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10 Free Screen Capture tools for Recruiting productivity

admin — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 20:00:51 +0000

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A key part of successful recruiting is your ability to organize your desk in a way that you are efficiently communicating and proving key information to candidates as well as clients. There are hundreds of tools available for organization on the web, but which tools are the right tools to play with?

Subscribe here to keep up to date on this series of organization and productivity tools for recruiters.

Screen Capture tools are critical for on the fly presentation needs and data capture. You can use these tools for data sharing or training or simply just too quickly take notes and stow away for later reference.

Here is a strong list of 15 free and low cost screen capture tools for you to try:

Capture: This is a free capture tool that is fairly simple to install and use. Capture works on all versions of Windows, from Window 95 to Windows 7 and everything in-between (including XP, Vista, Win2k, etc).

Faststone Capture: Another great free tool. You can choose to send captures to editor, file, clipboard, printer, email, Word/PowerPoint document or upload them to your website. Editing tools include annotating (texts, arrowed lines, highlights), resizing, cropping, sharpening, watermarking, applying edge effects and many more.

Greenshot: Greenshot is a free open source light-weight screenshot software tool for Windows

MWSnap: MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen

ScreenStamp: ScreenStamp! takes your screen shots by pressing the print screen button on your keyboard, names the screen shot, saves it to your predefined location and stamps the image with the current date and time.

Snippy: Free. Simply click on the little Snippy icon in the taskbar notification area, and mark out the region of the screen that you want to copy — that’s it, you’re done! The cut-out image will now be in your clipboard, and you can paste it in another application.

Webshot: The freeware version comes with a demo of the command line interface, which can be purchased, and used to streamline the screenshot process on whole websites.

Zscreen: ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program for Microsoft Windows. It can upload screenshots, pictures, text & files and put the URL in your clipboard in a single keystroke.

Screenshot Captor: Screenshot Captor is a program for taking screenshots on your computer. It’s different from other screenshot utilities in several notable ways

Fireshot: Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations.

Present yourself with SlideShare

mikevandervort — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:00:20 +0000

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SlideShare as a career resource

I am sure most of you are familiar with SlideShare. If not, you should be. According to their website, Slideshare is the best way to share presentations, documents, and professional videos. They also bill themselves as the world’s largest community for sharing presentations.

What SlideShare can do for you

SlideShare is a business media site for sharing presentations, documents and pdfs. SlideShare features a vibrant professional community that regularly comments, favorites and downloads content. Content also spreads virally through blogs and social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter. Individuals & organizations upload documents to SlideShare to share ideas, connect with others, and generate leads for their businesses. Anyone can view presentations & documents on topics that interest them. The site is growing rapidly with over 25 million monthly visitors.

What you can do with SlideShare

Embed slideshows into your own blog or website.
Share slideshows publicly or privately. There are several ways to share privately.
Synch audio to your slides.
Market your own event on slideshare.
Join groups to connect with SlideShare members who share your interests.
Download the original file

SlideShare is also a great place to keep up with an incredibly wide assortment of presentations and information specifically related to Careers and Recruiting, since they have a category specifically dedicated to the Careers topic. They feature a number of presentations every day, and many are really good sources of technical and topical information. Here are some of the topics that I found today:

A pretty random selection, and just a few of the many resources you can find on SlideShare. I encourage to explore, and if you have never used SlideShare, think how you could use it in your recruiting effiorts.

SMS and Text Candidates from your Desktop: 8 Top mobile carriers for your #socialrecruiting needs

admin — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:00:33 +0000

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Connecting with candidates on the go is an important measure to the success of most recruiters. Mobile recruiting is a big topic but this is something a bit different. This is about short message Texting. I do not consider sms and texting candidates to connect mobile recruiting. Texting is a tool to use to connect much like Twitter is a tool to connect. If you call a candidate’s cell phone is that mobile recruiting?

I guess technically it is, but the big difference here is that a full scale mobile recruitment program involves significant dollars and planning.

But this article is about SMS and Texting candidates. How often do you find partial contact info for a candidate? Maybe you have the candidate’s cell phone number but not their email, maybe it’s in the reverse.

*Warning* This process can be invasive so use it at your own discretion and certainly ask the candidate if it is ok to use this method to contact them.

How I use this method:

I recruit in an RPO format so this is high mostly going to be of a high volume nature depending on the project. I use this much less on Director and Executive / Leadership roles.
I contact the candidates as normal. Once I establish contact I ask if texting is ok to share quick info regarding the jobs they are being considered for. If yes, than I add them in. I am not running grand scale campaigns here. Each candidate is a separate case.
I use my email address to send all of my text messages.

How to send the text via email:

You need to get the carrier they are on
The email address format should be: [10 digit number without dashes or spaces]@the carrier’s text exchange. [see below]
Open up your email carrier and use the format below to send an email. This is swapped and displayed as a text message and only text message rates apply.

The industries main mobile carriers and their text / email extensions:

ATT:

Maximum message length: 160 characters
1234567890@txt.att.net

Verizon Mobile

Maximum message length: 160 characters, including the sender’s email address, subject line, and callback number

9495551212@vtext.com

Virgina Mobile:

Maximum message length: 160 characters.
1234567890@vmobl.com

T-Mobile:

Maximum message length: 160 characters (including email address, subject line, and body of the message). The subject line is limited to 16 characters and the body of the message can be no longer than 140 characters.
1234567890@tmomail.net

Boost Mobile:

Maximum message length: 500 characters.
1234567890@myboostmobile.com

Spint PCS:

Maximum message length: 160 characters, including the sender’s email address, subject line, and callback number
1234567890@messaging.sprintpcs.com

Nextel:

Maximum message length: 500 characters (including letters, punctuation and system-generated characters).
1234567890@messaging.nextel.com

All Tel:

Maximum message length: 200 characters [according to commenter Edward, below].
1234567890@message.alltel.com

Do you know you Texting Short Speak?

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.

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?

LinkedIn Signal: Track connections Twitter and LinkedIn Updates

MagicSourcer — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:15:53 +0000

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I have always been a big fan of LinkedIn and been using this tool for past 4 – 5 years in sourcing. However, in recent past they are shifting from Professional Networking to Commercial Job Board. In some way – they are breaching what they promised by replacing paid accounts to let people get direct access. This move totally goes opposite of basic concept of networking they incepted years back.

Anyways – it seems that they are reciprocating to these criticisms by focusing on innovation (Google Way!). It was a pleasant surprise when I saw LinkedIn Labs consolidate damage in some manner. They have recently released a series of beta tools including Signal, LI Instant etc. I would like to talk about LinkedIn signal in this post.

What is LinkedIn Signal?

LinkedIn has taken its integration with Twitter a one step ahead. LinkedIn Signal is basically a stream of Twitter & LinkedIn Status update for LinkedIn users – at one place! It shows you what people are twitting OR “Statusing” (my version of “Updating Status”!) who are in your LinkedIn network. However, this is only true if you have connected your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts wherein you can view your twits through LI.

Being in Beta version – I did subscribe to this and got an invite. On first stance, it looks really interesting and cool. Best thing about this is you can search and filter your streams according to various fields LinkedIn offers. However, it made me think what is the basic utility? Here’s what I came up with. I am sure these are starters. Creative folks around will add to this in big way.

Searching Twits/Status stream Real-Time

I tried searching “looking for job” and got 3k+ results. That’s not all – LinkedIn Signal also provides you a facility to filter through various fields like Company, Industry, Time Posted, Region, School and even hash tags.

OK – now this is interesting. What if I query “looking for job” and filter it through industry as “IT” and selects a specific location – it gets more interesting. Beauty over here is that you can filter those twits to LinkedIn filters – unique isn’t it? That’s where I think once these social networks joins hands to each other – you have one big POT. OK – let’s move ahead.

Linkedin Signal

Job Search – for Candidates

It has proven that Recruiters / HRs are one of the biggest communities to use Social Networking. I would not even look at a recruiter who doesn’t have a LI OR social networking account. Sometimes you get more jobs advertised on twitter than on job boards. As sometimes Hiring Managers / Team members also twits-in for jobs which are not advertised. Hence, LI Signal does make a very good platform to search jobs for candidates. Let’s see?

I queried-in “Account Manager” and got 3k+ results. Most of them will jobs and some of them might be candidates as well. Plus – filters make it really good to make our own choices as per industry, region, time-posted etc.

Cross Referencing

By combining twitter / LI – Signal gives a great platform to cross reference any prospective candidates. We can easily put candidate’s name on Signal to see what he is twitting OR what people are saying about him. This helps you to cross reference any candidate before putting him forward to interview OR even submit. See what he is up to on Twitter / LI…

Few other Advantages: –

Faster than Twitter: LinkedIn Signal is real-time!! It searches online Twitter/LI stream real-time and effectively very fast. You can also filter results very quickly. I have not come across any other websites which have same utility.
Finding Similar Hash-Tags: Once you queried in the search – LI Signal automatically searches for top Hash-Tags and place them in filter set. Simultaneously it also suggests some other related / similar Hash-Tags. This helps you to search similar information to topic of your interest. E.g. if you search java jobs; it also gives you hash-tags suggestion as #hiring #apple.

Problems: –

Limited Coverage: LI Signal only searches for people
Registered in Linked
Connected their twitter accounts to LI
And obviously – have something to say!

