RecruitingTools.com » Recruiter Talk

ATS Meets CRM.. What A Great Love Story

Noel — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 15:55:53 +0000

Guest Post by Becky Franzen

I’ve spent the past month or so researching, demoing, poking holes and asking tons of questions in the hopes to find something really unique that I could offer to my clients AND also use internally. I say unique, but what I was really out there trying to find was a technology that worked well as an ATS, had the smarts of a CRM AND the most important (in my world) a reporting function/capability to really look under the hood to see what was really going on.

In my quest for this elusive relationship, I narrowed it down to a select few and really dove down into the details. I made a spreadsheet with the following things I needed:

Saas
Global expansion capability
Boolean logic
Paid site outreach (can search multiple sites at once)
Non paid site outreach
Resume Parsing
Customized Workflows
Career Portals/Landing Site
Job Posting
Hiring Manager Access
Agency/Vendor Access
VMS Capability
Custom Forms/Templates
Talent Community Adaptation
Mobile App
Dashboard
Reports

- Time to fill
-Candidate pipeline
-Open jobs/requisitions
-Aging
-Source of Candidate
-Affirmative Action

Data Analytics
Integration with

-Social Media
-Background Check
-Reference Check
On-boarding Capability
Learning Management System
OFCCP Compliance

I am pleased announce that I chose Brightmove. They have gone above and beyond trying to answer all of my hundreds of questions, but besides that, they have a really cool technology that your recruiters, sourcers, hiring managers, and executives will love. For those that provide RPO services, this technology really caters to this market as you can have a parent instance and easily create child instances, with the ability to run analytics across all business lines you support.

The top 5 reasons I chose Brightmove:

1) Parsing capability (can upload folders of resumes, parse single documents, have candidates apply through Facebook, and forward a resume to an email address to have it parsed automatically)

2) Reporting (Graphically demonstrates Pipeline, Open jobs, aging reports, Recruiter activity, Source of Candidate as well as ability to run 32 reports with the basic package and hundreds more with the data analytics package)

3) Integrated with Social Media (will update a candidate profile from your system with their LinkedIn Profile)

4) Development of unlimited landing pages (important if you are building talent communities for clients or internally)

5) Ability to be an ATS and a CRM

So, that’s my love story for the day.. feel free to email me with any questions.

Guest Post by Becky Franzen, RPO Director at Employer Flexible originally posted on RecruitingBlogs.com

Free Recruiting Webinar: Building Your Talent Community In 30 Minutes A Day by Maren Hogan

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:12:02 +0000

Maren Hogan – Talent Community Expert, Social Media Maven, all around cool person.

Our last webinar went over the limit over 1K attendees and nearly crashed our system! Don’t get left out this week as @MarenHogan is presenting a very tactical webinar Thursday 2-23-12 on “Building your talent community in 30 minutes a day”.

Register Here Get your free “How to: Social Recruiting” white paper from iCIMS.

Everyone who registers for our Webinar HERE will get a copy of the white paper PLUS 12 free Power Boolean Searches: Register for the webinar HERE

Building a talent community is hard work. Doing it in 30 minutes a day is ridiculous! but Maren Hogan will show you it can be done. Can it? Join her 30 minute session on 2-23-12 to see the strategy and tactical tools she uses: Register HERE

All registrants will receive 12 FREE Power Boolean Searches when you register for the upcoming ICIMS Webinar presented by @MarenHogan: “Building Talent Communities in 30 minutes a day”: Register Here

Sponsored by iCIMS and RecruitingBlogs.com

50 Awesome Search Engines and more for #Recruiters

admin — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:55:54 +0000

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RecrutingTools has become a deep database of knowledge, tools and resources that may or may not be used by recruiters. We are in the information gathering business and so it’s important that we have at our disposal the proper tools at the proper time.

We’ve been building lists of research tools but why re-create the wheel right? I was recently running through some tools mentioned on Best Colleges Online for some research I was running and came across a fantastic list of research engines, Video engines, Images and so forth.

Ironically the article is labeled “50 Awesome Search Engines for Librians….” My wife is a teacher and we often swap search tools which is how I came across this article. It’s great stuff. Enjoy.

