Title:        LinkedIn for Recruiters and Sourcers: Live Demo, Search Strings, Mashups, Groups and More
Date:       Thursday, August 7, 2008
Time:       1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EST

This coming Thursday, July 24th at 1PM EST, I will be giving a fast-paced 60 minute webinar presentation for Kennedy Information on “Microblogging: The Hot New Sourcing Tool for Today’s Recruiters“.

In this presentation, I will fully demonstrate Twitter by walking through its search capabilities and will show you and your team how to build a “following” which benefits recruiters as they promote open positions and search for active and passive job seekers. I will also demonstrate backdoor tips and tricks of using other sites including Friendfeed and Pownce and review how recruiters and sourcers can use them to begin building relationships within online communities.

• Learn how to utilize microblogs to recruit and source candidates
• Discover fast-growing social networking communities online
• Find active and passive candidates who “live” online
• Watch a live demonstration of how to recruit on Twitter, an online network of more than 7 million people
• Learn how to grow your microblog networks in seconds
• Uncover hundreds of “leads” through sites such as Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed and more

If you are interested in learning more or would like to sign up, click here.

SlideShare is “the best place to share PowerPoint presentations” as stated on their site. Individuals and organizations can upload presentations to share publicly, connect with other members of the site, build their company brand, and dig up leads to follow up on.

First thing I do on SlideShare is run a search on “recruiting.” The search pulls up over 1,600 slide presentations with recruiting in the subject or description. See below:

This opens up the possibility for any recruiter or sourcer to peer into presentations being shared by others in the recruiting community. Some of the PowerPoints listed out on the site were given from past conferences such as ERE (Electronic Recruiters Exchange) when they held one of their annual ERE Expos. This is a solid way for a recruiter or sourcer to learn and stay up to speed on the latest discussions, technologies and trends in the recruiting landscape. The site offers a “Most Viewed” slideshows area to show what is popular on the site. There is a diverse amount of presentations out here including many business and technical related.

Believe it or not, you can get some recruiting and sourcing done out on SlideShare too. There is a section called “My Slidespace” where users can put up a profile with key words (tags), upload presentations, connect with other members of the SlideShare community and send messages right inside the site. If you are sourcing for say technical people, simply run a search across the tags. I ran a search on “Java” tags. See below:

The search pulls up hundreds of presentations with Java tagged. From there, you can see who has posted these presentations out on the site. If they are doing full-fledged PowerPoints on Java technologies, wouldn’t these people be worthy of reaching out to? I would guess they are highly coveted in their field regardless of location.

Finally, SlideShare represents a great community for floating presentations and information about your company to build buzz, whether it be a small PowerPoint outlining positions and benefits, or a presentation interviewing internal managers on why a candidate should be excited to work for you, or even a promotion of a new product or service to drive traffic to your site. SlideShare syncs audio to presentations as well allowing for more possibilities.

I discovered a site that recruiters and sourcers will find especially helpful on an everyday basis. It’s called Vumber. Vumber is a virtual phone number that can be linked to your home, work or cell phone and used to make your real number private.

Vumber opens up new possibilities for recruiting and sourcing tactics. For example, say you are trying desperately to reach a candidate, but this particular candidate is hard to reach and you have already tried calling he or she several times. Candidates can simply screen your call if they are unsure who you are or worse if they know who you are and don’t want to pick up. As recruiters, we are simply trying to do our jobs and find out if there is interest in our company and our positions, and are always looking to find out answers from our candidates. Using Vumber, a recruiter or sourcer can simply set-up a new virtual number to call out to certain candidates, and use your real number for other candidates. It essentially allows you to get multiple lines from one phone and allows you to disguise yourself when calling. On the other side, a second example is if a recruiter is in a tough position where they don’t want to give out there work number to a sales person trying to sell a product or service. A recruiter can simply hand out there Vumber, and screen out calls from there. Finally, a good third example for using Vumber is if you are calling a candidate out-of-state, and you want to appear as though you are a local caller. My experience has shown me that having a local number will attract more people to pick up on the first call. Vumber allows you to choose the area code for your virtual phone number.

