With robust content more or less evenly targeted to job seekers and recruitment professionals alike, Medzilla provides employment information, news and discussion forums covering the biotech, pharmaceutical, healthcare and science industries.

When you first arrive on the Medzilla homepage, you’ll notice that the site’s primary navigation is split between “Job Seekers” and “Employers & Recruiters”. Very quickly it’s clear that the site is designed and created first and foremost to appeal to its users’ needs, which of course is always a good thing.

Clicking on the “Job Seekers” tab provides a keyword-based job search, an interface to create an online account and submit a resume, develop a job search agent, access articles and forums and more. For recruitment professionals, the “Employers & Recruiters” navigational tab results in quick access to the site’s resume database, where site visitors can search via keywords or location radius. Employers can, of course, also create an account with which to post available job opportunities.

Medzilla also supplies a helpful means for both recruitment personnel as well as job seekers to search open assignments via company. The site displays about 70 corporate logos, each of which navigates to a job search result page when clicked. To be sure, it’s a great way for job seekers to find available openings at a given company, but recruiters can also discover value here in seeing at a glance what kinds of openings are currently available at a company-wide level. The search results are grouped according to location, which is also very helpful in terms of targeting recruitment opportunities. In terms of strongly serving a niche market, Medzilla more than fits the bill.

Recently, an article was brought to my attention that had been written a few years back.‚ However, it still pertains to the world of recruiting today.‚ The article is called “Heading off the Headhunters“, and it discusses how employers are trying to protect their employees from being pilfered by recruiters.‚ 

Even though this article was written during the “Dot Com” era in 1999, I feel as if IT Recruiters are going through a similar situation now.‚ In a lot of markets, there are fewer candidates readily available, so we are forced to come up with creative methods to find those perfect candidates.‚ If you weren’t already aware of some of the techniques discussed in this article that employers are trying to avoid, now you have learned some new tricks.‚ 

Dialing different desk numbers through a phone directory, paying for hard copies of employee directories, and doing some thorough web searches for employees of specific companies are methods that employers are well aware of.‚ I don’t think any company can really prevent recruiters from getting to their employees, one way or another.‚ A few years ago, I had the VP of HR from a company call me directly and tell me to stop emailing her employees from a directory that I had obtained legally.‚ Ironically, there was a pretty high rate of response from the employees that I did contact, and it was a great way for me to find some passive candidates and get referrals.

I hope you also find this article interesting.‚ As recruiters, we need to continue to come up with ways to find these hard-to-find passive candidates, especially as employers tighten security to keep us out.

With more and more candidates leaving work email addresses in their resumes,‚ I discovered a great sourcing strategy by accident. When sending‚ emails to several candidates in my database earlier this year‚ over the holidays, I was surprised to receive ALOT of leads to pursue.

After sending out emails to candidates, I received the following messages as the “Out of Office AutoReply”:

Example 1:

I will be on personal vacation from‚ July‚ 3 through‚ July 4‚ and will return to the Herndon office on‚ July 5. I will have limited access to email and voicemail. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact —– at (—)— —-.

Example 2:

Thank you for your email. I will be on vacation March‚ 15-19 without access to email. In my abscence, pls contact the following individuals:

—- —– Management Issues, Sarbanes Oxley Testing/General Remediation Issues, IT Audit

—- —– Logging & Monitoring Project, ESM Projects, CobiT Project, Operational Risk

—- —– Scheduling and Administrative Matters

Gets you thinking doesn’t it? In these two emails, I have colleagues and managers of candidates along with direct dial extensions and some titles. You can work the email address patterns from there too. I have tons of these types of emails to go through every time a holiday comes up, whether it be Memorial Day, Thanksgiving or Christmas. Try for yourself and see where it takes you.

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.

In an article I read recently in the Wall Street Journal, I discovered a few great‚ ideas for keeping up with the ever changing online language, and in the process, enhanced my recruiting and sourcing‚ abilities. The article has specific tips when using chat rooms or online communities.‚ Click here for the full article.

