Chris Murdock, executive sourcer & knowledge manager, Yahoo!, shared some of his thoughts on popular sourcing tools today at the NAER conference in Redondo Beach (a good place for a weekend afternoon but a pain in the kiester to get to on a work day).
ZoomInfo: Murdock notes that he has seen Darth Vader listed as a VP of marketing for ABC on ZoomInfo. “A lot of people think it’s crap, but it’s a great tool,” he says, particularly in conjunction with LinkedIn; you can sometimes find a name on ZoomInfo, and more information on them from LinkedIn.
Broadlook: Diver is “a good tool for resumes” if used with search strings, says Murdock.
Capital IQ. “Incredibly expensive,” he says. Murdock recommends pooling a few people together to share access. “Capital IQ wants to take care of the independent recruiters as well as the small firms.” Murdock also says of Capital IQ, “they don’t delete information,” so you want to make sure you only search for current companies, if that’s what you’re looking for. The company offers great customer service, he says and is willing to offer free trials.
OneSource: A good tool to find out about compensation packages, particularly related to stock grants. “Nobody else is capturing the stock ownership data,” he says.
LinkedIn: Notes that hiring managers play an interesting mind game with the site. If they see someone with just their current job listed, managers consider that person a passive candidate. If a person lists more jobs, it feels more like a resume, and managers consider them an active candidate. Murdock also showed how people can go to a search engine such as Google, search     site:www.linkedin.com/in     followed by, for example, “chief financial officer” “san francisco bay” to use the power of a search engine to search LinkedIn.
Switchboard.com: “It’s the best website for phone numbers,” he says, noting that it just added work numbers. He suggests searching for “Dav” if searching for the name “David,” because it’ll pick up Dave, Davey, or David.