Platinum Recruiter
by infoGIST

This month, I am happy to review the newly released Platinum Recruiter from infoGIST. With the big job boards not paying off like they used to, many recruiters are taking a harder look at the passive candidate pool in doing whatever they need to do to fill their requirements. This is a great product that goes a long way toward making our job of locating résumés of passive (and active) candidates for our open assignments a lot easier and more productive. This product offers a simple interface that easily accepts keywords and other criteria of your choice and searches literally hundreds of sites for résumés.

As of this writing, this product searches over 230 free résumé banks, 150-plus Web search engines, 10 of the largest Web communities/ISPs, and more than 90 colleges and universities. It can also search over 230 pay résumé sites if you have an account with them. All you do is set it up once and just include that search type in your project. A neat feature that most competitors don’t offer is the ability to use the software to search your local PC files as well. You can search any documents contained in résumé or other directories on your hard drive. There is also the ability to interface with a number of the leading ATS vendor pro-ducts to search your own candidate database at the same time. Another nice feature allows you to perform a “flip search” or link search for résumés using several search engines.

InfoGIST also offers a great component for research and competitive intelligence. It has another area where you can search for corporate/company information, patent and trade-mark databases, and other business-related archives for keywords, something I have not seen in many competitors’ offerings.

Their Search Manager allows you to create and save searches that you run regularly and re-run them at night so the new results are there when you get into work in the morning. Their Contact Wizard enables you to easily write custom messages to any potential candidate you desire. You can create any number of custom emails and send them to multiple recipients with one click.

Their user interface couldn’t be simpler: a very simple screen with a menu up top, a results screen below, and a résumé view at the bottom. You simply pick what type of search you want to run from the menu, type in the keywords of your choice (Boolean acceptable), select a date range if you like (a great feature, as we all know that Internet résumés can sometimes be a bit dated), and also pick a state if necessary.

I ran a broad search for Human Resources Manager, using All Resume Sources. I got back an astounding 3,989 results, which is actually too many. But from here I could have added additional keywords, a date range, or geographic restrictors to give me a more manageable number of results.

A welcome feature is the relevancy ranking that infoGIST assigns to each result. This is a score for each r̩sum̩ that tells you how closely it matches your need. You can then use this ranking to screen further for better results. Not familiar with search strings or Boolean? No problem Рthey also have a built-in string builder that helps you write a good search string. Once you run your search, you just click on a result and the r̩sum̩ shows up in the viewer on the screen. If you like that person, there are a couple of ways to deal with the r̩sum̩, but you can also simply check the box next to the result and send that person an email right from the software.

I could go on and on. This is a solid product that any recruiter or sourcer/researcher would love to have. The standard pricing on this product is a very reasonable and competitive $2,500 per year. InfoGIST is happy to offer prospective customers a free trial of this wonderful service. You can visit the infoGIST website at www.infogist.com for more information. Take a look.

Eclipse by Broadlook Technologies

I had reviewed this product once before for The Fordyce Letter subscribers, but not in quite some time, and there have been many updates since then. Eclipse, by Broadlook Technologies, is one of their more popular products and one that can be indispensable for any Internet sourcer and/or re-searcher that deals often with volumes of lists and table-type data. Eclipse takes data capture to a new level by capturing data directly from links and formatted tables, and spidering hyperlinks to capture data on the linked page without opening it. As useful as this product might be to a recruiter, marketer, or researcher, it is a very simple program. The top half is an Internet browser and the bottom half is for your captured results. Some of the new features allow the user to manage multiple Web pages in the same project, resulting in an improved workflow, and other advanced data-management features.

One of the main features is “Get Links.” Many times when you are looking at a list of hyperlinks, the actual website URL may or may not be visible (except by looking at your status bar at the bottom of your browser). You simply use the integrated browser to go to the Web page that has the links you need, and by highlighting your target links and clicking the Get Links button, Eclipse extracts all the URLs in a table format for you. You have many options here to clean and edit your data, including splitting columns, merging columns, renaming column headings, state code usage, etc. Once cleaned up a bit, this data can be exported to a spreadsheet or fed into another Internet research tool, including the Broadlook Profiler.

Another main feature is “Get Table.” Tables are often difficult for data-capture tools, but Eclipse makes it look easy. Select your table, click Get Table, and you are returned a column for each field in the table you captured. You have the same sophisticated data-cleansing tools and export ability with this feature as well.

Many lists of hyperlinks in either a table or link are not linked to a homepage but to another page with related data. Eclipse can spider a list of links or table entries and create “capsules” of information related to a specific link. This capsuling feature is definitely one of the highlights of this program.

Capsules are bits of data captured from behind a link, not available directly from the page you are spidering. You can pick up contact names, addresses, and phone numbers from these links and then merge them with your original results queue. In the old days, you would have to click on each target link one by one, parse the data, go back to the main list, and click on another one, over and over. This technology is a serious benefit and time saver for any researcher. Once you have the data you need for your assignment, Eclipse connects directly to programs such as Excel, Outlook, ACT!, Goldmine, and over 50 different CRM and ATS systems in order to export your results to the program of your choice.

Can’t close out without at least mentioning the training, which for many recruiters is just as important as the product itself. Broadlook offers the same first-class training for Eclipse as it does for all other products. I attended an Eclipse training class in preparation for this article, and it is performed via a live Web conference with a Broadlook trainer. Unlike many training scenarios, Broadlook offers all of its training under an “open-drop-in” concept; training is done within a group, and users can sign up for multiple training sessions at no additional charge.

In addition, all Eclipse users have access to on-demand train-ing and a series of interactive tutorials that allow recruiters to familiarize themselves and learn at their own pace. The training and support exceeds expectations, and their innovative model is starting to catch on with other vendors.

For pricing information, visit the customized Fordyce Letter subscriber landing page on the Broadlook website at www.broad look.com/fordyce.

I want to thank Andy Theimer, director of operations, for his help with this article. For more information you can visit the Broad-look Technologies home-page at www.broadlook.com and view an Eclipse demo. Anyone with any questions or comments can also reach Andy at (262) 754-8080 or via email at atheimer@broad look.com.

MedCareerLab.com

I recently received an email announcing a physician-centric network that looked like it would be worth a look for any health-care recruiter seeking those hard-to-find docs. This board claims over a million hits per month across its multi-board network. They also claim that over 45,000 job seekers per month are on their site, along with thousands of physician job seekers available for contact.

It looks like they have specialty career sites for pathology, psychiatry, radiology, ob/gyn, family practice, and dozens of other physician specialties. They also advertise specialty boards for nursing and medical office personnel.

They have a limited-time 30% discount for first-time users. I have not tried this service and do not know anything about it except for the ad I saw, but anyone who is interested can find out more at their website at www.medcareerlab.com.

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

Substitute whatever company you would like to target in place of oracle.com 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, or hotmail, or any of the other email address providers. Give it a try.

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@ramsey fox.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.

100th Column

Last month, this month, next month; I am not sure, but I do know I am right around the 100 mark. I am now in my ninth year as The Fordyce Letter Internet/Technology columnist and wanted to say what a privilege, honor, and outright pleasure it has been for me. To write for the “Cadillac” of industry publications . . . nothing better.

As you might imagine, a lot has changed as it relates to both the Internet and technology usage in general in our industry. This column has gone from promoting mostly active candidate boards for the first couple of years (remember Headhunter.net, CareerMosaic, Online Career Center) to searching for the résumés of passive candidates on the Internet using AltaVista (back in 2000). We have been reporting on online recruiter databases since 1999 and have reviewed dozens since. We have been reporting on Internet name-generation techniques and resources since early on as well (remember Eliyon, now ZoomInfo, and SearchStation, now SourcePoint), trying so hard to keep on top of the latest and greatest in our business. Had a great time doing it as well.

These days, it’s mostly tools and resources, with some technique thrown in from time to time. My monthly tip always offers a way for you to do something yourself. There has been so much to write about.

Out front, look for more on recruitment technology. New ways to recruit candidates. More on recruiter databases. Blogs, social and business networks, job-lead aggregators, competitive intelligence, names databases, sourcing techniques, recruiter networking and collaboration, anything and everything I can think of that you might use to increase your placement volume.

