February 2000 Column
The Internet is the Computer
The Internet is the Computer. I have heard that phrase over and over. I believe one of the bigwigs at Sun or Oracle Corp. first said it. It means to be able to conduct your daily affairs without any application programs or data on your local PC. All the programs you use, all your stored resumes and job orders, all your contact information and database information, your fax service, and all your other information and services are handled electronically, via the Internet. More and more companies are offering web-based services and consequently more and more people are taking advantage of these services. Do you want all your information online? You decide. There are probably as many negatives as positives but if you travel a lot or work from home and would like to be able to access all your data from any PC, some of this might be for you. Read on…
Web Databases:
We did a review on two Web Database products, RecruitMAX and APS, last year. The edge probably went to the APS service as the $30,000 for 10 users that RecruitMAX charges is beyond what most of us little guys can afford. In general, you do not purchase any software but instead use your browser and Internet connection to access your files. Keep in mind these are not resume services but your own database where you enter and store your own candidate information, enter your own job orders, keep track of your own interviews, set reminders, and perform candidate searches. No more software crashes, worrying about updates, paying extra to share data, not having access to your data from home. You will probably need DSL or a cable modem and an extremely reliable Internet service. A big positive includes you or your employees being able to access your database from work or home, day or night, from almost anywhere.
Web
Address Books:
Yahoo, one of the largest and most visited sites on the entire Internet offers a great personal address book you can access from any browser, free for the asking. You have to be a member of Yahoo/GeoCities (be sure to search GeoCities regularly for qualified candidates) to take advantage of this service but so what, it is free as well. I already had a Yahoo user name and password (get one from www.yahoo.com) so I simply logged onto the Address Book page (address.yahoo.com) and was able to quickly and easily add a couple of contacts. I logged off and logged back in and found my recently entered contacts just where I left them. You are able to enter quite a bit of information for each contact including multiple phone numbers and email addresses. You are also able to add new contacts and modify or delete old contacts. Great service!
Web Faxing:
We have been using EFax (www.efax.com) for several months in my office with great success. Although I actively discourage both clients and candidates from sending faxes in lieu of email, there are some that will insist on sending an analog fax. Using EFax, they will dial your long-distance or toll free fax number (they do have local phone number to assign in certain geographic areas – check their website) to send their fax and you will receive it as an email attachment. It is sent in a proprietary format that can only be read by an EFax viewer, provided free of charge, but can then be printed, saved and forwarded like any other email. If you live in an area where they have local numbers or can handle giving out a long-distance fax number to your customers, the service is free. In order to provide the toll free number (yes, even my local candidates dial a toll free number), there is a small set-up fee and a reasonable fee of $.10 per page received. My fax line is never busy, I do not have to dedicate a PC or fax machine to incoming faxes and I save money by not having to pay for a telephone line from my local phone company.
Web Backups:
I hate backups. Let’s see…install backup hardware properly, format tape, backup files, remove tape to safe location OR sign up for a web based backup service and never do any of that. One service that does this nicely is Connected Online Backup/Service from Connected Corporation (www.connected.com). They are one of many web based backup services that provide real-time, automatic, and secure online backup and recovery of remote desktop and laptop PC’s. They say it is designed for small businesses the service offers fast recovery of PC systems. Running from $6.95 for up to 100 MB of backed up data to $14.95 per month for unlimited storage, the price is right as well.
Web Email:
Hotmail/MSN comes to mind (www.hotmail.com) but there are a few others. A great free service for web-based email. If you are traveling or are using someone else’s computer this can be very handy in sending emails. You email address will be something like: yourname@hotmail.com. You do need to sign up and agree to their rules, which shouldn’t be a problem. You can store your emails, sort them, delete them and reply to them, all using only your browser.
Conclusion:
Something for everyone. No, I do not think we should all entrust our most critical data to our ISP’s but I do think there are many excellent web based services that we could all make use of to increase our productivity and make our data more accessible.
Time out. I know we write a lot about the AIRS people. As a matter of fact, I believe that next month’s column will be writing about the AIRS II training program. We might even write something on their certification program later this year. There is a reason for all this. The information that they present to us allows us to remain competitive in this day and age when all our clients are using Monster and Headhunter, just like they used (and still use) the local Sunday help wanted advertisements. In general, AIRS training allows us to do what our clients can’t or won’t do…actually recruit people. A big part of AIRS is finding resumes, but not necessarily those of people that are seeking employment. Another part of AIRS is finding people – leads – whom we need to recruit from scratch.
Having said all that, I will review the AIRS SearchStation, which is a web-based application that provides instant access to more than 5 million passive candidates on the internet by building boolean strings for you and searching the sites you say. Keep in mind you are not searching an expensive, proprietary database but the entire web itself. Everything this program does you can do yourself if you are a boolean construction expert and know the syntax for individual search engines but why be those things when you can be an expert in recruiting and placing people. Yes, based on the type of search you are conducting, you simply type in keywords and hit GO. The boolean is constructed for you behind the scenes. All the OR’s and AND’s are in their proper places and, just as important, the AND NOT words are used so your results consist primarily of resumes and not a bunch of time wasting web pages to muddle through. Visit the main AIRS page (www.airsdirectory.com), then enter your SearchStation user name and password. From there you are able to perform four different searches. As follows:
PowerSearch:
How often do you go to AltaVista or Snap or HotBot to search for resumes? Probably not often enough but when you do – you must go the power search page and be the boolean expert or your results are often less than satisfactory. No more…click on PowerSearch link and very simply add a few keywords, select an engine or two, hit GO and a few seconds later you have a number of solid hit, mostly resumes. This feature searches millions of web pages indexed by Alta Vista, Northern Light, Snap, HotBot, Yahoo, GO, Yahoo Canada, and Alta Vista Canada. It is more of a traditional search seeking out resumes based on skills, geography, etc. They say the results are 98% resumes thanks to the search strings embedded in the tool. The results are returned with 3 seconds in easy to read and understand format.
