When sourcing for new candidates, I find that using multiple sites can yield far greater results than if you used each‚ site seperately. Let me give you an example. When using LinkedIn, the only way you can reach out to candidates‚ in your network is if‚ they are 1st connections (where you can see their email address),‚ through InMail (if you‚ have an upgraded LinkedIn Business account AND if you have some to use),‚ or through Introductions (which any user of LinkedIn knows can‚ be very hit and miss). By using Jigsaw‚ with LinkedIn,‚ you can increase your communication with these candidates. Let me show you:

Once in LinkedIn, find a profile in your search of a candidate you want to contact (an example of mine is below). Let’s say they are not a 1st connection,‚ you‚ don’t have InMail’s to use, you don’t want to use “introductions”, there is no email in the profile (ignore mine please), and you don’t know how to get in touch with them.

Note what company they work for (General Lead in this case) and go into Jigsaw seperately.

Once in Jigsaw, look up the company name‚ of the candidate (General Lead for the example) and get‚ one of the‚ business cards (using their point system which is either free or fee depending on what you use).

From here, you have the email string that is used by that company. You can‚ leverage this knowledge when coming across other candidates in your searches for General Lead. You will know that the email string for this company is (”first initial last name AT generallead.com”).‚ You can bypass the LinkedIn communication features for this company next time you need to. For larger organizations, such as Fortune 500 companies, you may have to get a few Jigsaw business card examples, as they use multiple email strings. For telephone sourcers, you can see the phone string for that company as well.‚ Dial extensions up and down from the last few digits to get to different seats in an office building from there.

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.

In a follow up to a previous post on Jigsaw, here is a video tutorial on how to use their directory effectively and discover over 6 million plus people. The 18 minute video walks through the search functionality of Jigsaw and gives many sourcing and recruiting suggestions.

*If you want “full screen” hit the square button in the bottom right corner of the video toolbar.

See all of the StaffBytes video tutorials here.

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Have you checked out Pipl yet? Pipl is a search engine specifically designed “to retrieve information in real-time from the deep web, and interact with searchable databases and extract facts, contact details and other relevant information from personal profiles, member directories, scientific publications, court records and numerous other deep-web sources.” Sounds a bit technical huh? Easily put - Pipl will find people for you, and give you alot of information on them.

Pipl is useful for the recruiting industry in that it can be used to follow up on a candidates background, previous employment and education, as well as discover new sites to explore for sourcing. Another good reason to use is to follow up on an older resume of a very strong candidate with outdated contact information. This will allow you to possibly identify where they are currently. I ran a search on Bill Gates located in Seattle, Washington, and pulled up links to public records, social network profiles, publications, news articles and alot of other interesting sites. See part of the search below:

Spoke is an online network of over 35 million people. Membership to Spoke gives you the freedom to explore their database and connect with other professionals. 

Much like LinkedIn, Spoke offers both free and pay accounts, where you have to decide which is the best for your recruiting and sourcing needs. Pay accounts essentially get more search results and some easier information to work with and options for contacting people. The free account let’s you know the name of the contact, the company they work for and sometimes their number, if not the main number of their company for starters. No emails are provided, but a good sourcer should be able to figure out the email pattern from there.

Here is a search example below. I used Spoke to search for Software Engineer’s located in California. 6,259 results came up. Give it a try and let me know your thoughts.

Jigsaw is a good site to use to find passive job seekers. The site allows for buying and selling of electronic business cards.

They currently have over 6 million + business card entries in their system. There are both free and pay accounts. I originally signed up for a free account (where you have to put in 25 new contacts each month), but recently moved to a pay account. It’s not too hard to update 25 new contacts each month if you do a heavy amount of recruiting each month and have a good network at your disposal. I have used this site to recruit candidates in every industry and discipline, and it is pretty extensive. The majority of the Fortune 500 is represented here as well as a surprising amount of smaller “under the radar” companies. You may even already be in there - even if you never had a business card to hand out to someone in the past.

Here is a look at there search features:

I will post a video tutorial of this site in the next few days. There are many ways to use Jigsaw and I will outline them in detail. Stay tuned!