I have heard from many of you over the years, both calls and emails, and have thoroughly enjoyed every correspondence and phone call. Don’t be bashful – I hope to hear from many more over the next 100 columns.

SGA Executive
Tracker 2.0

I reviewed this great service from Sheila Greco Associates once before, but it was quite some time ago. In light of the continuing interest among the Fordyce subscribers in name and lead generation of passive candidates on the Internet, I thought it might be time to give them another look. I noticed many improvements since my last review. I really like their user interface. It is very clean and simple. Those regular readers know that is something I always look for. An easy-to-use interface with a short learning curve. Not a lot to learn here. This service contains information for over 7,600 companies, fed by a proprietary database based on the past 18 years of research, is 100% phone-verified in-house, and is updated regularly on a 90- to 120-day basis. Title levels range from senior level down through lower management, including supervisors, team leaders, sales managers, and buyers. Just fill in a few fields, click submit, and there is your list of names from industries, titles, functions, companies, and more.

The two main search components of this product are either searching for executives or browsing by company name. When searching for executives, you can search by company name, ticker symbol, industry, sales, number of employees, job function, title level, state, and SIC code, which is a very nice feature, especially for competitive intelligence. Browsing by company is a bit simpler. Just pick a letter of the alphabet and the list of companies follows.

Using the executive search mode, I left the company name blank and picked the Home Furnishings subcategory in the Consumer Goods category. Then I also selected the Merchandising Job Function. I left everything else blank. I was returned six great-looking merchandising executives (VP level) from furniture companies. From this point you can click on each contact’s name to obtain contact details, including phone number. On each contact details page, there is also a link to Colleagues that is a listing of other employees in the database from that same company. You can export the results to an Excel spreadsheet if you like or simply return to perform another search.

I then decided to search for all the Sears employees I could at their corporate headquarters in Chicago (yes, I was on a retail kick). I typed Sears in the Company Name field and also picked Illinois from the State list, then clicked Submit. I came up with a healthy 700 results that time. Too many to review, so I went back to my search page and added Supply Chain to the Job Function list and was returned six results, all managers with supply chain expertise.

I then tried my hand at Browsing by Company. I picked Deloitte, knowing their employees are highly sought after. I clicked on the Deloitte link and was taken to a Company Details page that offers some basic contact info, website address, sales, employees, SIC codes, a list of competitors, an email address formula (FirstInitialLastName@ deloitte.com), and a company description. The database contained over 4,400 Deloitte employees, mostly their consultants staff with their areas of expertise included in the job title. Again, I could click on any name to get the Contact Details.

I tried one more. I went back to my Merchandising search and picked one of the furniture companies I’d seen earlier, La-Z-Boy Inc. I clicked on the Company Details page and found that one of their SIC codes was 25, which is a code for Furniture and Fixture Manufacturers. I cleared my previous results and selected 25 from the SIC code list. I ran my search and ended up with a very large list of furniture and fixture manufacturers employing over 9,000 executives that are listed in the database. From here I could easily pare down my results based on job title, function, location, company size, or any of the other criteria mentioned earlier.

I want to say once again how easy it is for anyone to navigate searches with this product.

Pricing: This service has an annual, subscription-based fee structure, with one, full-year unlimited access at $4,995 or access to select industry sectors (consumer goods, financial, etc.) at adjusted, lower pricing. You can also access the product on a “pay-per-view” basis, i.e., $150/month, including a monthly download limit of 150 records.

I want to thank Anne Scofield, the VP of business development with Sheila Greco Associates, for her help with this review. Anyone interested in an easy way to locate the names of passive candidates can contact Anne via telephone at (518) 843-4611, ext. 234, or via email at ascofield@ sheilagreco.com. You can also visit the SGA Executive Tracker website at www.sgaexecutivetracker.com.

Advanced Live.com
A Recruiter’s Cheat Sheet
by Shally Steckerl

We have written about Shally’s Cheat Sheets in this column on more than one occasion. They are always wonderful, inexpensive resources that in a few pages seem to be able to give you all the information you need to be productive in the topic at hand.

This article will cover his Cheat Sheet on the search engine Live.com (formerly MSN Search). It is four pages of advanced search strings and the innovative use of special commands that produce better sourcing results in your passive candidate searches.

Shally covers many types of searches, for both résumés and names. You can learn about finding résumés using advanced methods, using synonyms, by file type, from academia, international, consultants, résumé templates, personal and employee homepages, and other methods as well. He teaches you how to find names of potential candidates from associations, conferences, alumni pages, mailing lists, and blogs, and by location offering search syntax examples that anyone can take and use for their own assignments.

He caps it off by explaining the use of results ranking and matching, results popularity, and results aging. These are all little-known and underutilized features of Live.com.

You can find out more about this publication or place an order at Shally’s website, www.jobmachine. net. Just click on the link on the left side of the page to Cheat Sheets. Also, be on the lookout for Shally’s new book, co-authored by yours truly, Live.com For Recruiters, due out by the end of this month.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Shally Steckerl will appear as a faculty presenter at the Fordyce Forum 2007 on June 14. More information is available at: www.fordyceforum.com.
HireAbility News Release
This is straight from the email, edited for length:

Londonderry, NH – April 9, 2007
- Today, HireAbility.com, a leading provider of integrated recruiting software and services, unveiled Talent Trader, a hosted professional networking platform that enables numerous recruiting communities to link their members to make more placements, obtain industry advice, resources, and job opportunities, and more. Talent Trader is the platform for HireAbility’s own recruiter network of over 350 professional staffing firms, and can be private-labeled for other networks of any size.

Using Talent Trader, members of large national staffing associations or small geographic-specific recruiter groups can easily locate and communicate with potential business partners, networking contacts, and industry experts. Detailed member profiles, discussion groups, activity ratings, endorsements, user-definable “recruiting partners,” and other tools once found only in social networks make this possible.

Additionally, because recruiters interact in members-only arenas, their discussions are more candid and carry more valuable decision-making information than those conducted in online public chat rooms.

Talent Trader also offers recruiters significant advantages over today’s social-networking tools. Functions for sharing job openings and candidates, cross-posting to job boards, and add-ons for Internet résumé mining are just a few of the ways HireAbility meets the unique needs of the staffing industry. Its own recruiter network leverages these features and more, such as libraries of shared documents, recruiter training materials, webinars by industry experts, résumé parsing, and weekly split placement conference calls.

TIP
Find Résumés on Live.com

For this month’s tip, 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 that not every one of those was a résumé, but many were. To cull out more relevant résumé documents, we would add some 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 month’s tip.

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.

Missing in Action

No, this isn’t a war zone, but it can seem like a battlefield sometimes. This has happened to all of us, I am sure. You recruit a great candidate; you can’t place him or her right away so you stash the person in the database for a future assignment. The perfect job opens up . . . you make a call . . . number disconnected. You send an email . . . undeliverable. What can you do? Thankfully, you can develop a “missing person” process for your office. It’s easy and only takes a few minutes. Just follow these steps to try and find your candidate.

First try www.WhitePages.com. It is just like the telephone company white pages, so unless your candidate has an unlisted number or uses his cell as his main phone, you might have some luck here.

If not, try the search engines www.Google.com, www.Yahoo.com, and www.Live.com. You put your candidate’s name in quotes and hit the search button. See if there is any updated information for you.

Also try the meta-search engines, including www.Dogpile.com and www.Mamma.com. Yes, these will search the big three, but also a number of other, lesser-known engines. Also use quote marks here for the name. Worth a shot.

If that doesn’t work, you can try the social and business networks www.LinkedIn.com, www.Spoke.com, www.MySpace.com, and www.FaceBook.com. These sites often have information the search engines don’t come up with. If your candidate is a professional, he may be in one of the first two. Quote marks are not necessary.

Zabasearch.com is a public records search site. If your candidate owns a home, she is probably in here. Zabasearch often returns many results, so it is often helpful to put a location in here as well.

ZoomInfo has a free component that lets you search for a name. Just go to their website, www.zoominfo.com, and type in the name without quotes.

One more shot. If you know the college from which the person graduated, you can always try searching the institution website. For example: www.harvard.edu, alumni “john e. doe.” You would use one of the search engines for this one.

