Meetup.com is a site that organizes groups worldwide into one area. Meetup.com is a free site to either find and join groups on a wide range of topics from technology to sports to politics and more, or a site designed for starting your own group and promoting your own causes. The site has alot of search functionality, where you can‚ find “meetups” by topic, city or group, or find people and connect with them directly. There are a number of ways to communicate with groups and organizers of groups within the site as well. If you become a member of a group, you will get invited to all the local events, where you can attend and network with all the members face-to-face. For recruiters, this is a great way to reach out directly with potential job seekers and get referrals and leads for open positions. Staying active in your local community through groups found on Meetup.com is a great way to promote your company, market job openings‚ and get your name out there as well - all of this being subtle of course.‚ ‚ 

Here is a look at the site in action. Say I want to find groups focused on Information Technology local to Pittsburgh, PA.

I note one group titled DotNext-Pittsburgh and click on it.

I see that this meetup group is for people who like to learn new skills in the technology arena. This group has 4 ways listed where a member attending the meeting could get involved. For example: you could introduce‚ your company’s product or service (making it relevant to the group) and make an impression on why your company would be a great place to work.

I continue further, and click through on the organizer of the group and note that there are a few ways to reach out to him without attending the meetup. Say for instance the group really frowns on recruiter attending. So I may send the organizer my contact information and see if I can share my company and openings with him and the group at the next meeting. It sure doesn’t hurt.

Squidoo is a site where “everyone is an expert on something”.‚ The site‚ hosts thousands of free “lenses” which are a one-page take, opinion, or expert look at a particular topic. These lenses are a way for users of the site to share expertise, teach people, establish an identity, build brand recognition, highlight websites and a variety of other creative reasons.

The site is set-up with the ability to search a particular topic and communicate with the user of‚ a page or “lensmaster” as the site calls them. This makes the site especially useful for recruiters and sourcers as they can either search the Squidoo site for people with expertise in a particular skill set and reach out to them, or set-up their own lens on their company or a particular topic and drive traffic to their open positions or website. I found many lenses on the site to give links directly to open positions they are currently recruiting for. This ultimately will lead to more candidates and more leads for open positions. In addition, The site acts as a medium for recruiters to really get the word out about their company and their expertise. The site currently has 117,641 members each with their own lens.

Here is an example lens set-up for job openings:

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A great lens to start out with is the guide to creating a successful Squidoo. This will give you ideas on how to effectively use the site moving forward.

Massively robust, immersive and philosophical, idealist - Action Without Borders is a wildly sprawling hybrid site. Part non-profit job-seeking; part philanthropic; part social network and part community outreach, it’s quite an impressive destination.‚ 

Employers, Recruiters and Job Seekers alike can find a lot to like at WorkGiant, a website that practices “Performance Based Recruiting”. More on that in a moment.

For Job Seekers, WorkGiant offers the usual capabilities to create an online profile, post a resume, and find jobs based on searchable criteria. WorkGiant offers a unique incentive in its referral program. Job Seekers who have recommended WorkGiant to their friends can pick up anywhere from $50 to $200 on every referral hired by a WorkGiant employer - and the program costs job seekers nothing to join.

WorkGiant offers “Performance Based Recruiting” to employers who join the service. What this means is that, rather than charging an up-front fee for listing open positions and searching resumes, WorkGiant allows employers to list all of their available employment positions for free, with no expiration dates, and the site only charges a fee when an employer’s position has been filled (the fee works out to 1 percent of that position’s annual salary).

WorkGiant also provides:

• The ability for Job Seekers to control their private information
• Complete job listings to job seekers instead of just a select few
• The “Recycled Candidate Program” where employers and recruiters can recycle surplus candidates
• Precision Match Technology to ensure accurate database searches to match job openings.

WorkGiant is a decent site and even features a live support interface, but the site’s usability could stand some updating. Some page load times are a bit on the long side, and navigating through the site’s pages can be a bit confusing. When you’ve reached the “Learn More” page for employers or job seekers, a video Flash presentation plays automatically with no ability to pause, turn the sound off, or avoid loading the show each time you visit the page. Another site worth checking out in this space is BountyJobs, which I covered in a post earlier this month.

