag your “question” as spam. But genuine, interesting questions are bringing people great positive exposure.

4. Connect with power networkers or “hubs” in your industry, company, or job function. You can be confident that the ones near the top of any search when sorted by connections are in the thousands, and their second degree is hundreds of thousands, which now becomes part of your third-degree network.

5. Install the Outlook toolbar and consider joining Plaxo (www.plaxo.com). The new Plaxo 3.0 not only works with PCs and Macs but also offers automatic synchronization with your address book of choice, various Web mail systems, and now LinkedIn.

Thanks to Bill for sharing. You can find out more about his very popular book, Happy About LinkedIn for Recruiting, at http://www.happyabout.info/LinkedIn4recruiting.php or his newest book about recruiting superstars at http://www.bigbiller.org.

Maureen Sharib
- Telephone Names Sourcer

“What’s a names sourcer?” you may be thinking. You might have seen that title recently, or maybe seen industry recruitment ads calling for the skill. Names sourcing is a little-understood activity. Simply put, it’s the finding of people who hold specific titles (usually) within specific organizations (usually) so that you, as a recruiter, can contact them and offer them your opportunity. Those of us who have “been around the block” might know this technique as “ruse calling,” something we all learned way back when in our first week on the job. Maureen is a names sourcer – more specifically, a telephone names sourcer – and she has taken this (almost) lost art, revamped the process to remove the “ruse” part of the job, and is now helping recruiters all over the country safely fill their open assignments. I wanted to give everyone a heads-up in case the need for this type of service might arise.

Maureen says usually 30 to 50 names should pretty much guarantee one immediate hire in most industries. “It’s a numbers game,” she reminds us. “Though in the month of June one of my customers wrote, ‘Your research into (giant manufacturing organization) produced two good candidates for the upper-level procurement position. All 12 names were usable. The client is impressed, and we are good to go.’ It happens, but it’s not the rule.” As a telephone names sourcer, she might use the Internet to do some initial research into a company to find a few names, but once she has those, she gets on the phone. “This is Maureen Sharib. Can you please tell me if Julia Matthews is still the organizational development director in your HR group? Oh, you don’t know? Can you please transfer me to the administrative assistant for that department?” Once Maureen gets in, she’s IN, and she’s famous for her retellings of the happy (and sometimes not) events.

One of Maureen’s typical jobs (she charges $42 per name, although the industry average seems to be in the $55 per name range) can save her customers, on average, 75% to 80% of typical recruiting costs.

Maureen not only provides the sourcing service described but also offers a course on telephone names sourcing to her recruitment industry students called The Magic in the Method. You can find out more information on Maureen, her services, and her training on her website at www.techtrak.com. You can also contact Maureen via email at maureen@techtrak.com or via telephone at (513) 899-9628.

Telecom Jobs
WirelessMobile-Jobsboard.com

I recently received an email announcing a recruitment hub for those seeking telecoms jobs, radio jobs, mobile computing jobs, Bluetooth jobs, WiMAX jobs, Wi-Fi jobs, and mobile telecoms jobs – WirelessMobile-Jobsboard.com. I know there are many recruiters in this specialty, so I thought I would include this site for those firms.

They advertise telecoms and mobile telecoms jobs for those seeking jobs in management, marketing, business development, sales, project management, business analysts, engineering, soft-ware, software development, software applications, and jobs in wireless technologies, networks, and regulatory and support functions.

I don’t know much about this service other than what is on the website, but anyone with a need in this area can find out more by visiting their website at www. wirelessmobile-jobs board.com.

Tip
Melissa Data

This is a site that offers many free lookups that we can all use in our daily recruiting and/or sourcing duties. They offer lookups for zip codes (by county and city), telephone numbers, addresses, IP location, SIC codes (including counts of businesses based on type or SIC code by state), radius searches (including zip and area codes), and much more. They do have some fee-based services of course, but most of the lookups are free of charge. I often use them to look up zip codes when trying to source candidates in a specific geographic area. Visit the Lookup page of this site by going to http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/index.htm.

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M.E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on
the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His web-site is www.swatrecruiting. com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.