News & Articles

Top 10 Ways to Find Open Source Software Developers besides resume/CV search

by Glenn Gutmacher

Q: Do you have any recommendations for skill sites to find LAMP, PHP and Python developers? I found a few but nothing great.

A: You will increase your possibilities greatly if you realize that you are basically talking about open source developers (what you mentioned are some of their primary tools/platforms - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python). The ones who are skilled in this arena don't need to promote themselves much (open source is hot, though don't count Microsoft out yet ;-) so they don't have to post resumes, and if they do, may not include the obvious programmatic keywords in their online footprint to minimize communication overload ("Funny, you are the 35th recruiter to call me today!").

I'm not saying you shouldn't do standard resume/CV search strings, but there are other options if that doesn't turn up enough of what you need. Your question was a bit vague - LAMP/PHP/Python developers are plentiful - so by skill sites, I assume you mean places that will let you search by number of years of a particular programming skill? I don't know any free sites that offer that in the aggregate (an example of a big tech job board with this option is Dice, but requires a paid login). I imagine you have some other job requirements that would narrow the field (e.g, by industry vertical expertise, geography, etc.) which would help narrow your search string criteria.

In any case, here are my top 10 most fruitful categories of sources that will lead you to open source candidates (I'm open to suggestions of others that have worked for my blog readers - I'll dig up a prize for the best one), not necessarily in this order:

1) Niche industry news portals: like OnLamp where you can find out about open source development projects. You can find other such sites simply by adding the word "portal" to a keyword/phrase string (e.g., python portal) on any major search engine.

2) Speaker/panelist lists: Find them from open source developer conferences (e.g., this was last week). They may be over-qualified, but querying their names on search engines will lead you to like people.

3) Blogs: On that note, also check out their blogs, because their blogrolls will link to other qualified folks and their posts will talk about interesting projects/people (e.g., look at this post - and don't forget that the people who post reply comments are potential candidates!)

4) Certifications: search on some of the unique open source certification acronyms (can add it as keyword to resume/CV queries, too) like CMDEV for MySQL developers.

5) Training: On a related note, you could ping companies that offer such cert training to see if they'd promote your opportunities to their alumni (maybe this) or request their list to reach out yourself (you never know if you don't ask!).

6) Discussion lists/forums: This is a goldmine for your needs. Find the niche ones where these types of developers ask and answer technical questions, and you've got relevant talent. One of several ways to do this is to search on Google Groups. Use the "search for a group" search box halfway down the page, not the default "search groups" at the top. The latter will search for your keyword within all postings, whereas the former just searches the group name/description. (There are valuable uses for the default search, but not in the case.) For example, try this. Since you're looking for quality candidates, remember that large groups aren't necessarily better than small ones. Once you're perusing group posts, people's names, what they say, and usually companies and emails, are revealed so it's not hard to track them down. Tip: the ones who answer questions tend to be more knowledgeable, all else equal, than the ones who ask questions (on Google Groups, use the insubject:re command to limit results to those).

7) Company names/titles: You're going to start finding company names that these people work for - those are fabulous keywords to use on search engines, social networks, etc., in combination with the job titles associated with developers at those companies. If you're unsure what those job titles are, use a job aggregator like Indeed or SimplyHired and in the left-hand column of search results, it will show you the variations.

8) Competitions/Awards: Search for people or companies who have won things in this space. All else equal, award-winning software tends to be designed by better developers (high revenue software would be another nice way to search, but we're talking open source where the money trail is harder to come by). As an example string template geared to companies, you can use phrases like award winning, best of, etc., along with your open source keywords to find things like this (hat tip to this post by my former Microsoft sourcing colleague, Jim Stroud)

9) What-they-do keywords: I probably should have said this earlier, but think about what open source developers do (in addition to working on software/IT services for companies). For example, they create toolkits (that or SDK is a keyword), they use open source licensing (GPL is a keyword), they contribute modules or libraries, they work on open source platforms/operating systems with unique names (Debian, Eclipse, Ubuntu), etc. That should give you plenty of fodder for search strings and places to go.

