As
you might imagine…in the course of writing this monthly column, both Wade and
I receive email from the Fordyce Letter readers. Much of this mail is questions
and comments about products or services, advice, web-sites, ideas, pricing and
many other topics. We do not mind one bit and absolutely try and reply to
everyone (not immediately at times). Frankly, nothing would please us more than
to hear from you more often so keep the emails coming.
Then
there are those that think of these columnists are their personal Internet
Recruiting coaches. We really do not mind that either but it seems we do get
questioned repeatedly regarding two of the most basic Internet Recruiting
techniques, Flip Search and X-Ray. This may be boring for some of you but please
read on as I have some comments to add further down. For the purposes of these
examples I will use the AltaVista search engine but to be thorough you should
use these techniques in multiple search engines in accordance with their
published guidelines.
Flip
Search
Simply
put (as there is no other way to put it), Flip Searching allows you, with a
specialized search engine command, to locate Internet web pages that are linked
to a certain website. The idea here is that the employees of a targeted source
company will have their resume linked to their employer’s website (maybe their
prior employers as well), which many do. This is the blue hyperlink that you see
in many electronic resumes. This also works well for seeking candidates with
particular equipment experience as candidates might have links to those sites as
well on their resumes. Follow these instructions:
Go
to www.altavista.com.
On
the left-hand side choose Power Search.
Type
in link:xyzcorp.com.
Select
Boolean from the Search By drop down box.
Click
on the Search button.
Yes,
you’ve done it…successfully flipped the Xyz Corp. website. You probably did
not get any results, as there may not be a Xyz Corp. so substitute the name of
your target source company’s website when running your search. When you do
this with a real company you will get a lot of results, many of which are not
resumes. Although this is a great technique for gathering names and conducting
research, you can amend you search to look like this:
link:xyzcorp.com
AND (title:resume OR url:resume)
At
this stage most (but not all) of your results will be resumes. You would
probably add some keywords at this stage to further refine your results.
X-Ray
Please
pay attention, as this one is very complicated as well. Searches Internet pages
inside a website. Especially useful for searching universities and other
organizations that might have resumes posted on site. Also, unmatched for doing
research on potential candidates and target source or client companies. Try
this:
Go
to www.altavista.com.
On
the left-hand side choose Power Search.
Type
in host:www.xyzcorp.com.
Select
Boolean from the Search By drop down box.
Click
on the Search button.
You’ve
done it again. Successfully performed another advanced Internet recruiting
technique. Again, you would substitute the website of a target company and add
other keywords as well depending on the results you wanted.
Yes,
I have been leading up to something…
Really
Basic
I
was talking with an old acquaintance recently…a gentleman I have great respect
for and who has been in this business almost as long as I have. He has been
through the AIRS Internet Recruiting training and was telling me about his new
employee who was going to source Internet candidates for him. He was telling me
how he was going to teach this person how to do Flip Searches and X-Ray’s and
get all kinds of great candidates for him. It sounded like he went to two days
of AIRS training and all he got out of it was a couple of techniques for
recruiting passive candidates on the Internet.
I
had to stop him cold. I had to set him straight. I write about this because he
is not the first to misunderstand AIRS and what they are trying to get across to
you.
I
explained to my friend that Flip Searching and X-Raying websites were around
long before AIRS trained their first person. These specialized search engine
commands were developed by the search engines…not by AIRS.
(Of
note is that although AIRS may not have developed these techniques, they were
the first to start teaching them in 1997. I can quote my co-author, Wade:
"In fact, AIRS techniques like 'Flipping' Web sites, 'X-raying' company
servers and 'Peeling Back' URL’s are so well known they've passed into common
recruitment vernacular.")
You
don’t spend two thousand dollars to learn how to do Flip Searches and
X-Ray’s as there are books out for two hundred bucks or so where you can learn
that. You can also go the Help section at any of the search engines for free and
learn of any specialized commands offered by that search engine.
Yes,
AIRS does teach you these methods and many others but that is not what sets them
apart and makes them unique…makes them the standard. It is the utilization of
these techniques using their methodology. Have you ever heard the saying
“Leave no stone unturned”? That’s the idea. Don’t just flip or x-ray a
site, save a few resumes, and call yourself an AIRS-trained recruiter. They
teach you, and assist you with their specialized browser, specialized forms and
recommended tools, to follow a methodology. They have categorized types of
searches and have methods to follow for each. You are taught this methodology
during the two-day training session. The idea is for you to follow this
methodology precisely. I will admit though, at first you do not realize that
this is exactly why you are going to these training sessions. You THINK you are
going to learn a lot of recruiting techniques, which you do, but at the same
time you are taught how to utilize these techniques in an overall recruiting
strategy. A strategy that normally results in you being able to locate almost
anyone on the Internet. You can’t learn that for two hundred bucks.