In closing, we can only do the best we can do. But at least do that. Even using the above-mentioned methodology, the search often ends in failure, but at least we can now sleep nights knowing we did everything we could.

AIRS SourcePoint CE

Remember SearchStation? Then came Oxygen. Now there is AIRS SourcePoint CE, a fairly new best-in-class service by the people at AIRS. The problem is that it handles so many different sourcing functions for you, it is difficult to determine just what class it is in. I was offered the opportunity to “test drive” this service for The Fordyce Letter subscribers and jumped at the chance.

It is hard to know where to start this review, so I will try to start at the beginning and simply offer an overview of the service.

This is the very first recruitment industry vendor that I can think of that has offered an “all-in-one” sourcing/recruiting solution. One complaint I always hear from recruiters across the country is their need to deal with multiple vendors when trying to tap the wealth of information on the Internet. Often, one has to have one vendor for names generation, another for résumé generation, and yet another for competitive intelligence. All with separate monthly fees and log-in information.

With SourcePoint, you get all that in one, fairly intuitive interface. Plus, since it is a module-based service, you pay only for the services you need and can use. With the various modules available, you can search the AIRS proprietary database of passive candidate names and résumés, you can use the search engines to search across the Internet for results, you can search the built-in CRM and/or your own ATS, you can search (either in simple or advanced formats) your membership-based résumé banks, you can search the social and business networks, and you can search the newsgroups for names.

The beauty of using this one interface to search all the components just mentioned is that all your results are compiled into one queue that can be imported into the AIRS CRM, or exported to a number of different formats. With the competing products, all your results from the different products are islands of data that you have to deal with separately. Plus, with this product you can manage this data with the CRM and also email any or all of the results directly from the program using customized email messages that can be saved.

I have listed some of the features and what they do below. For the most part, your searches are broken down into two categories: résumés and people (names).

Résumés

DeepWeb Search for R̩sum̩s РThis search feature searches the AIRS proprietary database of passive candidate r̩sum̩s for keywords.

TotalView Search РThis feature is used to search the built-in CRM, external r̩sum̩ databases, and your applicant tracking system.

R̩sum̩ Bank Search РThis feature searches Web-based r̩sum̩ databases. For most you are required to enter your user name and password, although there are some you can enable without that information.

Precision Search РThis is also used to search the membership-based r̩sum̩ databases, but it taps the features of the individual services for a more advanced search process.

People

PeopleSearch – This feature searches the AIRS database of over 33 million names.

DeepWeb Search for People – It uses the search engines to search across the Web for names of individuals related to your keywords or even a company.

Social Network Search – It uses the search engines to search for public information contained in the social networks, including ZoomInfo and LinkedIn.

NewsGroup Search – This feature allows you to search millions of newsgroup discussions. These discussions often contain the names and email addresses of potential passive candidates.

Of course, we can do all these searches manually, but it would take hours and hours of our precious time, and this product can do it all in just a matter of minutes.

They also have a directory search feature. There are directories for companies, colleges, and organizations (associations). These directories contain specific names of entities where you can search for keywords or browse by industry or state. You can also search for profiles, when available.

Another key component is their spreadsheet import feature. It is incredibly powerful, allowing you to import data into all fields of your CRM and set status in others. As a result, you can upload a list of conference attendees and mark the source field automatically.

As I have touched on earlier in this article, this service is not just about a bunch of résumés and names. The data management tools they offer pull it all together for you. Their CRM (contact relationship manager) I have mentioned a couple of times is a built-in candidate database that lets you save your results to it for further study or contact. From there, you can select names to send emails to from any number of customized messages. From that point, you can track the activity of your email recipients to see who is acting on your email (opening, clicking internal links, and other activity).

Other features I would like to at least mention are your ability to set up Agents, allowing you to set up recurring searches to run automatically; prebuilt reporting for further ease of data management; and the ability to export any results to your ATS or Excel. I forgot to mention before that they also offer a Quick Search feature for quickly coming up with a name or other contact information. The product also offers integration with the H3.com referral engine, which takes online networking and paid referrals to the next level.

I want to thank Chris Forman, CEO of AIRS, for his help with this article. Anyone seeking that killer all-in-one application should definitely take a closer look. Anyone who would like more information about this or any other AIRS product or service can visit their website at www.airsdirectory.com.

2007 Résumé Sourcing Survey
By Jim Stroud

Jim Stroud, Internet recruiting ranter and raver and one we have all been hearing about more and more, has published his 2007 Résumé Sourcing Survey. This is a report with some surprising information about sourcing résumés on the Internet. In this report you can learn about:

- The most popular formats for general résumés
- The most popular formats for technical résumés
- The top 10 industries by résumés sourced on MSN Live
- The top 10 industries by résumés sourced on Google
- The top 10 industries by résumés sourced on Yahoo
- Popular top-level domains for résumés
- Popular industry keywords mentioned on résumés
- Quantity of résumés found on search engines
- Most popular ways to spell “CV”
- Most popular ways to spell “Résumé”
- The most overlooked file types for general résumés

This information can be invaluable for any one of us who uses the Internet to source résumés. The report can be downloaded for FREE at http://jimstroud. com/2007/02/25.

Also, Jim has an award-winning recruiting blog that anyone can sign up for, also for free. Check it out at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JimStroud20?a=MaAl51YD.

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.

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.

Oh, brother – or, in the words of our almost-immortal editor, Paul Hawkinson – Hoo Boy! The end of something else in our industry. No, everyone, I cannot take credit for the title of this piece. I recently saw an article with this title on one of the recruiting blogs. Evidently, now the blogs will replace Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, and all the rest of the national job services. I wish they would. These boards cost thousands of dollars per year. The blogs are free. That is, until some genius comes up with the idea of charging for them. Anyway . . . it was only a few years ago that Monster.com was predicting the demise of the entire recruiting industry. Their service was going to replace every recruiter in the country, remember? I remember NOT biting my fingernails over that one. More recently, outsourcing and the Internet were going to replace all IT recruiters. Just a month or two ago, I read a piece by one of the leading business networking vendors saying that THEY were going to replace the recruiting industry. Last month, I read a post by a respected industry sage saying that retained search would replace contingency search (believe it or not, this statement caused a number of unprofessional responses). Long ago, it was predicted that the Internet would replace all newspaper employment ads.

Whew – it is becoming increasingly difficult for us all to keep track of what is staying and what is going.

I am so glad I am not one of the wise men who make these predictions, as they are always 100% wrong. I wish that long ago I had made a prediction that emailed résumés would replace paper mailed-in résumés, because since I started recruiting in 1979 the only thing that has bit the dust has been paper mailed-in résumés. I happen to know that index cards for candidates are still around. People still use paper daily planners. Don’t get me wrong – both blogs and business networking sites are new (relatively speaking) and great ways for all of us to look for candidates. I am always delighted when we all can add another source of hard-to-find candidates to our recruiting process.

Well, newspaper employment ads are still here, as are IT recruiters, as is the recruiting industry, as is everything else that was supposed to be replaced by something else Рexcept paper mailed-in r̩sum̩s.

AIRS Search Lab 3.0

The last time I sat through anything like this was years ago when I attended AIRS I and II. These classes have evolved over the years and have been combined into what is now known as AIRS Search Lab. This is a full-day program in a classroom setting that gives you the kind of quality information we have all come to expect from AIRS, one of the earliest proponents of Internet recruiting and sourcing and still the undisputed leader in the field. I was lucky enough to be invited to sit through a session and report this to The Fordyce Letter readership.

The day followed a logical progression. We started by learning about the three major search types Рone for senior executives, another for managers, and the last for specialized contributors Рand we learned how to build search plans for each type. We also learned about search techniques, including r̩sum̩ searches, people (names) searches, x-ray searches (searches inside websites), flip-searches (searches with results linked to websites), peel-backs, peer searches, and community searches.

We were given a thorough education on using search engines (including Boolean logic), directories, and meta-tools for gathering the information we wanted. I remember we learned a lot about AltaVista back in the AIRS I and II days, but now the search engines of choice were Google, Yahoo, and Live (MSN). We learned about the pluses and minuses of each and ran many searches for résumés on each one. We learned the best time to use the meta-search tools and also when not to use them.