10) Project Portals: Last but not least, you can go to the sites where open source software projects are hosted, which leads you to people, because the contributors (who are mostly volunteer) are typically listed publicly. The largest is http://sourceforge.net - start by using its default search with a few keywords, then click on the Members link next to any result. Instant contact list!

by Glenn Gutmacher

Disclaimer:  I am not compensated by Broadlook, but my employer is a paying customer and I occasionally review pre-release versions of their products, which gives me a chance to inject feedback.  I'm happy to report they've incorporated a few of my suggestions...

Many of you are already familiar with Broadlook Technologies, a company that makes software that helps recruiting researchers and salespeople. Most of their offerings incorporate some form of data spidering -- targeted collection and parsing of information related to your search criteria. While the software tends to be on the pricey side and a bit hard to learn to use, once you do master their tools, the sourcing ROI is impressive: you should be able to do your job more exhaustively and efficiently. However, lately they have been making more user-friendly products (e.g., Diver) and doing a better job with video tutorials and other how-to training on the more complex products (e.g., Eclipse).

Just as importantly for the budget-conscious (and more to the point of this blogpost), Broadlook is starting to release more free products. Joining Contact Capture (formerly a fee-based product) and also worth a look is a new freebie called Broadlook Title Research. This is a handy jumpstarter when you have been handed a job requisition with a title that's clearly internal jargon for that company/department/client/hiring manager -- your gut tells you there must be a slew of alternative ways that the same skillset is referenced by candidates at other companies. Or if you recruit in a fast-moving industry where job titles evolve regularly, it's worth checking periodically for new job titles that may relate.

So for those of us constantly on the lookout for alternative job titles to help flesh out our search strings, Title Research (free download/install) should help. It's basically a four step process:

1. Enter the job title(s) that you know already, and hit search
2. It returns dozens, many of which may be irrelevant. But you can type keywords or partial root words in the Filter field to limit the results.
3. Click the right-pointing arrow to select desired results (you can also fix spellings)
4. Export the results as an OR substring, AND substring, or simply as text. This allows you to build a boolean expression quickly.

The example (in Title Research's built-in Help menu, select Help, then click the plus sign preceding "How to Use Title Research") takes you nicely through how to find Sourcer-related job titles and is easily adaptable to whatever you're searching for. The only things it doesn't indicate are that you can:

• click any column heading to sort the results by that field (click again to toggle between ascending or descending order), which can be helpful when scanning through the results to sort the job titles alphabetically. However, you will want to click the Hits column to display the most commonly-found job titles first.
• type a minus sign immediately before any keyword/partial word to eliminate any job title results containing those characters, functioning just like the NOT boolean. For example, I might type -vp -vice to get rid of VP-level people. Note that this Filter is super-powerful, so be careful: it even looks WITHIN words for your characters, so if you type -gram it will eliminate Programmer from your results! That's why -vp is enough to get rid of EVP, SVP, etc.

Broadlook claims to search against many different sources to compile its results (they won't tell me which), and it runs in real-time, but is remarkably fast. Even searching against several common, synonymous job titles took just over a minute to generate full results. Download from http://files.broadlook.com/download/tresearch and install as usual (it may still say trial version only, but it's the full version). The required registration screen will prompt you to get a license key from their website, which is a quick and also free.

However, I would still recommend checking a job aggregator resource like Indeed or SimplyHired, which searches jobs across all the major job boards, quite a few niche ones and even many individual corporate career websites. When you are viewing results, note that the left-column displays job titles that the site thinks relate to what you searched for. I find these are generally very good matches, and thus worth adding to your search string. You can use these results as a point of comparison with Broadlook Title Research. You'll get more job titles from Title Research so it's vital to use the filter to eliminate the noise results.

How to Find Manager Candidates Online Based on Number of Direct Reports: Very Creative & Effective Sourcing Method Using Google

by Glenn Gutmacher

Q: I am trying to source for software development managers who have supervised at least 25 direct reports. Is there a way to efficiently target them in an Internet search?

A: The most elegant solution I can think of utilizes Google's numrange command, which lets you find any number in a range, in the format lowvalue..highvalue (note there are no spaces on either side of the two dots). I explained another powerful way to find candidates via their certifications using this command in a previous post, which occurred to me long after Shally first explained to me how to use it on zipcode search in early 2006 for finding resumes geographically (revisited by Tim O'Connor), but this application is different enough from both of those to merit a separate treatment.

If you think about what's in a resume or profile of somebody like this, it probably says something like:

"managed virtual team of 25 professionals", "managed cross functional team comprised of 25", "Managed geographically distributed team with 25", "managed and developed the development team of 25", "managed and trained global project team consisting of 25", etc.

