Strategies - Unique Web Sites to Leverage Your Recruitment

6. January 2010 by admin.

Criminal Searches provides the scary-but-useful data on how many criminals live in your neighborhood, what crimes they were convicted of, and, in some cases, their names and personal info. It’s all culled from public records, and is presented as a Google Maps mashup. You can restrict your search to sex offenders, search on a specific name to get a criminal history, or do a general search for criminals by city or zip code.

We have stared into the social-networking abyss and it is the information overload named FriendFeed. The service aggregates all your social content and activity from Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, Last.fm, blogs, and so on. It aggregates your friends’ activity, too, giving you a meta-feed of your online social life. Depending on how active your friends are, it can be a pleasant stream of sociality, or like trying to drink from a firehose.

Without a doubt, Howcast has the best-looking how-to videos on the Web. All kinds of topics like “The Questions That a Good Recruiter Asks a Hiring Manager”, “How To Automate the Resume Sourcing Process” or “How To Recruit With YouTube”. Sign up to get a How-To Video of the Day via e-mail, as well as to be able to edit their how-to wikis, talk to experts in the community area, or upload your own videos. The user-generated stuff is okay, but the Howcast-produced vids are particularly great.

PicApp can make a world of difference on your blog or Web site. It’s a free stock-photo service that lets you quickly and easily grab photos of whatever subject you need for use on your blog. PicApp has quite a large image catalog, and photos range from run-of-the-mill stock photos to celebrity pics.

Visual representations of data are nothing new, but Tag Galaxy takes it to new heights in searching Flickr photos. Enter a single keyword (I used “frog”) and you’ll see a 3D representation of a solar system with the keyword as the sun, orbited by related word “planets” (e.g., “amphibian,” “green,” and “toad”). Click a planet to combine keywords, or just click the sun (your main keyword) to get a unique photo-sphere covered with up to 236 images pulled from Flickr. Spin it in any direction with the mouse, clicking shots for close-ups. It takes a while to surf them all this way, but makes for a fascinating time waster.

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Welcome to 2010

4. January 2010 by admin.

Let’s usher in 2010 with more giving than asking. A recent search of “advanced sourcing tips” revealed that there are a ton of “self-professed” experts, who for a bit of bling will divulge all their secrets to you. Whatever happened to sharing what you’ve learned freely with others. I have found over the years that this method of exchange returns much higher returns that can’t be measured in just dollars and cents. If you have been reading this blog, you have found numerous examples of search string algorithms to better identify both passive and active candidates. Below are just a few more. I challenge you to devise some new and more radical strings and identify more sources and venues to find those ever elusive A-list candidates.

 

site:*.craigslist.org/*/res “software engineer” -”this posting has expired”

intitle:resume or inurl:resume (java or j2ee or weblogic) “software engineer”

intitle:resume or inurl:resume (admin or administrator or administration or administer or administered or maintenance or maintained) (server or servers) (mail or email or messaging) (mcse or “microsoft certified systems engineer”)

site:twellow.com “software engineer” and geeks

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Top 10 Tool - AutoSearch

31. December 2009 by admin.

A-list candidates are a recruiter’s market. Hence, the science for discovering these folks, their resume, profile, contact info, and anything else should be reclassified as performing market intelligence. To be an effective and productive analyst, it can take an enormous amount of time in a workday to collect all the necessary leads. So discovering tools that can greatly reduce the time to perform this market intelligence is a godsend to any recruiter. One such new tool on the market is AutoSearch. It does a variety of tasks in the public domain that makes sourcing fun and productive. It scours LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Plaxo, Xing, Spoke, and Jobster business networking sites as well as the Twitter, Ning, Facebook, and MySpace social networking sites. This tool also employs other web-based research sites such as Mail Tester, 411.com, Google, Whitepages, and pipl.com to best leverage your time.

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Top 10 Technique - The Power of the Word “Resume”

21. December 2009 by admin.

How many resumes can be found using Google? A bunch! The same is true for most any other search engine. My research revealed that when searching for nothing more than any one of the following versions of the word resume, over 3.6 billion were found. Now, of course, there was no additional filtering to remove jobs or other keywords that would return only true resumes, but the potential results far outstrip anything you could find using all the fee-based resume boards.

Variations on the word Resume

vitæ, resumé, rèsumé, rèsumè, resume, résumé, résumè, CV, vitae, vita

Going one step further, I further refined the search with this algorithm:

(~resumé|~rèsumé|~rèsumè|~résumé|~resume) -intitle:~job -intitle:~jobs -apply -submit -job -jobs -template -”resume writing” -”resume sample”

This produces over 170 million results. However, this is still much too large to work with. Your challenge is to introduce a variety of keywords to further refine your results. All the best.

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Strategies - Effective Recruiting Begins at Home

18. December 2009 by admin.

If you’re not collecting email addresses on your homepage (and anywhere else you can), you are missing out on opportunities to turn first-time job seekers into your best employees. No matter how they found you - maybe you rented an opt-in list, placed a banner ad or two, distributed a flyer or sent a postcard - if you’re not providing a way for passive/active job seekers and visitors to express interest in hearing from you in the future, that opt-in list rental, that banner ad, flyer or postcard was nothing more than a one-shot deal.

Here are some hints and tips on building your own opt-in emailing list.

