You are currently browsing the Top 10 Tools & Techniques for Recruiting weblog archives for December, 2009.
- Musings (1)
- Strategies (5)
- Techniques (12)
- Tools (14)
- 6. January 2010: Strategies - Unique Web Sites to Leverage Your Recruitment
- 4. January 2010: Welcome to 2010
- 31. December 2009: Top 10 Tool - AutoSearch
- 21. December 2009: Top 10 Technique - The Power of the Word "Resume"
- 18. December 2009: Strategies - Effective Recruiting Begins at Home
- 17. December 2009: Strategies - Online Job Postings
- 11. December 2009: Top 10 Technique - Google Does Math
- 9. December 2009: Top 10 Tool - Glance
- 9. December 2009: Top 10 Tool - ReferYes Sourcer
- 7. December 2009: Strategies - Free Video Tutorials
Archive for December 2009
Top 10 Tool - AutoSearch
31. December 2009 by admin.
A-list candidates are a recruiter’s market. Hence, the science for discovering these folks, their resume, profile, contact info, and anything else should be reclassified as performing market intelligence. To be an effective and productive analyst, it can take an enormous amount of time in a workday to collect all the necessary leads. So discovering tools that can greatly reduce the time to perform this market intelligence is a godsend to any recruiter. One such new tool on the market is AutoSearch. It does a variety of tasks in the public domain that makes sourcing fun and productive. It scours LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Plaxo, Xing, Spoke, and Jobster business networking sites as well as the Twitter, Ning, Facebook, and MySpace social networking sites. This tool also employs other web-based research sites such as Mail Tester, 411.com, Google, Whitepages, and pipl.com to best leverage your time.
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Top 10 Technique - The Power of the Word “Resume”
21. December 2009 by admin.
How many resumes can be found using Google? A bunch! The same is true for most any other search engine. My research revealed that when searching for nothing more than any one of the following versions of the word resume, over 3.6 billion were found. Now, of course, there was no additional filtering to remove jobs or other keywords that would return only true resumes, but the potential results far outstrip anything you could find using all the fee-based resume boards.
Variations on the word Resume
vitæ, resumé, rèsumé, rèsumè, resume, résumé, résumè, CV, vitae, vita
Going one step further, I further refined the search with this algorithm:
This produces over 170 million results. However, this is still much too large to work with. Your challenge is to introduce a variety of keywords to further refine your results. All the best.
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Strategies - Effective Recruiting Begins at Home
18. December 2009 by admin.
If you’re not collecting email addresses on your homepage (and anywhere else you can), you are missing out on opportunities to turn first-time job seekers into your best employees. No matter how they found you - maybe you rented an opt-in list, placed a banner ad or two, distributed a flyer or sent a postcard - if you’re not providing a way for passive/active job seekers and visitors to express interest in hearing from you in the future, that opt-in list rental, that banner ad, flyer or postcard was nothing more than a one-shot deal.
Here are some hints and tips on building your own opt-in emailing list.
Begin by asking for email addresses at every point of customer contact:
- On your company website
- In a guest book
- On customer service or support calls
- On invoices, brochures, customer surveys, feedback forms
- At tradeshows or events
- Place your email list sign-up on your homepage above the fold
You may also want to place it on other pages, like “careers” or “contact us” but whatever you do, don’t hide it! Same goes for your guest book. Place it prominently. Ask your employees to make it a part of their routine to ask friends if they would like to receive your newsletter, to receive special promotions, or to be notified of private events.
I want confidentiality
Just get the email address to start. Your visitors’ and jobseekers’ trust must be earned and this only happens over time. To that end, also make your privacy policy clear up front. Make sure they understand how you will be using their email address, that it won’t be sold or traded and that they can decide to “opt-out” of further communications at any time.
Why should I sign up?
If the lure of private events or promotions isn’t enough, email list sign-up success can be achieved with sweepstakes, drawings or the like. Make sure your incentive is closely related to your product or service. That way, you’ll end up with an audience interested in you, not just the latest gadget.
No matter what you’re recruiting and no matter what your size, your goal should be to make the most of every visitor and every job seeker. Make your site traffic and/or foot traffic, work for you by building your own opt-in email list and communicating with your visitors and job seekers.
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Strategies - Online Job Postings
17. December 2009 by admin.
Great online recruitment advertising can be the key to attracting the “A”-list talent your company needs. Here are 9 tips for maximizing your advertising budget.
1. No misspellings in your job posting.
2. Specify a salary range for your job posting.
3. Disclose your company name in the job posting.
4. Put as many keywords in your job description as you can.
5. Promote your company in the job posting.
6. Explain what makes your company unique and attractive to applicants.
7. Describe your benefits, emphasizing any special perks your company may have.
8. Use a more traditional job title so applicants understand what the position is.
9. Make sure the job posting is not too lengthy.
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Top 10 Technique - Google Does Math
11. December 2009 by admin.
Beyond using keywords and catch phrases to identify candidates with Google, this search engine also employs very powerful computational language that allows you to perform any type of calculation or conversion. Here are some examples.
