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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.

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

11 Global Research and Information Tools for Recruiters

admin — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 05:41:07 +0000

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Information Gathering is a vital line to success as a sourcer. Undertanding why you are searching what you are searching can prove to be the difference between success and failure. having a large tool box is great if you want to be the cool kid on the block, but around here I like to knwo that I am spending my time as efficeitnyl as I can. Billing lcients fro hours wasted is not a typical line item they like to see.

Below is a list of 11 strong data and statistical tools we use to create market and talent maps:

World Wide:

World Bank – The world bank is a great resource for learning, tracking and gathering data. This is a great resource for tracking economic and employment trends.

Best used for:

Data: for international and national statistics
Research: for cross sector reporting on human development and statistical economic information
Prospects: Information, analysis and advice on global trends

IMF – The IMF monitors the world’s economies, lends to members in economic difficulty, and provides technical assistance.

Best used for:

Economic Outlooks
Global and regional financial statistics
U.S Labour and economic forecasting

UN – The United Nations can be used for more than just a reference point you hear about on the news.

Best used for:

National Statistical systems
Global research for economic standards
Market research and Trade statistics

CIA World Factbook – provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities.

Best used for:

To study global intelligence
Country comparisons
Country profiles
Military and people studies

Google labs – Public data – The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand.

Best used for:

Population studies including job sector reporting
Unemployment by geo-location
Public data on human capital studies

OECD - OECD brings together the governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy from around the world.

Best used for:

Statistics comparison for almost any topic

UNESCO - Global and internationally comparable statistics on education, science, culture and communication.

Best used for:

Surveys and studies
World and regional statistics
Science and Technology statistics an surveys

US:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor is the principal Federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy. Its mission is to collect, analyze, and disseminate essential economic information to support public and private decision-making.

Best used for:

US Labor studies
Workplace studies
Unemployment rates, stats and charts

Census Bureau – To provide the best mix of timeliness, relevancy, quality, and cost for the data we collect and services we provide

Best used for:

Population & Housing Census – every 10 years
Economic Census – every 5 years
Census of Governments – every 5 years
American Community Survey – annually
Our many surveys — both Demographic & Economic
Economic Indicators – each indicator is released on a specific schedule, see the Economic Indicator Calendar

LatAm & Caribean

CEPAL – CEPALSTAT is the gateway to all the statistical information of Latin America and the Caribbean countries collected, systematized and published by ECLAC.

Best used for:

Studies on economic conditions
Science and technology
Employment and unemployment market and trends

Europe:

Eurostat – European statistical information

Best used for:

Statistical information surrounding European countries
Employment Trends and outlooks

15 Applicant Tracking Softwares & Systems

admin — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 12:00:32 +0000

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Depending on your business, Applicant Tracking Systems are typically an essential part of your business to keep organized and efficient. There are tricks and work-a-round for those without an ATS but there are usually free to very low cost options that are simple to learn and use.

Over the next few weeks we will start to build a live list of ATS providers mainly sticking to low cost and free options for independent and small market recruiters. We are calling this a live list because as we build the list we will be taking your input and suggestions. We’ll break them down into lists of 15 for easy consumption.

The suggestions on the list are not guided by sponsorships or paid features. All ATS systems listed are done so in an unbiased manner and is meant to share available resources with our readers.

Here are the first 15 Applicant Tracking systems for you to consider:

Zoho Recruit is an easy-to-use Applicant Tracking System that helps staffing agencies and recruiting departments track job openings, resumes, candidates and contacts more quickly and efficiently. Zoho Recruit allows you to spend less time on the process and more time on what you do best: getting the right candidate.

ZipRecruiter enables companies to post to multiple free job boards with a single submission and vet all applicants through simple-to-setup online interviews. Good for recruiting, hiring, job posting, candidate screening, and applicant tracking.

Active Interview is the fastest way to conduct video interviews online. Enjoy easy creation and publishing of custom interview with optional start-times and deadlines for interviews. Option to limit answer lengths on candidate responses and public (web-link) or private (invite only) interviews

CVWarehouse delivers the answer to many recruitment challenges modern companies face, by bringing the classic jobsite and tracking system into an integrated and highly efficient solution.

TalentFilter TalentFilter is TalentDrive’s on-demand, 100% SaaS model sourcing technology allows you to simply input your job descriptions into the user-friendly interface and then sweeps all your paid and free job board subscriptions, in addition to thousands of niche resume databases.

TalentPath New Features for Spring Release ’10 including a brand new User Interface, Consoles, and a powerful new platform for your Job Board with enhanced administrator and jobseeker functionality.

iRecruit is a hosted, web-based recruiting software designed to provide any size of business a cost effective, affordable and simple way to handle their recruiting process online.

Not only will this applicant tracking software work in conjunction with your current website, iRecruit provides you with it’s own career center that will allow your applicants to select the position they are interested in, and apply online through your website!

OpenCATS seems to be infinitely customizable. OpenCATS is a free Applicant Tracking System (ATS) designed for Recruiters by the recruiting community who need to manage the recruitment process from job posting, candidate application, through to candidate selection and submission.

ApplicantStack allows you to upload resumes and CVs, capture applicants from your website and public job boards and manage it all in a central database.

Jobtrain solutions deliver and support flexible, easy-to-use internet based e-recruitment software/applicant tracking systems to companies of all sizes and across all sectors

ALEX performs full resume/CV parsing of English (US/UK), Dutch, French, German, and French Canadian, while supporting nearly all US, Canadian, UK, Australian, New Zealand, South Africa, and AsiaPac address formats.

Rogerjob ATS offers an affordable solution to manage your recruitment process and talent pool. It consists of leading online tools that you customize to suit your unique recruitment priorities.

Desktop Recruitment Software is an online web application that integrates an interactive career center to your corporate website. It is built On PHP/MYSQL/Linux Platform that enables you to quickly deploy a fully functional career site customized to your requirement.

Simplicant is a simple applicant tracking system for small and medium sized businesses with easy to follow features allowing you to organize, collaborate, search and communicate.

Trovix Recruit is a human-like search technology is a breakthrough that combines complex scoring algorithms, learning, and a comprehensive knowledge base to provide personalized search results for recruiters and job seekers. Trovix understands the true context of the information on a resume

This is not a sponsored post / series. All lists and information provided in this series is meant to be used as a knowledge sharing tool to our readers. If listed software is an advertiser on Recruiter.com, that partnership does not apply to this posting series.

WTH is Influence with @radicalrecruit

admin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 20:48:27 +0000

No need to write on this one…Geoff will do all of the talking…

Geoff’s take on influence and lists…

Search Engine News: Blekko: Trying to Slash the Competition

admin — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 02:11:43 +0000

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Search Engine News: Blekko: Trying to Slash the Competition

Now that it is in public beta we can share some of our initial thoughts on Blekko. I’ll start by saying that I am certainly not the foremost expert on search engines, but I will say that this is why my view is important. I’m a user and I depend on these tools to provide results.

I love innovation as much as the next geek but when results are hindered by complexity I lose interest. This is what is happening with Blekko. Let me clarify that Blekko is still beta and when a tool is in beta you expect to not get perfect functionality. The trouble I am having with Blekko is that they are trying to introduce a completely new way of search to users that is potentially complex and requires users to learn a new process. It leverages what they call Slashtags. Slashtags according to Blekko’s site “allows users to slash in what they want and slash out what they don’t want”.

These slashtags work like filters and are built by you or others around the web. The idea is that the filters should contain the top rated sites bringing back only relevant results. In my opinion they’ve slashed out a large chunk of search users based on the fact that they have to learn a new way. I still find value here and we’ll share that in an upcoming post.

Based on the sites strengths and the people I’ve been able to speak with on Blekko it’s better used for quick research, SEO metrics and statistics. Sourcers and Market Mappers, this may be a nice addition to your suite of tools.

Blekko CEO speaks about the new release:

For better or for worse Google introduced a simplistic method of search. This has rung supreme eating more than 60% of the search market and could be the reason for Blekko being overlooked by everyday users. It happened to Cuil another engine that I liked but ultimately has failed to live up to its initial buzz. I am sure they’ll see some great traffic and buzz in the first few months but in the end I think we can chalk this one up to just another search engine.