Note the pattern (as all good sourcers do!). There are words between "managed" and "team", and again between "team" and the number, which you can manage in one move with the * (wildcard). This represents a placeholder for any other word or words, so assuming you were ok with people up to 100 direct reports, it would yield this string:

"managed * team * 25..100"

which simply and elegantly finds them all! However, if it's "managed team..." (no words in between), then you also need this:

"managed team * 25..100"

But don't try to get too efficient, because

"managed * 25..100"

generates a lot of irrelevant results having nothing to do with one's employees.

Of course, there are other variations like "managed 25 direct reports", "managed multinational 25 person staff", "managed a 25 person organization", etc., so you should account for those if the above doesn't generate enough results for your pipeline, a la "25..100 direct reports" and "managed 25..100 person". However, *don't* try putting them in an OR statement. If you search for something like:

("managed 25..100 person" OR "managed * 25..100 person") "software development"

it basically negates the numrange criterion. You might get a few good results at the beginning (first 5), but after that, it's only searching for "software development". This seems like a bug in Google to me, but it's not hard to tell when there's a problem, because the results count summary atop the first page changes from something like "results 1-100 of 439" to "results 1-100 of 63,700,000". The latter should always trigger your radar that there's something wrong with your search string.

Last but not least, don't expect much from (present tense of the verb)

"manage 25..100 person" "software development"

which generates only a few results. When you're searching within a phrase, realize it's doing an exact search -- don't expect it to find various forms of the root word. Since "managed" appears to be how most people reference it in their resumes/bios, you need to search on the past tense phrasing.

by Glenn Gutmacher

Over the past year, Shally Steckerl has come up with several creative (and legal) hacks to leverage the content spidered by the major search engines on the public versions of recruiting-rich candidate portals, notably LinkedIn (the large professional social network) and Jigsaw (the large business card exchange network). What's nice is that these free hacks don't require you to belong to either portal in order to tap the information.

Shally's recent post lists the basic Jigsaw hack. But if you run it as is, you'll probably notice many irrelevant (noise) results with the string, which is, by the way:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's CompanyName

You should eliminate the directory-type pages on Jigsaw which are not the pseudo (i.e., semi-blinded; read Shally's post if you don't know what I mean) business cards. (This step is just as important if you adapt the above Google hack to find LinkedIn profile results. I highly recommend you check out Shally's LinkedIn cheatsheet for the clean version, which works fabulously.)

So this tweak fixes the Google string to hack Jigsaw in that respect:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's CompanyName -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

Now let's use an actual example (Virtual Iron, a software company), which will illustrate a couple of further useful string tweaks:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's Virtual.Iron -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

The above still generates a number of business card results that are not people at the company, but rather contain the body text "Contacts with similar titles as [profilee's name]" followed by the name of someone else who is at Virtual Iron (or whatever target company you wanted) but there's no link to him/her. Some of you may find that valuable, but those names are almost always for people whose own business card pages will be among the results you obtained.

So in order to get really pure results (i.e., just the Virtual Iron personnel's business cards), you should use this template (again, substitute your target company for Virtual Iron):

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's "co-workers at virtual iron" -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

Notice that I did *not* type dots between words in the revised clause (which I kept in the rest of the string to be consistent with Shally's original post). Why? Because you can actually lose valid results if you don't use quotation marks. I don't know why that is, since these are supposed to be equivalent ways to indicate a phrase in Google, but notice what happens if you do the following string instead:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's co-workers.at.virtual.iron -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

You lose Steve Noyes (which is a Virtual Iron employee result in Jigsaw at the time Google last spidered that part of the site) from the results!

P.S. Many people have asked why LinkedIn and Jigsaw are giving free access to their people content via the search engines. It's also being done by Spoke and a number of other portals, by the way. They let the search engines spider a fairly robust public version of their people content on purpose because it generates a lot of click-through traffic back to their websites. That lets them generate new member registrations, additional advertising revenue through increased page views, etc. In their view, the pros outweigh the cons because it's still a relatively small percentage of their potential audience who knows how to hack this way!

by Glenn Gutmacher

Q: I have a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with thousands of names of potential candidates. I don't intend to blind e-mail them, but I do want to process them all over time. The entries are all in a single column, and look like this:

name1

company1

e-mail address1

ID number1

name2

company2

e-mail address2

ID number2

etc.

