Are you using Twitter? If so, check out Summize. Summize is a great site or should I say search engine that specifically searches across all conversations out on Twitter. Summize angles itself as “Conversational Search” among other search engines online.
Summize offers advanced search options as well as search operators to help you set-up quality searches. With these in mind, this search engine opens up the possibility to tap into the reportedly 12M+ people who have adopted Twitter and use it daily. Recruiters and Sourcers can now search by key terms such as titles: “Software Engineer”, company names: “Microsoft” and phrases such as: “new job”.
Let me show you Summize in action. Recruiters and Sourcers are always looking for active and available talent currently in the marketplace. Using Summize, I run a search on the key phrase “my resume” and tons of results come up:
From there, you can join in on a discussion or directly send a message to that user. Using Twitter, there are several ways to reach out to people. Check out my Twitter video for a further rundown on Twitter and it’s benefits to Recruiters and Sourcers.
Here is a follow up video to a post from last week on 11 Sourcing Alternatives to Google. This video gives a very short demo overview on‚ Powerlabs, which is a new search engine set to debut in 2008 and is based on “natural language” search technology. Recruiters and Internet Sourcers will see the potential value in using this search engine moving forward.
*If you would like full screen, please hit the small box on the lower right hand corner of the media player.
Google Maps is a very useful tool for Recruiters and Internet Sourcers in many ways. Let me explain.
Let’s say you are sourcing in a new area geographically, and are unsure of the surrounding cities and towns. You find a perfect candidate while sourcing, and you want to determine if this candidate is within a commutable range of the client site. In this example screen shot below, I am trying to find out if Stamford, CT. (where‚ a perfect candidate lives) is closeby to Hartford, CT. (where‚ the client is).‚ You can see it shows that it is 1hr. 30 min. away, most likely too far for the candidate. By using Google Maps, I can also see what‚ surrounding areas‚ ARE within a reasonable commutable distance, and I will take note in future searches.
Another example is say you are searching for businesses to source from a city you have not worked in before. Google Maps will do a search and show you where businesses are located nearby, along with contact information and links to their websites. In this example below, I searched for financial companies located near Hartford, CT.
Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform
Not finding what you are looking for on the web using the major search engines such as Google? In this short video, I briefly outline 11 other search engines to use other than the top three which are Google, Yahoo and MSN Live (in that order).
*For full screen, please hit the square button in the bottom right hand corner of the media player.
FlipDog‚ is a search engine‚ powered by Monster.‚ It doesn’t offer too many bells and whistles for both employers and job seekers, but‚ to its benefit, is very easy to use. Job seekers can simply enter keywords or a U.S. State to begin a search, or click on any of the “most popular” links to get started. From there, a job seeker can drill down through more specific criteria such as cities, regions, job categories and the like. Because FlipDog is searching the Monster database, there are plenty of listings to find and apply to, but only come from Monster and nowhere else.
Why use FlipDog at all? Once you decide to apply to a job listing, the site links out to Monster for that process. FlipDog seems to exist purely for the utility of providing a listing and then flipping - pun, I’m guessing, intended - the job seeker over to Monster. In the end it’s hard to understand why one wouldn’t skip the whole thing and go right to Monster. At FlipDog there is no ability to create a profile, save job searches, subscribe to an RSS feed, or perform any of the higher-level functionality that users have come to expect.
For recruiters, Flipdog can be used to find competitive intelligence. For example, if you are searching for candidates skilled in say Java technologies in the Washington, DC area, Flipdog will allow you to use boolean search strings (AND, OR, NOT) based on key words. From there, you can see which companies and competitors of yours are seeking the same type of resources. This will give you a very solid indication that they already have that type of talent in-house, and you can focus your sourcing strategies on recruiting their internal employees.‚ See the example below:
Are you looking for another way to find passive candidates? As a recruiter, who isn’t? Passive-Candidates.com does just that for you. This site is free for recruiters to find resumes that have been posted on the web, usually as personal web pages. The site looks easy to use, and well, it is! As the website says, it’s “The search engine that grows each time it’s searched”.
For every one resume you share with the site, you will get thirty back for free. Here’s how: you do have to do a little work in order to get the thirty free resumes as stated (or less depending on the search results). The site requires you to input the link to a resume that you have found on the Internet (note that your link will be rejected if it is already in their search engine results). If you are doing a search on Google or Yahoo for resumes and come across links, save‚ some results and load‚ them up on Passive-Candidates.com. The resumes that this site gives you in return are ones that have been entered by other recruiters who have used the site before.
‚
This site represents a great way to stumble upon a personal web page of a person who may have posted their resume a few years back and who isn’t actively job searching and putting their resume on job boards for others to find. Even though you may receive some duplicate or outdated‚ resumes, finding passive candidates in this industry is one of the best ways to recruit. The site also respresents a great way to build up a large personal candidate database for free.
Indeed is a search engine exclusively dedicated to jobs. Per their website, Indeed‚ ”gives job seekers free access to millions of employment opportunities from thousands of websites, including all the job listings from major job boards, newspapers, associations and company career pages”.
Indeed represents another option for recruiters‚ to‚ advertise their open positions instead of ponying-up for a package of job slots with say Monster. In fact, if done right, it could be pretty cost-effective too. Indeed offers a performance-based model like “Google” where you only pay when targeted job-seekers click on the ads that are relevant to what they’ve searched for.‚ They claim to get over 4 million unique visitors to the site each month.
So for an example, you could place an ad for a Systems Administrator position based in San Francisco, California with Linux, SNMP and other key skills. You would place the‚ ad on Indeed with a link back to‚ your companies career site or perhaps another location on the web where it is placed, and each time a user finds your job, you are charged per click. See the example screen shot:
There are great benefits to both recruiters and job seekers. Recruiters get a targeted audience for their open‚ positions (based on defined key words, locations and more).‚ Job Seekers find jobs that match their exact search criteria (including key words, locations and more). In addition, Job Seekers can save‚ their searches on the site and have jobs delivered to‚ them by email alerts,‚ RSS feed readers and other means. The RSS feed directly to candidates is great because they simply set-up their search criteria and when a job matches it is sent directly to them without having to revisit the Indeed website.
While Internet Explorer is the most widely used web browser on the planet and has the lions share of the market at this point at some 60-70%, Firefox (at close to 15% by some accounts) is in my opinion the best browser. For Recruiters and especially Internet Sourcers and Researchers, Firefox can be used to grab as many resumes as you can take. Think millions if you are ambitious enough!
Firefox has what they call “add-ons” that you can attach to the browser to make searching, bookmarking and other tasks very easy. One add-on in particular I want to show you is called DownThemAll. Let’s say for instance you were doing some boolean searching for resumes using Firefox. Let’s also say that your search string pulls up thousands of resumes. DownThemAll makes it possible to download all items from your search with a few quick clicks. Here is a video example:
*If you want “full screen” hit the square button in the bottom right corner of the video toolbar.
Exalead is, per their website, ”a global provider of software designed to simplify all aspects of information search and retrieval for organizations of all sizes.” Exaled has been around since 2000, and provides recruiters and sourcers some nice features for searching resumes out on the Internet. Exalead offers the ability to search text, images and video specifically.
For an example, I continued with my “technical recruiting” theme from my earlier postings, and did a search for resumes with the key word “Java” in them and focused in on resumes from California. My search string was: intitle:resume java california. Exalead pulled up 5,248 search results, most of them resumes. The neat part of Exalead is the screen shot preview to the left of each search result, which let’s you peer into the site very quickly and find out if it really is a resume or worth a click through. See the example below:
Comment