We then learned the difference between profiles and résumés and started learning how to perform searches for non-résumé data. Instead of words such as “résumé,” “bio,” “cv,” or “homepage,” we were taught how to use people words like “employee,” “staff,” “alumni,” and others. We were able to use keywords with the people words to locate profiles of people we might be interested in contacting for our assignments.

One aspect of the AIRS training that has always been of great interest to me is the process behind the technique. Anyone can teach techniques. As a matter of fact, anyone can get techniques alone by going into the help sections of the search engines. What AIRS has been most famous for, in my opinion, is their ability to combine the technique with a process. Once you have the process down, the technique is easy. This was most apparent when we started learning about how to build your own professional network. We were taught how to use the communities, business networking sites, and discussion forums to actually become a part of the community from which you are trying to recruit – to start the process of building your professional network so you have a constant pipeline of qualified candidates to choose from the next time a hard-to-fill assignment arises. We were taught about specific communities to reach out to, learned about three of the most productive business-networking sites, and also learned how to cull names of qualified candidates from the discussion groups (one of the most underrated recruitment methods).

Peer searching is another great technique learned during the course of the day. “Find one and find them all.” We were taught how to research the name of a specific individual in the hope of locating information about other individuals with the same type of background. We were taught how to accomplish this task with the search and meta-search engines.

The day ended with some strategies for actually contacting the people we found. A name in a search engine results queue isn’t worth much unless we can turn that name into something more tangible, an actual contact. We learned a bit about actually locating contact information, communication techniques, contact strategies, and contact guidelines, and were even given some sample emails and phone messages.

Our instructor for the day, Lisa Brusack, was just perfect for the job. Anyone could tell she was truly an expert in her field. Aside from her knowledge of the class information, she exhibited an enormous amount of patience with our group and delivered the vast amount of information that day in a way we could all easily understand and absorb, all with a big smile on her face all day long. One of the most personable trainers I have ever met.

I want to thank Chris Forman, CEO of AIRS, for his help in writing this review. Anyone looking for advanced training in the area of locating the names and résumés of passive candidates for their search assignments should take a closer look at this program. It is offered periodically in person in a number of cities around the USA but is offered as an online class as well. You can visit the AIRS website at www.airsdirectory.com for a full class description and also find a listing of dates and times when this training is available.

EHSCareers.com

I recently received an email announcing a website for environmental, health, and safety positions. EHSCareers claims 6,000 EH&S professionals in their database and has an established network of over 70,000 EH&S professionals. I have not used this service myself nor do I know much about it other than the marketing email I received, but if you have a need for this type of candidate, they may be worth a look.

TIP
Bookmarkets.com

For this month’s tip I am going to steal a tip from 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 that has what they call “power tools for surfing.” These bookmarklets are mini programs that you can use to extract specialized data from a webpage (like when it was posted), navigate pages in new ways, modify page views, and really too many other items 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.

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He has been a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and 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.

Those of you that have been reading my Fordyce Letter columns for any length of time know that I have written on more than one occasion about ZoomInfo. Most everyone in our industry knows this service is the “Cadillac” of the “semantic search engine” industry. They have just released a major upgrade to their user interface and I was anxious to have a good look at it.

The flexibility and intuitive nature of the new interface stands out. Personally, I like it a lot more than the previous interface. There is very little training required to become proficient with this service. You can search their database a number of different ways. Actually, there are twenty different data characteristics you can screen for. The two main searches that you might run are for either People or Companies. When People searching, you can search for an individual by name, people with title keywords, people with industry keywords, company size, credentials, date, geography, education, and you can also scrape specific websites for names. When Company searching, you can search by company name, industry, geography, and company size.

As always, I ran some test searches and the results are as follows:

I first ran a general search for an industry I picked at random, Managed Health Care. I got a list of 113 companies. I had many options to screen this list further so I typed in Network Manager in the title field and got a list of 11 managers along with their employers, titles, and telephone numbers ready for my call. I went back to my original list of 113 companies and searched for only those firms in Missouri. I got back a list of two companies headquartered here. You are also given options to either narrow or expand your search. By narrowing my company search to Managed Health Care Providers, I limited my results to 28 companies in that industry. By expanding my search to all Health Care Insurance companies, I got back 207. At any time I could click on any of the company results I had and obtained a list of people that work for that particular company. By clicking on the link to Humana Corp., I got a list of all their key executives, along with titles and telephone numbers. The page also contained a list of Humana competitors, branch office locations and phone numbers, and other company information. By clicking on the Find Employees link, I got a list of 413 people that work for this company that I could further screen by job title, if I chose to.

Another search entailed any companies in the data-base in the St. Louis, Missouri area. Simply done, the search yielded over 18,000 results. If I switched over to a People search, I got back a list of over 78,000 names of people in the database in St. Louis. If I chose the keyword “beer,” my results were limited to 19 companies that either manufactured or distributed beer in the area. Clicking on one of the links for a local beer distributor, I got the information in the database for that company. I was then able to click a link to competitors and got a list of 27 firms across the country.

Continuing on with the People search function, I decided to look at database results for another random pick, Food Distribution industry personnel. I got back over 74,000 results. I decided to narrow my search to Specialty Food Distribution and got back 400 names, then plugged in Missouri and got back 10 names. Going back to my broader search, I clicked on the link to Aramark, one of the employers I noticed. Again, I was presented with their top executives, key competitors, and other company data, as well. Going back to my 74+k person list again and limiting my search results to those with the title of Manager, I was down to 6,700, then down to 350 names if I picked Grocery only, a great starting point for any search assignment.

Getting the idea? This database contains over 34 million names and 3.5 million companies, all with their associated locations, titles, phone numbers, bios (when available), and whatever contact information and other tidbits the ZoomInfo search engine can find. You can search broadly then zoom in on whatever more specific needs you have. Or, expand your searches if you are not getting enough results.

ZoomInfo is not only a database; it is also a project management tool. Using the interface you can create projects and save results, type notes on people and companies. In case you get sidetracked in one of your searches, they also have a new Quick List feature, where you can drag and drop search results you see that might be good for another project down the road. The interface itself is also customizable, allowing you to highlight those features most important to you and the way you work.

Don’t forget about their JobCast add-on service, reviewed previously in this column, that ties everything together for you and simplifies the process of actually following through and contacting the people you find on your searches.

Pricing starts at $12,000 per year for three seats. I want to thank Russ Glass, VP of Products and Kari Hanson, PR Director for their gracious assistance in putting this article together. Any recruiter out there who has the slightest need for passive candidate name generation and/or one of the best competitive intelligence databases I have ever seen should contact ZoomInfo for more information. It has created a website page just for The Fordyce Letter readers and is offering a free trial of the service for the asking. Visit http://www.zoominfo.com/fordyceletter.

Resume Grabber Pro 5.0

I am happy to be able to review this new version of this venerable product for all of you this month. I have written about the products from eGrabber a number of times over the years. There will always be a soft spot in my heart for these people as they were there in the beginning . . . of Internet recruiting, that is. Before passive-candidate search interfaces and exporting programs, those early proponents of Internet recruiting had to deal with the laborious, time-consuming and mind-numbing task of reviewing hundreds of resumes, then cutting and pasting the ones we liked into either Excel or Word. ResumeGrabber was such a boon for us back then . . . and it still is.

This new version is simply packed with new features, making the task of bulk-level sourcing and recruiting so easy. You can now capture data from a number of sources. You can still highlight resume contact information and generate a record or table entry as you always have but now you can also select to capture contact data from entire resume directories on your hard drive, all at once. You can also still capture data from your Outlook or other email program files but you can now capture data from entire Outlook folders, as well. A very nice new feature is the ability to run a Google resume search and then capture entries on the entire page. It works wonders as opposed to opening every link on a page to review, then transferring the ones you like to another program or file. New also is your ability to capture data from national resume services that you belong to. At the time of writing, they have specialized add-ins, available at extra cost, to enable Monster, HotJobs, Dice, and CareerBuilder users to capture search results, but can also customize a solution to utilize whatever service you are using.