I can't find anyone who can tell me how to "rotate" this spreadsheet so that I'll end up with 4 columns that look like this:

name1 company1 e-mail address1 ID number1

name2 company2 e-mail address2 ID number2

A: I'm glad you don't plan to mass-email that many, which can get you in trouble with the US federal CAN-SPAM Act. But I do agree you need to change the vertical orientation to horizontal as you indicated in order to send even small batches of messages in any email processing program.

Fortunately, lists like this are easily fixable. The key to doing this simply is the INDIRECT function, which didn't exist with earlier versions of Excel. (If you have Microsoft Office 2007, then you're all set.)

Assuming your list is in column A, with the first name in cell A1, first company in cell A2, etc., put the following in the cells indicated (values beginning with an equals sign are formulas):

cell b1: =INDIRECT("A"&F1)

cell c1: =INDIRECT("A"&F1+1)

cell d1: =INDIRECT("A"&F1+2)

cell e1: =INDIRECT("A"&F1+3)

cell f1: 1

cell b2: =INDIRECT("A"&F2)

cell c2: =INDIRECT("A"&F2+1)

cell d2: =INDIRECT("A"&F2+2)

cell e2: =INDIRECT("A"&F2+3)

cell f2: =F1+4

The cells in B2 through F2 can be copied in one move all the way down (starting with corresponding columns in row 3 down thousands of rows as desired). This will instantly "rotate" (display) the data from column A as you desired.

If you don't want the (now) extraneous data in column A and F, don't delete them or everything in columns B-E will be messed up! Instead, click column headings B-E to highlight the content all the way down, and copy (Ctrl+C). Launch a new blank worksheet in the same file (or a completely new spreadsheet file) and press Paste --> Paste special (not the regular Ctrl+V paste). Select the radio button preceding Values and click OK.

You now have all the records in rows, with the formulas replaced by plain values, and won't be messed up if you sort, move them around, etc.!

by Glenn Gutmacher

Like many of you, I've been curious about who's really behind this upcoming Global Sourcing Conference at which I and a number of my esteemed peers have been invited to present. Finally, some cooperative sources have led me to some insights: none other than Shally Steckerl is a core "technical advisor" to the project. Among other duties to help insure high quality for the debut of this (hopefully) annual event, Shally probably vetted or even suggested you if you were/are to be chosen as a speaker.

Another intel source has indicated the key to discovering the remaining players is to remember the old adage: "follow the money." I have thoughts on that, too, but I'm going to refrain until I have more conclusive evidence. If you can offer more than random speculation, I encourage you to comment below. FYI, Jeremy Langhans offers to give you his take on the SourceCon question if you email him.

Dave Mendoza launched his Six Degrees of Dave blog this week with a solid post. He rightly complains about how many LinkedIn users trivialize the practice of giving out endorsements, illustrated with good examples/analogies, and what that does to the quality of the social network. Elaborated upon in a comment to that post, Shally makes the good point (among many others) that we should look at online endorsements as something akin to a letter of recommendation, which we would give out sparingly and carefully.

Here's another aspect to this question I'd like to raise: Ok, great, so everyone who respects their personal brand treats online endorsements like letters of recommendation, etc., and follows other rules that preserve the value and quality of the network. But the majority of LinkedIners will never see this thread, no matter how many bloggers join the discussion. So what leads to a change in the unscrupulous behavior of those who, as in Dave's example, blast a message to their entire LI network of thousands asking for an endorsement?

I think it resides with LinkedIn itself, and it ties into a bigger problem there. If they see a bad member practice, they say they will take appropriate action with the user to remedy the situation. (I actually spoke with Mrinal Desai, who was a business development manager at LI until early this month, who confirmed this while he was still there.)  But they depend on us to report problems. For example, you may see someone listing 15 concurrent employers on their profile (and you'd be surprised how many of those there are!).  So you know it's a scam just to get more people to connect to them.

I've reported a few of these individuals to LI's privacy officer. He's responded each time with a personal email saying they'll address it with the user. Guess what? Violations remain. Some people changed nothing on their profiles. Others did, so the problems are not as egregious as before, but some clearly inappropriate stuff remains on all of the reported profiles. Alternatively, the cases where I've clicked the Abuse button on the received connection invitation, which is also supposed to trigger an investigation of the person to see if they've broken rules and take action, yield no better results.