See the full article HERE

Meta Search and Multi Search Engines

These meta search and multi search engines can search numerous engines and sites at once, maximizing the number of results you get each time you conduct a search.

Ms. Freckles: Adorable Ms. Freckles can search online for different file types, definitions, translations, film, finance sites, and a lot more all at once.
Kart00: This cartoon-inspired search engine lets you hover over results to get a preview of the site before you open it. Results are also organized by topic so that you can narrow down your search and organize hits.
Fazzle: Search the web’s best, the entire web, downloads, images, videos, audio or headline news. You can also select an advanced search to find incredibly specific results.
Trexy: This site saves your search memory so that you don’t have search multiple times on different engines.
Mamma: Here at “the mother of all search engines,” librarians search the web or video. Next to your results is an option to refine your search by choosing a suggested category.
1-Page Multi Search: Type your search into one or several of the following search engines at once: Alta Vista, AOL, EntireWeb, Gigablast, Hot Bot, Lycos, Scrub, Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves, and a lot more.
iZito: Busy librarians who are constantly finding new reference sites and search engines will like iZito because of its ability to save your history in an easy drop down tab.

Multimedia and Interactive

For help finding pictures, podcasts, music and shareware, use these search engines.

Metacafe: Find videos on this site if you want a change from YouTube.
Songza: Patrons looking for music can use this search engine, which “lets you listen to any song or band.” You can also search the featured list or top played list.
Picsearch: This large photo search engine has more than 2 billion images in its directory.
Get a Podcast: Search for podcasts all around the web in this directory.
Shareware: If you need to install new software programs on your library computers, turn to Shareware first, which pulls up tons of free programs and downloads.
Public Radio Fan: Find information for thousands of public radio stations on this site. You can find the times of different broadcasts, station names, podcasts and more.

Boolean Search Strings and Life

admin — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:53:58 +0000

This post has been contributed by Sarang Brahme

Earlier today I was delivering a Boolean Training session for our new members in the sourcing team. My aim was to simplify the Boolean concept for sourcing. Often it is mistaken that “Boolean” is very scientific and relatively tough which is why people tend to ignore. Finally – I found the connection!!! Very simple and life-like (!)…

I took an example of life and how the sourcing of candidates is very similar to our life. In life, our choices are the keywords and we either choose to go ahead with them OR drop them. Right choices bring expected results and if we do not put them in right order – it all messes up.

Sounding familiar to how we build search strings in sourcing?

Let’s look at each Boolean operator

AND

We keep adding many variables into our life to try to make it perfect.

Money AND happiness AND satisfaction AND “work-life balance” AND fun AND adventure AND hobbies.

Very little we realize – more AND’s we put in this search; lesser the results will be.

It’s more important to use combination of these at right times. That is a best way to extract most out of life. Do not restrict your search results!!!

One of the most important operators from the list!!

It is imperative that we look out for alternate options if your desired variable is not available at the particular time. We waste lot of time waiting at something which may not be available. It is better we look for alternative ways to progress.

Work Satisfaction = Money OR passion OR dedication OR enthusiasm OR excellence

We tend to forget that if we excel in what we believe – money will follow!!

Perfect substitute??

NOT

Sometimes we need to draw a boundary and should not go beyond our own limits. When you know what you can not compromise on – it’s really easy to filter it out to get your desired results.

Money AND fame AND satisfaction AND love NOT unethical

Even though you say “No Strings Attached”, these strings bind you together as one unit. These variables build your character (read resume) and help you to grow as a mature person (read grow in your career).

All our life we shuffle across various search strings with time and condition using different combination of choices (keywords). Our aim is to get perfect life.

What we forget however is just like “There is no such thing as perfect search string”; you can not have a “Perfect Life”. Learn to use AND, OR and NOT at right time, at right place with right keywords.

Have fun with your search strings!!!!

11 Research, Data Capture and Search Engine Tools from our readers for #Recruiters

admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 07:23:55 +0000

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Throughout the last year we’ve posted on many search tools, technigques and apps that can be utilized by recruiters. Not all of these tools are created for recruiters but all of them can be used by recruiters and sourcers to gather pertinent information during your search.

