Category Archives: Internet Sourcing

All Recruiting Sources Are NOT Created Equal

9 Replies

While there is much written on the subject of how to search the various talent sources available to recruiters and sourcers today, such as the Internet, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, ATS/CRM systems, etc., there does not seem to be much written about their ROI as sources of talent/human capital information.

I believe that the value of any source of information is 50% based upon the actual information contained within (data depth), and 50% in the ability to extract out precisely and completely what the user needs (searchability). Information has no value if you are unable to easily access, effectively search for and find what you need and take action on it.

When it comes to leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition, it is critical to assess the depth of the talent/human capital data offered by the source as well as how “searchable” the source is.

Why is Data Depth and Searchability Important?

Quite simply, the deeper the data offered by and the more searchable the the source is, the higher the ROI for your sourcing efforts.

All electronic sources of talent are NOT created equal, and some offer sourcers and recruiters instrinsic advantages with regard to the ability to more quickly and precisely find more of the right people, yielding higher productivity.

I’ve created a graphic representation of a comparison of the data depth and searchability of the most common information systems used by sourcers and recruiters to find candidates. Continue reading →

Beyond Boolean: Human Capital Information Retrieval

13 Replies

When I recently spoke at SourceCon in New York, I showed an example Boolean search string that could be used as a challenge or an evaluation of a person’s knowledge and ability.

The search string looked something like this:

(Director or “Project Manage*” or “Program Manage*” or PM*) w/250 xfirstword and (truck* or ship* or rail* or transport* or logistic* or “supply chain*”) w/10 (manag* or project)* and (Deloitte or Ernst or “E&Y” or KPMG or PwC or PricewaterhouseCoopers or “Price Waterhouse*”)

During the presentation, an audience member asked me why there wasn’t any use of site:, inurl:, intitle:, etc. I responded by acknowledging that for many, sourcing and Boolean search seems to be synonymous with Internet search – however, this is definitely not the case. Continue reading →

The Internet has Free Resumes – SO WHAT?

7 Replies

BEWARE: This post takes a contrarian (yet fact-based!) view of the Internet as a sourcing tool that may be unsuitable to some readers. If you don’t want to hear anything other than how awesome the Internet is for sourcing and recruiting, please stop reading now. 

The Internet has Free Resumes – SO WHAT?

Okay, so you can find free resumes on the Internet.  So what? What’s the big deal?  The fact that the Internet is free? While free is nice and certainly can’t be argued with, I am sure you have also heard that you get what you pay (or don’t pay) for. Or if it’s too good to be true – it is.

So let’s take a look at what you get for free on the Internet:

Not a lot of resumes

If you are a sourcer or recruiter I am sure that at some point in your career you’ve read somewhere or heard someone say how the Internet has 10X the number of candidates that can be found on the online job board resume databases. I’ve always taken that for face value because, to be honest, it’s really tough to prove or disprove such a figure/statement. However, I am a bit of a skeptic and I don’t just accept what I read or hear at face value – especially grandiose statements/claims, so I’ve taken a critical look into the matter.

While you may be able to find more names/people on the Internet than you can find on any given internal (corporate) resume database or the major online job board resume databases such as Monster, Careerbuilder, etc., the Internet does NOT have more RESUMES, even when it comes to the most common job titles and roles. 

In fact, I’ve found that the Internet has in many cases at least 10X FEWER RESUMES than you can find even on ONE major job board. Continue reading →

Boolean Contest!

Leave a reply

Boolean Contest – come one, come all!

Irina Shamaeva and I were chatting a few weeks back and she asked me if I thought a contest focused on Booolean strings would be a good idea. You can imagine my reaction – “Of course!” She thought offering prizes of ResumeFinder or ResumeGrabber would be a great idea, and Chandra Bodapati, CEO of eGrabber, was gracious enough to offer his fantastic products FREE to the winners!

Here are the Official Rules of the Worldwide Boolean Strings Contest – 2008, sponsored by eGrabber

The contest starts on Tuesday December 9, 2008 and ends on Sunday December 21, 2008.
To participate, you need to complete three steps.

1) Post one new discussion item either on the “Boolean Strings” group on RecruitingBlogs or the “Boolean Strings” group on LinkedIn.
(Your post can be a tip, a question or a reply to somebody else’s question. Post between 12/9/08 and 12/21/08.)

2) Download and try ResumeFinder and/or ResumeGrabber.
(This step is optional but you get one bonus point for this.)

3) Answer questions in this Quiz.
(This is a multiple choice quiz on your mastery of Boolean Strings.)