My point is that the only way the quality improves is if the policing and consequences are meaningful, because only with plenty of examples made of the violators will the message trickle down sufficiently. The scale of the problem already appears too large for LI to handle it all manually. Unfortunately, even if a technological solution could be devised to automate temporary profile disablement, it would probably have enough errors that would require a manual re-review that the scale would still be too large for LI to handle.

There are plenty of other social networks forming, some in direct response to this problem with very different approaches to network connectivity (some of which are completely open networks). I don't think they will solve the problem, either, but I wish them well. The ones that do it better will succeed; the Internet's brief history shows the others will die, be bought and/or morph to another business model.

I don't want LinkedIn to die, or to lose its focus. Fortunately, the complaints of active recruiting industry professionals like us can make an impact, if only by convincing the powers-that-be at LinkedIn to do what it takes to fix the problem by moving it up their priority list. Are there enough squeaky wheels among us to get them to give us the grease?

The following is an advertisement and does not imply an endorsement:

Employers rely on BIS to perform employment background checks on their candidates.

This is a guest post by Asia Pacific Headhunter Steven Kempton, as part of the Recruiting.com blog swap.

Online recruitment is alive and kicking in Japan. In particular, for non-Japanese companies trying to break into the lucrative market, it is important to hire an experienced person who can bridge the chasm between your business and the Japanese paying customer. Often employees of foreign firms in Japan will have western style titles like Manager, and Sales Engineer. But Japanese titles are most commonly used when it comes to management levels.

If you are a Recruiter or HR Manager helping your company break into Japan, a quick primer on some of the most common titles will be very helpful for you in screening candidates. Below you will find the most common examples listed with their possible English equivalent. If you would like more information on Japanese honorific titles in general, there is a great article in Wikipedia here.

• Kaicho - Chairman
• Shacho - President - is a term that is very commonly used and more recently can also be used for the founders of smaller businesses.
• Fuku Shacho - Vice President for the Company (usually only one in the company)
• Senmu Torishimariyaku - Senior Executive Managing Director - This title and the two next "torishimariyaku" titles are normally roles that are found in large firms. Using the term "Director" will normally mean they are member of the Board of Directors for the company. Dropping the "torishimariyaku" should create an equivalent to Vice President for a function.
• Jomu Torishimariyaku - Executive Managing Director
• Torishimariyaku - Director
• Bucho - General Manager
• Kacho - Section Chief
• Kacho Dairi - Deputy Section Chief
• Kakaricho - Chief Clerk
• Ippan Shain - General Employer

Knowing these titles in order to undertake online recruitment in Japan is also very useful. Boolean searches using these titles and other target terms can produce excellent name-sourcing results. If you would like more information feel free to contact me through my blog.

Bloghost Editor's note:  Thanks, Steven! I love stuff like this that helps expose us to new cultures. These are probably not great resume search terms on English-language search engines (at least from my cursory tests), whether or not you use the site:jp command, but they do lead to interesting results that give you insights on Japanese business culture/office politics as they relate to use of titles, such as this thread (read all the way down -- it gets more interesting as you go). It will also expose you to more variations of the titles that Steven indicated, such as for directors, you have jookin torishimariyaku for "standing director" and these variant phonetic spellings -- daihyou torishimariyaku or daihyo torishimariyaku -- listed for "representative director" as well as "president." And that's in addition to the comprehensive Wikipedia link that Steven gave above!  Clearly, this is a whole other world from America, and it just reinforces Steven's point in the first paragraph of needing an experienced, culturally-aware person to help navigate these waters. --Glenn Gutmacher

cybersleuthing, Internet Recruiting, Sourcing

Some of you might say this could have been handled just as easily by phone sourcing, but for those who like to dig into Internet sourcing, here's a research method I used that might be applicable occasionally when standard methods fail (and it's still free):

