Secrets of Online Recruiters Exposed!

Workforce, Oct, 2000 by Glenn Gutmacher

Anyone can take advantage of these techniques, developed by a leading trainer of Internet recruiters. And they're free.

Many of the recruiters that I train came to me thinking that if they have an online presence with the big career, job and resume portals like Monster.com, they've covered their bases for Internet recruiting. Anything else I can show them, they say, is just gravy. Au contraire, mon ami. Monster.com and the like are the gravy. The vast majority of candidates to be found online at elsewhere.

It's true: While Monster and its competitors have about 5 million unique resumes in then databases, you can find double or triple that number on the open Internet. There are billions of Web pages, plus many more millions of archived newsgroup posting and user group and list-serv messages. Many of those are passive job seekers waiting for you to find them. And don't forget you can find people online who don't even have resumes posted, but who have certain skill-sets, often targetable by location and company as well. The whole Internet is your database if you know how to tap it.

Here are a few of the techniques you can start using today to find your desired types of candidates, in specific locations:

Virtual communities

Ever hear of Geocities, Tripod, or Angelfire? These are "community" Web sites that let people express themselves and find others who share their interests. To that end, the sites offer chat rooms, clubs, free e-mail, free Web-page creation tools and server space to upload your personal home pages, and more. The good news for us recruiters is that many folks upload their resumes as one of those free pages.

These three virtual communities are among the biggest ones, with millions of members each. As a result, even bigger Internet companies bought them. (Yahoo acquired Geocities; Lycos got Tripod and Angelfire), which added more functionality--including better search engines that allow you to search within the community's pages.

So let's say you wanted to find resumes of software engineers in Massachusetts who are comfortable on the Unix platform. (If that's not who you need, don't worry--you'll see how to easily adapt this for other candidate types or locations.) On Geocities, go to www.geocities.com, and in the text field under "Explore Our Neighborhoods," type:

--resume (without the usual accent marks; using them will mess up the results) AND software engineer AND unix AND MA

--Then click the "Search" button and start grabbing those resumes.

Note that Geocities' engine searches for words contained in the page body or in the title (those words in white type that appear over a darker color background at the very top of your Web browser). Our search assumes a few things:

* The word "resume" is in that title at the top (e.g., "Resume of John Smith"). Most people do so by convention; admittedly, some resumes slip through the cracks if they don't include the word on their resume page. The search is not case-sensitive: If you use a lowercase "r", it also catches pages using a capital "R", and vice versa.

* MA is in the address part of their resumes near the top. However, that MA could be deep in the body of the resume, specifying the location of a past employer or collegiate alma mater, while the candidate no longer lives in the state. Geocities won't let us specify where in the resume that MA should appear. You could try spelling out "Massachusetts," but people rarely write the whole state name on their resumes, so we'll eliminate many good resumes as a result. As tradeoffs go, it's better to use the MA and get more good resumes for the effort of eliminating a few resumes that referred to a past employer or school.

* The terms "software engineer" and "unix" app ear in the body of their resume. But what if the candidate is a software engineer but phrased it as "test engineer" or "software programmer"? Those resumes would probably be eliminated from our results, That's why it's important to substitute different search phrases, thinking of the various synonyms that candidates might use other than just the official job titles or skill terms we assume.

Boolean Searching Targets Better

We can do this same search on Angelfire or Tripod, and get even better results in many cases. Conveniently, their parent company, Lycos, has created a search engine that delivers results on both sites at once. In addition, their search engine supports some features of Boolean logic, which is the ability to create long search strings using the operators AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR. These connector words allow us to search for those job-title or skill-term synonyms in one search. They also better ensure that the candidates live in the geographic area we're targeting.

We'll stick with our earlier example, but now we'd like to narrow our search to candidates in greater Boston, because when all of Massachusetts is included, some candidates live too far to commute, and it's unlikely that they want to relocate (even if we were willing to pay for it). The area codes for greater Boston are 978, 781, 617, and 508. (If you're not sure which area codes are within a commutable distance of a particular location, visit www.mmiworld.comlstatelis.htm. This site lists all U.S., Canadian, and Caribbean area codes in alphabetical order, with the towns that they cover.)