RecruitingTools.com » Social Recruiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsored by iCIMS and RecruitingBlogs.com

50 Awesome Search Engines and more for #Recruiters

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

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

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

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

See the full article HERE

Meta Search and Multi Search Engines

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

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

Multimedia and Interactive

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

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

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

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

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

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

Various Search Tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data Capture Tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Text from Puffinware site:

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

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

Text from Puffinware site:

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

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

Text from Puffinware site:

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

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

Text from Puffinware site:

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

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

Talent Communities are great. The Recruiters Suck

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

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

have no clue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People Search with Zoominfo

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

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

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

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

Tool #1: Zoominfo

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

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

Why I like Zoominfo:

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

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

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

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

Here’s an example:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

#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**

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