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#Recruiting with Google Tools To Save Time

SourcerKelly — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:00:32 +0000

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In October I spoke at ProjectSAME (for you outside the DC Metro area that it the Staffing Alliance of Maryland Employers). The presentation was focused on my adjustment to my new work life as a Strategic Recruiting Manager after my former life as Technical Writer and Sourcing Researcher. And of course, paramount to this discussion was tools. Because now I’m in the throes of managing candidates, their profiles, contact and more. And to be honest, time is precious.

But Google helps, immensely.

Here’s my Core 4 that help me get my job done and I’d be lost without:

Chrome: If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written, you know I’m a nut about Chrome. I have about 5 extensions that I use regularly: Bit.ly, LightShot, See Google Similar Pages, ChromedBird, and ChromeIn. I only use IE now because of icims or the occasional webinar that requires it. That’s the only reason. When I can drop it forever I will.

Bookmarks: I used to believe in hyper organizing my bookmarks. But now I have 5 main folders:

Directories – have more than 200 just 60 days into the gig, so they earned a bookmark of their own
Team (that’s my team…data specific to their individual needs)
Search Strings (Templates stored first, favorites and works in progress fall in line)
Resources
Social Media Niche (I’m constantly on the hunt for niche sites…this helps me track them)

Docs: Brian Solis has a great quote… “Keep It Simple and Shareable” and that fits my team to a T. We have increased our review time and eliminated about a 100 emails a day just by sharing information via the cloud. It’s a beautiful thing.

Custom Search Engines: These are amazing. If you don’t know how to create one, go get training on how. The ability to target my search across select competitors, or industry organizations, or social networks or whatever is huge. And I don’t have to deal with all the other random results I’m not interested in. Completely friendly to all of Google’s unique operators too.

I’m sure there will be items that I tweak and drop over time. Part of my job is to figure out how I can get the most done in the least amount of time. And where free is available and quality is top notch, I’m there.

Check out Google Bookmarks “How To” **Note: This is not a recruiting example so you’ll have to relate this to recruiting**

Selecting an ATS: Trials, Successes and Failure’s

admin — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 22:00:03 +0000

Michael Goldberg based in Dallas Texas is a frequent contributor to blogs in the recruiting space. He is currently engulfed in a project reviewing and selecting the next applicant tracking system for his recruiting firm. For those that have been part of an ATS slection process and implementation, you certainly know the pain. We will be following Michael’s path through ATS selection and implemetation as he shares the good, bad, ugly, and painful.

Below is his first installment. If you have your own stories about ATS selection, please share.

Over the last three months, I have been seeing demo after demo of the best ATS Systems in the world. I mean they got everything we need-OFCCP Compliance, Excellent Reporting Tools, and my favorite…it is configurable. I will say we have it down to our top choice who I will keep nameless for the time being, but the road to getting down to the selection has been extremely exhausting.

Five parameters I set at the outset of the search: Needs to be configurable, easy for our field offices, easy for candidates to apply, easy for the recruiters to use the system and finally, keep us compliant as we are a federal contractor. Simple, right? Not exactly. As our company selects and begins implementation, I will be blogging about the experience and add some helpful hints so when you and/or your company goes through this, you will have some insight. I will throw out a disclaimer that what works for one company may not be a one size fits all. As always know your culture, your business partners and your resources available before starting.

Pushing the Easy Button: I cannot say enough that every time I ask about a certain feature it was always how how easy it for my customers to do X or how easy is it to do Y. Who are the customers? Hiring managers who will use the system to review the candidate information, set up requisitions, and find the information they need quickly. My second customer is my candidate. How many clicks does it take to get to the candidate portal? Can they find the job(s) they need to apply to quickly? Most important, number of clicks it takes to apply for the job. Ask anyone, the less the number of clicks to apply, the less candidate drop off you will have in the process.

We are in beta with a company who is measuring the analytics around candidate drop off within our site (stay tuned for some results in a future posting). We will use that data to determine the clicks we want.

My goal is to keep it to three (3) clicks. Companies with poor career sites beware…if you want candidates to apply, keep them engaged throughout the online profile process so they do not drop off. The goal in selecting your ATS is to have all questions and can the system do this questions answered before signing on the dotted line. Do NOT settle for, oh yeah, it can do that. I have heard too many horror stories over the last few months of “100K later and we are totally unhappy”, false promises, poor delivery lead to the assumption that recruiting made poor decision making.

