Missing in Action
No, this isn’t a war zone, but it can seem like a battlefield sometimes. This has happened to all of us, I am sure. You recruit a great candidate; you can’t place him or her right away so you stash the person in the database for a future assignment. The perfect job opens up . . . you make a call . . . number disconnected. You send an email . . . undeliverable. What can you do? Thankfully, you can develop a “missing person” process for your office. It’s easy and only takes a few minutes. Just follow these steps to try and find your candidate.
First try www.WhitePages.com. It is just like the telephone company white pages, so unless your candidate has an unlisted number or uses his cell as his main phone, you might have some luck here.
If not, try the search engines www.Google.com, www.Yahoo.com, and www.Live.com. You put your candidate’s name in quotes and hit the search button. See if there is any updated information for you.
Also try the meta-search engines, including www.Dogpile.com and www.Mamma.com. Yes, these will search the big three, but also a number of other, lesser-known engines. Also use quote marks here for the name. Worth a shot.
If that doesn’t work, you can try the social and business networks www.LinkedIn.com, www.Spoke.com, www.MySpace.com, and www.FaceBook.com. These sites often have information the search engines don’t come up with. If your candidate is a professional, he may be in one of the first two. Quote marks are not necessary.
Zabasearch.com is a public records search site. If your candidate owns a home, she is probably in here. Zabasearch often returns many results, so it is often helpful to put a location in here as well.
ZoomInfo has a free component that lets you search for a name. Just go to their website, www.zoominfo.com, and type in the name without quotes.
One more shot. If you know the college from which the person graduated, you can always try searching the institution website. For example: www.harvard.edu, alumni “john e. doe.” You would use one of the search engines for this one.
In closing, we can only do the best we can do. But at least do that. Even using the above-mentioned methodology, the search often ends in failure, but at least we can now sleep nights knowing we did everything we could.
AIRS SourcePoint CE
Remember SearchStation? Then came Oxygen. Now there is AIRS SourcePoint CE, a fairly new best-in-class service by the people at AIRS. The problem is that it handles so many different sourcing functions for you, it is difficult to determine just what class it is in. I was offered the opportunity to “test drive” this service for The Fordyce Letter subscribers and jumped at the chance.
It is hard to know where to start this review, so I will try to start at the beginning and simply offer an overview of the service.
This is the very first recruitment industry vendor that I can think of that has offered an “all-in-one” sourcing/recruiting solution. One complaint I always hear from recruiters across the country is their need to deal with multiple vendors when trying to tap the wealth of information on the Internet. Often, one has to have one vendor for names generation, another for résumé generation, and yet another for competitive intelligence. All with separate monthly fees and log-in information.
With SourcePoint, you get all that in one, fairly intuitive interface. Plus, since it is a module-based service, you pay only for the services you need and can use. With the various modules available, you can search the AIRS proprietary database of passive candidate names and résumés, you can use the search engines to search across the Internet for results, you can search the built-in CRM and/or your own ATS, you can search (either in simple or advanced formats) your membership-based résumé banks, you can search the social and business networks, and you can search the newsgroups for names.
The beauty of using this one interface to search all the components just mentioned is that all your results are compiled into one queue that can be imported into the AIRS CRM, or exported to a number of different formats. With the competing products, all your results from the different products are islands of data that you have to deal with separately. Plus, with this product you can manage this data with the CRM and also email any or all of the results directly from the program using customized email messages that can be saved.
I have listed some of the features and what they do below. For the most part, your searches are broken down into two categories: résumés and people (names).
Résumés
DeepWeb Search for R̩sum̩s РThis search feature searches the AIRS proprietary database of passive candidate r̩sum̩s for keywords.
TotalView Search РThis feature is used to search the built-in CRM, external r̩sum̩ databases, and your applicant tracking system.
R̩sum̩ Bank Search РThis feature searches Web-based r̩sum̩ databases. For most you are required to enter your user name and password, although there are some you can enable without that information.
Precision Search РThis is also used to search the membership-based r̩sum̩ databases, but it taps the features of the individual services for a more advanced search process.
People
PeopleSearch – This feature searches the AIRS database of over 33 million names.
DeepWeb Search for People – It uses the search engines to search across the Web for names of individuals related to your keywords or even a company.
Social Network Search – It uses the search engines to search for public information contained in the social networks, including ZoomInfo and LinkedIn.
NewsGroup Search – This feature allows you to search millions of newsgroup discussions. These discussions often contain the names and email addresses of potential passive candidates.
Of course, we can do all these searches manually, but it would take hours and hours of our precious time, and this product can do it all in just a matter of minutes.
They also have a directory search feature. There are directories for companies, colleges, and organizations (associations). These directories contain specific names of entities where you can search for keywords or browse by industry or state. You can also search for profiles, when available.
Another key component is their spreadsheet import feature. It is incredibly powerful, allowing you to import data into all fields of your CRM and set status in others. As a result, you can upload a list of conference attendees and mark the source field automatically.
As I have touched on earlier in this article, this service is not just about a bunch of résumés and names. The data management tools they offer pull it all together for you. Their CRM (contact relationship manager) I have mentioned a couple of times is a built-in candidate database that lets you save your results to it for further study or contact. From there, you can select names to send emails to from any number of customized messages. From that point, you can track the activity of your email recipients to see who is acting on your email (opening, clicking internal links, and other activity).
Other features I would like to at least mention are your ability to set up Agents, allowing you to set up recurring searches to run automatically; prebuilt reporting for further ease of data management; and the ability to export any results to your ATS or Excel. I forgot to mention before that they also offer a Quick Search feature for quickly coming up with a name or other contact information. The product also offers integration with the H3.com referral engine, which takes online networking and paid referrals to the next level.
I want to thank Chris Forman, CEO of AIRS, for his help with this article. Anyone seeking that killer all-in-one application should definitely take a closer look. Anyone who would like more information about this or any other AIRS product or service can visit their website at www.airsdirectory.com.
2007 Résumé Sourcing Survey
By Jim Stroud
Jim Stroud, Internet recruiting ranter and raver and one we have all been hearing about more and more, has published his 2007 Résumé Sourcing Survey. This is a report with some surprising information about sourcing résumés on the Internet. In this report you can learn about:
РThe most popular formats for general r̩sum̩s
РThe most popular formats for technical r̩sum̩s
РThe top 10 industries by r̩sum̩s sourced on MSN Live
РThe top 10 industries by r̩sum̩s sourced on Google
РThe top 10 industries by r̩sum̩s sourced on Yahoo
РPopular top-level domains for r̩sum̩s
РPopular industry keywords mentioned on r̩sum̩s
РQuantity of r̩sum̩s found on search engines
– Most popular ways to spell “CV”
– Most popular ways to spell “Résumé”
РThe most overlooked file types for general r̩sum̩s
This information can be invaluable for any one of us who uses the Internet to source résumés. The report can be downloaded for FREE at http://jimstroud. com/2007/02/25.
Also, Jim has an award-winning recruiting blog that anyone can sign up for, also for free. Check it out at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JimStroud20?a=MaAl51YD.
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.
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.