Another newer feature I noticed is the Grid. Used to be, you parsed a resume and the contact information was ported into Outlook or another email program, Excel, or some other destination. Now, with the Grid, you get to look at and evaluate your data prior to porting it into a destination product. I think this is very important because it gives you a chance to make an informed decision as to what does and does not go into your database or other recruiting program. The old adage “junk in, junk out” applies here. When you parse data on a wholesale level into your database you do end up saving time on the front end. Lots of new records appear in your database. However, you end up wasting a lot of time on the backend when unqualified candidates that do not meet your needs start showing up in your database search results. The Grid is a “holding pen” of sorts. Once evaluated, these records can be selected and exported into a number of destination programs. Aside from contact information, the Grid contains resume information, candidate years of experience, can contain skills if set up properly, resume URL or location, candidate status, and other pertinent data. You can also save your search results in the Grid and go back to a previous search for further review at any time, offline.

I put this new product through the paces, testing all of the resume sources. I started with an easy one. I selected an Outlook email in my inbox, one I knew had a resume attached. Hit the Grab button and seconds later had the contact information in the grid.

I then selected a resume folder I had on my hard drive. This folder had over 1,200 word docs in it. All resumes. I selected the folder (not the resumes), and then hit the grab button. In minutes I had, in the Grid, contact information parsed for all the resumes in that folder.

The next test was a Google resume search. I ran a resume search on Google using a fairly simple search string. I selected the resumes on the first page of results then hit the Grab button. ResumeGrabber then parsed all the resumes on that page into the Grid. The beauty of using ResumeGrabber to evaluate Google results is that you do not have to go through the monotonous task of opening each resume for viewing. RG does that for you. Behind the scenes it opens each page, then parses the results into the Grid from there. You then only have to click on each Grid result to view the captured data, including the resume. You have the options to see the original resume page if you like, add personalized comments, reject a result (removes that resume from the Grid), click Never Show (removes that resume from future searches), transfer (transfers result to destination of your choice), view the next resume, or select the resume (for bulk transfers). You also have several views you can choose. The snippet view shows highlights including keyword matches, or you can choose text view or original view (which shows the original page that Google located).

Finally, I tested the product with a job board I belong to. I logged in, ran a search, got 40 results, hit the Grab button and watched RG open the results one by one and put them in the Grid. From there I could easily review all 40 results by clicking on the entry in the Grid, without having to open each page individually and clicking the Back button on my browser 40 times.

Once you have your search results in the Grid you have the ability to filter the resumes further through the search bar on the Grid. For example, if you started with 100 resumes, you can easily reduce it to 50 and then 25 . . . etc., by putting in keywords (ranging from skill sets to location or even company names). With each key-word, only resumes containing the keywords would remain, enabling you to quickly narrow the search down to a couple of star candidates. Also, the grid behaves like an Internet browser. If the recruiter wishes to go through the search results, he/she can simply click on the “back” and “forward” button.

Another handy feature is the ability to email either the candidate or the hiring manager directly from the ResumeGrabber grid. ResumeGrabber syncs with most email clients to allow recruiters to email their candidates with personalized pre-prepared templates direct from the Grid. This can be done on an individual basis or to all contacts on the grid. ResumeGrabber also allows recruiters to send emails to hiring managers with the resumes of the recommended candidates attached; key contact information of the candidates are also extracted and placed in the email body for the convenience of the hiring managers.

Pricing: The price for one license is $549.95; bulk pricing is negotiable. For the add-in, the available ones go for $350; other customized sites are subject to time needed to complete them.

In closing, even for those recruiters who have an ATS product or service that offers single or even bulk parsing, or those recruiters who use Google or one of the national boards to assist with their recruiting, this product is one to look at. It makes the frustrating and time-consuming task of reviewing dozens or even hundreds of resumes quick and easy, making your Internet recruiting experience more enjoyable and productive.

I want to thank Eugene Chean and Chandra Bodapati, CEO of eGrabber for their help with this article. Anyone with any interest in learning more about this great resource can find out more by visiting their website at www.egrabber.com/resumegrabberpro.

TIP
Passive Candidates from Active
Candidate Boards

I know many of you are using the major resume/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 resume. Often these are managers or co-workers having the same basic skill set of the active candidate in question. To find passive candidates with Java skills simply type into the search box: java references.

You will get resumes of active candidates with java on the resume but you will also get those resumes 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 resumes 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.

Mark E. Berger, C.P.C., AIRS CIR has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm and 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. We recommend you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

I have talked many times over the last couple years about the need for many of us to expand our candidate searches beyond the national active candidate boards, especially as they are not paying off as they once were.

More and more recruiters are tackling the passive candidate marketplace using Google, the other search engines, name and lead generation services, and/or almost any other way they can think of to fill client’s needs. That’s a good thing.

One practice you are going to want to start is to try and locate information about your candidates before you submit them to your clients. This is easy. If I was your candidate and you wanted to Google me you simply type into the search box (with quotes):

“mark e. berger”

Upon doing this, you would find many Internet pages with my name on it. These are coming from my web sites, my Fordyce Letter columns, vendors I have relationships with, my MAPSS state board association, and others as well, but what you would not find is any reason your client would not hire me for a job for which you submitted me.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with all candidates. In these days of personal networking site proliferation, people at times have a tendency to put a bit too much information on these public sites. Please know I have talked to more than one recruiter who has been embarrassed because his client Googled his submitted candidate and found good cause not to consider that candidate for employment. I will leave it to your imagination as to what reasons might disqualify a candidate in a client’s eyes.

If you try this with a common name and you get too many responses, try adding an additional keyword or two after the name. Maybe try an industry or state of residence to pare down the list.

Make this a standard practice before you submit any candidate to a client, whether they are an active or passive candidate.

Other resources

Almost everyone knows about LinkedIn. I devoted an entire column to it in a recent issue of Fordyce. This is also a resource you can use to investigate a potential candidate.

Social and business networking sites have become so popular lately it is worth checking out a few others, especially if there is a big fee on the line. Although there are dozens (if not hundreds) of these types of sites now some of the more popular ones include Plaxo.com, Spoke.com, Friendster.com, Flickr.com, Orkut.com, MySpace.com, Windows Live Spaces, Live-Journal.com, Blogger.com Hi5.com, Passado.com, Xing.com, Ryze.com, and Ecademy.com.

Statistics are rolling in. More and more companies are taking the extra step before making an offer of running the candidate’s name through one or more search engines or networking sites. Give it a try and hopefully you won’t be surprised.

ERE Group
Finding the Right Recruiting Software

Hopefully many of you have checked out ERE since its acquisition of The Fordyce Letter. For those who haven’t and have a need for information on Applicant Tracking Systems, I wanted to mention one group of which I am a member and one that can be of great help to anyone on this type of search. This is one of thousands of ERE groups on almost any topic you can think of. You can post questions and make comments. Many recruiters contemplating a change go here to query other recruiters about their experience with a particular product or service. Here you get the real scoop. Unlike references provided by the vendor, which are always stellar, you also get candid responses from former users. Anyone looking for a new ATS solution should get on here and check out the vendor they are considering. Signing up for both ERE and this group is free of charge.

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.

Mark E. Berger, C.P.C., AIRS CIR has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm and 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 you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

Mark E. Berger of Swat Recruiting will be presenting an hour-long webinar on February 19th at 12:00 p.m. Central time, titled Google Techniques for Finding the Right Candidates. It’s a candidates’ market, but how can you find those top-notch candidates who command premium fees? Many people just don’t realize how powerful Google and other Internet search engines can actually be. This session will introduce you to an array of techniques designed to help you conduct a more manageable, more focused, and ultimately more productive search for passive superstar candidates. And the best part? Using these search engines is absolutely FREE. Mark will provide worksheets and examples illustrating how you can get started as soon as the session is over.

I am happy I had the opportunity to review this online recruiter network for the Fordyce subscribers this month. HireAbility is fast becoming a household word in the recruiting community. Although probably the newest of the split networks they are growing by leaps and bounds and will be a major force in this space in time to come. For the purposes of this article, I took a membership in order to properly report on this service.