Here are some excerpts:

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For years, heavy users of Internet games and chat groups have conversed in their own written language, often indecipherable to outsiders. Now, some of those online words are gaining currency in popular culture — even in spoken form.‚ Online gamers use “pwn” to describe annihilating an opponent, or owning them. The word came from misspelling “own” by gamers typing quickly and striking the letter P instead of the neighboring letter O. Other words substitute symbols or numbers for similar-looking letters, such as the number 3 for the letter E. The language is sometimes called elite speak, or leetspeak, written as l33t 5p34k. The letter A, for example, can have several replacements, including 4, /\, @ , /-\, ^, and aye. As the Internet becomes more prevalent, leetspeak, including acronyms that used to appear only in text messages like “LOL” for laughing out loud, is finding a voice.

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Some suggest such verbal creations are nothing new and are integral to how language evolves. Gail Kern Paster, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has reason to believe that a certain English poet and playwright would cheer the latest linguistic leap. Just as the rise of the printed word and the theater spurred many new expressions during Shakespeare’s time, the computer revolution, she notes, has necessitated its own vocabulary — like “logging in” and “Web site.”

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A couple of years ago, Katherine Blashki, a professor of new media studies, didn’t understand some of the words used by her students at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Her subsequent, semester-long research on the subject found their use of leetspeak stemmed partly from wanting to find faster ways to express themselves online. As with other forms of jargon, it also enhanced a sense of belonging to a community, she says.

Source: The Wall Street Journal Online‚ 

If you are a technical recruiter seeking out IT professionals, ITtoolbox is the place to go.‚ ITtoolbox is a website similar to MySpace or LinkedIn but is specifically catered to those in the IT industry.‚ There are 1.2 million people who are members, and there are four main areas to the site: Blogs, Groups, Wiki, and Peers. Below, I will give some information on each area. First, before you start jump into the site, you can sign up and build your own profile on the site, including a photo if you’d like.‚ After you’re signed up, you are able to interact in all of the areas of the website.

Blogs - The blogs on this site relate to every IT topic that you can imagine.‚ You can search blogs by topic, and you can also sort them by factors like most recent and most popular.‚ If you feel like you have something to share with the ITtoolbox community, you too can start your own blog on the site.‚ 

Groups - The groups section is a place where members can go to ask questions and receive advice from other members. The groups are also sorted by topic.‚ If you join one of these groups, you can interact with the other members of it to discuss things related to a particular technical specialty.‚ I would say that this area has the same idea as Yahoo!‚ Groups and Google Groups.

Wiki - Due to the popularity of Wikipedia, almost everyone is now familiar with the term Wiki.‚ ITtoolbox has its own Wiki for their members to contribute to.‚ It works the same way as Wikipedia, where users of the site can write and edit entries for specific topics if they have knowledge of the topic (and hopefully it’s accurate information!).‚ In this area, you can find answers to many of your simple and complex questions related to the IT industry and technology.

Peers - Since you just built your ITtoolbox profile, you are now able to connect with your peers on the site.‚ The search functions are similar to those on LinkedIn: you can search by someone’s name, employer, expertise/skills, or display name.‚ After you have a profile on the site, you can also do a search for people who have a similar background as yours. You can make connections with your peers on the site, too.‚ 

Navigating this website is a bit confusing for a first time user because there are so many links and different areas to look at, but it seems like it gets much easier to click through once you get the hang of it.‚ Recruiters can use this site to learn more about the technologies that their consultants and employees work with, and it is a good alternative to LinkedIn to connect to those in the IT industry.

As a content-rich destination for web-based resources and information for the life sciences industry, BioSpace includes a vast and varied set of career tools for recruiters as well as job seekers.

