I recently attended and thoroughly enjoyed the Talent42 conference in Seattle – John Vlastelica and Carmen Hudson have done a fantastic job, and I was also honored to be asked to present the closing keynote on the current and future state of sourcing.
Aside from the stacked speaker lineup, valuable content, sourcing roundtables led by a good portion of who’s who in the sourcing community, and power + wireless for all (other conference organizers please take note!), what I especially enjoyed about Talent42 is the fact that it is the only technical recruiting-only conference. My entire career has been focused primarily on the technical recruiting, so it was nice to spend a couple of days in the company of people who share a similar recruiting background and appreciate the unique challenges associated with sourcing and recruiting IT professionals.
As my keynote presentation had a lot of animations, off-slide commentary and embedded videos, I took the time to modify the slide deck so that it could be largely understood that without the benefit of hearing me speak to the content (I wish more presenters would do the same!!!), and I have uploaded it to Slideshare, complete with informative, funny, and controversial YouTube videos.
In this presentation I address what I feel is the current state of talent sourcing as well as what I believe the future of talent sourcing will be, sooner than later. Additionally, I demonstrate Facebook’s Graph Search and offer insight into functionality from several “Big Data” talent sourcing tools, including Dice Open Web, TalentBin, Entelo, and Gild.
Falcon allows you to find people’s “social details” by hovering their names on certain sites. In other words – you can use one social profile to discover many of the other social profiles that the person might also have. For example, from someone’s Twitter handle, you could quickly reveal their Facebook and Github profiles.
While the Falcon.io site mentions that the Chrome plugin/extension leverages Hacker News, Tweetdeck, Twitter, Github and Dribble, there isn’t much documentation to be found on exactly what other sites Falcon leverages.
However, a little exploration and experimentation shows that the Falcon social discovery tool also supports (to a lesser or greater extent):
Google+
Foursquare
Klout,
Facebook
Slideshare
Instagram
StumbleUpon
YouTube
Vimeo
WordPress
It very likely works with other sites I have yet to discover. However, there is one key site that it doesn’t seem to work with – LinkedIn.
In addition to working by hovering your mouse over certain social links, you can also enter and search for specific social profiles. I’ve entered and successfully searched for Facebook, Google+ and Quora profiles.
If you like what Falcon can do for you, then you might also like TalentBin’s free social discovery tool.
If you’re not familiar with TalentBin, their “talent search engine for the entire web” is what I would consider to be one of a few sourcing solutions available on the market today that harnesses the power of big data when it comes to sourcing and recruiting.
In addition to their premium solution, the wonderful folks at TalentBin whipped up a free Chrome extension/plugin that allows you to perform social discovery from any one of a number of sites.
As you can see from the image to the right – TalentBin cross references a HUGE number of sites. It also leverages an incredibly simple and easy 1 click functionality to serve up results – no mousing over links or entering URLs to search for results.
The only catch (and it’s a BIG catch) is that you have to be a premium user to take action on the data, including the “contact vectors” that TalentBin conveniently serves up to you (which is a fantastic feature, btw).
I know some people may be less excited about a freemium tool, but I think TalentBin’s expansive social search and simple execution is impressive. I also think it provides insight into what’s to come with regard to social aggregation empowering research, sourcing and recruiting. Plus, sometimes you do get what you pay for.
Download the extension file from the website and save it to your computer.
Click the wrench icon on the browser toolbar.
Select Tools > Extensions.
Locate the extension file on your computer and drag the file onto the Extensions page.
Click Install.
Final Thoughts
TalentBin’s Chrome extension cross references a surprisingly large number of social sites that it can leverage cross for social discovery. This impressive functionality is no doubt a direct result of the work they’ve been performing on their premium solution. As such, while TalentBin’s browser extension is free, you can’t make much use of it without being a user of their premium product.
On the flip side, while the Falcon social discovery tool isn’t as comprehensive as TalentBin’s, it’s 100% free to use and take action on – thanks Gwendall!
If Gwendall’s open to suggestions, I would recommend adding support for LinkedIn profiles, as well as functionality similar to TalentBin’ simple one-click execution over having to hover over links or search for URL’s.
However, I’m certainly not complaining about Falcon’s functionality – I’ll gladly use Falcon as is!
I recently attended and thoroughly enjoyed the Talent42 conference in Seattle – John Vlastelica and Carmen Hudson have done a fantastic job, and I was also honored to be asked to present the closing keynote on the current and future state of sourcing.