- 4+3 displays 7
- 9-4 displays 5
- 3*7 displays 21
- 45/9 displays 5
- 5^3 displays 125 (5 raised to power 3)
- 11%5 displays 1 (the remainder after division)
- sqrt, nth root ofx (sqrt(64) displays 8, if you need non-square roots you can use for example 3th root of 27)
- sin, cos, arctan, tan…
Google calculator supports various trigonometric functions, expecting a radians value, that can be expressed also using the pi constant: sin(pi/2), tan (2/3*pi)
- ln: displays natural (base e) logarithm: ln(e^5)
- log: displays base 10 logarithm: log(100)
- !: displays n factorial: 3!
Numbers can be entered also in hexadecimal, octal and binary base, using 0x, 0o and 0b prefixes, for example 5 +0xf+0b1001
Conversions
- in degrees / in radians: convert radians to degrees: pi/2 in degrees or convert degrees into radians: 90 degrees in radians
- in hex / in binary / in octal / in decimal: convert to each of the given bases: 16 in hex , 16 in octal, 16 in binary, 0×11 in decimal
- use 2009 (MMIX) in Roman numerals
- distance conversions: use 100miles in km , 1m in mm, but also 200000 km in light-second etc.
Examples:
- 100mph in kph
- 1 month in seconds
- 280 Kelvin in Celsius
- 50 Fahrenheit in Celsius
- 3 euros in $ or 3 euros in dollars
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Top 10 Tool - Glance
9. December 2009 by admin.
If all the major competitors for the same product offer their service at the same cost, what sets them apart? I believe the answer is ease of use or simplicity. Glance offers one-click screen sharing, and I mean one-click. No software to download, or embedded program pop-ups. I was recently invited to attend a product demo for a new resume search tool and all I did was enter in a user code. The remaining information like name and contact details were optional. In less than a second, I was watching the demo. Just for reference, here is the pricing and basic service details for 3 major web-conferencing/meeting products.
Glance.net - $49.95/mo
one-click screen sharing
# Unlimited online meetings
# Up to 100 participants per meeting
WebEx.com - $49/mo
# Unlimited online meetings
# Up to 25 participants per meeting
GoToMeeting.com - $49/mo
# Unlimited online meetings
# Up to 15 participants per meeting
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Top 10 Tool - ReferYes Sourcer
9. December 2009 by admin.
A free passive and active candidate sourcing tool to find resumes and candidate profiles on top social networks and search engines. (e.g., Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ZoomInfo). ReferYes provides tools for sourcers and recruiters to help them find candidates online. Now, you don’t have to be a Boolean expert or familiar with the X-Ray search techniques to source candidates. It also includes an automated advanced search strings developed by search experts to find resumes and candidate profiles on the web.
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Strategies - Free Video Tutorials
7. December 2009 by admin.
Knowledge is power. And free knowledge aint so bad either. Butterscotch offers lots of free video tutorials that can greatly improve your social networking and further leverage your company’s recruiting muscle. Here are a few of the many subjects presented, most having 10 or more episodes per subject.
Advanced Twitter Tips
Craigslist Fundamentals
The Finer Points of Facebook
Introduction to Flickr
Getting connected with LinkedIn
Beginner’s guide to YouTube
Facebook for grownups
Get Twittering - Twitter for Beginners
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Top 10 Tool - Free Resumes
6. December 2009 by admin.
Find free resumes on the Internet using the eGrabber widget below. A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be easily installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page without requiring additional coding..
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Top 10 Technique - Basic and Advanced Search Tricks for Google.com
5. December 2009 by admin.
- Google didn’t always understand certain special characters like [#], but now they do; a search for [C#], for example, yields meaningful results (a few years ago, it didn’t). This doesn’t mean you can use just any character; e.g. entering [t.] and [t-] and [t^] will always return the same results.
- Google allows 32 words within the search query (some years ago, only up to 10 were used, and Google ignored subsequent words). You rarely will need so many words in a single query - [just thinking of such a long query is a hard thing to do, as this query with twenty words shows] - however, it can come in handy for advanced searching… especially as a developer using the Google API.
- You can find synonyms of words. i.e., when you search for [house] but you want to find “home” too, search for [~house]. To get to know which synonyms the Google database stores for individual words, simply use the minus operator to exclude synonym after synonym (they will always be shown as bold in the search engine result page (SERP), like this: [~house -house -home -housing -floor].
- To see a really large page-count (possibly, the Google index size, though one can only speculate about that), search for [* *].
