swatrecruiting's tips and tricks
Domain
Search
The
main domains for U.S. recruiting are .com (commercial enterprises), .net
(network enterprises like ISP’s), .gov (government sites), .edu (education
sites like colleges), .org (non-profit sites) and .mil (military sites). The
domain search allows you to search for specific things on a domain. Example:
go to http://www.hotbot.com
(a search engine) and type domain: net AND resume AND java (or AND anything
else) then click on the search button. You
will see a lot of resumes of Java programmers.
Try the same search string on other domains (.com and .org etc.).
link:
NAME COMMAND
The
Link command finds pages with a link to a domain.
For example, in AltaVisa (www.altavista.com),
type link:sun.com and resume to
find resumes of people who have linked their resume page to Sun’s domain.
As you can imagine, many of these are Java programmers. The same search
on Netdynamics.com (link:netdynamics.com yielded 34 hits). In addition to
searching for links based on the product development companies, try it on a
source company you are trying to recruit from for your client.
For example, you run: “link:monsanto.com and resume” (without quotes)
if you would like to recruit out of Monsanto.
NEWSGROUP
ETIQUETTE
Read
the FAQ file before posting anything in a Newsgroup. A complete guide to
‘netiquette’ is available at news.announce.newusers. There is more to read than most recruiters have patience for,
so here are the basics:
No insulting, degrading or racist comments.
Keep your postings clear and to the point. Example, when quoting another person’s message, use a partial quote, not the entire message.
Avoid personal messages.
No soliciting, business promotion, advertisement, get-rich-quick schemes, chain letters, pyramid schemes, or similar postings.
No anonymous postings.
Don’t cross-post (posting one message to many Newsgroups).
Do
have a “signature” on your message postings.
KEYBOARD
TIPS
Find
a page on the web and click your cursor on the page anywhere (except on
hypertext – the blue stuff)
With
your left hand, place your pinkie finger on the CTRL key (bottom row,
far-left key). While holding it
down, use your middle finger on your left hand to touch the letter “a”. When you do, all the text on the page should get highlighted.
If it didn’t get highlighted, one of two things went wrong: either
you didn’t click your cursor on the page to make the page active with the
browser or you didn’t hold down the CTRL key while you pressed “a”.
Try again.
Now
that the entire page is highlighted, hold down the CTRL key again with your
left pinkie finger and use your index finger to touch the letter “c”.
This copies all the highlighted text into your clipboard in Windows.
Now
place your left thumb on the ALT key (just left of the space bar).
While holding down the ALT key with your left thumb, hit the TAB key
with your left middle finger. This
will take you the blank page on your word processor.
Put
your left pinkie finger back on the CTRL key and hold it down while toggling
your hand to the right to touch the letter “v” with your left index
finger. This will paste the page you copied from the Internet into
the blank page of your word processor.
Notice
that your cursor is at the bottom of the document in your word processor. Let’s pretend that the document is a resume you copied from
the web and you want to save it using the person’s name. Typically their name is at the top of the document so, give
your left hand a break and place your right thumb on the CTRL key (just
below the Shift key on the right side of the keyboard).
While holding down the CTRL key with your right thumb, toggle your
right hand up to hit the “home” key with your right middle finger.
This takes you to the top of the document.
By the way, CTRL + “end” takes you to the bottom of the document.
Now, pretend that this is a resume and pick any two words at the top
of the document and highlight them. I
actually find it quicker to use the mouse for this part although it can be
done from the keyboard.
Now
that you have 2 words highlighted that we are pretending represent the name
of the candidate on a resume, use your left pinkie finger to hold down the
CTRL key and toggle your left hand to hit the letter “c”.
This copies the 2 highlighted words into the Windows clipboard.
Place
your left thumb on the ALT key (remember, it’s just left of the spacebar). While holding down the ALT key with your left thumb, hit the
letter “f” with you left index finger and then the letter “a” with
your left pinkie finger. This
will open a box in which you name the file you are saving.
Place
your left pinkie finger on the CTRL key and, while holding it down; toggle
your left hand to touch the letter “v” with your left index finger. This will past the 2 words we highlighted that represent the
candidate’s name into the Save As box.
Finally,
place your left thumb on the ALT key (just left of the space bar) and, while
holding it down, use your left middle finger to touch the letter “s” to
actually save the document in your word processor.
DOMAIN
NAME LOOKUPS
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.
This
product is becoming a standard for the sourcing industry. If you are tired of
copying and pasting names and contact information into a database, check out
Address Grabber, a product from ProdEx Technologies (www.egrabber.com).
All you do is highlight the name and contact information and hit a button
and Address Grabber pulls the information into database fields.
You can make edits (usually not necessary), and then just one mouse click
saves the data - so you can stay in search mode, not data administration mode.
SEARCH
FOR LINKS
A
quick and easy way to search all the Internet sites with links to a particular
URL is to use Snap.Com. Go to http://www.snap.com and in the middle of the page,
you will see another link to Power Search. Go to the ‘Power Search’ page. At
the top of that page, click the ‘Search For’ drop down box and pick ‘Links
to this URL’, then type in the URL of the site you want to flip. You results
will give you all of the indexed web pages on the Internet with a link to that
URL. To locate candidate leads or resumes, you refine your search further by
using the ‘More Search Terms’ boxes below. Try searching the URL for
Engineering or Accounting associations or maybe a university (especially an
alumni page) for resumes.