On signing up, you are given a user name and password to access the site. This service is a web-based model that does not require any local software installation. The heart of their online system is Sarah, a stripped down recruiter database that offers a place to store your candidates and job orders, then search on both. Sarah offers a very simple and easy to navigate interface. You can opt to share all or part of your own candidates and orders with the rest of the network, or certain groups within the network. One of the major features of the network is their shared job orders. Many of the job orders from the network members, that number over 300 at this point, are posted into a database that is completely searchable by anyone on the network.

They go to great lengths to help all their members facilitate the building of their own recruiting community by fostering personal communication and conducting online sessions between members with similar specialties.

There are three types of memberships offered. The typical membership is the Exchange Membership, which is basically the full membership and this grade offers Sarah, with the access to all member contacts, orders, and candidates for $85/month ($850/year) then charges a 6% commission for placement on the back end. Their Virtual Recruiter membership is less expensive at $10/month ($99.00/year) but does not offer the unlimited job postings like the Exchange Membership. There is also a 20% split placement commission on the back end for this grade. Interestingly, they also have a Corporate HR Membership level where clients can be members and post jobs to the network. They typically also post the fee they are willing to pay for the placement service.

For an extra $99 both the non-corporate memberships can get a HireAbility email address, marketing promotional materials and access to business cards. They also offer all members a back office/employer-of-record service so that anyone interested in the lucrative temp/hourly market can take advantage of that without all the grief that goes with hiring employees.

All the membership levels also have access to ALEX, the resume parsing technology developed by HireAbility although only the Exchange Membership has access to batch processing. The other memberships allow single resume processing capability only, but all levels will have the batch processing capability in the new software release, which is imminent.

A nice benefit of membership for the two non-corporate grades is their discounts that they have worked out with some of the major recruitment vendors including Yahoo/HotJobs (resume database), LinkedIn (job postings), Buzz Recruiter (websites), Absolutely HealthCare (job and resume service), InfoGist (Internet search tool), and SkillSurvey (reference checks). Some of these are worth the monthly price alone.

Although still fairly young compared to some of the other recruiter networks out there. HireAbility is growing very fast and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them at 500…1,000 members before too long. I have spoken on many occasions with Craig Silverman, Executive Vice President of HireAbility and know they have a solid plan in place for future growth.

They are about to release a new web portal powering the recruiting network, that promises easier navigation and communication facilitation. Look for a paragraph or two about this new release in this column in the next month or two.

I want to thank Craig, Eric Cullin, Andrew Stock, and Joanna Ransley as all were a great help in putting this article together. I would encourage anyone with any interest in increasing their billings to take a close look at this service. Anyone with any questions or comments can contact Eric Cullin, Senior Business Development Executive at HireAbility. Eric can be reached via telephone at (734) 397-4430 or via email at ECullin@HireAbility.com. You can also visit the HireAbility website at www.hireability.com for more information.

TIP
Invisible Web – a.k.a. 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 that we can use. This requires the use of specialized search engines that do a great job in 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/ – This is a project by the University of Michigan that mainly is 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. Also try:

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

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

Mark E. Berger, C.P.C., AIRS CIR has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm and 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 you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com

This month I have devoted the entire column to LinkedIn. I am sure most of you are either members or have thought about becoming one. At the very least you have heard a lot about it. Starting out as a social network, as it still is, it has turned into a great resource for sourcers and recruiters, for finding candidates, locating job order leads and networking in general. I am very pleased to have an interview with Konstantin Guericke, the co-founder of LinkedIn, plus a review for a fairly new book by Bill Vick, and a piece on Shally Steckerl’s new LinkedIn Cheatsheet. If you have even the slightest interest in this resource…read on…

Interview with Konstantin Guericke
Co-founder of LinkedIn

Me: Konstantin, as the co-founder of LinkedIn, tell us how you view the world and the world views LinkedIn.

Konstantin: We started LinkedIn with the idea that relationships matter, no matter which business you are in. LinkedIn is designed to help professionals get back in touch with the people they’ve worked with, to strengthen relationships with former co-workers, clients and business partners, and to effectively leverage those relationships to get business done. Not sure how the world views LinkedIn. Some people may see LinkedIn as a place to look up people before a meeting. Others probably see it as a place to find an inside connection to a potential customer or to find a recommended service provider. Recruiters tend to see it as a great place to find and approach passive candidates.

Me:  Could you explain the term “social networking” to our readers?

Konstantin: I think of social networking as a way to gain and use social capital more effectively than was possible before. For example, using LinkedIn, I’ve been able to help my professional colleagues more than ever before and with far less effort on my part. So I feel that I’ve increased my social capital — and I’m sure there will be times when I’ll be able to draw down on this accumulated capital, like when I need to do a backdoor reference check, for example.

Me: The Fordyce Letter subscriber base is comprised of many third party recruiters. How can a member recruit candidates using LinkedIn?

Konstantin: I recommend clicking on the “advanced search” link next to the search box which is on every page once you are logged in. You can search by industry, region, title, company, etc. All the profiles you find are maintained by the professionals themselves, so it’s like an opt-in list rather than a database — which translates into high response rates. The results will be shown in two tabs. People within three degrees of you will be shown on the first tab. Three degrees means the friends of the people your contacts know. If you find someone two degrees away from you, you can see which of your contacts know this person and ask one of them for an introduction, or you can contact them directly. The second tab shows the results from the entire LinkedIn Network. Since there is no introduction path, you can only reach people outside of your network directly via a system called InMail.

Me: How can a member use LinkedIn for getting job order leads or marketing his or her service?

Konstantin: First, you need to have a full profile that shows the keywords a potential client is most likely to search for. Second, make sure you are connected to your past clients. This ensures you show up at the top of the list when contacts of your clients search for a recruiter on LinkedIn. Finding a recommended service provider is one of the key ways people use LinkedIn, so be sure you also get recommendations from past clients — there are a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn, and our data shows people are five times more likely to select a recruiter with client recommendations on their profile. Finally, I’d set up my account with OpenLink, which makes it easy for potential clients to contact you without having to go through an introduction or use an InMail.

Me: Can a member actually post job orders to the service?

Konstantin: Yes, our job postings have become quite popular lately. Interestingly, the more senior the position, the better the results. You can also distribute your job to your connections on LinkedIn asking them to pass it on if they know of good candidates. If you have a lot of connections, be sure to use this selectively or you may be using up your social capital quite quickly. Finally, for each candidate who applies, you can get a list of people this person has worked with in the past — and you may be surprised to find that people you know have worked with the candidate at a prior company. It’s never been easier to do backdoor reference checks.

Me: What about networking with other recruiters in order to facilitate split fees?

Konstantin: Yes, with so many recruiters on LinkedIn, this is definitely possible. I recommend picking recruiters where you both know someone in common to ensure the deal goes off without a hitch.

Me: Tell us a little about the networking process. How do you get started?

Konstantin: First, you need to have connections. Most recruiters find that between 20 and 30% of their contacts are already on LinkedIn. To find out whom, I’d go to the tools section (see footer of every page) and use the ‘find contacts’ wizard. I’d not necessarily connect to everyone in your address book, but only to those who you feel you can genuinely recommend to others. If they ask for an introduction, be sure to really help them — if you give them a strong, specific recommendation, you are helping them much more than if you are just passing on the message with a note such as “hope you can help” or “passing it along,” which makes it look like you can’t recommend the sender and can put your connection into an awkward position. What comes around goes around — reputations get enhanced or destroyed on LinkedIn much faster than ever before, so be sure you keep up with your connections and add value when making introductions.

Me: Is it a free service? If not how much does it cost to join up?

Konstantin: It is free to join, and most of the functions I’ve talked about are free-of-charge. Many recruiters do end up upgrading their account to the business or pro level, which are $20 and $200 per month respectively, since those accounts gives you the ability to contact people outside of your network and to contact them directly through a built-in messaging system called InMail.

Me: Sounds like a great service for any recruiter. Where do we go and how do we sign up?

Konstantin: That’s easy — just go to www.linkedin.com and register. It should take less than five minutes to register and try some searches for projects you are working on. Also, it’s a lot of fun to see what the people you went to school with are doing now, so don’t miss the “classmates” function. And you never know if one of your former classmates knows someone who needs a recruiter or works with a candidate who is just perfect for a search assignment.