No one wants that kind of egg on their face. Avoid the mistake by asking “What can’t the system do”, “What are the upcoming updates in the next 3, 6, 9 and 12 months?” Reporting is where the questions need to be asked. Get sample reports and ask to play in the sandbox. Test out all screens and get your clients involved when you are in the sandbox.We believe we have made the right choice and I will be announcing our decision in the coming months. Stay tuned to my post on Project Planning when Implementing an ATS coming soon!

An ATS choice is one of the most important decisions for a recruiting firm to make – the actual recruiters will be stuck using the ATS you choose for many years. It can severely impact recruiter productivity for the good or bad. Do you have your own story about applicant tracking system selection? What do you think are the most important features for an ATS to have?

Sourcing Resumes with CraigsPal.

admin — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 20:00:52 +0000

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As a recruiter you goal is to use the right tool at the right time to uncover the right talent or information. Craigslist is often a tool of choose for recruiters but I have to question how efficient they are gathering the needed information. My guess is that the resume section on craigslist serves like your ATS. Hundreds of resumes that are not qualified, so you get heavy eyed and close it out.

CraigsPal has an app for that. There are 2 versions, free and paid. Both have no search restrictions and both provide the same results. The difference is that you can save searches and distribute the information a bit differently in the paid version.

It’s fully compatible with Boolean search and offers a search builder as well. Now it was not built for resume searching specifically but it works pretty darn well. You should try using this to search for garage sales or open houses as well.

Check it out below:

eGrabbers LeadResearcher Pro…mass (and fast!) email location

SourcerKelly — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 21:00:17 +0000

This is not a paid endorsement. All opinions are that of the author.

Since I started my new job in recruiting and sourcing, I’ve been collecting directories and lists. Sometimes I source for them specifically, sometimes they just appear in my results as I’m sorting out keywords that will work. Either way I save them.

Some are small, 10 names tops. The largest one I have on file is 3,000+ and covers all executive levels within a targeted industry. Sometimes email and phone appear on these lists, sometimes not. Of course, I want to locate email addresses so I contact them for jobs that I’m recruiting for.

If the lists don’t have emails and phone numbers I have been known, on weekends, to spend a couple of hours downloading the list, and searching for that information. It’s boring. Tedious even.

But then I read this Egrabber Case Study about LeadResearcher Pro prepared by Marvin Smith. And said “Aha!” I won’t lie, I’m a fan of Marvin’s since he stopped by recruitDC last spring and thought his write up was interesting. And I had heard of EGrabber but never had the opportunity to demo their products. So with that information in hand I committed to a demo, which is no small thing considering it was going to involve 3 days of product testing plus a 60 minute phone call. That’s getting back to our recruiting time being precious, at that point I was hoping for some good results.

But it was worth it. I ran some of my largest lists through LeadResearcher Pro and was pretty impressed by the results. Twitter friends advised that I pursue results that received at least a 4 star ranking (LeadResearcher Pro delineates the quality of the email found on a 5 star system). And they were spot on. I let the system work on one of my larger lists overnight, and came back in the morning to find a good chunk of the emails I needed found. It might have taken me days with interruptions and other priorities to complete that list. And better yet, at least the structure of many of the emails had been determined. I could use that information to build on.

LeadResearcherPro is not free. It currently has a $1995 price tag. Up there for the small search firm but worth it when you’re working to uncover the hard to find candidate email addresses. Especially if you’re a data hound like me and you need a way to quickly locate email addresses, you might want to check out LeadResearcher Pro.

Google URL Modifications – Applied to International Sourcing

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 05:00:10 +0000

Google URL Modifications – Applied to International Sourcing

Sourcing for international candidates presents many challenges. Job board access can be very expensive as most major boards charge separately for each country. Yet traditional Boolean web searches get very tricky as each country has its own postal codes, geography, metro regions, area codes, etc. It takes a lot of time to become familiar with all this, not to mention the language barrier and all the different translations of the word “résumé”.

Usually for International sourcing on Google I’ve found research on these options:

¨ Use a “site: search” to find résumés within the Top Level Domain. For this example I want sites that end in .UK. – - site:.UK intitle:cv j2ee -jobs Results

¨ Do a traditional résumé string and then filter it with geography keywords. Example – - intitle:cv j2ee “49″ Germany -job Results

¨ Fill out the Advanced Search: Date, Usage Rights, Numeric Range Form and sort results by Region.

Problem

1. For the “site: search” I found that the results, while they are accurate, are VERY limiting. Some domains, like .net or .com, will be left out of this search, even though a .com site may also contain information from an international candidate.