Anyway,
I told my friend to log onto the AIRS alumni page and download fresh copies of
the forms and browser. Then go ahead and teach his employee to do Flip Search
and X-Ray websites. As you see from the above it takes about five minutes or
less to learn these two techniques. But then teach how to utilize these
techniques as part of an overall recruiting strategy. I hope he does. He could
also subscribe to SearchStation or outsource his Internet Recruiting function,
and then he wouldn’t have to teach anybody anything.
I
know you all have been waiting for my final article on Sendouts.com, the new
Internet database/applicant tracking system my company started using recently. I
was unable to complete this series last month as the ‘data mapping’ portion
of the conversion took a little longer that expected.
Sendouts
was difficult for us all in the beginning…partly because we were unfamiliar
with this product and partly because a lot of the ‘bugs’ had not been worked
out yet. They had also not addressed a lot of the performance issues prior to us
using the database, which they have since addressed.
This
product is still in ‘beta’ test mode. I believe I had made a comment in one
of my earlier articles that this is both a positive and a negative. Beta does
mean that we regularly experience errors and problems but these are reported to
the Sendouts staff and are dealt with promptly. This also means that we, as a
user, have an enormous influence on usability changes and we have used that
influence many times to make this a better database for our own company and
other users as well.
Did
I mention this is a fantastic product?
We
now have 6 users using Sendouts daily and, although there is still some
grumbling, I do believe the consensus in the office is to keep using this great
service. The hard part is over and it will only get better from here. Our old
database offered us familiar territory, better speed and a simpler interface but
this offers us features that we never dreamed about before.
We
all now work from the office, from home, even while on vacation with any
Internet connection. We all know our activity both as individuals and as a
group…How many resumes did we get out the door this week? How many interviews
do we have going on? We all have our active candidates in one place for everyone
to review. We all have our active job orders in one place for all to review as
well. We can email resumes (using our Outlook programs) to clients directly from
the software with the email address and subject lines filled in for us. We now
receive reminders to follow up on resumes sent (not that we would forget).
We now also receive reminders to do interview-prep calls on scheduled
interviews and reminders to do follow up calls to both candidates and employers
(not that we would forget that either) after a scheduled interview. We are able
to see all of the activity pertaining to a specific search assignment…Who did
we send? When did we send them? What was the result? We are able to look at the
activity history for a particular hiring manager. How many job orders have we
received from that person? How many have we filled? Who have they hired? Who
have they rejected? We are easily able to both add skills to candidate’s
records and job order records by selecting from a defined, searchable skill
list. This list could easily go on and on but you probably get the idea by now.
More
and better things to come in the future I am told. They are integrating the
Address Grabber product Wade and I have both talked about to work with the
Sendouts software. Found the right candidate… Address Grabber will import a
lot of the data directly to a new contact record. They are synching the Sendouts
calendar with your existing Outlook calendar. You will soon be able to access a
map for driving instructions to a client site via MapQuest with the click of a
button. Most importantly, they are actively working on usability and performance
improvements.
In
all of this I must add that the staff at Sendouts.com…including but not by any
means limited to Don, Rick, Matt, Julie, Tracy, and Kara…have bent over
backwards to accommodate our every whim, complaint, error message, concern,
issue, etc., etc. You could not ask for a better support team. They have been
more responsive than any other software product or service vendor that I have
ever dealt with.
Anyone
interested in learning more about Sendouts should contact Chris Novak, their
Vice-President of Sales at 314/961-3338 x113 or you can email him at chris@sendouts.com.
In
closing…this is something everyone should at least check out. This service
could be of use to a one-man operation or a large agency with local and remote
employees. You also usually get the best deals with a beta product and they may
reward their beta and early users by keeping the price down. We wholeheartedly
recommend this product and will continue to use it as long as they let us…or
until something better comes along.
PDQ
SOURCING
I
recently received an unsolicited email notifying me of a service by
CareerShop.com…PDQ Sourcing. This is a new service being offered by CareerShop
(a traditional Internet resume/job order service). As you all know Wade and I
both have been writing less and less about using the more expensive Internet
services and more and more about sourcing passive candidates yourself (or
outsourcing this function). PDQ offers several services along these lines: