Skype is per their site a “little piece of software that makes communicating with people around the world fun and easy.” I think of Skype as a great tool that downloads directly onto your computer and allows you instant access to a large database of over 12 million people. Skype essentially lets you make phone calls as well as video calls from one Skype user to another Skype user for free. If you want to make calls to someone outside of Skype, the rates are very low (but I’m not trying to pitch a phone service here). I just joined in on the whole “Skype Revolution” where alot of people are actually ditching their land lines, and have found that it is a great place for recruiters and sourcers to find passive candidates.

I remember last year Amybeth Hale put together a great post on “Skype Searching” and how to run searches out on Skype. Please check out her blog post for more. I think her article hits all the key points and shows step-by-step how recruiting can be done with Skype, and all for free.

VideoJug is per their site “the world’s most comprehensive library of free factual video content online”. The site is basically a competitor to YouTube, but is geared specifically toward‚ ”How To” and “Ask The Expert” videos and content. After visiting the site, I discovered that there are several ways to uncover and source potential candidates and job seekers. Let me show you what I mean:

First I click “Technology” in the top toolbar.

Next, I click on “Computers” half way down the page on the left hand side.

I then click the first video titled “Computer Basics” under Hardware SOS.

Once the video starts, I note two things. First, I see the name, title and company are listed for the “expert” who has developed the video. Second, there is a “Meet the Expert” link at the top.

When clicking on “Meet the Expert”, I discover more information about this potential passive candidate, including details about his job duties, technical skills and work location. His current company is listed as well. All of this information gives me plenty of leads to go on to determine if he may be a fit for one of my open positions, and how to track him down if needed.

Another avenue to pursue on VideoJug‚ is to utilize the search feature at the top of the site. This‚ will allow you to locate videos based on key words and important skills sets.‚ 

One final way to take advantage of VideoJug is to ask a question in the Discussion Forum‚ and open dialog with experts and potential job seekers.

A new trend in recruiting that is becoming very popular is Podcasting, or as some‚ call it “Jobcasting”. Jobcasting is a way to advertise your jobs through a fast growing medium and also a way to build up your employment or company brand. Recruiters and Sourcers are always looking for new avenues to promote their job openings, and with‚ ITG Group‚ predicting that almost 60 million people will listen to podcasts by 2010, this should be grabbing the attention of all in the recruiting field.

Jobs in Pods is a great site that is geared toward this fast emerging‚ trend of using podcasts in recruiting.

Jobs in Pods‚ allows employers to record audio descriptions of their current job openings,‚ interviews with managers or employees, and provide overviews of their companys.‚ In addition, employers get to display a blog post out on the site with relevant links to the job and their company. The site offers ways for employers to categorize their jobs and provides RSS feeds for job seekers and interested parties. Podcasts are distributed to Podcast sites, RSS feeds, the Blogosphere and the website of your company.

A few directories to check out on Podcasting include‚ Podcast.com, Podcastalley, Podcast.net, Podseek and Podcastdirectory. Microsoft is a great example of a Fortune 100 company implementing podcasting into their recruiting efforts. Check out their‚ JobsBlog for more details.

If you recruit or source, chances are you work with an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) that is filled with candidates and potential gold for your open positions. Whether you use Taleo, Peopleclick, Sendouts or the like, they offer search capabilities to delve way back to candidates who applied years ago when they were active candidates. The nice part about having their resume currently, is that they are now a potential active or passive job seeker. Today it seems to be a revolving door world for employees,‚ who look for new job opportunities every few years, if not sooner. Next time you run searches in your ATS for candidates and go back several years, try using some of the following tools to run campaigns to them…and see the many ways you can get their attention:

Mobile Storm is a digital marketing company that provides services to both small and medium businesses as well as offering enterprise solutions. Specifically they provide robust options for companies including email, sms/texting, voice and fax campaigns for your company.‚ These‚ offerings‚ allow you to do large campaigns to targeted audiences (i.e. candidates in‚ your database regarding open positions in your company),‚ free up your time‚ from pointing, clicking and choosing among each individual resume in your database (not to mention the time to reach out to‚ each one‚ individually),‚ help spread the word about your openings and your company (creating a viral marketing effect), and turn-up‚ active and passive job seekers from your ATS.‚ Fairly cost-effective too.

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Emma is an “email marketing and communications service” that essentially let’s users create custom email newsletters and campaigns. Emma offers self-service options for companies of all sizes. Essentially you can create templates or get help in creating custom email templates to run very polished and unique looking emails. Emma is set-up for companies to run large campaigns to specific audiences - and gives recruiters and sourcers a way to reach out to candidates with more of a personal touch not found in standard text emails. This service has full campaign management, tracking every email out the door with response rates. The pricing seems affordable as well.

Here is an example template of how United Way is promoting their message through Emma…

Other options in the “campaign” marketplace include: Constant Contact,‚ Campaign Monitor, PopularMedia, StrongMail, EmailLabs, iContact, eCampaign and a slew of many more.‚ If you run a search online, you will honestly get‚ a headache with all the options. I think that the above selections have the right options and price points for most size organizations. Let me know your thoughts…

An Instant Message (IM) service called‚ meebo really opens the door to new possibilities in recruiting and sourcing candidates. Instant Message services have been around for years enabling friends, family and co-workers to stay in touch while online. Meebo differentiates itself by pulling all IM services into one place, such as AIM, Yahoo and MSN, in‚ addition to adding a community, blog and chat rooms (called meebo rooms)‚ and products.

