SPAM
AND THE LAW
Mark
and I write a lot about Internet search techniques, but building a great
database full of candidate information is only useful if you can turn that data
into money. To do that, you need to
contact the candidates by phone or email or U.S. mail to recruit them.
I love to cold call and have spent years making 100 to 200 cold calls per
day to recruit candidates in the traditional "dialing for dollars"
approach. For the last few years
I’ve been using email to make the initial contact with great results.
Email recruiting is really akin to direct mail marketing - you have to
carefully tailor the subject, message, and list to achieve the desired results.
Early on, I rejected the approach of employing extractor programs that go
to selected sites and harvest all the email addresses for mass mailings.
I am very careful in my research to select who is added to my database,
who I mail to, and to ensure that the email I send is professional and highly
targeted, I get very few complaints, flames or remove requests – less than
.025%. Those who do complain
typically accuse me of sending Unsolicited Commercial Email or UCE.
The test to qualify a message as UCE seems to be that the message is
making an offer for the financial benefit of the sender.
To avoid this, most recruiters send messages similar to the indirect
recruiting phone call, where we describe what we are looking for and ask for the
recipient’s help to refer us to the right person.
Of course, like the phone call, we already know we are talking to the
right person and are hoping they will express interest.
In my case, this happens with up to over 25% of the recipients in my
email projects.
An
explanation of the argument for bulk email being allowed can be found at www.lawmall.com/abuse/abe-mail.html.
The threat to recruiters is that our work can be confused with unsolicited commercial email (UCE) and result in complaints or even lawsuits/fines. This is an issue you must be aware of if you are using email to recruit. I’m not an attorney, but here are some sites you can visit to learn more:
www.spamfree.org/cgi-bin/spaminthenews.pl?199912
www.cdt.org/legislation/106th/junkmail/
dir.yahoo.com/computers_and_internet/communications_and_networking/el
ectronic_mail/junk_email/laws_and_bills/
www.cauce.org/
www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/all/9810056CE6
www.cyberspacelaw.org/loren/phase2.html - good overview of legal issues
directory.netscape.com/Computers/Internet/Abuse/Spam
www.netcreations.com/ddm/issues/97apr/97apr.html
www.interactivehq.org/html/spam.htm
pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~jgo259/resspam/web2.html
www.aclu-wa.org/ISSUES/cyber-liberties/spamtest.html
www.itaa.org/isec/pubs/fcc19991018.htm
www.law.fsu.edu/faculty/jrossi/97cyberlaw/week12.html
www.bakerinfo.com/itc/backissues/99/071999.htm
boardwatch.internet.com/mag/99/jul/bwm64.html
abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/CNET/cnet_netbill990129.html
www.ljx.com/newsletters/private/computerlaw/1999/1999_04_04.html
paml.net/
www.ljx.com/newsletters/internet/1999/1999_01_00.html
dcwi.com/~lx/spam.html
pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~jgo259/resspam/web3.html
www.virtulaw.com/site-law.htm
boardwatch.internet.com/mag/96/dec/bwm39.html
www.cpsr.org/program/privacy/spam_jj.html
www.cyberlaw.se/swedish/bell10.htm
www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/all/98081762C6
www.pghfamily.net/member/help/email-spam.htm
www.lawmall.com/abuse/abe-mail.html
www.junkemail.org/
Not
knowing the law can cost you a lot of money.
Be careful out there.
Snap.com
Let’s
take a tour of one of the major search engines available on the Internet. I
wanted to highlight SNAP because I think they have a very easy interface that
does a lot for you. Very versatile and flexible. Go to www.snap.com then look about halfway down your
viewing area on the left for the POWER SEARCH feature.
On most search engines, including Snap, the general search page is
normally used for simple, one or two word searches. To get the most out of your
Internet searching, utilize the ‘Advanced’ or ‘Power’ search feature
that most major search engines provide. Once on the POWER SEARCH page you see
what I mean. As opposed to typing in a few keywords, you can utilize multi-level
keyword fields, add date ranges, search for specific file types, languages, etc.
I don’t say you need to use all of these fields but they are there if you need
them.
Here
is the fifty-cent special…the first object at the top alone makes Snap one of
my favorites. Drop down the ‘Search for:’ box and see what Snap does for you
that you have to do yourself with many of the other engines. You can run eight
different types of searches with ease. Let me explain…
All
of the Words – Name as many keywords as you like with spaces in between. Your
results will contain pages with all of the keywords you mention. Using the two
keywords ‘industrial’ and ‘engineer’, your results will all contain
pages with at least one instance of each of the two keywords, not in any order
or necessarily together.
Any
of the Words – This is like using OR’s in a Boolean string. Your results
will contain pages with any of the keywords in this field. Again using the two
keywords ‘industrial’ and ‘engineer’, your results would contain all of
the pages from your previous search – All of the Words – but will contain
many, many additional pages that contain either ‘industrial’ OR
‘engineer’. This search is normally tough to use because of the heavy
response, however, if you are using very specialized keywords it is sometimes
the best type of search to run.
Exact
Phrase – Your keywords are considered a string similar to putting a phrase in
quote marks in Boolean. If you were actually searching for industrial engineers,
this would be your selection. Typing in ‘industrial’ and ‘engineer’
(without quote marks) in that order will give you results that all contain the
phrase ‘industrial engineer’, probably closer to what you are actually
seeking.
