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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.

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

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

Download our free toolbar with more than 100+ Boolean Searches HERE

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

#SocialRecruiting tool Jobmagic for #Facebook

admin — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 12:00:39 +0000

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It’s shaping up to be a Facebook week on Recruitingtools, but that’s OK. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with the folks over at jobmagic the last couple of weeks. In that I’ve run multiple variations of demos and trails of this application both on a corporate level and individual recruiter level.

This is not a paid review. I’ve just had significant success with the tool and felt that I wanted to to share my thoughts. I’ve been speaking with 2 of their people over there. Paul (Thanks for the guidance and product demos) and Jindrich, founder and CEO.

You’ll see the quick breakdown in the video below, but in the end Jobmagic has been givin me a significant reason to use Facebook during the day. It’s certainly not perfect but it’s a damn good tool that you need to evaluate.

You’ve got options to:

Add in a jobs tab to display your careers opportunities from your corporate fanpage or personal page
Search their internal database (growing)
Candidate profile organizer
Job description mathcing with candidates from the internal database
Create, link and share all job posting (Which are Unlimited) across more than 200 social sites

You’ll see how easy you can index your friends on Facebook and how the tool instantly breaks down the demographics and profiles of your connections, how candidates apply and how your jobs are pushed to more than 200 social sites with one click. If you’ve built your Facebook conenctions based on recruitment, industry and location you’ll enjoy this tool 10x’s more.

In the end Jindrich and his team have made significant strides in converting Facebook into a recruiting tool. Take a look at my thoughts here and check them out for a free trial (no affiliate links)

A few more Facebook sourcing tips: Click here

Get the overview here:

About Jobmagic

Jobmagic, the leader in social media recruiting, helps companies to reach the best talent on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and 300 other social networks. Jobmagic’s comprehensive platform includes advanced technologies for social media sourcing, social media optimization, automatic job publishing to social media, referral hiring, talent network management and semantic profile-based matching. Jobmagic is used by companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 to startups, across all industries from retail to healthcare, and by direct employers as well as staffing and recruiting firms.

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…

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

How to choose a LinkedIn Group – Be Selective, creative and proactive

MagicSourcer — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 23:39:01 +0000

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Human beings are social animals and they always like to be in groups. In the new web 2.0 world – this also holds very much true. The social networking has provided people a life 2.0 where they can create their own groups, be part of them and engage people – without actually having a trouble to meet them (!).

This time, I am talking about professional networking groups – LinkedIn Groups. Groups provide a great platform for like-minded people to discuss and share thoughts about their common interest. Especially LinkedIn Groups is a very engaging way to create a community around similar skills / interest / industry / technology (so on and so forth). However with 100s of new groups popping every day AND with 50 groups’ limit of LinkedIn, one has to think very logically about his/her strategy around groups. Though 50 seem to be a big number; with amount of groups that LI offers – this actually proves to be a very small number.

This creates a new challenge for everyone about how to manage their LinkedIn groups. Here’re my few guidelines as starters (I’m sure you will come up with many more).

Be selective about your groups and ignores the rest

LinkedIn Groups has also powered personal branding in a big way. Now-a-days people mention on their resume / CV / profile about the groups they author and population of their groups. While creating Groups is a very easy process, maintaining / growing them needs dedicated efforts. You have to be very selective about groups you join and ignore the rest of requests. Avoid being part of groups without proper overview analysis of people in the group, motto of the group and author. Remember – LinkedIn is a professional network; hence joining groups of night clubs, celebrity fan pages OR sports / entertainment would not give a good professional image of yours.
Groups that you join also get featured on your public profile page in LinkedIn. Hence, make sure those groups reflect your professional image / expertise.

How active are your current groups?

As I said previously – people starts their groups with great enthusiasm; however fails to carry on the momentum. After sometime those groups just occupies your Group list without any significant activity. It’s difficult to track activities of all your groups daily – but once in a while visit every group that you have subscribed and see what’s going on.
• Observe how much relevant the discussion topics are.
• See how current those topics are.
• Do you see many replies or threads by industry specialists?
• Did those discussions / news allow you to learn anything new?
• How big is audience? Even if it is small – how engaging they are?