The list below is a list that we’ve built off of the comments, suggestions and tweets shared with the RecruitingTools community.

Various Search Tools

trueknowledge: A quick and easy way to get answers to your questions. It’s a search engine built on knowledge…Sounds rudimentary but you’ll get the drift once you check it out.

Footnote: 70 million plus documents posted on the site. It’s not free and not always the best source but a source none the less that hold some valuable info. This is not a site to search resumes.

PennTags: User created data based on Tags and academics. It’s a UPenn affiliated site, thus the name

Search Engines: (Not exhaustive but a few neat engines that can add some direction to your search)

GigaBlast.com: A green site powered 90%by wind energy. But the real reason I’ve included the site is that it gets results. You can search for resume using Boolean but not all the same syntax as Google. So you’ll have to play with it. The results or clean and presented quickly

GO.com: Kid of silly to include since it’s the new infoseek and powered by Yahoo. The main page is built nicely and it’s fast but they play an auto video and that is annoying as hell.

SavvySearch AKA Search.com: Nice site, very quick and accepts Boolean search. The results are displayed in a clear and wasy manner.

Rollyo: Customizable search engine giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines and target specific areas.

HotBot: Not a boat load of features here but it will save you search criteria across a few search engines to prevent you from having to retype or copy and paste your queries.

Data Capture Tools

Knolwedge Probe Inc.: Captures,filtering, mining, and conveniently processing text from WebPages and other sources,

Contact Capture: A free capture tool that allows the user to use a free fully functional capture tool and export tot excel among other programs.

The Email Extractor: It’s free on a trial but can be used a few times over. This is inexpensive and well worth the purchase. You can pull 1000+ emails / minute if you are looking to pull data that quickly.

iMetaSearch: A Powerful new Windows search tool #recruiting #sourcing

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:00:19 +0000

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Group, cluster, sort extract, export, filter: and search keywords, phrases, search results and candidates. This is what iMetaSearch lets you do for free.

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is what stands between Google and iMetaSearch. Now I won’t profess to be a expert in this area, but I will say that I have had a productive time gathering relevant information on my areas of research. The pure definition of LSA or LSI (Indexing) is that the system is analyzing documents to interpret the underlying meaning or concepts of those documents rather than matching word for word. Here is a great visual that breaks it down rather nicely.

If however you just want to assume it works and try this bad boy out you can download the free version HERE from PuffinWare.

See the videos below to help walk you through. We did nto create these videos as they have already been posted and created on the Puffinware website. Here they are. Pay them a visit and try out the tool.

Here is a set of tutorials on the tool. Be sure to visit there site: iMetaSearch

Text from Puffinware site:

This video covers the basics of how to do a search. It also briefly covers the 4 main areas of the user interface.

Groups of Results - each search result is put into a group made of similar results.
Search Results – a list of all the search results.
Selected Result – the details of the currently selected search result.
Extracted Words – a list of all the words and phrases from all the results.

Text from Puffinware site:

This video covers how to explore search results by taking advantage of:

Sorting results by column
Looking at groups of similar results
Updating relevance scores by marking interesting results
Going to the webpage of a result
Exporting results to a CSV (Excel) file

Text from Puffinware site:

This video covers using the extracted words and phrases in the following ways:

Doing quick searches on any extracted words or phrase
Finding all phrases that start with a certain word
Filtering extracted words to find people and websites
Exporting words and phrases to a CSV (Excel) file

Text from Puffinware site:

This video covers how to use groups of related results in the following ways:

Sorting groups by description, color, or relevance
Controlling the number of groups, from large general groups to small specific groups
Marking groups to find related groups, and also related search results and words

Talent Communities are great. The Recruiters Suck

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 03:58:42 +0000

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Engagement. What is it? What does it mean? And how do you measure it? It’s a tough question, and I will jump to say that the vast majority of companies, corporate or vendor based running a form of social campaign

have no clue.

The last few years have seen corporate talent operations engulf social media or “social recruiting” (Google has no definition) as the only absolute in their organization. I want to be clear that I am a firm believer in social and 2^nd generation connecting for the purpose of talent acquisition. But I am a bigger fan of process and meaningful connecting. I talk about it a bit here in the 4 c’s, Engagement and the Electronic Exchange.

