RecruitingTools.com » @ryanleary

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.

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.

SourceSolution.com: Name Gen, Target and List Building

admin — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:00:50 +0000

Often times the tools we use as sourcers / recruiters are not recruiting tools. You’ve heard me say it time and time again that we are in the business of gathering information, not resumes. The other day Maha Akiki, a frequent contributor of information to our site shared a link with me that she found while doing some research.

SourceSolutions is not a recruiting tool. It’s a service that helps connect people with business. You won’t find resumes here but you can walk away with great information to narrow your search.

We’ve found that levering SourceSolutions in a way similar to how you’d use jigsaw can help you uncover some great leads. Since the site focuses on CRO and CMO’s you’ll strong data relevant to CMO and CRO’s, Biotech and Pharma, Professional Services and Regulatory.

Pros:

Most info for free
Targeted to the CRO and CMO industries
Few options and filters are intuitive

Cons:

Not every company has lists or information
You cannot search freehand

Cool:

You can Link up to your LinkedIn account to see who you are connected with in your targeted immediate network
You can research pipeline reports from the company and search their management teams

Step 1:

Goto http://www.sourcesolution.com

Step 2:

Choose the heading you wish to research. I tend to choose company directory or Industry Organizations but you’ll find valuable info in all categories.

Step 3:

Choose your company and research pipelines and management teams

Search pipelines for products and release dates

Search management teams for names, locations and titles

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.

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

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:

Free Recruiting and Sourcing Tools from around the web

admin — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:14:36 +0000

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It’s friday and we’re wrapping up the week with some serious food for thought. Take a look at the postings on the tools below. We had soe fantastic contributions this week. Be sure to share and download the Boolean Bar. It’s free and impactful.

Tools and techniques for the Social Recruiter:

100 + Boolean Searches free in our Toolbar!: http://bit.ly/cRguVj

Sourcing resumes with CraigsPal: http://bit.ly/cPqf5O

LeadResearcher Pro via Sourcer Kelly: http://bit.ly/c0vgmo

5 Recruitment tools recruiters need to consider: http://bit.ly/bjCxw4

The Recruiting Carnival is returning. Here are a few of the more popular articles from last time:

3 Elements of a world class marketing call via Mike Ramer: http://bit.ly/ccr1sd

Gonzo Sourcing and the Evolution of Online Social Networks via Shally Steckerl: http://bit.ly/a6NtZI

Deep into the Web: A brief guide for Recruiters via Irina Shamaeva: http://bit.ly/95OEWj

Don’t be stuck without free sourcing tools

Check out our new Boolean Bar with more than 100 pre-constructed Boolean searches for recruiters. Just change out the keywords, location etc. to fit your search!

Download it here: http://bit.ly/9zJBRb

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: