Basic Boolean Operators Explained No, those aren’t my hands. I never cease to be amazed by what you can find on the Internet and what people take pictures of. Now that I have your attention, this post is going to focus on the basic Boolean search operators and search modifiers symbols and will not go into any detail of the many … Read More
Lean Recruiting: No Forecasts or Talent Pipelines Required!
Lean Recruiting: No Forecasts or Talent Pipelines Required! This is a follow up post to this article I wrote on Lean/JIT recruiting, which I circulated as a dicussion topic through a few of the larger staffing and recruiting groups on LinkedIn. I recieved some interesting responses, some of which led me to believe that perhaps I was not clear enough with my … Read More
Boolean Contest!
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 … Read More
Master Boolean Logic and Raise Your Game!
When it comes to golf, what’s more important – the clubs or the golfer? It should be obvious that it is not the clubs, but the technique and skill of the person wielding the clubs. Tiger Woods could play better than most people even with 20 year old clubs found at a yard sale. If you own a set of golf clubs but can’t … Read More
Lean Sourcing and Recruiting: JIT Candidate Acquisition
Lean Sourcing and Recruiting: JIT Candidate Acquisition According to globally accepted supply chain management principles (such as those of Lean and the Toyota Production System), building and maintaining product inventories is wasteful. In an ideal state, companies would acquire the right material, at the right time, at the right place, and in the exact amount. This is called Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory management. However, … Read More
Resumes on the Internet: Monster vs. Google Round 2
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 … Read More
The Sourcer’s Fallacy
A significant step on the path of sourcing enlightenment is becoming aware of, and not falling prey to The Sourcer’s Fallacy. The Sourcer’s Fallacy is the conscious or unconscious belief that: #1 If you haven’t found what you’re looking for in a particular database, social network, or on the Internet – that it’s not there, And/Or #2 After you’ve run searches in a particular database, social … Read More
Searching Facebook for Candidates
I recently received a request from a reader to come up with some example Boolean Strings for finding software engineers on Facebook who are from Top 10 schools (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, etc) and live in the Silicon Valley. ***Quick disclaimer*** I am definitely not a Facebook sourcing guru – I don’t see it as a high yield source for … Read More
Why learn how to master Boolean search strings?
Why bother to learn the arcane art and science of Boolean search logic? It really bothers me when I read or hear about the idea that sourcers and recruiters don’t need to worry about learning how to craft and execute Boolean queries for talent identification and acquisition. This opinion usually has something to do with the idea that creating effective … Read More
Resumes on the Internet: Monster vs. Google
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 … Read More
Targeting PAST experience on LinkedIn – can it be done?
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, … Read More
Twittering for Sourcing
I recently saw a discussion on ERE started by Erika Hansen Brown on the topic of using Twitter for sourcing. I weighed in on the discussion, which can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/4q73dw Personally, I think that Twitter is most effective when leveraged for passive talent identification and acquisition via recruiter and/or employer branding and job opening notifications. Some of the … Read More
The value of a resume database
How do you value a database? I say that the value of a database lies not in the information contained within, but in the ability of a user to extract out precisely and completely what the user needs. When talking about the value of a company’s internal candidate database or the online job board resume databases, we must always be aware … Read More
Resumes are not dead!
With the buzz I continue to see and hear surrounding Twitter, social networks, Internet sourcing (blogs, articles, etc.) and such, it’s easy to look at resumes as dull, outdated, or at least “uncool” when it comes to sourcing and recruiting. I fear there are many people who get blinded by the “shiny object” factor of each and every “next new thing” that will … Read More
Job Boards = Bad Candidates? Don’t believe the hype.
I continue to see well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the value of the job boards is waning and that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low. A few years ago, I weighed in on an ERE discussion in response to the question of, “What would happen if the job boards became … Read More
Talent Mining – what is it anyway?
By my definition, Talent Mining is a simple adaptation of Data Mining, which according to Wikipedia is the process of sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information, or “the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data” and “the science of extracting useful information from large data sets or databases.” I define … Read More
Black Belt Boolean
I know – you may be asking yourself, “What is this guy thinking?” A blog about Boolean queries when all the buzz is currently about Social Networking, Mobile Recruiting and such? True – Boolean search strings aren’t as sexy, shiny or new as Facebook, Twitter or Cloud Recruiting. However, in the hands of an expert, and in my direct experience, advanced Boolean search strategies and tactics … Read More