Page
Title – Similar to using ‘title:’ in Boolean. This type of search takes
advantage of the fact that all Internet pages have a unique title. You can
search this title for keywords. This is a very common way to find resumes on the
Internet due the habit that most people have of naming their résumé’s
‘resume.html’ or something similar. You would type in ‘resume’ or more
likely to produce results type in ‘*resume*’ to pick up those resumes named
‘paulsresume.html’ or ‘resumebob.html’ or something similar. Beneath
this object is the ‘More Search Terms’ section where you would keywords
pertaining to the type of resumes you are seeking. You might put ‘Must
Contain’ COBOL or HVAC or ‘electrical engineer’ to zero in on your target
resume.
Person
– Very simple. Type in the name of a person you want to check out. You results
will contain pages with the name of that person. Using the ‘More Search
Terms’ section again, I might add some keywords to help cut down on heavy
responses for common names.
Links
to this URL – Another very common way to search for resumes on the Internet.
Similar to ‘url:’ on Alta Vista. Assuming employees often have a links on
both their web pages and resumes to their employers it is common the to search
for resumes linked to a particular target company. Say you wanted to target
Cisco systems to raid their telecom engineers, you would type in www.cisco.com and your results would
contain Internet pages that have a link to the Cisco website. I’ll bet there
are quite a few. Next step is to enter some resume-oriented keywords below in
the ‘More Search Terms’ area and maybe some telecom keywords as well.
Without further refinement you would still have a lot of hits but many of them
would be resumes of telecom engineers working for Cisco. This is not to say they
are looking for a job, but is a great starting point.
Boolean
Phrase – For the most flexibility, use this feature. Not the time or place for
a Boolean primer as we have published in prior articles. Use any Boolean
operators you would normally use in the other search engines. This is the only
type of search many of the competing engines allow you to run.
All
Forms of the Word – Says what it does. Typing in ‘program’ will also give
you results containing ‘programmer’ and ‘programming’ and
‘programmed’. Very broad search you would normally run in conjunction with
other keywords.
Whew!
All that for just the first feature on the Snap Power Search page. To make the
most use of the ‘Search for’ feature it must be use in conjunction with the
second feature, the ‘More Search Terms’ box. Go ahead and drop this box down
and you have three simple choices…’Must Contain’, ‘Should Contain’ and
‘Must Not Contain’. The ‘Should Contain’ box, I think, is of little
value but the other two should be used almost 100% of the time. The ‘Must Not
Contain’ box is almost as important as the ‘Must Contain’ box. Whenever
you use the ‘Page Title’ or ‘Links to this URL’ features in the
‘Search for’ box you should put all of your keywords in the ‘More Search
Terms’ box. The next box over contains another three selections…’Words’,
‘Phrase’ and ‘Person’. Again, choose your selection based on the type of
search you are running. Then click the ‘More Terms’ box further to the right
and another row of search terms will magically appear. Choose the ‘Must Not
Contain’ box this time and add keywords that you know you do not want in your
results. If you are searching for resumes, you might try screening out all pages
relating to employment ads or H1B visas.
Those
are most of the neat features but let’s go on a bit. On this and other search
engines you are sometimes allowed to select the number of results you get per
page. Using this next feature, ‘Return Results’, you might pick 15-20 if you
are using a slower dial-up connection. If you are on DSL or Cable, go ahead and
try 50-100 and see what happens. These search engines, including Snap, are
normally very fast but much depends on your connection to the Internet. If you
ask for 100 hits per page on a slower 33k dial-up connection, you are in for a
wait. Selecting 15 would get your first page up much quicker.
Beneath
that, you can select to search all pages or only the ‘Top Level’
pages…meaning to search on the home pages for each website indexed by this
engine. You would normally search all pages, especially if you were out on a
resume hunt.
Date
ranges can be effectively used to filter out dated material. I normally use the
default dates but if you find in your search a lot of resumes from 1996 and 1997
that are dead ends you might want to consider using a date range going back
maybe a couple of years or so.
Searching
extensions is a specialized feature, helpful for searching for image files or
other specialized files. If you know all your resumes are going to be in .html,
.doc, or .txt format, you could include these extensions in this box to weed out
many non-resumes.
If
you were recruiting for College or Non-Profit administrators, I would definitely
try filtering in the .edu (educational institution) or .org (non-profit)
extensions for those searches. You can also screen for .mil (military) and .com
(commercial). They say others are coming. If you were seeking a Sales Manager
for a client in France, you might search the .fr (France) or if you need some
from England, try the .uk domain search.
Last
but not least, pick a language. It defaults to ‘Any’ but in reality the vast
majority of any search results will be in English. Selecting ‘English’ is
certainly a way to weed out at least a few results that you may not be
interested in.
Let
me wrap it by encouraging you to visit Snap.Com and give it a try. As with the
other major search engines, there is no charge, registration, user name/password
or anything else. It is a way to locate resumes on the Internet without spending
a lot of money on the national services and at the same time does not make you
learn a lot of advanced techniques. It has a lot of features and does a lot for
you.
TIP
OF THE MONTH: Image Search
I
learned this one the other day from Archer at AIRS when he was in Dallas and
loved it. The image search allows
you to search for .jpeg images on .html documents.
For example, in the technical world, people earn vendor certifications
like the MCSE or the CCIE and gain the right to put that vendor’s logo on
their resume. You can search for
resumes with these logos to quickly find the people you want. Here’s how: Open www.altavista.com, select the advanced
search mode and write a Boolean script along these lines: (title:resume OR url:resume) AND (image:mcse OR image:microsoft certified
systems engineer) then run your search. The
bulk of your search result will be exactly what you are looking for.