Hence, it does not cover entire gamut; however a pretty good add-on tool to have in your armory.

I sincerely hope LinkedIn should promote their LABS in big way. Being an early-bird in Professional Networking they have captured a huge amount of followers and they are now commercializing their offering; minimizing usage for normal users. If they want to strike a right balance between commercializing and socializing – they have to continue finding new ways to attract with new offerings.

For now – enjoy what they have in BETA. It might go to their new discount offering soon

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

“How to use” the Boolean Bar: 100+ Pre-constructed Boolean searches

admin — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 05:24:19 +0000

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It’s big, it’s bad and it’s jammed packed with more than 100 pre-constructed Boolean searches for you to play with.

Check out the original post Here. I’ve gotten a boat load of emails asking for advice on how to use the the toolbar. This post that you are reading now is to share the “how to” video when trying to use the toolbar.

Download the Toolbar here: Free Boolean Toolar

See the video on how to use the Boolean Bar:

Source hundreds of leads, names, phone numbers and zip codes

admin — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:39:19 +0000

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How to source hundreds of Mortgage, Loan and Banking professional in my zip code in 60 seconds

Video at the bottom

60 seconds? Yep, and it wasn’t rocket science. Sourcing is not rocket science. In fact most people ask me what I do for a living and I just tell them I play on the internet and smile. Bottom line is that it’s my job to unearth names, contacts, emails, phones numbers and any intelligence I can for my clients.

Now you can apply this technique to most any industry especially sales or any occupation that requires the person to be available to client around the clock. Technical service professionals, sales people, pharmaceutical reps, banking professionals, security people, and technology and on call IT professionals etc. Another example of how I like to use lcoal meetups and confrences to source is with Ignite or LinkedIn Events.

3 Steps I used to find more than 320 Lenders, their cell phones, emails and location including zip code (Some with social networking profiles)

Goto: http://www.Google.com and in the search bar type the name of the institution you are targeting.
Click on the appropriate tab for company contacts or service providers “in your area”. This can be a local branch or office in your target area. (Typically avoided because most people think that is for the leadership of the company)
Enter the zip code of your target location and there you have it.
Use a contact capture tool like Contact Capture which is free from Broadlook or List Grabber Minimal fee) from e-grabber to rip out the all the contact information for your recruitment campaign.

Now it’s not always that simple, but I routinely gather hundreds of names, contacts and emails to contact for clients, our sales team and our project recruiters.

See it in action below:

How #Recruiters are generating 100′s of organic and targeted visits to their Joblog

admin — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 01:00:17 +0000

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I recently received a question around document sharing sites. What are they can they be used in recruitment? What is the return? Though doc sharing sites were not developed for recruitment you can certainly reap the benefits of their obnoxious growth.

Here is how I use a few key sites for recruitment myself.

Challenge: I went out and bought a cool domain name to advertise jobs and openings but I get little response. This social media stuff sucks.

This is a great start, and if you are using wordpress among others you’ll get some kick organic traffic if you post on a regular basis. But what if you can take your internal knowledge, post it to the masses, and direct that traffic directly to your job openings?

It’s simple to do. Here is a very brief overview of how you can approach this tactic.

Decide what who your target audience is and what content they are searching. You can use research tools such as Google Wonder Wheel, Onet or Google Insight. Run you searches, take note of commonalities and build your targets.
Now that you’ve completed some due diligence take that information and make use of it. People in industry love to read about their respective careers. That means anything of relevance that is good content will be read. Create a small 2 page essay on a specific technology, case study, industry news or happenings. Create a “how to” or a reference list. Keep it brief and then PDF it for free with services like openoffice or youconvertit or others like adobe.
Make sure your content is “re-tweetable”. In today’s world if it cannot be re-tweted or updated on a friends status it’s changes of being read on minimal. You can find great topics in your industry right in your inbox, from conversations with hiring managers, the questions candidates are asking you in the phone screens, upcoming conferences. Convert these questions into topics and write about them.
The final step is to share it with your audience. Forget making it viral. Your audience is not viral. Your hiring managers are looking for a specific candidate, not all of YouTube. There are many doc sharing apps and sites, but I like to use scibd or docstoc among a few other lesser known tools. These sites will send you hundreds of targeted visitors if your content is direct and targeted.

The only other thing that you need to do is include your contact info and push it out as hard as you can. Ask your friends to share it, re-tweet it, run adwords and so forth.

Take this content, triplicate it and post it often on your blog. The more you post the more traffic you will get. We’ll follow this up with creating your job blog to target your candidates.

Check out some of these examples that I like from Jim Stroud of TheRecruitersLounge.com

e-books / publications that drive large tartegted audiences.

Which resume sourcing tool should I use?

Twittering Recruiters