This past week I was a silent participant in a recruiting conversation offline that opened my eyes to how dangerously clueless a lot of recruiting leaders are. (Silent as I sat in but remained quiet)

This is a serious problem that will only lead to greater failures. These are large mega companies with billion dollar brands and trillion dollar dreams. Companies that on the surface have elegantly articulated the process for their talent community but have genuinely failed at any backend process that would be recognized as mediocre.

The conversation was around engagement and metrics within the talent community. What do we need to measure and how do we measure it? The companies will 100% remain anonymous and I will not share the participants, but I will share a few good things that came out of the call.

Building and measuring a talent community are 2 separate challenges. How to measure and what metrics “we” (collectively) need and/or want to measure:

Engagement: Engagement was defined as how the organization would approach potential prospects or visitors to the named landing page or community page. Some ideas included activities, contests, give a ways and so on. The end result was an agreement that the engagement must consist of a way to attract potential talent; which I agree with.

The question posed was: What metrics you currently use to measure return on engagement activities? Though I felt this could have been a deeper conversation here are the notes that I gathered during the call.

Metrics to monitor when assessing the return on your talent community efforts: (Not an exhaustive list but a few to get the conversation started):

Content: Content is king and the king will always win. Great content generates great engagement. Though I agree with this there was no serious breakout of what great content is. I am not even sure you can label great content. Great content is in perspective of the reader. My feeling is that you need to understand your target audience and why they are visiting your site or reading your content.

It’s important to understand your goal and have a clearly defined plan on how you will get there and how you will navigate around the roadblocks that will arise. And arise they will.

Content tracking can be accomplished rather quickly and easily with programs like Google Analytics but study these before you choose. There are others that will fit your specific needs better than the standard free applications.
Tracking stickiness: how long a reader was reading your content and how many click thru’s they had during their visit. Did they click 1 article or 4? And which article where they? Were they related to the entrance point they came through to get onto your site or did you entice them to read additional articles that are not related to the original reason they visited your work? Another nice tool I find helps is Yahoo’s Index Tools.
Content Downloads: i.e. whitepapers, research, abstracts. Did you convert the visitor into a candidate? A visitor is a prospect. Do not be fooled by your statistics telling you that you had 600 visitors today but 50 where unique and you only had 5 downloads of the content you wanted to push out.
Measure Subscriptions to your community and to your links or feeds. There are free and paid services. I prefer some of the the paid for tracking details however you can always use free services like a mailchimp (to an extent) but a very strong service or you use an open source like PhP if you can handle it on your own.

A career blog for example that has 17,000 subscribers looks good, but is it relevant? This is the same argument as being a top 10 connector on LinkedIn. What does this get you? Access to more people? On the surface yes, but relevance..not a chance in hell. We’ll discuss that in another post, but you can read bit on relevance at Boolean Blackbelt and Glen’s post on LinkedIn’s Competitive advantage.

Target your network accordingly. If you are focused on sales recruiting than have a plan to target your top prospects (companies not individuals) and work out a way to effectively convert them into a candidate.

Recruiter return is a serious metric that without fail needs to be measured, tracked and monitored. Your recruiters are the face of your organization. Their attitude tells the story. Their ability to effectively articulate the message decides whether or not the prospect is converted into a candidate.

I will leave on the note of “recruiter return” and tackle that in the next installment.

People Search with Zoominfo

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:05:34 +0000

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Sourcing for candidates can be simple or it can be frustrating. Putting aside the intricacies of deep web searching this series will be dedicated to listing and explaining some best practices around leveraging people search tools to find and attract great talent. First, let me start by saying that there are obviously thousands of applications that are available to mine HC (human capital data).

Choosing the proper application can only be done by you using what you feel comfortable with.

The tools that I’ll be sharing will not require you to be a super duper sourcing hero. I hope you enjoy. Please share your best tools and practices if you like the tools.