The contest will have multiple winners! One person for every 25 participants will get the tool of his/her choice, ResumeFinder (a $349 value) or ResumeGrabber (a $495 value).
Plus, eGrabber will offer one month subscription to ResumeFinder to everybody who participates in the Contest! Check the box at the end of the quiz and you will receive a ResumeFinder product key.

The winners will be announced on Tuesday December 23. The top winner will get the title “Boolean Strings Master – 2008″. If you have any questions or comments please email us at contest@booleanstrings.com

Good luck, and good Boolean!

Resumes on the Internet: Monster vs. Google Round 2

4 Replies

In response to my post of Resumes on the Internet: Monster vs. Google one of my readers commented that “While it may be true that Monster has more resumes than Google, using a zip code search is not a fair comparison for Google. People who post their resumes on Monster are required to enter their zip code, while people who resumes are stored online will generally only put their email and/or phone number. Also, even using the term resume can be limiting in Google. Because it was not built to only index resumes, you have to get more creative to filter out the noise. You can try the ~CV or ~Resume, you can also take that out completely and search for types of documents, .DOC, .PDF, etc. and look for words commonly found in CV’s like education, objective, etc.”

His comment inspired me to get these industry heavyweights into the ring for a second battle and experiment with not using zip code ranges or the word “resume” when searching for resumes on the Internet using Google. Let’s begin with the same searches as Monster vs. Google Round 1.

Search #1 – Java, Oracle, Sprint or Nextel, State of MD

Google #1 Zip range (original search) = 4 results

(intitle:resume | inurl:resume) java oracle (sprint | nextel) 20601..21930 (MD | Maryland) -~job -~jobs Continue reading →

Resumes on the Internet: Monster vs. Google

21 Replies

If you are a sourcer or recruiter I am sure that at some point in your career you’ve read somewhere or heard someone say how the Internet has 10X the number of candidates that can be found on the online job boards. I’ve always taken that for face value because, to be honest, it’s really tough to prove or disprove such a figure/statement.

However, I am a little bit of a skeptic by nature and I tend to question everything. Socrates and I would have been fast friends. I don’t typically accept what other people say or write just because they say or write it. So that whole “there are TONS more candidates on the Internet than the job boards” thing has been slowly eating away at me and I’ve decided to take a stab at dispelling the myth by pitting The Internet (via Google) vs. Monster.

Before you jump all over the Boolean search strings I settled on for this little exercise – I’m going to keep them relatively simple for easy apples-to-apples comparisons. I am well aware that the searches you see below can be tweaked in many ways – and just so you know, I did experiment with them before settling on a particular search string format. I did not find any significant variation in the results by tweaking the approach I took to pulling resumes. For example, when I used intitle:~resume, I got a couple extra CV hits, but also a bunch of false positives that were not resumes – so I kept it pure and simple at intitle:resume.

I chose to go with 1 Internet search engine (Google) and 1 major job board (Monster). Yes – I know that there are resumes that you can only find using other search engines (hey – I do have a Black Belt in Boolean) – but I figured I would let the 800 lb gorillas of their respective niches battle it out. Plus, there are other major job boards – so we’re even.

It is important to bear in mind that I set out to just run a little experiment to see how many resumes I could find via Google for particular search terms/skills in specific locations vs. how many I could find on Monster with the same search terms and locations.  I chose the state of Maryland and a 20 mile radius of 94118 in San Francisco, CA. 

Google – are you ready? Monster – are you ready? Now, LET’S GET IT ON!!! Continue reading →

Targeting PAST experience on LinkedIn – can it be done?

2 Replies

I recently had a recruiter ask me if there were any way to be able to search LinkedIn for people who have worked at a specific company in the past, but who are NOT currently working for that company.

I can see why some Sourcers and Recruiters would want to specifically target people who are not currently at a company, but have worked there in the past. I’ve done a bit of digging on this, and I have yet to find a way to reliably targeting past experience while ensuring that you only get results of people who are not currently working at the target company.  When searching within your network on LinkedIn, as you may know, the only controllable option you have is to be able to search for people who are currently at target companies. If you leave the “current companies only” option unchecked, you will get results with a mix of people who are currently employed at your target company as well as those who are no longer working there. Also – when searching inside your own network – you are limited to results of people to whom you are connected up to the 3rd degree.
 
Going beyond your own LinkedIn network, you can try using Google and other Internet search engines and employ the site: command to search into LinkedIn – but we have to be aware that this is not a method that affords you precise control over current or past experience.  However, I’m going to give Google, Exalead, and AltaVista a thorough LinkedIn Boolean workout. Continue reading →