SEARCH
PLAN
Build
a search plan: When you do Internet searches for a living, it is helpful to
build a blueprint of your search plan so you stay on track.
AIRS pushes a Word template for their search planning tool and it is
fine. I prefer to work in Excel.
In any event, your search plan should usually start out at the client’s
web site to learn all about their products, their buzz words, the associations
they belong to and conferences they attend, etc.
Trace their employees on the web and see who they interact with.
Go to Hoovers.com and look up your client and learn who their top
competitors are. Visit their sites
like you did your clients and repeat the process.
It doesn’t take as long as you might think and you will end up with a
list of direct competitors and buzzwords that make the search a snap.
Now follow a pattern of x-raying and flipping each competitors domain in
a combination of field searches using the key words you have identified and soon
you will be covered up with great leads. As you search you will learn new
buzzwords and add them to the search plan.
On one search I’m doing now I have over 300 companies targeted!
The extra time setting up a search results in a smoothly paved road to
roar down as you search. – and , chances are, you will do that kind of search
again in the future, but you only have to build the road one time.
META
Searches
Always
include a meta search in your routine. Remember that no search engine indexes
the entire Internet. Your search
results will vary, requiring the use of several search engines.
If you want to try a meta search engine (one search command is run on
many search engines at the same time for increased coverage).
Dogpile
http://www.dogpile.com
ProFusion
http://www.profusion.com
VOICE
MAIL MAPPING
Integrating
an Internet recruiting effort with “Voice Mail Mapping” to quickly build a
cold call list in a specific “source” company.
Let’s
say that you’ve taken a great job order and done the research to identify the
5 top competitors of your client as the best places to source.
By applying the Internet techniques we regularly write about, you can
build what I call a “foot hold” in each company – that is, you can get
some names and some phone numbers/email addresses of people in the function you
are targeting. At this point I like
to build a voice mail map. Being an
“early bird”, I like to start by calling in between 4am and 6:30am to use
the source company’s voice mail system directory to identify the names of the
people 5 to 10 extensions above and below the extensions of the people I’ve
already identified in my Internet research.
If the Internet research went well, I may see a pattern that lets me fill
in the gap between several extensions. As you build your voice mail map, listen
to the tone and content of the voice mail messages…
you can tell who the sales people are versus the techies, versus the
admin staff in many cases just from their communication style. The work goes
quickly and I can often build cold call lists of 100+ people before regular
business hours. Many of these calls
connect with good candidates later in the day – AND – I don’t lose time
rusing, as I already have the names and direct phone extensions of the people I
wish to speak with.
SPAM
Do
use email to make money. Don’t get in trouble. Read up on the latest in spam
and other important email issues at http://www.junkemail.org/.
Virtual
Communities
You
can get to the resumes by searching for resumes or home pages within their
community menus. To save time, you
can X-Ray the communities using a search engine to get the kind of resumes you
want to see in the locations you want to get them from (Why look at a Java
programmer in Detroit for a “local-only” job order in Denver?).
The same Boolean logic is used here as in all other searches.
The trick is knowing where the communities are.
Searching the Web for “free home page” will find them, or you can
save a lot of time and visit the AIRS web site: http://www.airsdirectory.com/people/offthebeatenpath/communities.html,
for a pretty good listing of communities. Two
examples to get you thinking about the quality of Boolean you write and how it
affects your results:
Geocities
– a search using AltaVista in the advanced search mode with the Boolean
string: host: geocities.com AND (resume OR "home page") AND java
AND architect AND Chicago --
this string brought back 8 good looking hits.
Geocities
–host: geocities.com AND (resume OR "home page" OR cv OR
"curriculum vitae" OR bio) AND java AND architect AND Chicago
brought back 11 hits. Remember that the URL on a hit in Geocities will look like this: http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Gorge/9721/links.html.
When you peel back the link to read: http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Gorge/9721
you will see the main home page and the resume or link to the resume.
In this case the link is to the Biography (same thing really).
ZIP
CODE SEARCH
Want
to find a candidate in a very specific location, like the loop in Chicago or
South Bay in the San Francisco Bay area? Try a zip code search. Here is an
example of a search in Dallas' Telecom Corridor for a Java person using the Alta
Vista search engine:
In
the Advanced Search mode, type: (title:resume* OR title:cv OR title:bio OR
title:"curriculum vitae" OR title:homepage OR url:resume*
OR url:cv OR url:bio OR url:”curriculum
vitae OR url:homepage) AND 75038 AND java
For
those of you who seek the R&D types for your clients, patent searches can
give you leads to the scientists and engineers you want to recruit. Here's
how you do it. Set up a free account (or set of accounts) with spyonit at
www.spyonit.com. Select "Swiss Army Spies". Next, select
"Generic Page Change". For the sake of an example of what to
fill in under "Watch this location", let's use the delphion.com site
that monitors patents and enter in: http://www.delphion.com/patlist?&xcl=359349
which is the page that monitors Optics: systems (including communication) and
elements. Select whatever is appropriate to your needs, such as
"notify me when the page changes in any way", which would be
synonymous with a new patent in this category. Then select your
notification method below and you are done. Now spyonit.com will notify
you of each new patent filing in the area of your interest by email so you can
stay on the phone instead of surfing the site daily.
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.
BOOLEAN QUICKIE
Take
a minute and master this critical sourcing skill.
AND
and OR