My thanks to Konstantin for taking time out of his busy schedule to assist with this month’s column. Anyone with any interest in exploring LinkedIn further can visit the website at www.linkedin.com

Happy About LinkedIn for Recruiting
Book Review

Bill Vick, industry icon, one of the early proponents of Internet recruiting and one, I am happy to say, I have personally known for many years (since his RON days), has written a book telling you everything you ever wanted to know about LinkedIn. Good thing for us, Bill’s book is written for recruiters letting us all know how we can utilize this powerful resource to recruit more candidates, get more job orders, and make more placements.

The book starts out by offering an overview of how recruiters can best utilize the network. Detailed explanations and instructions on getting known, getting connected, getting endorsements … all part of the process of building your LinkedIn network, are offered.

Bill also offers full chapters on using LinkedIn for marketing and finding new clients and also how to use the service as a candidate-sourcing tool. There is also an entire chapter devoted to using LinkedIn as a collaboration and recruiter fee split tool.

Even more than a recruiting or marketing tool, LinkedIn has become most well-known as a networking tool and place to develop solid, trusting relationships. An entire chapter is devoted to using LinkedIn for this purpose. Sprinkled through the book, in every chapter, are quotes by industry leading big billers, recruiters and sourcers offering advice and comments relevant to the topic at hand.

Bill also includes a comprehensive listing of sites inside LinkedIn to accomplish any task that he writes about in the book.

Anyone with any interest in using LinkedIn as a recruiting, marketing, or networking tool should take a look at this great resource. It retails for about $50 in an eBook format and is also available in a paperback version as well. You can find out more information about the book at www.happyabout.info/linkedin4recruiting.php. Thank to Bill for his help with this article.

LinkedIn Cheatsheet

One more “must-have” item in today’s LinkedIn lineup includes a new resource by nationally renowned master sourcer, Shally Steckerl, The LinkedIn Cheatsheet. Similar in format to his very popular Google Cheatsheet, this two-page document offers recruiters and sourcers alike the ability to go into LinkedIn and be immediately productive using the easy-to-understand examples.

He offer tips and examples including using Boolean strings, limiting results, connecting to power networkers, international searches, reference searches, one-click references, bookmarking, finding 2nd and 3rd degree connections, recommendations, and direct contacts.

Shally also includes a nice extra: “5 Never-Before-Seen Hacks” that enable you to conduct searches beyond your own LinkedIn network. Included are the Site Hack, the Link Hack, The URL and Title Hack, The Group Hack, and The Freshness Hack.

For more information on this item, or to place an order, visit Shally’s website at www.jobmachine.com.

SmartSearch Online by APS

In my quest to keep The Fordyce Letter subscribers as up to date as possible regarding ATS solutions, I am happy to review SmartSearch Online this month, one I have reviewed in the past but not for a couple of years. Many changes and revisions have occurred since my last review for this industry-leading service so any of you who are on a hunt for your next ATS, read on.

SmartSearch Online (a product of Advanced Personnel Systems, Inc. APS) has been around a long time, since 1985, having been on the forefront of browser-based solutions and the entire industry in general. This product is marketed as a total Internet recruiting solution. In addition to all the basic requirements you need to run your business including candidates, contacts, job orders, etc. it has an extraordinary number of advanced features, many of which are completely customizable, that allow you to run your software the way you run your business. This is a 100% browser-based solution and does not require any software locally installed. No additional hardware is required although you will need an Internet connection. Broadband (cable or DSL) is recommended but not necessary as this service also works well on a dial-up connection.

Moving right along, adding a candidate is easy. Click ‘Candidate – New’ to add a new one. You can either paste the resume into the resume window or browse to upload a local file to the resume parser. You can also import a Candidate from an email. Once parsed, you have a preview of the candidate for your review. The resume parser captures primary contact info including name, address, multiple email addresses and phone numbers, SSN (if included), highest degree attained, source, years of experience, and the entire resume, which is indexed for searching.

Once reviewed, you can save the record and click on any one of a number of tabs including resume, profile, qualifications, tests, user defined questions, and hours (for staffing). Most of these candidate record pages have drop down boxes for ease of selection that are completely user configurable.

Searching for these candidates is also easy. SmartSearch Online offers a variety of ways to easily search your candidate database including searching by job title and/or job description, keyword searches (including AND’s, OR’s, phrases, date ranges, etc.), searching by profile (which is to search on any field in the candidate record), and note searching. Once a search is complete the results (lists of names, corresponding resumes and contact history) are displayed on screen. All search criteria are highlighted within the resume results in order to facilitate screening. By clicking on a candidate name in the search results queue you open the resume up and from there you can view other information on the candidate and also add them to a call list, a folder, email the resume to a client, add a note, or view a history of activity with that person.

To enter a job order you have the ability to link the order to both a company or a hiring contact. Once either is selected, your job order form is presented and ready for you to fill in. From there, you add the order specifics and, outside of the job description/requirements, are able to populate the form with easily customizable dropdowns.

Navigation and customization is definitely a great feature. All of your needs are met by a toolbar on the top of the page. You can access your candidates, contacts, businesses, jobs, projects (you can organize your work into projects if you like), searches, folders, tools, help, and emails all from this toolbar, which is always on the top of the page. Then, on the left side of the screen is another bar that gives you one-click access to all of your “work-in-progress” including you calendar, notes, recent searches, call lists, open jobs, submittals, interviews, offers, and other information as well. Part of the beauty of this system is that everything is linked to everything. You work flows smoothly as there is not a lot of opening and closing windows just to get to another item. You can access all of your data from almost any page you happen to be on.

They also have a very useful Folder tool for sorting and organizing candidate and client contact records that serves as an extremely flexible CRM tool. There are two types of Folders. Regular Folders are user created for organizing Candidates as well as Client Contacts into desired groups such as “hot” or by skill set. Each user can create or delete his or her own Regular folders, not unlike creating folders in Word or Outlook. Once a group of records are sorted into a Regular Folder, the user can enable a variety of group function tools such as Broadcast Email, Mail Merge or create Call List.  The other type of Folder is specific to a Job. A new Job Folder is created automatically when a new Job Order is opened. To match Candidates to a Job, the user simply files selected Candidates into the appropriate Job Folder. Once a Candidate is filed in a Job Folder, regular group function tools plus the Job Track toolset is enabled for tracking & status reporting on each step of the hiring process. Candidates and Contacts may be sorted in more than one Folder at a time, and Candidates that self-apply are automatically routed into the desired Job Folder.

They have at least a couple of dozen management reports. Accessed from the Tools menu, you can select a report and then there is some ability to customize the report results from there. You can either show the report on screen, or export it to Word or Excel. The Tools menu also has all your setup information, where you are easily able to customize the drop down boxes found throughout the program.

SmartSearch Online integrates directly to MS Outlook for all calendaring and scheduling. When Outlook notifies you of a schedule item originating from SmartSearch, it not only references the appropriate information in the actual schedule record but it contains a “link” which when clicked automatically opens the appropriate record. Another neat feature is the wireless access. Access your data from any net-ready cell phone and/or palm device. You can look up records, review activities and even get maps to your customer’s facilities. For non-Outlook users, the system supports virtually an email and calendar with the optional vCard and vCalendar tool.

With their Career Center, you can fully integrate your database and your website. Candidates visiting your web site can search for jobs and submit their resume. You can also allow them to create an account that allows them to apply for jobs and update their resume when needed. They can also create a job profile that messages them when a job meeting their requirements is entered. Employers also have the ability to log onto your site and enter jobs that they would like for you to work on.

Pricing: SmartSearch Online offers a scalable, moderately priced solution to serve one or two person shops all the way up to their largest multiple-office client, Adecco Technical.  The base system starts at $3,500 one-time set-up that includes initial user training for up to 10 users, and monthly hosting and maintenance cost from $100 per month per user or less depending on the number of users. Larger clients have a choice of add-on modules, additional training packages and customization services at competitive prices.

As always, these reviews are not meant to cover every aspect nor feature of the product or service. SmartSearch Online has much more to offer than can possibly be described in the few paragraphs above. I would encourage anyone looking for their next ATS solution to give SmartSearch Online a look. I want to thank Sylvia Dahlby, National Account Manager for her help with this article. Anyone with any questions or comments can reach Sylvia via voice at 480-502-4513 or via email at sylvia@aps2k.com. You can also get more information at the SmartSearch Online website by visiting www.smartsearchonline.com.