2. The problem I had with my traditional search strings was that using “Germany” and area code “49” as keywords got me several false positives. It also required someone to put their phone number on their résumé which doesn’t always happen.

3. And with Google Advanced Search, I didn’t want to have to keep going back to the Advanced Search: Date, Usage Rights, Numeric Range Form every time I wanted to change my search criteria. Also, Google Alerts does not support the Advanced Search function.

Solution: Google Advanced Search – URL Modification

To save time I wanted a way to HAND CODE the results. This way I could automate and set up RSS feeds for new hits, or be able to generate a new search quickly with Copy & Paste. Right now, both Live and Yahoo support Boolean operators that help narrow down a search geographically, but Google does not. Since Google has no geography-based Operators, I decided to spend some time analyzing Google Advanced Search URL’s to see if it was possible.

Here is what a Google URL looks like for a basic J2EE résumé string. The keywords are underlined in the URL:

Now I am going to use the same keywords, and click the Advanced Search. In the Date, Usage Rights, Numeric Range tab I am going to select France in the Region Field. Now, all my results should originate in France and my URL looks like this:

When looking over the new URL, I noticed that each new phrase begins with the “&” symbol. Then, I noticed that one of the phrases contained the word “country” so I figured that must be the Region Command in the URL. It is underlined in the picture above.

Putting the Google URL Modification together

First – ADD the phrase “&cr=countryXX” to the end of any Google search URL

Second – Use a two letter country code to replace “XX” (must be capital letters) then hit Enter.

For a Complete List of Country Codes: http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/ctycodes.htm

Example1: ADD “&cr=countryIT” for Italy hosted sites

Example2: ADD “&cr=countryCA” for Canada hosted sites

Example3: Complete Walkthrough

Here is the Original Search URL for the keywords “oracle sales”:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=oracle+sales

Here is the same search Modified for China:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=oracle+sales&cr=countryCN

Benefits

¨ Tons more results than traditional “site: search”. With a Google URL mod search in France I got 2390 Results. With a “site: search” I got only 44 Results.

¨ Automate searches and create RSS feeds from URL’s

¨ Get more results faster with less research

¨ Search beyond Top-Level domains

¨ Create quick web bookmarks of favorite searches

Here are some additional shorthand Google URL mods that may be helpful

¨ &lr=lang_XX Add this to the URL to control the language of the results. Replace XX with the 2 letter Country Code.

¨ &as_qdr=d Add this to return hits dated today

¨ &as_qdr=w Add this to return hits dated within the most recent week

¨ &as_qdr=m Add this to return hits dated within the most recent month

¨ &as_qdr=y Add this to return hits dated within the most recent year

About Adam:

Adam Wiedmer works within the Recruitment Process Outsourcing industry in the Boston area. He specializes in providing sourcing and recruiting solutions for high-volume recruitment needs. With only two years experience, Adam has placed candidates for Fortune 500 companies in many verticals such as IT, finance, sales, and customer service. Aside from recruiting, Adam is a dedicated musician and spends his time attending concerts, playing bass, and writing music.

Email: adam.wiedmer@sevensteprecruiting.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamwiedmer

Steve Levy’s Predictions for 2006? Radio Shack?

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:00:39 +0000

(December 26, 2006) After years, we finally met Steve Levy this fall. For some reason, we had him pictured as a shortish older fellow with really big ears (It’s probably the impish quality in his writing). We were surprised to find a young energetic noticeably bald guy. At least we got the impish ears right.

That’s the way it is with people you read online. You develop these incredible, usually inaccurate mental maps and decide you know the guy. Usually, nothing is farther from the truth than an image you create with limited feedback. So it was with Mr. Levy.

Occasionally here, more likely here, Levy’s voice is biting, sarcastic and very, very clear. It’s a must read. As is usually the case in great writing, having an opinion matters. Levy knows how to have one.

Here’s his take on 2006:

2006 has been no different than any other year in recruiting – really, the more things change the more they stay the same. Recruiting has always been like the Matchmaker song from Fiddler on the Roof. New technology comes and goes, productivity increases then decreases then increases – it’s like the building of roadways around New York City by Robert Moses in the mid-1900s: traffic increased, more roadways were built, these roadways became clogged again, build another road, etc. The basic premise here is still moving from point A to point B as expeditiously, comfortably and safely as possible. Just like recruiting – finding the best person for the opportunity as expeditiously, comfortably and safely as possible. How has 2006 changed this?

Not at all.

