AIRS
II – REVIEW
Last
year in this column we reviewed AIRS I – Finding Resumes. We found out how to
locate resumes of potentially recruitable candidates without spending a lot of
money on the expensive resume services. Earlier this month I had the opportunity
to attend another AIRS training session, AIRS II – Finding People. AIRS II is
different from AIRS I in that you are taught how to research, identify and
communicate with potential leads for your hard-to-fill job orders, as opposed to
simply locating resumes. Let’s go back 10 years or so. We used to (and
sometimes still) go to the library and search for client competitors, call
blindly from manufacturing or financial services directories, keep a library of
yellow pages from distant cities, and beg, borrow or steal company personnel
directories. It was an exhausting, time-consuming prelude to finding the right
candidate for your client. Well, it is still an exhausting, time-consuming
process but AIRS II training takes a lot of the frustration and aggravation of
following dead leads by showing you how to locate most of your leads right on
the Internet from the comfort of your desk. Yes, you still to have to call these
candidates as you did in the old days (some things never change) but a lot of
your legwork is done at that point. As was the case last year, I am not in a
position to reveal all of the AIRS secrets and methods in the context of this
article but the information presented will hopefully allow you to make an
informed decision as to whether this type of training is for you.
Why
not start at the beginning. The session began around 9:00 AM and ran until 4:30
PM or so with a couple short breaks so everyone could race to check their
voicemail and a lunch break as well. Our trainer for the day was Erica Provost
who said she was one of eight trainers working for the company. If memory serves
that is more than double the number of trainers last year. Business must be
good. You could tell she was extremely knowledgeable and gave an excellent
presentation. We were a group of 12
that included 6 trainees representing four large St. Louis corporations and
another 6 trainees (including myself) representing 4 consulting / placement
companies.
Peeling
Back, X-Ray, Flip & Search, Field Searches, and Discussions Groups…we
learned it all. AIRS II actually started by recapping some of the information
learned in AIRS I. We covered the AIRS Search Process, Internet generalities,
search definition, search terms, data retrieval and organization, desktop
organization, and contact management. Erica spent some extra time going over the
AIRSware Toolbar, their browser add-on (free for alumni) that integrates with
your Internet Explorer or Netscape browser to assist you in organizing all your
newly found data. The browser add-on looks a little complicated until you
realize it conveniently organizes all of your bookmarks, saved web pages and
saved search results.
We
also covered the AIRS Forms that seminar Alumni can download from their site.
There is only one form for AIRS I but there are nine more forms for AIRS II, an
indicator of a more complex search process. Again, these forms are used more out
of a need for organization than anything else. They assist, or guide you in the
proper search path…where to go in what order using what tools or software. You
fill out a form based on a particular search, save it to your hard drive with an
appropriate name, modify the form as your search progresses and then when your
client gives you the same job order six months from now, there it is on your
hard drive, no need to do all this time-consuming research over again.
The
process of beginning at the end and hopefully end at the beginning. A URL is
made up of several components. Usually, anything after the .com or .net is a
subfolder of the folder containing the websites homepage. Many times you can
gain access to the next level up by deleting everything after the last slash
mark. For example, you are looking at a resume on the Internet. The URL ends in
alumni/~ smith/bio.html. By deleting the bio.html you might gain access to all
the files in the ~smith folder…maybe his resume. By deleting the ~smith, you
might gain access to all of the alumni that have folders on this website…maybe
their resumes as well. Peeling Back is something you would want to do at almost
every page you visit. Where there is one lead…there are usually others.
Sometimes you are stopped cold in the Peeling Back process. The dreaded - access
denied - page appears. When this happens, an X-Ray might be just what the doctor
ordered. Read on.
Why
would you want to X-Ray a website? Obviously, so you could see everything
inside. In general companies will only have links to other web pages that they
want you to access. There are many web pages on public servers that do not have
public links. Other times, when trying to peel back a URL for a look at
something you are denied access for this same reason. The major search engines
index these mysterious web pages, many of which contain vast amounts of
recruiting information including names and telephone numbers. Any indexed page
on the Internet will show up in a website X-Ray.
You
learn how to X-Ray a website using Alta Vista, Snap, Northern Lights, and
Infoseek using a combination of search engine syntax and keywords. This works in
any industry. The target company
does have to have a website. You start by asking your client to provide a list
of their big competitors. You then X-Ray the website of the target company to
locate names of managers, directors, sales people and other personnel, minutes
of meetings with names of attendees, names of related associations and
affiliations, maybe even a company directory. You can X-Ray college servers for
lists of alumni, names of professors and instructors or published papers. You
could X-Ray industry organizations for names of conference attendees, mailing
lists, etc. You can X-Ray any website then by using the Peel Back technique
build enough leads to mount a respectable telephone campaign in less time that
it takes to get from you house to the county library.
Opposite
of X-Ray. You examine everything on the outside of a website, not the inside.
