Although
I have been writing about and reviewing the latest and greatest products for our
industry in this Fordyce Letter column for over 6 years now I am continually
amazed at the sheer ingenuity of some of the new products coming out, including
this one, eTrak, by eSearch Logistics of North Carolina. Imagine
having caller ID on your web site. Imagine knowing who is interested in your job
postings and who is interested in your candidates. A
recruiter website (which we have talked about in this column many times before)
and email marketing / recruiting / tracking system /
CanSpam compliance rolled
into one. I do like this one as you can tell the people that put this together
understand the specialized needs of any recruiter using email as a recruiting or
marketing method.
I
still see email addresses from many of you ending with @aol or @earthlink or
something similar. This is a good time for anyone that does not yet have a
website to consider one,
or for individual recruiters in a larger office to have personal web sites
where they can brand themselves as experts, provide useful content to their
contacts, and reach their contacts quickly and effectively.
Once you sign up with eTrak you log in and start the very easy and quick process
of developing your eTrak-hosted website. I do admit that many of you will
possibly need some assistance here, but...they do make it as easy and user
friendly as they can, with features similar to FrontPage. And
the expert staff at eSearch will personally help you through the initial set up
and usage of the system. It is a
simple,
yet very powerful, website
with as
many pages as you want.
You
could have a home page,
a contact page, job orders, profiles, information, etc. And
eTrak comes with an easy-to-use job board and a candidate board so you
can easily post your jobs and summaries of your best candidates online. Your
website address would be something like www.etraksystem.com/public/yourname
but you can very easily and inexpensively register your own domain name as well,
or have eTrak as a sub-domain of your main domain (e.g.
newsletter.maindomain.com).
As
a rule, mass email marketing is not a part of my recruiting method but there are
many occasions when I will use one of my Internet research tools to develop a
list of 20-30 candidates to contact. Using eTrak I would export my research
results into an Excel spreadsheet and then import the list into the eTrak
system. Once in eTrak you blast an email message to everyone on your list.
Instead of your recipient receiving a standard text email from you, on opening
the message they are taken directly to your website. Keep in mind normally your
target would have to click on a link in the message. Once your target is
delivered to your website it is up to you to have the right content to keep them
there and click to your jobs page or candidates page.
Whatever
program you are using now for emailing you would still use for your day in day
out communications but when you wanted to send marketing or recruiting emails
you would use eTrak as it includes its own email program and actually emails the
blasts for you. Not only does it send the emails for you it also tracks who
opened the message, when, how many times, which pages they clicked to, etc., all
online in a simple report
format. When they don't email you back you have to call but at least you are
going to know who visited your website and
what they viewed before
you call them up on the telephone. You'll
know which hiring authorities are interested in your candidates, and which
candidates are interested in your job listings. Plus you can become a reliable
resource if you add some current and interesting articles, studies, etc. that
will brand you as an expert in your field.
Recruiting
continues to be a very competitive profession, and more and more candidates and
hiring authorities are using the Internet for their searches and to find
information and recruiters. Each of us needs online tools to help us
differentiate ourselves from the competition and brand ourselves as experts.
eTrak is an excellent proactive tool for doing just that. In
the course of this last year or so we have reviewed products that, individually,
provided many of the services included in the eTrak subscription. Both recruiter
website providers and more recently an email tracking system have been reviewed
but this is the first time I have seen an integration of this type and I think
it is a great idea. Around $50 per month.
Anyone
without a recruiting website or those that want to run a more effective email
campaign can reach Brian
McMerty, President of eSearch Logistics,
via email at brianm@esearchlogistics.com
or via voice at (910) 256-1027.
HealthCare
Job Bank
With
health care placements still a hot area for many of you I thought I would pass
along this information from a recent email. HealthCare Job Bank claims over 3.5
million hits per month and over 3500 daily visitors. Fairly impressive for a
niche site. A site to post healthcare oriented jobs for any recruiter serving
the Healthcare, Biotech, Medical, and/or Pharmaceutical industries. Their email
noted a special 2-for-1 posting price $249. Anyone interested in learning more
about their service can visit the website at www.healthcarejobbank.com
or call (714) 665-1945.
Wilder,
VT - September 20, 2004 - AIRS, the global leader in recruitment training and
technology, announces the publication of the “AIRS Job Board Directory
2005”, a comprehensive directory of all general, niche and specialty job
boards delivering services to employment practitioners today.
The
AIRS Job Board Directory is the largest compilation of job boards and employment
hubs on the market. It serves as a quick reference guide for recruiters,
recruiting managers, and employment advertising professionals. Categorized by
Industry, Geography, Function, & Diversity Groups, the AIRS Job Board
Directory 2005 is an easy-to-use ‘yellow pages’ style resource that
recruiters can use to make purchasing decisions.
“As
a provider of critical resources to the recruitment and human resources
industry, we saw that our web-based job board listing was the most accessed
section of our site by our members and realized that no one had put together a
complete and accurate listing of active job boards for practitioners to
utilize,” said Chris Forman, CEO of AIRS. “We already had a good start and
we took the time and effort to ensure that our directory was exact and
inclusive, in order to provide an time-saving efficiency tool for our
community.”
ClearanceJobs.com,
an excellent niche job posting and resume database site catering to the DOD
contractor community, has recently been acquired by Dice.com, the venerable
IT/Technical career site. Hopefully, ClearanceJobs (I believe they will remain a
separate entity) can continue to provide the same type of excellent service that
their clients have come to expect and appreciate. I have dealt with Evan Lesser,
proprietor of ClearanceJobs, on numerous occasions and wish him well in his new
relationship with Dice.
Tip
We
have run a tip on the “anchor” tag before in this space but not in a long
time. This is such a simple technique to get free resumes from the Internet I
thought I would mention it again. Both Google and AltaVista use this tag but my
example today is using the Google Advanced Search features. If I recall I
believe Barbara Ling originally provided this tip to the Fordyce subscribers’
years ago.
Everyone
knows, or should know, that you can search for Internet resumes by looking for
“resume words” in the titles and url’s of web pages. Another method is to
search for words or phrases that are hyperlinked. We will assume that many
resume sites use the term “view resumes” to access their resume database.
Try this:
Go
to www.google.com
Click to the Advanced Search page
Type “view resumes” (without quotes) into the field that says “with all of
the words”
Scroll down to “Occurrences” and select “in links to the page“
Click the “Google Search” button
My search
resulted in 4170 hits with some interesting looking results on page one. I
clicked into the first hit, joblink-usa. This site has an occupation chart with
dozens of job categories. I clicked on Computer Information Systems and got more
links to pages of over 800 resumes from all over the country. I qualified these
no further but I need to point out this was hundreds of resumes in IT alone from
just the first hit out of my 4170 hits. You might try adding additional keywords
and other limiters to pare the results down a bit, possibly to your geographic
region, specialty, etc. Good luck!!