CareerWoman.com

I recently received an email announcing discounted job postings from this site. They call themselves the “National Leader in Women’s e-Recruiting.” I have not used nor do I know much about this service but for those with any interest they claim to have 100’s of women-friendly employers, 1000’s of women job seekers and are also a portal for women’s employment related news and information. They have a special on 60-day job postings for $199 down from $249 regular price. Check out their website at www.careerwomen.com.

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 resumes. 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, 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.

Mark E. Berger, C.P.C., AIRS CIR has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm and 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 you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.

JobCast by ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo, a name you have seen in this column before. This venerable service is not unique but certainly the “Cadillac” of their industry. ZoomInfo, for those who don’t know, is a search engine that helps you discover people, companies and relationships by searching their own, proprietary database full of over 30 million A+ contacts and 2 ½ million companies culled from web sites, press releases, electronic news services and SEC filings, then summarizes the information into a comprehensive format. Having said all that, this review is not on the flagship ZoomInfo service, but for a new add-on service just announced this year, JobCast.

JobCast does what the competitors don’t do; it allows any recruiter who has a JobCast subscription to easily contact, in a very professional manner, the individuals that come up on the search.

JobCast starts with a Job Requisition. This is a simple form used to enter in some very basic information about the job for which you are recruiting. Once you enter your job requisition, you run the ZoomInfo search in the normal manner by entering the search criteria. As always, you are presented with a list of matches. You then have the opportunity to cull this list of contacts. Hovering your mouse over the contact name offers a quick snapshot or you can click on the link for more detailed information. You check a box next to each contact name you would like to message and then click a link to add these people to your email campaign.

The next steps are the meat of this service. Once you have selected the email campaign recipients, you click a button to add them to the campaign that brings you to the Email Campaign page. From there you are able to compose the email message you are going to send your potential candidates. A default subject line is offered that you are able to modify. Choose your greeting. A space to compose your actual message is available with sample messages also available. Then choose your closing. There is also another space in which to put some information on your recruiting assignment. Once that form is filled out you review your message, then click the Send Now button to begin your campaign.

Once sent, you are able to track your campaign success, or lack thereof. JobCast keeps track of who opens your message, who replies, who forwards it, and denotes. On the test campaign that I used, there were approximately 40 recipients. Those marked “hot” were ones that had actually applied for the position, with a link to their resumes and/or cover letters nearby. Others were marked “direct reply” meaning they had applied to you outside of the JobCast program. Those marked “warm” were not interested in the position sent them but indicated they may be interested in others down the road. Also noted were those that clicked the “apply now” button but did not complete the form, or those who clicked a link in the email but did not take any action, possibly indicating a phone call is needed to reel them in. You are also told of recipients who forwarded the opportunity to another recipient. Last, but certainly not least, are a list of those who chose to “opt out” and not receive emails from you in the future.

Speaking of opting out … JobCast takes care to keep you in line as it relates to spam issues. Technically, anytime you send out bulk, unsolicited email, it is spam but if you take a couple of simple precautions you are safe. One is that you provide an opt out ability, which they do. JobCast keeps a list of those that have opted out and makes sure that they do not get emails from you in the future as long as you are using the JobCast software. Another issue that helps is to make sure you use a subject line that is not misleading in any way. They provide a default subject line for your emails, which you are free to modify but, if you do, make sure it is not misleading in any way.

Overall, this is a wonderful add-on to their outstanding passive candidate search service. It is one thing to be able to search a database and locate a suitable target candidate, but another to contact them and turn them into a real candidate. JobCast makes this process much simpler by providing the seamless and very simple process.

At this time the JobCast service is only available for users of the ZoomInfo service. Anyone interested in more information about JobCast or ZoomInfo should contact Lee Byrne via voice at 781.693.7500 or via email at byrne@zoominfo.com. You can also visit the ZoomInfo website at www.zoominfo.com/recruiting.

TALENThire.com

I am happy to write about this service for the Fordyce subscribers, as I believe it may be of some benefit to some of you, especially the smaller firms. I also want to state I have used this service personally with some success. TALENThire.com is an ASP that, through a private B2B network, puts employers together with recruiters. They contract with many companies, large and small, to place the assignments on their network, along with whatever fee they feel the placement service is worth to them for that type of person. Recruiters are then free to submit candidates to those assignments through their web-based system. Although candidates are submitted through TALENThire.com, the recruiters are able to deal directly with the client companies for interviews and offers. The fees posted by the client companies are typically not in the 25-30% range but often approaches 20%. But keep in mind, they do all the marketing for you. An agency-to-agency split of a 25% fee only garners you 12.5% of the fee.

Many of these clients are A+ employers including Motorola, America Online, Kraft Foods, Giant Foods, Barclays, and a host of other firms you may or may not have even heard of. Once the candidate is submitted, the client company contacts you directly for further information, interview assistance or any other issues that arise. No black hole here … clients are obliged to give you some type of feedback on your submissions, usually with a week or two but often sooner.

TALENThire.com’s revenue is derived from membership fees from recruiters and a portion of the placement fee. Recruiters can either pay a very reasonable monthly rate plus a 10% commission or a straight 25% commission if no monthly fee is paid. There are currently over 100 open positions on the site, with over $1.5M in fees – the average fee is $15K.

For more information on this service you can visit the TALENThire.com website at www.TALENThire.com or you can contact Jeremy Harrison, Agent Relationship Manager, via voice at (770) 989-7314 or via email at jharrison@TALENThire.com.

OnrecEXPO2006

Don’t miss this. They are calling it the “Global Summit for Online Recruitment.” Onrec.com, the UK-based online recruitment magazine is sponsoring a two-day conference offering a great mix of leading online recruitment experts and commentators, along with some of the most popular industry suppliers. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about the growth and development of this industry and the adoption and implementation of technologies in the USA. Discussion groups will follow the speakers allowing the audience to participate in this conference.

As the new “War for Talent” gains momentum, recruitment is again becoming a huge issue. The search for talent is borderless and global in nature. There are best practices out there to learn and profit from, and online recruiting is changing very quickly.

Mark your calendar for September 12th and 13th in Chicago. For more information about this event, including speakers and fees, visit www.onrec.com/conferences/120906/attendees.html.

RESUMate Update

RESUMate, a simple, easy-to-use ATS we have reviewed in this column at least a couple times over the years has announced the inclusion of a new daily planner for their 2006 edition. With one click you can view all of your active jobs, showing key dates and facts; the active candidates on those jobs, including interview dates; planned callbacks and other items in your personal schedule; planned marketing calls; and planned recruiting calls. This information is presented in a calendar view, so that you can see your marketing or recruiting plan for the next 30 days.

RESUMate remains one of the most economical recruiter databases on the market with a retail price for the 2006 edition of $795. Those seeking an inexpensive and simple solution to applicant tracking can visit the RESUMate website at www.resumate.com for more information or contact Chuck Schaldenbrand via email at chuck@resumate.com or via voice at 1-800-530-9310 Ext. 202.

Tip – Salary Research

There are many occasions when a recruiter might want to do a bit of research on salaries. Maybe your client is low-balling your candidate. Maybe your candidate needs a little push in the right directions. If a situation arises in the future when having appropriate salary information will help you close a deal, Salary.com (www.salary.com) is a good site to bookmark. You enter a title and a zip code and it offers a very basic range for a particular skill set, which is user selectable, in a given geographic area. For a fee they will sell you a more comprehensive report.

Homefair.com (www.homefair.com) offers a salary calculator based on cost-of-living indexes that allow you to see what a person would have to make when moving to a higher or lower cost-of-living are to maintain their standard of living. A person in the St. Louis area making 50k would need to make 129k in La Jolla, CA just to stay even. SalaryExpert.com (www.salaryexpert.com) offers a free basic salary calculator based on the review of over 10,000 jobs.

Next time you need to sound like an expert on candidate compensation, visit one of these sites. All the services mentioned offer some type of free basic service with more professional level services available for a fee.

Mark E. Berger, C.P.C., AIRS CIR has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm and 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 you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.