I got a voice mail last week from somebody at a venture capital (VC) firm, and I wanted to learn more about them before responding. When I went to their website, their staff list was plain enough to find, through spread across multiple pages (but still easily parsable, if you wanted, using a robot tool like Broadlook's Eclipse product).  However, the only address listed on their website was in New York City, even though several staff had Boston-area phone numbers listed on their bio pages. I wanted to get that address. Unfortunately, the places I'd normally look (e.g., Argali meta-directory search tool) yielded nothing. I even keyword-searched for variations of the company name (boolean OR clause) plus Boston. Typing the area code-phone prefix combination on a search engine, I saw it corresponded to a Boston suburb town. So then I used the search engines for the company name combination plus that town name. The first search result took me to another VC incubator's website, where the target company was listed as a tenant. Mystery solved -- their local office was housed at the incubator's location, which explains why it didn't have its own business directory address/phone listing!

cybersleuthing, Internet Recruiting, Sourcing

Q: I've seen some big public databases like Census data and birthday searches to find people information, but they're not as user-friendly or as flexible as I'd like. How can I do more pinpoint searching of what's available?

A: You can always count on ResearchZilla's founder to discover some cool research tools. Dave Carpe is a competitive intelligence guy, which isn't just limited to recruiting, but he's fond of applications to our kind of sourcing work. This post from last fall on his original research site, PassingNotes, is worth revisiting to answer your question.

It discusses some cool search tools created by Steve Morse, a programmer who obviously also likes search. Actually, the tools are more useful interfaces to existing databases that let you search them in more targeted ways. Recommended are the overlays to BirthDatabase and Private Eye for people information, but he's also got phone directory, census and other search interfaces.

And here's the best part, if you know how to do a little JavaScript, PHP, Perl or SQL: He has a One-Step Search Tool creator that lets you make these custom overlays yourself for most any public database. He has examples and a useful FAQ to get you started.

But even if you can't or don't have the time to do that, you can at least add favorites to your browser -- or better, make some bookmarklets -- for the interfaces he's created. Damn -- I have to find some time this weekend and get busy on this. Thanks, Steve!

P.S. Dave's post also mentioned Steve's zipcode search tool, which is also cool, but the nifty functionality of this other site, especially the zipcode range finder (e.g., useful for a Google numrange search) is still my fave in that category. Maybe Steve can top it?

cybersleuthing, Internet Recruiting

Q: Hi Glenn, I need to write a Boolean Search String for an IT AUDITOR req. I have never recruited for this before so I am starting from scratch. I have a solid idea on how to approach this search but my search string just doesn?t seem to narrow it enough for me. Also how I would find the best places to identify them on the internet?

A: The good news is that the job description you supplied contained plenty of information. The key is to sift relevant keywords out of it, and combine the similar ones into boolean OR clauses. Certification acronyms are great, too. Then add the resume narrowing-specific boolean clauses before and after your keywords, and you have your strings! Of course, no one string will do it for you, so you need to try variations that widen or narrow results until you hit the magic sweetspot under 200 total results. Even then, you may need a few relevant strings per search engine.

To that point, yes, you must use multiple search engines, because the overlap between them is low. (Don't believe me? Try a comparison search on Thumbshots.) At least use the big three. Here is an example string analogous for each that seems to yield solid results:

MSN:

(intitle:resume | inurl:resume) prefer:resume audit (COSO | COBIT | "control framework" | "control theory" | "control design") (MIS | CIA | CISA | CPA) -job -jobs -careers

Google:

(intitle:~CV OR inurl:~CV) audit (legal OR regulatory OR standards OR policies) (COSO OR COBIT OR "control framework" OR "control theory" OR "control design") (MIS OR CIA OR CISA OR CPA) -eoe -opening -post -preferred -reply -send -submit -your

Yahoo!:

(intitle:CV OR inurl:CV OR intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) audit (legal OR regulatory OR standards OR policies) (COSO OR COBIT OR "control framework" OR "control theory" OR "control design") (MIS OR CIA OR CISA OR CPA) -careers -eoe -job -jobs -opening -post -preferred -reply -send -submit -your

As to "best places" to identify these candidates, you also want to find the online communities where they hang out. The good ones probably won't have resumes floating online, so your goal there is just name-gen: find some names and contact info, and then contact them to obtain resumes and/or network for more names. (That's phone sourcing -- a whole other topic!)