FlipSearch:
Have
you ever had the need to recruit from a specific company, possibly the
competitor of a client? Have you ever been really angry at a particular company
and wanted to raid the heck out of them? This is the tool. Another easy to use
feature. Simply select and enter the URL of a company, school, association, or
Government agency; pick a few keywords; and hit GO. The Search Station will automatically flip the website and find all of the resumes that contain a hot link to the target site. You will find that many, many people have a link to their employer or past employers on the online resume. Very satisfying results.
NewsGroups:
Newsgroups or Usenet was one of the first major uses of the Internet. I do not think as many people post their resumes to Newsgroups as in the past as there are so many more options now but it is still a useful tool. Newsgroups, one of the original sources for passive candidates, can sometimes be difficult to search. Not with the SearchStation…just like the PowerSearch feature, simply define your keywords and click GO. Everything else is done for you.
ResumeBanks:
Lastly, the ResumeBank Meta-Search Engine. Again, works like the PowerSearch but searches 32 free resume banks. Couldn’t be simpler…enter two or three keywords, select any or all of the 32 resume banks and hit GO. All engines are searched simultaneously and results returned quickly.
New Features Coming:
I understand a new release of this software is arriving soon. Version 2.5 will offer many powerful new and enhanced features. Included is the ability to save searches and search results into a private directory, manage your Internet search results (with the ability to view, save, and email resumes with the click of a button), merging meta-search results to remove duplicates, a dozen new resume sites to search, web based phone directory searches, email and telephone reverse look-ups (this is where you know the phone number or email address and want to find out who it belongs to), and domain name and zip code searches. Can’t wait.
Pricing:
Annual subscription price is $1,999 per year with a discounted price of $1,499 for AIRS alumni.
Conclusion:
Another great product by AIRS. Takes the grind out of creating the perfect search strings for your resume hunts. Yes, you could do all this yourself but why when they can do it for you…even better than you can. I do wish I would have been able to view the boolean. I would like to see the search strings that are created and maybe even tweak them from time to time. Nor are you able to add any AND NOT words to your search strings…you live with the embedded words. Those are really the only shortcomings. Take the test drive and see for yourself. For more information or a free trial, contact Chris Forman, Director of Sales, at cforman@airsmail.com OR 1-800-466-4010.
TIP
OF THE MONTH
So
you took the plunge and are searching the Web for candidates.
Here’s the problem: You are getting a lot of data, but where do these
people live? After all, why collect
people in a place you don’t do business?
The answer for email addresses is domain name lookups. Huh? Domain name lookups is a fancy way of saying that you
can find out where a person is, based on the domain in their email address.
Internet domains are analogous to Post Office zip codes.
After all, why send out 1,000 emails to folks from a discussion group if
you can target the 150 of those who actually live in the city where you have the
job order? Here are 2 sites that
make it easy to find out where a person lives based on their email domain: http://www.whois.net –
does a great job of quickly identifying the location of U.S. domains.
Runs fast. http://www.allwhois.com
– also does a great job on U.S. domains, and looks up international domains,
too. Runs a slower than whois.net, but produces more detailed results. When I
can’t find a domain on whois.net, I can often get my answer here.
Slow down, what is the domain part that I put into the whois.net? What is
a domain? In an email address: yourname@someplace.com
– someplace.com is the domain. Just
copy the domain name from your candidate’s email address (everything after the
@ symbol) and paste it into the domain name lookup tool.
Some candidates have non-standard domains in their email addresses like myname@fun.not@whereIwork.com.
Domain name lookup tools don’t work on these unless you clean them up
– in this example the domain name is whereIwork.com. If you find out from the
domain lookup that the prospect lives in a small town you aren’t familiar
with, you can find the nearest major city using a good old atlas or map, or you
could use Yahoo Maps and Driving Directions http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py.
Alternatively, you could use MapQuest http://www.mapquest.com/ and
click on online maps to begin. Yahoo
is a little faster, but MapQuest provides more information.
Now suppose you have a source company phone list and don’t know which
employees are in which city. Here’s
how you find out: http://www.555.1212
allows you to enter an area code and find out where it is located.
Other sites that do the same thing include http://www.aegisbooks.com/ACMapLpg.html
(a large static page displaying an area code map of the U.S. and Canada with an
area code lookup table below the map), and http://www.globaltelecom.org/telecom.htm
(very helpful for identifying international locations).
One more favorite is http://www.prodial.com/codes1.html
(all area codes indexed in numerical order and associated with a location on the
page – a fast site). Using
the free tools in these tips you can find out where most people live and focus
on those living in your market. Good
hunting!