Again, using a combination of specialized search engine syntax and keywords you
are able to locate all web pages with links to a given website. Many people with
resumes on the Internet have links on those resumes to their current and past
employers. Knowing that…you can expect to find a number resumes linked to a
target company website. More than resumes though, you are searching for ideas,
names, leads, other pages, anything to get you closer to your target candidate.
Any resumes you find are a bonus. A Flip & Search of a university server
will lead you to the websites for many of their alumni. A Flip & Search of a
source company website will reveal the sites of many individual sites,
association sites, vendor and supplier sites, etc. All these sites contain
names, resumes and other leads to follow up on.
Sometimes
a Flip & Search of a tool or machinery site will reveal many users of those
tools or machinery. If you Flip & Search an industry Organization or
Association website you will find many leads, including resumes, for persons
related to your search just waiting, I am sure, for your call.
You
may have noticed that many of AIRS techniques like Peeling Back, Flip &
Search and X-Ray have become so well known that they've entered the recruitment
vocabulary.
Field
Searches
Again,
these searches are specific to a given search engine. You can search on the
Title field, the URL field, and the Dot field. The Title is the name of the
document as given by the page developer. There is a statement on each web page
denoting it’s official title. The Title search only searches this field. A
Title field search might be for certain keywords, for example – user group,
or, members. You also might run a Title search for a particular type of hardware
or software, company, service, product, etc. By adding other keywords you are
able to pare down your results to a manageable number. Each
web page also has a unique URL or address. Using that information we can search
each web page on the web for keywords in the URL. Both the Title and URL search
methods are very effective for finding resumes on the Internet. But what happens
after you run you search, look through 150 resumes, call 20 people and can’t
find one person to go to Minnesota in January, well…using these same methods
you could probably find a lot of leads, not resumes, but leads of people to call
to recruit, to call for referrals, to call for information and maybe find
someone living in Minnesota already. The Dot field search is a little more
straightforward. You are simply searching the domain name for this website –
the part in between the http://www. and the .com or
.edu or .org. You can search .com websites with keywords for certain
specialties. Search .edu websites for names of college administrators to place.
Leave
the World Wide Web to enter the vast, greatly unexplored and ever-changing world
of Discussion Groups, a.k.a. Newsgroups or Usenet. You can absolutely find
resumes on newsgroups but those are normally found in Newsgroups specifically
for resumes and job postings. As it relates to the AIRS training, Newsgroups are
a place to mine leads and names of candidates to contact. There are tens of
thousands of Newsgroups. Multiple newsgroups, I am sure, for almost any
recruiting specialty. By using deja.com and a combination of keywords you can
view conversations between potential candidates you might be interested in.
These conversations are strictly reserved for their intended topics so beware,
do not post a recruiting oriented message to any of these Newsgroups as you will
be considered a Spammer and will be subsequently Flamed. It’s not pretty. You
have been warned. What you can do, however, it to cull names and email
addresses, which are plainly visible on each message, then in an extremely
professional and courteous manner, approach these leads individually, using
personalized emails. You also get leads from these discussions that you follow
up via web pages. Your success rate is not 100% here but this in a proven way to
locate exceeding hard to find candidates.
I
didn’t really cover data mining from mailing lists and Yahoo People searches
(these are more ways to locate lots of people to populate your call list) but
you get the gist of this training by now I am sure.
Toward
the end of the day, Erica talked about building relationships and making contact
with candidates. Getting a response
to your letters and phone calls begins with caring a lot about what the person
at the other end thinks of you. She
emphasized the value of addressing candidates as individuals, noting that the
time you invest will repay you in value very quickly.
AIRS
philosophy is that your success = their success.
To help you be successful, AIRS provides aftercare, included in the price
of admission. You get a toll free line for questions, a help desk that provides
answers via email so you can contact them at your convenience, the AIRSware
Toolbar to help organize your search, and the Planning Guide (a 50+ page online
guide that covers the Internet search process from a recruiter’s perspective).
Alumni also receive a user name and password to access the alumni site
including all downloads and discounts, the Coursebook including all screenshots,
a cd-rom full of best-in-class tools, and the AIRS Directory…a great recruiter
resource and a great starting point for any search.
Tim
McKegney is still the Director of Sales. He
stated the charge for AIRS I or AIRS II is $995.00. When both are taken together
(they are normally offered on consecutive days), the charge is $1890.00. You can
reach Tim directly with any questions or comments by telephone at 800/466-4010
or via email at tmckegney@airsdirectory.com.
It’s
more fun to go out on the Internet and find resumes but that doesn’t work all
the time. If it worked every time we would really be in trouble as our clients
wouldn’t need us so much. Although the methods described above can be used to
locate almost anyone in any industry anywhere, AIRS II training would be
especially beneficial for those recruiters with a true specialty, ones that do a
lot of manual research, ones that are in industries that typically relocate
people. Using these methods you start to develop leads immediately, probably
within a few minutes of starting your search process. You have to have the
patience and desire to do this right, which is why AIRS has painstakingly
described the proper processes for the methods and teach you the same. Having
this training could mean the difference between one dead end after another and
one lead after another. Enough said.
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