Tips Galore
With the holiday past and not a lot of free time at this time of year, I am offering my annual column of tips from about the last 14 months or so. Enjoy . . .
TIP – Job Leads
I have recently given a couple of classes on finding job leads on the Internet. Thankfully, due to some great Internet resources, this activity is not nearly as technically oriented or time consuming as finding résumés. Although you can use Google or other search engines to locate job leads, it is not very productive compared to other methods. There are a number of FREE sites available to all of us called job aggregators that cull job leads from company websites, national career boards, niche sites, university and government sites, agency sites, free job sites, and other places as well. A few of the larger and well-known sites are:
Indeed – www.indeed.com
SimplyHired – www.simplyhired.com
Jobster – www.jobster.com
GoogleBase – www.googlebase.com (click on Jobs link)
The Ladders – www.theladders.com
Just to name a very few. Aside from being free, these sites are very simple to use. Usually, you just type in a job title or other keywords and a location if applicable, click the search button, and you are presented with a search engine style results queue with clickable results that take you to the actual job posting. Most of the services offer additional filters for further screening and an advanced search page. Next time you have that perfect candidate and no job order, give one or more of these sites a try.
TIP – Resume Advance
I have written before about résumé distribution services and will again in the future, I am sure. These are normally free for recruiters, and they charge the candidate to distribute their résumé to thousands of recruiters across the country. Resume Advance is a service I just recently learned about. You can visit their website at www.resumeadvance.com, sign up for free, and then select whatever criteria you wish in order to start receiving free résumés. There is also a more comprehensive list of free résumé distribution services on my website at www.swatrecruiting.com.
TIP – Define
The tip this month is an easy one but one that everyone can make use of from time to time. The “define” command is used to find out the meaning/definition of a term or acronym. Go to Google at www.google.com and type in:
define:MVS
You will be presented with a page with links to numerous Web pages with a definition of the computer operating system MVS. Substitute for MVS the acronym or other word of your choice, and you can have any definition you need at any time.
TIP – Invisible Web – aka Deep Web
I am asked about this all the time. Most of you know that the traditional Internet search engines search for Web pages. That is great when we are looking for Web pages, but what if we are looking for specialized Web-based databases that contain information we can use? This requires the use of specialized search engines that do a great job of navigating the portion of the Internet not accessible from the standard search engines. Here are a few Web-based tools you can use to look for whatever you like.
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ – A project by the University of Michigan that is mainly for academically oriented resources.
http://www.findarticles.com/ – An excellent collection of over 10 million articles on almost every topic you can think of.
http://www.libraryspot.com/ – List, lists, and more lists.
http://www.firstgov.gov/ – The U.S. government’s official Web portal. More information than you could ever think about using. State government info as well.
http://www2.library.ucla.edu/search/eresources.cfm – A proprietary Web database from UCLA. Much information not found anywhere else.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. For more information about the invisible Web, there is a wonderful resource available at About.com. Try:
websearch.about.com/od/invisibleweb/a/invisibleweb.htm
You might be surprised at what you can find at some of these sites.
TIP – Keyboard Tip
If you ever have the need to utilize international currency symbols but do not have the symbols on your keyboard, here are some shortcuts for you.
Hold down the Alt key, then use the numeric keypad to enter:
0128 for Euros (€)
0163 for pounds (£)
0165 for yen (Â¥)
Then release the Alt key and your character appears.
TIP – Passive Candidates from Active Candidate Boards
I know that many of you are using the major résumé/job-posting boards for candidates. Although it is not paying off as much as it once was, I think it remains a legitimate part of the candidate sourcing process for most of us. Here is one way to extract passive candidates from these services. Use the keyword “references.” Many candidates list references down at the bottom of their résumé. Often these are managers or coworkers who have the same basic skill set as the active candidate in question. To find passive candidates with Java skills, simply type into the search box:
java references
You will get résumés of active candidates with Java on the résumé, but you will also get those résumés that have a list of references at the bottom of the document. Call these people to pitch your opportunity. This is not foolproof, as many candidates also have the phrase “references on request” or something similar and you will pick up those résumés as well, but you may as well make the best use of these pricey services and get as much out of them as you can.
TIP – Bookmarklets.com
For this tip, I am going to steal a tip from a class by Lisa at AIRS. Throughout the day we were given tidbits of information not actually part of the class outline that could be of help to us all. One of the sites mentioned was Bookmarklets.com. This is a site with what they call “power tools for surfing.” These bookmarklets are mini programs that you can use to extract specialized data from a Web page (such as when it was posted), navigate pages in new ways, modify page views, and really too many to mention. Best just to visit this site and see what would work for you. There are over 150 bookmarklets on this site, and they are all free to use. Visit www.bookmarklets.com.