Consider the passive candidate. In 1998, he wrote about an HR Manager from Chicago getting all worked up about recruiters peeling back URLs to find company directories and finding passive jobseekers – she complained it was like stealing someone’s wallet right off a table.John snorted (yes, he snorts), “The idea that recruiting so-called “passive candidates” is stealing sounds like a deep rationalization for poor performance on a critical strategic task.” In 2006, more people became aware of how to identify and recruit the passive candidate – not only the ones on the Deep Web but also those who can only be reached through old-fashioned brick and mortar, pick-up-the-phone and dial-and-smile. This is utterly fantastic – regardless of how one gets to these people – the magnifying focus on the passive person is a best of 2006. Ultimately those who can deep search and phone source will find themselves at the top of the market while those who cannot…
Consider discussions on ethics. Was there something in the water used by Starbucks in their coffee or Coke/Pepsi in their soda? Was there a sudden infarction in one corner of the Universe that mutated the genetic code of recruiters causing them to suddenly feel guilty about recruiting people away from companies? The vocal outburst by a few recruiters has been noticed by those who do not see a problem in our industry – I think I may have been one of these people (lol). If nothing else, I was certainly opinionated towards the got ethics? debate at ERE San Diego. Ah, the halcyon days of ethics in 2006.The issue is not so much the use of what some may consider to be unethical techniques but is more so the pervasiveness of the problem. Whether you want to believe it or not, no data exists proving that we have a problem in our profession. I called my friend at the AESC and asked about surveys that measured the breadth of “unethical behaviorin the executive retained industry…no data. All in all, an entire year of discussion…but no data. My hope is that our industry does not develop an industry wide code of conduct but rather promotes education to companies, recruiters and candidates. Once educated, I strongly believe that market forces would begin to weed out the “lesser” performers – especially given the number of communication vehicles available for sharing such information. As they say at Syms, an educated consumer is our best customer.
Consider the increase in the number of recruiting blogs. Some good, some bizarre, some serious, some comical. But the sheer number of blogs portends that many viewpoints will continue to be aired – and this is a slam dunk for our profession. In 2006, recruiter-centricthreads went nose-to-nose with candidate-centric ones: The nexus of these two has resulted in a mutual, “I never knew you felt this way” – as evidenced by the number of mutual posts and comments (see Steven Rothberg’s CollegeRecruiter blogs and Jason Alba’s JibberJobber blog). This has been a slam dunk and education for everyone. But what I’d like to see in 2007 are CEOs blogging about their company’s quest for talent – now this would be revolutionary.
Consider the escalation of staffing in SHRM. No, I’m not kidding. There are still less than 20 EMA chapters and well over 500 general SHRM chapters in North America – and far too many generalists still believe cost-per-hire is a valuable performance metric for recruiting – yet when SHRM’s LINE report (leading indicators of national employment based out of Rutgers University), finally took off in 2006, SHRM took a quantum leap in the right direction. Please SHRM- more!
Consider the definition of an applicant. Do we have to? Has any recent government ruling generated so many puzzled looks by recruiters than the one issued by the OFCCP? Simple FAQs aside, did this ruling ever create a cottage industry for our profession: Job boards, ATS’, consultants – it was the recruiting industry’s version of Y2K.
Consider Radio Shack. Trash 80 is now Trash 06. See? No one ever really learns – companies and recruiters. And they won’t in 2007. Incidents like these just demonstrate that Groundhog Day exists in Recruiting.
Consider Armed Forces Recruiting. You think you have a problem because people don’t know your company well and your salary is at the 50^th percentile? Try recruiting people to join a service branch – especially a frontline one – when the media details every death and injury each day. Yet the recruiters who sit in local stations and become part of the community and try and educate people about the benefits of being a soldier, a pilot or a seaman are cursed at, have doors slammed in their faces, and are lied to every day. Despite this, 2006 proved to be a success for them in meeting their goals. I’m proud to be a COI – Circle of Influence, someone who works with local recruiters to identify and implement alternative forms of recruiting. And I’m a better recruiter for it.
Consider Monster. Naughty, naughty. And from the recruiting industry no less. Now, where are their ethics???
Consider that even consumer product companies are changing their ads to reflect workers. We all know that Madison Avenue still primarily presents us as geezers, using likenesses for medical ads. Yet there are changes – even I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up has gone younger…need we even mention Viagra?What this portends – and I’ve seenthe move towards ads that accurately reflect their target audiences – is that the hiring of older people will continue to grow as companies view for workers who can help them generate greater revenues. So to the younger recruiters out there – do you think you know me?