Did you know who rules Search Engine Market Share?

Google: 62.9%
Yahoo!: 19.2
Bing: 12.5%
Ask: 3.4%
AOL: 2.0%

I’m not sure yet who the target audience is but it’s surely not the everyday browser.

Subscribe here to learn how to use Blekko to search resumes. We will be featuring a post dedicated to searching with Blekko in the coming days.

Decrease your candidate screenings 72%: Ovia: Video recruiting done right

admin — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 17:00:16 +0000

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*Disclosure* This is not a paid review and RecruitingTools.com does not have a partnership with Ovia at the time of this article.

What if I said that I have a potential solution that will reduce your candidate screening time by 72%? Would that be a nice feeling? Would that create an efficient environment for your recruiting team? Would you hiring managers be more engaged? Would your earnings rise due to increased customer satisfaction?

These are the questions that have been asked from the people at Ovia. Ovia is an interesting recruitment tool that blends interviewing, screening and video together into one complete package for your hiring teams. I will be up front and say that I have not used this tool in real time with my clients but I have used it behind the scenes.

In my honest opinion I think the tool is pretty innovative. Is it a new concept? Maybe not some much as recruiters and organizations have been talking about this for a few years, but Ovia brings it home. It’s quick, very easy to use and if used properly should have a serious impact of your screening and selection process.

Why you should consider test driving this tool:

It’s very efficient
The quality if video is high quality.
Videos are indexed properly and easily accessible for your hiring teams.
Spend time video screening candidates and collecting the videos. Schedule a weekly meeting with the hiring manager and review the videos with him/her to discuss immediate feedback. I currently work with other tools were we do this and the relationships immediately gain credibility.

Pit Falls:

I am not sure how discrimination laws govern video at this time, so be sure to research this on your own.
Advise hiring managers not to weigh too much in on the candidates composure on video. This is probably not a normal thing they do every day.
This should be used to screen in and not out. Still depend on your traditional methods and use this as an added check point.

How it works:

Invite: Similar to other apps like Tungle and social networks you let your candidate know that you are inviting them to partake in a screening or recruiting event. The screening is pretty simple. You create the questions and invite the candidates to answer those questions via webcam. Clearly you will need to get the candidates permission prior.
Record: Candidates get to record their responses to your questions in an unrehearsed manner using their webcam. The idea is that the software tries to simulate real time interviewing. The candidate will have 10 seconds to review the questions and than 2 minutes immediately after to record their response.
View the interview: Once the candidate has recorded the video responses you have the ability to review the responses with the hiring teams in an efficient and concise manner.

See it in action:

Try me out free here

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:

Drop.io is gone but here are 5 others to try for #recruiting and File Sharing

admin — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 12:42:56 +0000

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Drop.io is shutting down. If you don’t already use it, it’s an online file sharing service similar to Boxnet. That stinks for me because it’s already shut down and I use it. Why did it shut down? It’s now part of the Facebook team and the services are not needed. You can read more about the business end of it over there but check out these 5 tools that I tend use and recommend to friends and colleagues.

If you use Dop.io you can still use your drops but be aware that all drops are permanently deleted as of December 15, 2010.

5 Strong file and video sharing tools for recruiters:

Spicebird: This is an opensource communication platform including emails, IM and an online calendar. It’s windows and Linux based and will connect to standard email and calendar based programs.

ReviewBasics: This tool is free for now as of today but will eventually offer a paid platform. Is a nice service for people that are collaborating and editing various forms of content. I liked the option to markup videos as well as documents.

Writeboard: I like Whiteboard because it’s free but it also serves as a collaboration tool for writing. I can share documents and keep track of previous versions and ideas. They call this a roll back but it’s great for blogging and project work for multiple users and revisions.

Vyew: This is quickly taking over for as my choice of free web conferencing and on the spot training tools. You simply log in and play. No installation required.

Mikogo: Is another strong and free web conferencing tool that is free for both enterprise and private use. I’ve been using this for a few weeks now and it’s really simple to use.