TIP – Nanpa.com
Many times when we are searching for résumés on the Internet in a specific geographic region, we use area codes as keywords. For example, if I were searching for résumés in the St. Louis area, part of my search string might be (missouri OR MO) (314 OR 636) plus other résumé words and keywords. When I started in recruiting, I could almost name the area code for every area, as there just weren’t that many. Nowadays, that task is impossible. There is a site for NANPA, which is the North American Numbering Plan Administration, where you can go and look up the area codes for anywhere you like. It is simply www.nanpa.com. Keep this address in your favorites and use it whenever you need to.
TIP РFind R̩sum̩s on Live.com
I thought I would steal a tip from Shally’s Live.com Cheat Sheet. It is easy to locate the résumés of passive candidates on this search engine if you know what you are doing.
Go to www.live.com and type into the text box:
inbody:present inbody:resume java developer -job -jobs -send -submit -you
Most résumés contain the phrase “xxx to present.” Knowing this, I ran the search and got back over 11,000 results. I am sure not every one of those was a résumé, but many were. To cull out more relevant résumé documents, we would add some additional keywords relating to the skills of our assignment, and also maybe put in some keywords reflecting a geographic area (city, state).
Give this a try. Just copy the string above and then substitute my Java and Developer keywords for the keywords from your assignment. Thanks to Shally for this tip.
TIP – *@ Search
This search has at least a couple of solid uses. One might be when you are looking for an email address when targeting a particular employer. In the search engine of your choice, type in:
*@oracle.com oracle design java
In place of the oracle.com, substitute whatever company you would like to target, and also replace my keywords with those more useful for your search. This technique is also helpful if you want to locate the home email addresses of passive candidates. Messages to these addresses are unlikely to be held up or deleted in a corporate spam or junk mail filter. Basically the same but use:
(*@gmail.com OR *@aol.com OR *@comcast.net) oracle design java
Or you can use any common email address you can think of. Others might include yahoo, hotmail, or any of the other email address providers.
TIP – Melissa Data
This is a site that offers many free lookups that we can all use in our daily recruiting and/or sourcing duties. They offer lookups for Zip Codes (by county and city), Telephone Numbers, Addresses, IP Location, SIC Codes (including counts of businesses based on type or SIC code by state), Radius Searches (including zip and area codes), and much more. They do have some fee-based services of course, but most of the lookups are free of charge. I often use them to look up zip codes when trying to source candidates in a specific geographic area. Visit the Lookup page of this site by going to http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/index.htm.
TIP – SearchAllInOne.com
Here is an interesting site that basically is an interface to literally dozens of search engines, many that I am sure you have never heard of. I know I hadn’t. Of course they offer access to all the big search engines, but also allow all-in-one access to many specialized search engines for sports, news, science, encyclopedias, government, financial, education, meta search engines, and directories (which are compiled by humans, not spiders). If you need an answer to almost any question in any category, visit this site. In this case, it is true that a picture (website) is worth a thousand words. Take a look at http://www.searchallinone.com/search.html.
TIP – from Shally
I thought it might be appropriate to steal another tip from Shally’s book for this tip. There are so many in there, I am hoping no one will mind my offering this one to the masses. In his section titled “Results in Ten Minutes or Less,” Shally offers many examples of search strings for different types of passive candidates. Here is one of his tips for sales recruiters:
contact sales.manager IKON 770
In the example above, he is looking for sales managers (the dot between sales and manager forces the search engine to look for that exact phrase) from the IKON office-supply company. The 770 is to find people in the Chicago area. He also uses the contact keyword in hopes that the names he garners will have some way to contact the person on the page. To use this in your office, simply swap out the company and the area code and use other keywords that suit your needs.
TIP – MySpace.com
Unless you live in a cave, you have probably heard about the social networking site MySpace. Its membership is now in the tens of millions and growing by millions each month. There is a common misconception that MySpace is the exclusive domain of teenagers. It makes sense to think that, as most of the time when you hear about MySpace, it is in the context of younger people. I have three young children who are all members, but so am I. Actually, you might be surprised to know that the average age of a user is mid-thirties. It is fast becoming a great way to get leads for passive candidates on the Internet. Although you can go directly to the MySpace website and search the membership from there, we have better luck using one of the lesser-known search engine techniques – the “site” search method. Try this:
Go to www.google.com (or any other search engine that supports the site).
Type in: site:www.myspace.com “graphic artist”.
Click the search button.
I got over 3,000 results using the string above. Not résumés, but profiles of people of all ages, many who were graphic artists. Since that is a lot of hits to go through, to pare down the results, I would maybe add some other skills keywords to the string or even some geography keywords to find people in a specific locale.
Do try this in your office. Simply replace the “graphic artist” with keywords of your choice. Be sure to use the quote marks if you are using a keyword phrase and omit them for individual keywords.
Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M. E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is www.swatrecruiting.com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.