A company called Red 5 Studios got themselves in the news in the summer of 2006 when they put together an extremely creative recruiting campaign to attract top talent for their company. I read the article in The Wall Street Journal at the time and wanted to share with my readers. I learned alot and so can you.
Check out the link here which explains what they did step-by-step.
Experience is a site that links to colleges around the country and enables recruiters and employers to search resume databases and post jobs.‚ In order to use this site, you have to be linked to a school or schools, meaning that they have given you access to their databases of student and alumni resumes.‚
You can search what are called “resume books” for each of the schools you are linked to.‚ Resume books are basically groups of resumes, organized in different ways such as by major or by industry.‚ Whenever you choose a folder, it pulls up a list which includes the name of the student, their GPA, graduation date, and their major.‚ You then have to click on each name to pull up their profile, and on their profile page, you can click to view their resume.‚ You can also email the student directly from their profile page if you are interested in their qualifications.
Another feature of this site is the ability to post jobs for the individual schools you are linked to.‚ These jobs can be accessed through the school’s Career Center, where students can apply and have their resumes sent directly to you.‚ Registering your company with Experience and linking to colleges in your area is a great way to find entry-level candidates.‚ This is also a helpful tool if your company has internships available, since many of the resumes posted are ones of students who have not yet graduated but want to get their foot in the door early.
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:
Jobster is a site designed to connect employers with job seekers. Per their website - they are a “leading innovator in online recruitment technology”. Jobster gives employers many options when using their site - such as posting jobs, searching for candidates, building a talent network, managing email campaigns‚ and promoting their brand.
As with most career websites, their are free and pay plans to choose from. Jobster has a variety of different packages designed to meet most recruiting needs. Jobster has partnerships in place with companies such as‚ Facebook and ZoomInfo to provide a wealth of contacts and additional sourcing data found outside of the Jobster network. Posting jobs gives you the option to pay $25 up front and receive unlimited applicants, or pay nothing upfront, and pay $5 only when a job seeker‚ applies to your posting. There are other ad options and upgrades, such as sending a feed of all your company jobs to be included in their search engine.
The free option lets you create a user profile and search across their network by key words and locations. Each profile can be filled with work history, resumes, personal information, videos‚ and tags.
Here is an example search. I want to find people with sales experience located in Miami, Florida. Please note the arrows in the screenshot. Each profile has what Jobster calls “superstar tags” which are key words a user picks out to best describe themselves. There are ways to refine your search on the right hand side, such as filtering profiles to find only those who are “job hunting”.
An example of a profile I clicked on is here. Alot of profiles have resumes attached to them, and there are ways to reach out to each user by “leaving a note”.‚ Users can get set-up in their system for notifications on notes, candidates, profiles, you name it.
LinkedIn, a professional networking site which I covered in a few previous‚ posts, has a great feature that is worthy of standout attention - LinkedIn Answers.‚ As a member of LinkedIn, users can ask their direct connections and the entire community 10 questions every month on a variety of topics from Technology, Careers, Business, Politics and more.
For recruiters and sourcers, LinkedIn Answers represents a great avenue for finding information. Let me show you an example question I posed recently and some of the responses I received. I‚ asked‚ ”Can you help me identify the top‚ ’International’ job boards/career sites?”‚ I received 55 answers in the 7 days it was posted to the‚ LinkedIn community. Most answers were very direct with links to valuable‚ career sites I was unaware of. Asking questions using LinkedIn not only helps to provide good leads for recruiters and sourcers, but ultimately will help to build your network there.
Slashdot is a site that states they have “news for nerds” and is owned by SourceForge which is a pioneer in the community-generated content space. The site has sections featuring IT, Hardware, Science and Games‚ for example.
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Slashdot has a job board, where users can post open positions and get them cross-posted to Linux.com, Freshmeat, IT Managers Journal and Newsforge, which are sites similar in set-up to Slashdot. The site claims to have a reach of over 9 million developers and IT professionals.
Slashdot users can join for free and submit articles to place on the site for readers to see.‚ For Internet Sourcers, this site is filled with articles‚ for techno-enthusiasts, and represents another‚ way to find leads or potential matches for open technical positions. Like most news sites, there is some digging involved.‚ The articles themselves can give good leads to other technical communities, groups and popular trends among the readers. Users can‚ look into the profiles of those who submit articles on the site and take part in the forum by adding comments. If you want to find out who submitted an article, there are not too many with contact information attached to them. Here is one for an example:
For Internet Sourcers, one way to stay current with ways to find candidates is to search across periodicals. In periodicals, such as magazines and newspapers for example, there are tons of solid leads to pursue. This short video tutorial will walk through 5 sites that are proven to be effective for the recruiting industry.
*If you want full screen, hit the square box in the bottom right hand corner of the video toolbar. Please leave your comments and viewpoints on this video.
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.
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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.
By now the vast majority of the recruiting industry has taken notice of Craigslist. Craigslist originally was a small website set-up for the San Francisco area as a way for the local community to sell items (before eBay became a household name), find local services‚ and advertise available apartments and houses for rent. Job seekers and Recruiters were not frequenting the site. Now, Craigslist dominates what we call the “classifieds” space with a few other online companies nipping at it’s heals. I will talk about others in future posts.
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Craigslist is a very good alternative to the major job boards such as Monster and Careerbuilder in that there are options for posting positions here, and searching across resumes posted‚ to the site‚ as well. Posting is free in most of the‚ cities, with small fees in some of the major cities including NY, Los Angeles and Washington, DC. More than 1.5 million jobs are posted to the site every month. In terms of traffic, the site gets 8 billion page views per month - so you are guaranteed to have alot of people see your postings. I did a quick search in their resumes section and found 75 “Software Developers” in the San Francisco area. Here is a screen shot of the resume searcing capabilities:
Craigslist has expanded well beyond it’s northern California roots to encompass every major city in the U.S. as well as Canada and many other countries overseas. The site covers 450 cities worldwide.‚ I have heard many success stories from using Craigslist as a strong alternative to other career sites that have forced employers’ hands with huge fees.‚
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.
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