These are my major happenings for 2006. What do they mean to most recruiters? Probably not too much. Recruiting is still like politics where elections are won by shaking hands and kissing babies. Technology may help remedy the administrative quicksand that seems to be growing deeper but we still have to get out there and press the flesh. So for 2007, why not stop using that job board for one week, and take a stack of business cards, a pad of paper, and some pens down to that coffee shop (I’d recommend Starbucks) near where some companies are introduce yourself.

I think I did pretty well…

About Steve Levy:

Steve Levy, Principal of outside-the-box Consulting, has been graciously referred to by Jeff Hunter of Electronic Arts, as “the recruiting industry’s answer to Tom Peters” and by JobMachine’s own Shally Steckerl as someone who “facilitates the generation of fresh solutions to quagmired problems.” Others have called him a creative thought leader in recruiting but Levy prefers action to thoughts – and is actually embarrassed by such platitudes. Better to Google this phrase (without quotes): steve-levy recruiting – that’s steve hyphen levy space recruiting then press the key – it makes no sense to hide from all the recruiting and business content he’s created especially given the mission of JobMachine.

With a bevy of business experience outside of HR – sales, marketing, information technology, software development, management consulting, patent law – his expertise is on working with companies to plan, design and implement creative systems, processes and infrastructures that improve workforce planning, recruiting, and organizational development while strengthening financial and operational performance under demanding business conditions.

An incurable observer, pundit and even serious writer of all things employment, he was the Electronic Recruiting Exchange’s (www.ere.net) first blogger back in November 2004 – a few hours before Shally became the second blogger – and has for the past two years offered the bulk of his points of view on job search, recruiting, onboarding, and business on RecruitingBlogs.com. His previous blog, The Recruiting Edge, was a Blog of the Year Nominee for 2006. He is the co-Founder of the Long Island dot NET Users Group and was previously on the Board of Directors for the New Jersey Metro SMA; Steve also sits on several Advisory Committees for various HR, job search, and HR technology organizations. He is an incurable attendee at far too many professional association meetings – only a handful of which are related to human resources.

Levy has been profiled and quoted in articles on human resources, social media, and the employment landscape in Newsday, NY Post, Kennedy’s RecruitingTrends newsletter, and QuintCareers.com, as well as on many an HR and recruiting blog. Even Dave Mendoza wrote something nice about him a few years back.

Steve is a Tau Beta Pi engineer from the University of Vermont (there is no such thing as a former engineer, Marine or Jesuit) with his graduate degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology (focus in research design and quantitative methods) from Hofstra University. He lives in New York and doesn’t possess a single professional certification in recruiting or human resources.

Most of all, Steve is on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Plaxo so be sure to connect to him.

Oh, and did I mention the Jones Beach Lifeguard Corps? Who’s launching the boat?

www.BlogDigger.com

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:03:16 +0000

Blogs are great for recruiting and I’m sure you keep up with the blogs in your industry. So you use Technorati and you are tired of looking at the same site over and over? Well, here another good blog search that allows you to narrow your searches in a number of ways. The search capabilities are pretty tight and the results seem to be better than most I’ve used. Now, I have never spoke to the site’s founders but I did insert some copy as it appears below.

I particularly like the ability to search links and local blogs. This is a great recruiting tool to use when you are looking to narrow you search. It’s a young site but with the proper usage and feedback, we may have another billionaire developer on our hands. Check it out and comment back to let me know you thoughts as well.

www.blogdigger.com

Text as it appears on the blogdigger site

Blogdigger uses it’s vast collection of blog content in novel ways. Some of our most popular services are:

Media
provides RSS feeds of recent media content for many well known media types (WindowsMedia, MP3, QuickTime, BitTorrent) that support RSS 2.0 enclosures. Subscribers to the Media feeds are automatically pushed links to media content of their choice. Try Blogdigger Media search.

Groups
is a state-of-the-art online aggregator, providing RSS or Atom feed grouping into a single configurable page. A Group can be filtered either by blog or by keyword, and content is exported in RSS, RDF, Atom, OPML and OCS, making it the richest and most full-featured feed splicing tool available. Try out Blogdigger Groups.

Link Search
Blogdigger Link Search provides backlink checking, seeing which posts are linking to other online content, tracking the conversation as it evolves. Try Blogdigger Link Search.

Overall, Blogdigger seems like a very useful tool that makes recruiting with blogs a lot easier. It’s important for recruiters to keep up to date with their industry or profession through blogs, and hopefully this tool will be useful. Do you know any other useful tools or sites for keeping up with blogs or for recruiters to use?

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