- Google has a lesser known “numrange” operator which can be helpful. Using e.g. [2006..2009] (that’s two dots in between two numbers) will find 2006, 2007, and so on until 2009.
- Google’s define-operator allows you to look up word definitions. For example, [define:css] yields “Short for Cascading Style Sheets” and many more explanations. You can trigger a somewhat “softer” version of the define-operator by entering “what is something”, e.g. [what is css].
- Google has some exciting back-end artificial intelligence to allow you to find just the facts upon entering simple questions or phrases like [when was Da Vinci born?] or [da vinci birthday] (the answer to both of these queries is “ Leonardo Da Vinci’s Birthday -
- Google allows you to find backlinks by using the link-operator, e.g. [link:blog.*.com] for this blog. The new Google Blog Search <http://blogsearch.google.com/> supports this operator as well. In fact, when Google’s predecessor started out as Larry Page’s “BackRub” < http://www.smartmoneydaily.com/business/project-backrub-aka-google.aspx> in the 1990s, finding backlinks was its only aim! However, not all backlinks are shown in Google today, at least not in web search. (It’s argued that Google does this on purpose to prevent reverse-engineering of its PageRank algorithm.)
- Often when you enter a question mark at the end of the query, like when you type [why?], Google will advertise its pay-for-answer service Google Answers.
- There is a “sport” called Google Hacking. Basically, curious people try to find unsecured sites by entering specific, revealing phrases. A special web site called the Google Hacking Database <http://code.google.com/p/ghdb/> is dedicated to listing these special queries.
- Google searches for all of your words, whether or not you write a “+” before them (I often see people write queries [+like +this], but it’s not necessary). Unless, of course, you use Google’s or-operator. It’s an upper-case [OR] (lower-case won’t work and is simply searching for occurrences of the word “or”), and you can also use parentheses and the “|” character. [programmer (java | j2ee)] will find pages containing the word (or being linked to with the word) “programmer” and additionally containing at least one of the two other words, “java” or “j2ee”.
- Not all Google services support the same syntax. Some services don’t allow everything Google web search allows you to enter (or at least, it won’t have any effect), and sometimes, you can even enter more than in web search (e.g. [insubject:test] in Google Groups <http://groups.google.com/>). The easiest thing to find out about these operators is to simply use the advanced search and then check what ends up being written in the input box.
- Sometimes, Google seems to understand “natural language” queries and shows you so-called “onebox” results. This happens for example when you enter [goog], [weather
- Not all Googling is the same. Depending on your location, Google will forward you to a different country-specific version of Google with potentially different results to the same query. A search for [site:stormfront.org] from the
- Sometimes, Google warns you about its results, especially when they might seem like promoting hate sites (of course, only someone misunderstanding how Google works could think it’s them promoting hate sites). Enter [jew], and you will see a Google-sponsored link titled “Offensive Search Results” leading to this explanation <http://www.google.com/explanation.html>.
- For some search queries, Google uses its own ads to offer jobs. Try entering [work at Google]. Further drilling down revealed a great and current HR position need (Director of People Operations) in
- For some of the more popular “ Googlewashing” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb> results, like when you enter [failure] and the first hit pertains to heart failure; George W. Bush is now second. Google displays explanatory ads titled “Why these results?”.
- While Google doesn’t do real Natural Language Processing <http://research.google.com/pubs/NaturalLanguageProcessing.html> yet, this is the ultimate goal for them and other search engines.
- Some say that whoever turns up first for the search query [president of the internet] is, well, the President of the internet. (I’m applying as well, and you can feel free to support me with this logo.)
- Google doesn’t have “stop words” anymore. Stop words traditionally are words like [the], [or] and similar which search engines tended to ignore. Sometimes, when you enter e.g. [to be or not to be], Google even decides to show some phrase search results in the middle of the page (separated by a line and information that these are phrase search results).
- There once was an easter-egg in the Google Calculator <http://www.google.com/help/calculator.html> that made Google show “42″ when you entered [The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker’s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy>. The easter egg only works in lower-case.
- You can use the wildcard operator in phrases. This is helpful for finding song texts - let’s say you forgot a word or two, but you remember the gist, as in [”Science in the home * Maxwell Edison * *”] - and similar tasks.
- You can use the wildcard character without searching for anything specific at all, as in this phrase search: [”* * * * * * *”].
- Even though www.googl.com is nothing but a “typosquatter” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting> (someone reserving a domain name containing a popular misspelling) and search queries return very different results than Google, the site is still getting paid by Google - because it uses Google AdSense <https://www.google.com/adsense>.
- If you feel like restricting your search to university servers, you can write e.g. [java-tutorial site:.edu] to only search on the “edu” domain (you can also use Google Scholar <http://scholar.google.com/>). This works for country-domains like “cn” or “de” as well.
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