Begin by asking for email addresses at every point of customer contact:

- On your company website
- In a guest book
- On customer service or support calls
- On invoices, brochures, customer surveys, feedback forms
- At tradeshows or events
- Place your email list sign-up on your homepage above the fold

You may also want to place it on other pages, like “careers” or “contact us” but whatever you do, don’t hide it! Same goes for your guest book. Place it prominently. Ask your employees to make it a part of their routine to ask friends if they would like to receive your newsletter, to receive special promotions, or to be notified of private events.

I want confidentiality

Just get the email address to start. Your visitors’ and jobseekers’ trust must be earned and this only happens over time. To that end, also make your privacy policy clear up front. Make sure they understand how you will be using their email address, that it won’t be sold or traded and that they can decide to “opt-out” of further communications at any time.

Why should I sign up?

If the lure of private events or promotions isn’t enough, email list sign-up success can be achieved with sweepstakes, drawings or the like. Make sure your incentive is closely related to your product or service. That way, you’ll end up with an audience interested in you, not just the latest gadget.

No matter what you’re recruiting and no matter what your size, your goal should be to make the most of every visitor and every job seeker. Make your site traffic and/or foot traffic, work for you by building your own opt-in email list and communicating with your visitors and job seekers.

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Strategies - Online Job Postings

17. December 2009 by admin.

Great online recruitment advertising can be the key to attracting the “A”-list talent your company needs. Here are 9 tips for maximizing your advertising budget.

1. No misspellings in your job posting.
2. Specify a salary range for your job posting.
3. Disclose your company name in the job posting.
4. Put as many keywords in your job description as you can.
5. Promote your company in the job posting.
6. Explain what makes your company unique and attractive to applicants.
7. Describe your benefits, emphasizing any special perks your company may have.
8. Use a more traditional job title so applicants understand what the position is.
9. Make sure the job posting is not too lengthy.

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Top 10 Technique - Google Does Math

11. December 2009 by admin.

Beyond using keywords and catch phrases to identify candidates with Google, this search engine also employs very powerful computational language that allows you to perform any type of calculation or conversion. Here are some examples.

-  4+3 displays 7
-  9-4 displays 5
-  3*7 displays 21
-  45/9 displays 5
-  5^3 displays 125 (5 raised to power 3)
-  11%5 displays 1 (the remainder after division)
-  sqrt, nth root ofx (sqrt(64) displays 8, if you need non-square roots you can use for example 3th root of 27)
-  sin, cos, arctan, tan…

Google calculator supports various trigonometric functions, expecting a radians value, that can be expressed also using the pi constant: sin(pi/2), tan (2/3*pi)

-  ln: displays natural (base e) logarithm: ln(e^5)
-  log: displays base 10 logarithm: log(100)
-  !: displays n factorial: 3!

Numbers can be entered also in hexadecimal, octal and binary base, using 0x, 0o and 0b prefixes, for example 5 +0xf+0b1001

Conversions

-  in degrees / in radians: convert radians to degrees: pi/2 in degrees or convert degrees into radians: 90 degrees in radians
-  in hex / in binary / in octal / in decimal: convert to each of the given bases: 16 in hex , 16 in octal, 16 in binary, 0×11 in decimal
-  use 2009 (MMIX) in Roman numerals
-  distance conversions: use 100miles in km , 1m in mm, but also 200000 km in light-second etc.

Examples:

-  100mph in kph
-  1 month in seconds
-  280 Kelvin in Celsius
-  50 Fahrenheit in Celsius
-  3 euros in $ or 3 euros in dollars

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Top 10 Tool - Glance

9. December 2009 by admin.

If all the major competitors for the same product offer their service at the same cost, what sets them apart? I believe the answer is ease of use or simplicity. Glance offers one-click screen sharing, and I mean one-click. No software to download, or embedded program pop-ups. I was recently invited to attend a product demo for a new resume search tool and all I did was enter in a user code. The remaining information like name and contact details were optional. In less than a second, I was watching the demo.  Just for reference, here is the pricing and basic service details for 3 major web-conferencing/meeting products.

Glance.net - $49.95/mo
one-click screen sharing
# Unlimited online meetings
# Up to 100 participants per meeting

WebEx.com - $49/mo
# Unlimited online meetings
# Up to 25 participants per meeting

GoToMeeting.com - $49/mo
# Unlimited online meetings
# Up to 15 participants per meeting

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Top 10 Tool - ReferYes Sourcer

9. December 2009 by admin.

A free passive and active candidate sourcing tool to find resumes and candidate profiles on top social networks and search engines. (e.g., Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ZoomInfo). ReferYes provides tools for sourcers and recruiters to help them find candidates online. Now, you don’t have to be a Boolean expert or familiar with the X-Ray search techniques to source candidates. It also includes an automated advanced search strings developed by search experts to find resumes and candidate profiles on the web.

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Strategies - Free Video Tutorials

7. December 2009 by admin.

Knowledge is power. And free knowledge aint so bad either. Butterscotch offers lots of free video tutorials that can greatly improve your social networking and further leverage your company’s recruiting muscle. Here are a few of the many subjects presented, most having 10 or more episodes per subject.

Advanced Twitter Tips
Craigslist Fundamentals
The Finer Points of Facebook
Introduction to Flickr
Getting connected with LinkedIn
Beginner’s guide to YouTube
Facebook for grownups
Get Twittering - Twitter for Beginners

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