100th Column
Last month, this month, next month; I am not sure, but I do know I am right around the 100 mark. I am now in my ninth year as The Fordyce Letter Internet/Technology columnist and wanted to say what a privilege, honor, and outright pleasure it has been for me. To write for the “Cadillac” of industry publications . . . nothing better.
As you might imagine, a lot has changed as it relates to both the Internet and technology usage in general in our industry. This column has gone from promoting mostly active candidate boards for the first couple of years (remember Headhunter.net, CareerMosaic, Online Career Center) to searching for the résumés of passive candidates on the Internet using AltaVista (back in 2000). We have been reporting on online recruiter databases since 1999 and have reviewed dozens since. We have been reporting on Internet name-generation techniques and resources since early on as well (remember Eliyon, now ZoomInfo, and SearchStation, now SourcePoint), trying so hard to keep on top of the latest and greatest in our business. Had a great time doing it as well.
These days, it’s mostly tools and resources, with some technique thrown in from time to time. My monthly tip always offers a way for you to do something yourself. There has been so much to write about.
Out front, look for more on recruitment technology. New ways to recruit candidates. More on recruiter databases. Blogs, social and business networks, job-lead aggregators, competitive intelligence, names databases, sourcing techniques, recruiter networking and collaboration, anything and everything I can think of that you might use to increase your placement volume.
I have heard from many of you over the years, both calls and emails, and have thoroughly enjoyed every correspondence and phone call. Don’t be bashful – I hope to hear from many more over the next 100 columns.
SGA Executive
Tracker 2.0
I reviewed this great service from Sheila Greco Associates once before, but it was quite some time ago. In light of the continuing interest among the Fordyce subscribers in name and lead generation of passive candidates on the Internet, I thought it might be time to give them another look. I noticed many improvements since my last review. I really like their user interface. It is very clean and simple. Those regular readers know that is something I always look for. An easy-to-use interface with a short learning curve. Not a lot to learn here. This service contains information for over 7,600 companies, fed by a proprietary database based on the past 18 years of research, is 100% phone-verified in-house, and is updated regularly on a 90- to 120-day basis. Title levels range from senior level down through lower management, including supervisors, team leaders, sales managers, and buyers. Just fill in a few fields, click submit, and there is your list of names from industries, titles, functions, companies, and more.
The two main search components of this product are either searching for executives or browsing by company name. When searching for executives, you can search by company name, ticker symbol, industry, sales, number of employees, job function, title level, state, and SIC code, which is a very nice feature, especially for competitive intelligence. Browsing by company is a bit simpler. Just pick a letter of the alphabet and the list of companies follows.
Using the executive search mode, I left the company name blank and picked the Home Furnishings subcategory in the Consumer Goods category. Then I also selected the Merchandising Job Function. I left everything else blank. I was returned six great-looking merchandising executives (VP level) from furniture companies. From this point you can click on each contact’s name to obtain contact details, including phone number. On each contact details page, there is also a link to Colleagues that is a listing of other employees in the database from that same company. You can export the results to an Excel spreadsheet if you like or simply return to perform another search.
I then decided to search for all the Sears employees I could at their corporate headquarters in Chicago (yes, I was on a retail kick). I typed Sears in the Company Name field and also picked Illinois from the State list, then clicked Submit. I came up with a healthy 700 results that time. Too many to review, so I went back to my search page and added Supply Chain to the Job Function list and was returned six results, all managers with supply chain expertise.
I then tried my hand at Browsing by Company. I picked Deloitte, knowing their employees are highly sought after. I clicked on the Deloitte link and was taken to a Company Details page that offers some basic contact info, website address, sales, employees, SIC codes, a list of competitors, an email address formula (FirstInitialLastName@ deloitte.com), and a company description. The database contained over 4,400 Deloitte employees, mostly their consultants staff with their areas of expertise included in the job title. Again, I could click on any name to get the Contact Details.
I tried one more. I went back to my Merchandising search and picked one of the furniture companies I’d seen earlier, La-Z-Boy Inc. I clicked on the Company Details page and found that one of their SIC codes was 25, which is a code for Furniture and Fixture Manufacturers. I cleared my previous results and selected 25 from the SIC code list. I ran my search and ended up with a very large list of furniture and fixture manufacturers employing over 9,000 executives that are listed in the database. From here I could easily pare down my results based on job title, function, location, company size, or any of the other criteria mentioned earlier.
I want to say once again how easy it is for anyone to navigate searches with this product.
Pricing: This service has an annual, subscription-based fee structure, with one, full-year unlimited access at $4,995 or access to select industry sectors (consumer goods, financial, etc.) at adjusted, lower pricing. You can also access the product on a “pay-per-view” basis, i.e., $150/month, including a monthly download limit of 150 records.
I want to thank Anne Scofield, the VP of business development with Sheila Greco Associates, for her help with this review. Anyone interested in an easy way to locate the names of passive candidates can contact Anne via telephone at (518) 843-4611, ext. 234, or via email at ascofield@ sheilagreco.com. You can also visit the SGA Executive Tracker website at www.sgaexecutivetracker.com.
Advanced Live.com
A Recruiter’s Cheat Sheet
by Shally Steckerl
We have written about Shally’s Cheat Sheets in this column on more than one occasion. They are always wonderful, inexpensive resources that in a few pages seem to be able to give you all the information you need to be productive in the topic at hand.
This article will cover his Cheat Sheet on the search engine Live.com (formerly MSN Search). It is four pages of advanced search strings and the innovative use of special commands that produce better sourcing results in your passive candidate searches.
Shally covers many types of searches, for both résumés and names. You can learn about finding résumés using advanced methods, using synonyms, by file type, from academia, international, consultants, résumé templates, personal and employee homepages, and other methods as well. He teaches you how to find names of potential candidates from associations, conferences, alumni pages, mailing lists, and blogs, and by location offering search syntax examples that anyone can take and use for their own assignments.
He caps it off by explaining the use of results ranking and matching, results popularity, and results aging. These are all little-known and underutilized features of Live.com.
You can find out more about this publication or place an order at Shally’s website, www.jobmachine. net. Just click on the link on the left side of the page to Cheat Sheets. Also, be on the lookout for Shally’s new book, co-authored by yours truly, Live.com For Recruiters, due out by the end of this month.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Shally Steckerl will appear as a faculty presenter at the Fordyce Forum 2007 on June 14. More information is available at: www.fordyceforum.com.
HireAbility News Release
This is straight from the email, edited for length:
Londonderry, NH – April 9, 2007
– Today, HireAbility.com, a leading provider of integrated recruiting software and services, unveiled Talent Trader, a hosted professional networking platform that enables numerous recruiting communities to link their members to make more placements, obtain industry advice, resources, and job opportunities, and more. Talent Trader is the platform for HireAbility’s own recruiter network of over 350 professional staffing firms, and can be private-labeled for other networks of any size.
Using Talent Trader, members of large national staffing associations or small geographic-specific recruiter groups can easily locate and communicate with potential business partners, networking contacts, and industry experts. Detailed member profiles, discussion groups, activity ratings, endorsements, user-definable “recruiting partners,” and other tools once found only in social networks make this possible.
Additionally, because recruiters interact in members-only arenas, their discussions are more candid and carry more valuable decision-making information than those conducted in online public chat rooms.
Talent Trader also offers recruiters significant advantages over today’s social-networking tools. Functions for sharing job openings and candidates, cross-posting to job boards, and add-ons for Internet résumé mining are just a few of the ways HireAbility meets the unique needs of the staffing industry. Its own recruiter network leverages these features and more, such as libraries of shared documents, recruiter training materials, webinars by industry experts, résumé parsing, and weekly split placement conference calls.
TIP
Find Résumés on Live.com
For this month’s tip, 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 that not every one of those was a résumé, but many were. To cull out more relevant résumé documents, we would add some 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 month’s tip.
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.