You would probably want to search for professional communities online, too, using some of the relevant keywords above, preceded by:  (association OR "user group" OR conference)

Niche job boards might exist for these roles as well, which often have content revolving around them. Same deal as above, except you'd precede with ("job board" OR "career site")

And do searches of the social networking portals like LinkedIn. In that case, it's typically more effective to list a variety of job titles and potential target company names in the search criteria fields. To find these, do a search for job postings on a job aggregator like Indeed, SimplyHired, RSSJobs, etc., and see what variant job titles emerge (more terms to add to the "it auditor" OR ... clause in your boolean string) as well as which companies are posting for such roles (more terms to add to your existing list of competitors for that OR clause).

That's not nearly everything you could be doing, but it should be enough of a start to get you results quickly. And isn't that the goal of sourcing? Find just enough names for the pipeline, but then move on to spend more time cultivating the prospects into candidates!

cybersleuthing, Internet Recruiting

Q: Would you mind posting your notes from the sourcing training you did for IHRCA on 5/18/06?

A: Thank you to the several people who requested this. First, let me give a shout to IHRCA, a Boston-area association primarily for contract recruiters and known for the quality of the networking and peer assistance, for inviting me to speak, and to attorney Bob Shay and everybody at Morse Barnes-Brown & Pendleton for hosting the session in their main conference room with the tasty snacks (bigger than IHRCA's typical meeting space, but still not enough for everybody who wanted to attend).

The good news is that this is what I showed, and in a more logical order, plus some extras. And I've been asked to do an encore presentation (subject to some modification/customization) for the 495-128 HR Collaborative in September (details TBA) and they have agreed to open it up to the greater recruiting community in a large meeting space TBD.

The only thing missing below are the bookmarklets. They are like favorites/bookmarks on steroids. They don't just simply take you to a website -- they DO something beyond that, such that when you "arrive", search results have already been generated, information has been parsed, etc. It's because they have JavaScripts embedded in them. Bookmarklets are vital to sourcing productivity, and so it is a key component to "Internet Sourcing at Lightspeed." Talk to your favorite e-sourcers: everyone's got their favorites, with new ones being developed all the time.

Ok, here we go:

My favorite blogs' headlines rotate on my screen during idle time thanks to the MSN Screensaver (bookmarklet #01) -- a tip from Shally's blog, FYI.

Finding blog posts about a particular topic is much easier on Google with bookmarklet #02 -- it has the boolean clause (inurl:~blog OR intitle:~blog) already built in, so all you need to do is type your keywords -- e.g. "java beans" python -- at the prompt!  (Or here if you lack the bookmarklet.)

But I know most recruiters prefer resumes when available, so you can run bookmarklet #03 to pull up resumes on MSN using the (intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) command, plus the NOT terms (-jobs, -careers, etc.) already included to eliminate job postings for "clean" results. For example, try:

"financial analyst" "series 7" (212 OR 718 OR 914)

to find those licensed analysts in the NYC area!

And to keep those resumes coming to you, try bookmarklet #04 to make it an RSS feed (or you could have just clicked the orange RSS button at the bottom of your search results).

Google's alternative to receiving continuous results is favorite #07, Alerts, where you input a boolean string (curiously, not tied to Google's 32-keyword limit, but rather a 250-character max. length string) and get results on an ongoing basis.

Perfect Keyboard (favorite #08) is a low-cost way to quickly generate unlimited template letters, favorite strings, etc., in any application or web window, using any shortcut you like. Start with the free trial (no, they don't pay me anything either way).

If you're looking for techies or scientists especially, you need to search the newsgroups that comprise what's called Usenet, the now-million-plus discussion groups which predate the web. Bookmarklet #10 is to find newsgroup postings by authors affiliated with the company whose web page you're on. Yes, you could go to Google Groups and do an author: search, but this is much faster! Once you know the name or email of a particular author, use the more narrow bookmarklet #11 to see their posting history -- potentially including some embarrassing ones!  There's value in MSN and Yahoo! Groups, too (e.g., using their online personals sites to source diversity candidates is another goodie that Jim Stroud has blogged about recently).

When you're looking for sites related to a topic, thematic search is a great way to go. Bookmarklets #12 (Microsoft Research Asia's SRC) and #13 (Vivisimo) are great examples of this kind of search engine. Again, the bookmarklets just prompt you for the search terms and take you to the results.

Continuing on that theme, Acronyma, Wikipedia and Word IQ (bookmarklets #14-16) explain abbreviations and terms in varying degrees of depth, but all are useful, especially if it's a new area for you (recruiters aren't expected to know every tech jargon term in the fields they recruit for off the top of their heads, but they should be able to find the info quickly!).