One product in particular, called meebo me, is “designed for anyone with a home on the web. If you’ve got a web page where you’d like to communicate with your visitors, meebo me allows you to see the people who are visiting your web page and chat with them.”‚ Examples include Wordpress or Blogger (blogs), social networks like MySpace and Friendster, Salesforce.com, and any other web page you can control.

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Think of the possibilities for recruiters and sourcers‚ here. You post open positions on sites where you have a profile, and add-in meebo me, which gives visitors to your page more ways to reach out to you. Instant Message is‚ a fairly “non-threatening” way for someone to reach out, and not have to get into a full discussion at the same time. Instant Message gives potential candidates an easy way to reach out for a first step and test the waters while hunting for a new job, not to mention handy while someone is at work! Once a Meebo account is created, you can also advertise your Meebo account in other areas like your email signature (Outlook for example), and other places like LinkedIn.

Now about those other features…a quick search in meebo rooms for “programming” pulls up several seperate chat rooms to choose from. Most were empty when I checked, but offer a way to leave your questions‚ for others to answer as well as leaving links, such as‚ a job opening.

Also, meebo has a community forum to communicate and search for other meebo users. Some users in their “directory” list their occupation and several ways to contact them outside of meebo. See below:

Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform

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

eQuest is a different kind of online tool for human resource professionals. There are no job listings there; no quick or advanced search involving career criteria such as job description, location or desired minimum salary; you won’t find e-newsletter sign-ups or message board forums there. In fact, eQuest has virtually none of the kinds of functionality that one tends to see at the most popular job board sites.

What it has, however, is the ability to use all of the other job board sites to your advantage.

Essentially what eQuest offers is the ability for human resource departments and recruitment professionals to post their company’s available job listings to multiple online job boards all at once, thereby eliminating the need to visit multiple sites re-enter information multiple times and pay multiple vendors for essentially the same service. According to the site, eQuest manages the flow of job-posting transactions to more than 1,000 unique job boards and reaches more than 200 countries and territories worldwide daily.

And eQuest offers additional tools besides simply posting your company’s job listings on multiple sites. eQuest will also track those sites for you, providing detailed analytics in terms of where candidates are finding your listings, where they’re clicking when they find them, and which job sites are working best to bring you serious, qualified job candidates.

Ultimately, eQuest provides a fairly specialized service for a specific clientele; but it’s simple to see how a large corporation with many open job assignments at any given time would be able to realize savings of time and money by taking advantage of eQuest’s services.

Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform

Another alternative to reaching candidates today, beyond phone, email and in-person meetings is text messaging. Most resumes today give multiple ways to contact candidates, along with providing cell phone numbers. The vast majority of cell phones today are advanced and have text messaging capabilites - so why not take advantage as a recruiter or sourcer?

I found a site I liked recently called Joopz, where you can set-up an account for free and send and receive text messages all online at no cost. The interface is very easy to use and displays all messages outgoing and incoming, along with other nice features. Here is an example of a recent outgoing test text for this post:

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You get notified online when you get‚ a reply:

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Texting affords recruiters and sourcers a great way to further reach out and communicate with potential job seekers and candidates. There are links to other free text messaging services online here.

Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform

DataFrenzy uses automated technology to provide job distribution and resume management for recruiters and human resource departments to effectively manage Internet employment advertising from one location. Essentially how this translates is that the site supplies the means for recruiters to search job listings from many well-known and less well-known career sites across the Internet, and then automatically matches up client resumes to those aggregated job offers.

For recruiters, this also means that DataFrenzy provides “immediate internal access to candidates within 60 seconds of the candidate submission from any job board.” On the site’s page in which they list their online partners, a‚  colorful mosaic of clickable job site logos is a veritable “who’s who” of the Internet career listing world - including the biggies like Monster and CareerBuilder as well as the niche sites like nursejobshop.com and LatPro.com.

The site offers several intriguing recruitment tools including RAM (Resume Aggregate Manager), which searches resume databases, aggregates the results, then displays the most qualified resumes at the top of a list. This functionality also keeps track of candidates previously contacted, resumes already reviewed, and more.

DataFrenzy provides a lot of introductory information about its services, but recruiters have to register and start paying before most of the site’s functionality is unlocked. As a non-registered job seeker, you’re able to search and review job listings on the site, but not apply to them without logging in.

Overall, DataFrenzy offers some decent resources for recruiters and job seekers, but if your goal is to find a site offering a free and un-logged-in set of career tools, this is not an ideal destination.

Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform

With such a competitive job market right now, it’s pays to be creative. One solution I have used with success to reach out to job seekers is to use video emails. A company called Accelstream offers solutions for inserting video messages in your emails - and I have found that they do get a better rate of return (response from candidates) than the average “text only” emails. With a camera, record a message‚ describing your open job opportunity and why the candidate‚ would benefit from working for your company, load it up to Accelstream and add the video to your email.‚ It’s pretty straightforward to use and easy to get going. It shows great initiative on your end to the candidate, and the subscription services Accelstream offers‚ are fairly cost-effective.

This is what will show in emails that you send out:

A video screen pops up from there when you click on the video frames in the email. The video starts playing automatically. The screen is customizable - where you can insert your company logo, pictures, text and contact information.‚ 

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There‚ are a few video examples on the Accelstream site to get a feel for what they offer. Try a campaign‚ for one job opening you have and see what kind of results you get. ‚