The Software Contractors’ Guild website is a place for “career contractors”, as we call them in this business, to come to post their resumes and credentials for prospective employers.‚ It’s also a great way for recruiters to find highly experienced consultants.‚ 

This site gives recruiters the ability to post open contract software positions and search for contractors numerous ways - by keyword, location, preferred working location, name, et cetera.‚ Another way to search is by using the “Search by Skill Set” function, which breaks down almost every technical skill set that you could ever think of.‚ This website is especially helpful when you are searching for hard-to-find skill sets that aren’t as prevalent on major job boards.‚ 

The screen shot below shows an example of the results that come up while doing a skill set search on SAP FI/CO contractors.‚ Next to each contractor name, the site shows you whether or not the contractor is currently available (if they regularly update their profile), and where they are willing to work.‚ This site is free for employers and recruiters, and the contractors post their contact information in their profile so they can be contacted directly.‚ 

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Gmane (pronouned mane) is a mailing list archive established in 2002 for‚ thousands of‚ technical groups worldwide. Gmane‚ offers a way where mailing lists are‚ funneled into news groups. No messages ever expire. All messages have the ability to be searched across by key words, groups, people and dates‚ (boolean search capabilities included). Members as well as outsiders can post to‚ most mailing lists without being a member, and can read all information posted to‚ the‚ various‚ groups. There are groups here that cover a wide range of topics, but the overwhelming majority are technical lists dealing with everything from Linux to Java to .NET technologies. The site‚ states that they are‚ ”heavily dominated by computer-related mailing lists, which reflects the interests of the user base.” The site currently has 9,984 lists with over 60 million plus messages archived.

Gmane has great potential for the recruiting community.‚ Everything archived‚ has‚ some form of user contact information listed per article, some with just email, while others have full names and companies they work for. It’s a safe bet that someone giving a detailed answer on Java code must have some experience with Java. Wouldn’t this be someone you may want to reach out to‚ for your job openings?‚ Another solid assumption would be that if one user from a certain company identified on Gmane is using Java, that other users‚ at this company‚ are as well. That company would‚ represent a good lead to pursue further.‚ This especially comes in handy when you are identifying a very obscure or niche skill set not found in many places. In addition,‚ I saw several job postings in mailing lists - so there is always the option to introduce yourself and your open positions by posting to a certain list.

The‚ screen shot‚ below shows a quick search for J2EE (a Java based skill set). Gmane searched across roughly 50 million emails from various groups and pulled up close to 184,000 articles‚ where J2EE was being discussed among users of the site. You can see by the arrow that email contact details identify each user.

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The one downside I see from Gmane is that you can’t identify very easily where people on mailing lists are from geographically. So if you are trying to locate technical talent in Java from say New York, you may have to take additional steps in your search, such as looking up the company name a user works for, or “googling” a users name to see information on where they may live. A previous post on Pipl may help here.

Have you checked out BountyJobs yet? BountyJobs is a website where “employers can find talent cost effectively, faster, and more efficiently while recruiters can make more placements, earn more money, and become more respected.” BountyJobs is set-up to act as the middleman between employers and recruiters on candidate placements, acting as the third party.

There is value from both sides (employer and recruiter side) to using the site. Employers can post their hard-to-fill positions there and not have to go through the burden of working with 3rd party consulting firms or vendors, while getting the benefit of having several recruiters working on a requirement at a time. Recruiters can simply decide where they would like to be active and submit their candidates, with no obligations. There are alot of independent recruiters on the site, but I can see where recruiters already working for another firm would want to use the site. Say for instance they have several sharp Java Developers in their active pipeline in Washington, DC, but their current employer does not have any open positions for Java skill sets, or anything for Java in the DC area. The perfect scenario would be to see if there are any relevant openings for these Java folks out on BountyJobs, and “get engaged” on that particular requirement as BountyJobs puts it. There are very recognizeable companies already using the site including Freddie Mac, Toys R Us, State Farm Insurance, M&T Bank and Deloitte to name a few I saw today. Recruiters are set-up on 1099 terms if they place a candidate with an employer. There are nice submission features for candidates and communicating with the employers, as well as searching for open positions based on job categories, key words, industries and regions. All positions are full time and recruiters receive a set percentage of each placement. Let me know your thoughts and if you have had any successes there. Below is a screen shot:

I’m still trying to “get” Twitter, but realize there is potential here for recruiters and sourcers. I signed up for an account a few weeks back, and have been trying to use as a sourcing tool to find new candidates for various positions.

Twitter asks the question “What are you doing?” As a user of Twitter, you create a short profile of yourself, and update the Twitter community with what you are doing, whether it be sourcing for candidates on your computer, making dinner or away on vacation. People who use Twitter seem to be very addicted and make frequent posts that give you insight into their lives and who they are. There is an option to “follow” people on Twitter where you get daily feeds of there posts.

Getting back to recruiting, there is a search feature in Twitter that is useful for recruiters. The only search functionality is by key words. For an example to show, I ran a simple search using the key word “developer”. I received 1,700+ results from Twitter profiles. The profiles and details listed are limited to short amounts of information, so there is very little to go by, but regardless, there ARE developers here if you are a Technical Recruiter or Sourcer. No profiles I found had any contact information listed or even full names, but did find profiles with links to personal pages and their blogs:

What is your take on Twitter? Am I missing something? I want to be able to utilize the community effectively.