LinkedIn is currently the leading social network for professional networking, so sourcing with it is essential. It deserves more than just bookmarklet #17, but that will prompt you for current job title, company and/or other keywords and conveniently show the results. The larger your network, the more results you can see, though any paid tier will allow you to make connections to people outside your 3 degrees. Shally just presented a webcast for LinkedIn on this -- maybe they'll share his slides if you ask Brendon (bcassidy[at]linkedin[dot]com) nicely.

Argali (bookmarklet #20) is an app you must download to run, but the free version is robust. Useful for finding phones of any person or business, and typically more successful because it searches five major directories simultaneously and de-dupes the results.

Zipmath's zipcodes in a mileage radius (#21) is great when you're trying to find the low and high values for a metro area that you'd like to use as geographic-limiting criteria in a search (e.g., Google supports that numrange command: just type two dots between the values, without spaces).

Anagram (#22) is a nifty program for accurately parsing contact information you might find in a document, web page, email message, etc. You can save your new contact records to Excel, Outlook, SalesForce.com, Jigsaw, etc. Before your free trial runs out, also review Contact Capture (#23) which is not always as accurate as Anagram, but it can parse a near-unlimited number of contacts in one move and export to just about everything, too. #24 and #25 are sample sites to try out Anagram and Contact Capture.

If all you know is someone's website, and you're curious to get contact information but they're not sharing it there, try DomainTools (#26 will prompt you for the domain name to search on), while #27 will conveniently pull up Domain Tools results for the site you're currently on.

Copernic Agent (#30) is a useful spider, searching multiple engines simultaneously, and giving you the ability to de-dupe and search within the results for additional keywords, and easily share the final output (export or email them around). A more expensive tool is InfoGIST (#31), but it will automatically parse resumes from the web, hundreds of free sites, and almost any others you have logins for. There's other functionality I don't have time to describe, but check places like ERExchange's groups, where online discussions have reviewed products in these categories.

Finally, when you're ready to send a targeted email campaign to some of the people you've sourced, one inexpensive but powerful automated tool is WorldMerge (#32) which allows for personalized field values, HTML or plain text messages, etc.

Happy sourcing!

cybersleuthing, Internet Recruiting

Q: There are so many recruiting/HR blogs, but I need to focus on my niche of the industry. Where do I go?

A: If you meant sourcing, it's rare that this is broken out from Recruiting blogs on any categorized list (blogroll) -- one of my pet peeves. But you also need to maintain the big picture on the recruiting/staffing/talent industry so you shouldn't ignore the pundits who seem to know what they're talking about (exactly who those are will depend on your perspective/opinion, and will change over time).

Anyway, here's how to find the few you will want to scan to keep up on industry buzz, as well as find the specific blogs subcategory whose blogs you'd want to follow more closely.  Three great lists of recruiting blogs and posts are:

1) The Recruiting.com portal, which features recent posts from various industry blogs as its main content, but did you know about its Big Bad Blogroll, a/k/a Ultimate Recruiting Blogroll ? a comprehensive listing of most all recruiting-related blogs with subcategories?

3) RecruitingAnimal's Blogroll is also comprehensive and very similar to Recruiting.com's (those of you who know the folks behind the two sites can guess why).

There are others trying to be mega-blogrolls with selected postings for the HR industry (e.g., HRmegablog) but those tend to give recruiting short shrift so I'd pass on those for now if talent search is your focus.

Of course, the quality and relevance of posts day-to-day on any given blog varies, and so you may be able to scan/filter based on headlines. Use RSS feeds and download the MSN Screensaver (which cycles through the most recent posts on each of your favorite blogs during idle time) to deliver desirable blog posts to you.  Either method lets you see the headlines and you can click on those you're interested in.

Finally, regarding my gripe that the sets of subcategories used on the three sites' blogrolls are not as complete/finely gradated as I'd like: I admit it's hard to draw firm black and white lines since many blogs' content cuts across categories. In such cases, I think it's ok to double (or triple) list certain blogs that consistently cover multiple topics. If all the sites took a more databased approach to the categorization (as site #2 apparently has) and took it to the next level, it'd be more feasible to maintain such a system.

cybersleuthing, Internet Recruiting