Where are your industry experts?

Generally speaking this is a good indications about which are the better groups than others. Being experts in their industry – these are the sources for good advice, tips etc. Try to follow their groups as starting points. This can give you a way to other like-minded professionals. This will also help you to connect with them and their community as a good brand building exercise for yourself. However – again don’t follow them blindly.

Are you getting ROI?

We subscribe in groups with set of expectations. It’s a simple give and take activity. People expect to contribute and in return get advice about their own requests. To evaluate this you have to participate actively in group discussions by answering or posting new topics. Closely observe about how much attention / response you get for your meaningful contribution. Are you getting new ideas, concepts and responses? If yes – this is an investment group for you. If there is very little response and sharing by group members – it’s best to exit and create a slot for new group.

Spam-Hunters

Everyone has his/her own strategy behind creating their groups. Some people want to enhance their own brand and others have a genuine knowledge sharing intentions. Groups are a very easy target for Spam-hunters – especially now when we have open groups. If you are getting spam emails about any product / company / individual promoting something and if that person is group author – it’s a clear indication of his ROI of group. If you are getting spam-mails from other member – best to tell group author so that he/she can remove this person.

Industry Presence

How many of your colleagues, industry connections etc are present in your group? This might give you a good indication about usefulness. At the end of the day – groups are nothing but collaboration of people along with their skills / experience. This might also be a good opportunity for you to invite your colleagues to your groups to increase effectiveness. This chain reaction helps any group to be people and content rich.

Engagement / Relationship Building

Apart from knowledge sharing and Q&A sessions – groups are excellent way to meet new people in your industry. This way you can create, engage and maintain relationships with new people. A good group and its leader (at least initially) should facilitate conversations and engagement process. I’ve got many good industry connections and even friends by being an active member in some groups. This engagement and relationship building helps a great deal when you meet them face to face to cement this further.

Periodic Review – Clean up & Enrichment

You should visit your set of groups once every 3 months or so. Just go through your list and pick out any obvious groups which are not yielding any ROI despite your contribution. This helps to clean up non-yielding groups to give space (Remember 50 limitation?) to new fresh groups. I’m sure you will find at least 3 to 4 such groups every quarter. Similarly – you should also search for any new groups and consider any good recommendations within your network. This cleaning up exercise makes sure that your set of groups is really worth being onto your profile list.

Thinking of Creating your own Group?

OR even better – do you already have one? You have a great responsibility of making sure that you keep your group enriched and engaging all the time. As an author – you have to invest good amount of time (at least in initial stages) to attract new talent and keep your audience engaged. You also need to have a specific vision/motto to create your group. You work as a facilitator initially to set right tone and giving direction to your group. Once you start getting good contribution – work as controller to avoid any ill-effects and make sure your group is on right track. Key thing is that you have to lead from the front and invest efforts to get good ROI. Make sure that you key-in right people into the group who will lead from the front – also make them co-admins if you have trust.

In recent times Social / Professional networking has given a fantastic platform to create communities, share ideas and drive thought process. Saying this – one has to know how to manage and get most of out of their groups. It’s key to be in right groups and right times! With 50 group limit in LinkedIn – this becomes more important.

At the end of the day – you get identified by a Group (company) you keep!!!!!

About Author

Sarang Brahme has been in sourcing for the last six years. He began with job board sourcing and networking and gradually found his way into the magical world of sourcing. He has enjoyed wearing different hats, including sourcer, recruiter, team lead, client servicing manager, pre-sales, and executive hiring – but beneath all that, sourcing is what makes him happy. Currently, Brahme works for CapGemini in India in Strategic and Executive Hiring – Sourcing. He is a firm believer in the recruitment sourcing concept and always thinks that sourcing as a function has immense power to change the way recruiters recruit.

http://magicsourcer.wordpress.com

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.