Platinum Recruiter
by infoGIST
This month, I am happy to review the newly released Platinum Recruiter from infoGIST. With the big job boards not paying off like they used to, many recruiters are taking a harder look at the passive candidate pool in doing whatever they need to do to fill their requirements. This is a great product that goes a long way toward making our job of locating résumés of passive (and active) candidates for our open assignments a lot easier and more productive. This product offers a simple interface that easily accepts keywords and other criteria of your choice and searches literally hundreds of sites for résumés.
As of this writing, this product searches over 230 free résumé banks, 150-plus Web search engines, 10 of the largest Web communities/ISPs, and more than 90 colleges and universities. It can also search over 230 pay résumé sites if you have an account with them. All you do is set it up once and just include that search type in your project. A neat feature that most competitors don’t offer is the ability to use the software to search your local PC files as well. You can search any documents contained in résumé or other directories on your hard drive. There is also the ability to interface with a number of the leading ATS vendor pro-ducts to search your own candidate database at the same time. Another nice feature allows you to perform a “flip search” or link search for résumés using several search engines.
InfoGIST also offers a great component for research and competitive intelligence. It has another area where you can search for corporate/company information, patent and trade-mark databases, and other business-related archives for keywords, something I have not seen in many competitors’ offerings.
Their Search Manager allows you to create and save searches that you run regularly and re-run them at night so the new results are there when you get into work in the morning. Their Contact Wizard enables you to easily write custom messages to any potential candidate you desire. You can create any number of custom emails and send them to multiple recipients with one click.
Their user interface couldn’t be simpler: a very simple screen with a menu up top, a results screen below, and a résumé view at the bottom. You simply pick what type of search you want to run from the menu, type in the keywords of your choice (Boolean acceptable), select a date range if you like (a great feature, as we all know that Internet résumés can sometimes be a bit dated), and also pick a state if necessary.
I ran a broad search for Human Resources Manager, using All Resume Sources. I got back an astounding 3,989 results, which is actually too many. But from here I could have added additional keywords, a date range, or geographic restrictors to give me a more manageable number of results.
A welcome feature is the relevancy ranking that infoGIST assigns to each result. This is a score for each r̩sum̩ that tells you how closely it matches your need. You can then use this ranking to screen further for better results. Not familiar with search strings or Boolean? No problem Рthey also have a built-in string builder that helps you write a good search string. Once you run your search, you just click on a result and the r̩sum̩ shows up in the viewer on the screen. If you like that person, there are a couple of ways to deal with the r̩sum̩, but you can also simply check the box next to the result and send that person an email right from the software.
I could go on and on. This is a solid product that any recruiter or sourcer/researcher would love to have. The standard pricing on this product is a very reasonable and competitive $2,500 per year. InfoGIST is happy to offer prospective customers a free trial of this wonderful service. You can visit the infoGIST website at www.infogist.com for more information. Take a look.
Eclipse by Broadlook Technologies
I had reviewed this product once before for The Fordyce Letter subscribers, but not in quite some time, and there have been many updates since then. Eclipse, by Broadlook Technologies, is one of their more popular products and one that can be indispensable for any Internet sourcer and/or re-searcher that deals often with volumes of lists and table-type data. Eclipse takes data capture to a new level by capturing data directly from links and formatted tables, and spidering hyperlinks to capture data on the linked page without opening it. As useful as this product might be to a recruiter, marketer, or researcher, it is a very simple program. The top half is an Internet browser and the bottom half is for your captured results. Some of the new features allow the user to manage multiple Web pages in the same project, resulting in an improved workflow, and other advanced data-management features.
One of the main features is “Get Links.” Many times when you are looking at a list of hyperlinks, the actual website URL may or may not be visible (except by looking at your status bar at the bottom of your browser). You simply use the integrated browser to go to the Web page that has the links you need, and by highlighting your target links and clicking the Get Links button, Eclipse extracts all the URLs in a table format for you. You have many options here to clean and edit your data, including splitting columns, merging columns, renaming column headings, state code usage, etc. Once cleaned up a bit, this data can be exported to a spreadsheet or fed into another Internet research tool, including the Broadlook Profiler.
Another main feature is “Get Table.” Tables are often difficult for data-capture tools, but Eclipse makes it look easy. Select your table, click Get Table, and you are returned a column for each field in the table you captured. You have the same sophisticated data-cleansing tools and export ability with this feature as well.
Many lists of hyperlinks in either a table or link are not linked to a homepage but to another page with related data. Eclipse can spider a list of links or table entries and create “capsules” of information related to a specific link. This capsuling feature is definitely one of the highlights of this program.
Capsules are bits of data captured from behind a link, not available directly from the page you are spidering. You can pick up contact names, addresses, and phone numbers from these links and then merge them with your original results queue. In the old days, you would have to click on each target link one by one, parse the data, go back to the main list, and click on another one, over and over. This technology is a serious benefit and time saver for any researcher. Once you have the data you need for your assignment, Eclipse connects directly to programs such as Excel, Outlook, ACT!, Goldmine, and over 50 different CRM and ATS systems in order to export your results to the program of your choice.
Can’t close out without at least mentioning the training, which for many recruiters is just as important as the product itself. Broadlook offers the same first-class training for Eclipse as it does for all other products. I attended an Eclipse training class in preparation for this article, and it is performed via a live Web conference with a Broadlook trainer. Unlike many training scenarios, Broadlook offers all of its training under an “open-drop-in” concept; training is done within a group, and users can sign up for multiple training sessions at no additional charge.
In addition, all Eclipse users have access to on-demand train-ing and a series of interactive tutorials that allow recruiters to familiarize themselves and learn at their own pace. The training and support exceeds expectations, and their innovative model is starting to catch on with other vendors.
For pricing information, visit the customized Fordyce Letter subscriber landing page on the Broadlook website at www.broad look.com/fordyce.
I want to thank Andy Theimer, director of operations, for his help with this article. For more information you can visit the Broad-look Technologies home-page at www.broadlook.com and view an Eclipse demo. Anyone with any questions or comments can also reach Andy at (262) 754-8080 or via email at atheimer@broad look.com.
MedCareerLab.com
I recently received an email announcing a physician-centric network that looked like it would be worth a look for any health-care recruiter seeking those hard-to-find docs. This board claims over a million hits per month across its multi-board network. They also claim that over 45,000 job seekers per month are on their site, along with thousands of physician job seekers available for contact.
It looks like they have specialty career sites for pathology, psychiatry, radiology, ob/gyn, family practice, and dozens of other physician specialties. They also advertise specialty boards for nursing and medical office personnel.
They have a limited-time 30% discount for first-time users. I have not tried this service and do not know anything about it except for the ad I saw, but anyone who is interested can find out more at their website at www.medcareerlab.com.
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
Substitute whatever company you would like to target in place of oracle.com 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, or hotmail, or any of the other email address providers. Give it a try.
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@ramsey fox.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.