The site certainly is a comprehensive resource for job career news and information, but it also provides recruitment professionals with an impressive array of tools to target opportunities in the life sciences segment. Clicking the site’s Career Fairs tab at the top of the page provides upcoming events truly geared toward‚ the life sciences industry to include‚ pharmaceutical and biotechnology. Likewise, the site provides highly organized and widespread company profiles that include available jobs, related news items and contact information. These profiles can also be searched via industry, location, services and more.

And here’s a helpful piece of functionality that the site offers to further target its content: clicking on the main navigational tabs at the top of the page provides segmented versions of the site’s content for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry (BioSpace); medical device and diagnostics interests (DeviceSpace); and a clinical research channel (ClinicaSpace). See the screenshot and note the arrow:

Each tab provides some similar site content, but with a number of key differences so that site visitors can appropriately segment their search for news, events and job search opportunities.‚ There is an “Employers” section to each site, where there are options for job posting and resume search packages. With extensive access to newsletters, featured stories, blogs and more, all three of these interconnected resource websites provide a wealth of content for job seekers and recruiters alike.

A comprehensive, robust career site targeted to communications professionals in advertising, marketing, broadcasting, publishing and public relations, Talent Zoo nevertheless also features a wealth of industry content that can be leveraged by anyone in the recruitment industry.

It’s professional - but hip. That’s probably the first thing you’ll notice about Talent Zoo upon visiting its homepage. From the animated, bouncing star in the site’s logo to the cool pictures and relaxed writing style, this is clearly a site created for, well, creatives.

Talent Zoo features a job board for employers to post open positions, and the usual content valuable to‚ recruiters - which companies are hiring what kinds of employees - but there’s quite a bit more to be found here. Employment trends, salary information and guest articles are just three examples of communications industry-specific content that can be found on the site. There are also numerous links off-site to like-minded Internet destinations of value.

One example is the Hiring Revolution blog a Talent Zoo affiliate site which offers “¢‚¬¦advice, information, and insight into recruitment and retention¢‚¬¦” in the advertising and communications industries. It’s a very informal, sometimes raw, site, but it’s also a pretty rare and valuable find in the way that it speaks the recruitment language and tells stories from the trenches while still providing compelling industry information.

That’s just one example of unique content found at Talent Zoo. Job seekers can also find more blogs, Web comics, podcasts, tons of career advice and extensive resume and salary tools to assist in career development. And of course, there are plentiful and nationwide job listings to search through, including a “Rookie Directory” resource in which entry-level job seekers receive special consideration.

Ultimately, Talent Zoo might have a few offbeat quirks, but it also makes for a fairly natural environment for recruiters and job seekers alike.

There’s no doubt that Vault provides a vast amount of useful information for recruiters and job seekers alike. From simple job listings and the ability to post resumes to more complex functionality such as employee surveys, salary research, career forums and much more, Vault is a comprehensive and robust information warehouse.

Vault offers a general job board for employers to post open positions for a fee, a free HR newsletter and‚ employee surveys. Employers can post internships for free to the site. A community section of the site offers a forum where topics are listed and members of the site can interact with others‚ by reading and posting‚ messages. In addition Vault offers a “Buyers Guide”, which offers a comparison of‚ recruiting and HR related products and services.

Vault offers job seekers the full capability to search nationwide job listings and apply online, provided they have registered and have uploaded a resume. Similarly, researching salaries is only available to logged-in members, and many other levels of information can only be accessed with a paid membership.‚ Vault attracts heavy student traffic to it’s site‚ offering a‚ campus marketing program that delivers an online “career library”‚ with guidebooks,‚ company profiles and articles all aimed‚ at helping students launch their careers.

Vault memberships are both fee and free depending on what you want.‚ Vault membership provides “insider” access to employee and salary surveys that are searchable by location, company name, industry type and more. Paid members can also find out interviewing tips, company quality of life rankings, tools to review and evaluate resumes and cover letters and quite a bit more. Without the membership, job seekers can still get a snapshot of company profiles, and can also access a wealth of information, career tips, white papers, etc., but paid membership, however, is the only way to truly open up the Vault.

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.