Tool #1: Zoominfo

(Paid – but you can use it free via site searching to an extent) – Sure, it’s the standard and most everyone knows about the tool, but there is a reason for that. It’s good. In essence it’s deep aggregate of HC data that allows you to effectively source data and competitive intel form target companies including sales info, but more important prospect information of potential talent for your organization.

I’ve been using Zoominfo for a couple of years now to uncover talent that I could probably find otherwise, but possibly not as quick without spending valuable time searching.

Why I like Zoominfo:

1. The key is the relevance to the results set provided. The info is concise and package extremly well.

2. You are provided with the sources from which the intel was gathered from for your review. This is obviously a great soruce to have for further research and tracking

3. SImilar to Hoovers and Yahoo finace among others, your given suggestions and information around key intel such as finances, competitors and stake holders.

4. Leveraging the free version, you really do get a significant amount of free data that you can than cross reference.

Here’s an example:

1. Try a very basic Site search via Google to target specific titles / companies etc. You can also go directly to Zoominfo and play with their search features. I tend to have better results through Google. Also try yahoo and bing etc. to be sure you are maximizing all results sets.

2. See the set of results showing “software engineers” from Microsoft

3. Full profile and breakdown of sources of information on potential candidates

Now certainly you can get deeper with the results set as you hone in on your search. As you play with the tool be sure to try the search capabilities internal to the application as well.

Subscribe HERE to stay up to date with our people search series

Search for Resumes with Aggregation with @JimStroud

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:00:53 +0000

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Jim Stroud is a regular contributor the Sourcing community and we partner of some projects. I love his work and his videos are very informative. I recently viewed this small training video searching for resumes

on Dogpile.com. loved the video and Jim was gracious enough to allow me to share it on RecruitingTools with our readers.

In this episode of The Searchologist, Jim Stroud explains how to search Google, Yahoo and Bing more efficiently by using the metasearch engine – Dogpile. Plus, Otis Collier gives tips on how to increase views of your Linkedin profile.

Visit Jim’s Website. View other posts by Jim Stroud here

Site Surfing and Brand Management for Recruiters

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 15:00:03 +0000

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As a recruiter one of your key drivers is to create value around your insights. Creating this value can sometimes be a difficult task. Having the proper tools to efficiently mine conversations and comments better ref, “micro-conversations” will provide you with some great ammunition when targeting prospects both candidates and clients.

I’ll look at this from 3 different perspectives and show you one of my favorite mining tools in the video below. When leveraging these tools I really focus on 3 key areas; Candidate prospecting, Client prospecting, and Personal brand management.

As difficult as it can get, with the proper tools it can be easier. And I’ll stress the ier part of that because this job is not a cake walk. But having the ability to set filters, targets and mediums allows you to get inside of the candidates and clients world is essential.

One of the first rules of social media or social recruiting is listening. It’s about understanding how to build your social world around you in an effective and efficient matter that I refer to as the 4C’s.

Understanding where and how you prospective candidates and clients are communicating with each other will not just provide you with some critical messaging but will allow you to be genuine in your approach and help you to refrain from sounding like a sales person that just read up on the company website.

Here are 2 key tools we’ve been playing with and find to be pretty solid:

WhosTalkin

This is a failry in depth search tool with free acces to monitor conversations online across more than 60 top social media sites. You can use the tool direct from their site at WhosTalkin or you can use the very cool iGoogle widget or one of teir 2 search plugins below.

Click here to add gadget.

Browser Search Plugin

The WhosTalkin Browser Search Plugin brings the power of the WhosTalkin.com platform straight to your browser search bar! You can now use the WhosTalkin.com Platform by simply typing in your search request into your browser’s search bar. To install check out the video guides below.

Installation Instructions for Firefox

Installation Instructions for Internet Explorer

Quarkbase

Quarkbase provides an easier way to find website information. You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase

‘whois on steroids’ or ‘imdb for websites’. Quarkbase saves you from spending hours on search engine finding website details, as it provides you with up-to-date information in seconds for free!

Why we like it:

This is a great site for gathering key compeitor infor for free in an easy to read and real time format
You can serch by topics, category or industry sites
Tracks realt time updates including twitter
With nothing more than the website address you can serach individual controbutors in your competitors

Give these 2 tools a try and subscribe here to get updates on more tools like these.