Are you using Twitter? If so, check out Summize. Summize is a great site or should I say search engine that specifically searches across all conversations out on Twitter. Summize angles itself as “Conversational Search” among other search engines online.

Summize offers advanced search options as well as search operators to help you set-up quality searches. With these in mind, this search engine opens up the possibility to tap into the reportedly 12M+ people who have adopted Twitter and use it daily. Recruiters and Sourcers can now search by key terms such as titles: “Software Engineer”, company names: “Microsoft” and phrases such as: “new job”.

Let me show you Summize in action. Recruiters and Sourcers are always looking for active and available talent currently in the marketplace. Using Summize, I run a search on the key phrase “my resume” and tons of results come up:

From there, you can join in on a discussion or directly send a message to that user. Using Twitter, there are several ways to reach out to people. Check out my Twitter video for a further rundown on Twitter and it’s benefits to Recruiters and Sourcers.

Glassdoor is a well put-together site that aims to give an “inside look” into companies around the globe. With over 40,000 employees from 11,000 companies in 76 countries already on Glassdoor, this site is growing fast to show employee ratings, company reviews and salary information…all for free.

Glassdoor provides detailed company reviews so outsiders can get the good/bad and pros/cons about working for and working with each company listed, employee ratings so outsiders can get a pulse on what the morale is like inside each company, not to mention the benefits, perks and other inside information, and finally real-time salary and compensation details for employees at each company to include salary, bonuses and more.

This site can benefit employers, recruiters, sourcers and more in many ways. Sign-up for an account and put your take in their system. Recruiters and Sourcers can use information they put into Glassdoor as a huge selling piece for why a hot candidate should join your company over the next. Glassdoor can really make a solid employer and company stand out and help to attract top talent in the marketplace.

Secondbrain is a community online with a mission to “help people manage their content online and create the biggest library of user generated content in the world”.

Secondbrain opens up all sorts of avenues for recruiting, human resources and sourcing professionals. For starters, the site let’s users import content they find online from a wide variety of popular services such as Google, YouTube, Digg and Delicious to name a few. Users of Secondbrain can then search upon all of this content, share sites, pictures, videos and more with other users, in addition to finding users on Secondbrain and connecting with them. In a nutshell, recruiters and sourcers will discover new sites and new leads to pursue for finding available talent online, as well as connecting with new resources and people right in the Secondbrain community.

Here is an example of a user’s page on Secondbrain. Take notice of the red arrows. One arrow shows that each user gets to set-up his or her own profile, and another arrow shows that Secondbrain has search capabilities to search content (articles, sites, videos, pictures) as well as user profiles.

A nice site I recently discovered is called Grouply. Grouply is an online tool and networking community I noticed recruiters and sales professionals were starting to use. Grouply lets users manage all of their Yahoo Groups in one place, in addition to finding another place to do some solid networking.

Grouply currently only supports Yahoo Groups, but states they are moving to support Google Groups and other groups shortly. After signing up, I found that the site is a real time saver in that you can manage all of your groups from one site and see an overview of the activity of all your groups on one page, much like a dashboard. When you subscribe to hundreds of different Yahoo Groups this can really be a huge time saver, not to mention a very efficient way to recruit.

As for networking, Grouply has thousands of users who manage their groups from the site, so naturally, Grouply let’s you connect and network with all the users in the community. Add Grouply to your list of social and business networking sites you use for recruiting and sourcing. It is worth a look when you are trying to reach out to new people for positions or simply to market your job openings.

This Thursday, May 22nd at 1PM EST, I will be conducting an interactive live webinar presentation for Kennedy Information titled: Emerging Tools, Techniques, Trends and Technologies for Recruiters and Internet Sourcers.

In this one hour webinar, I plan to cover:

• How to use news site online to find experts that lead to high value candidates
• How to build your own social network and the benefits of doing so (highlighting Ning and other emerging sites)
• Examples of automated sourcing and search tools that save you valuable time
• Live demonstrations of numerous internet sites designed for research and sourcing
• Emerging trends in recruiting media including text messaging, wikis, portals, podcasting, bookmarklets and microblogging

*I will have a valuable and very detailed HANDOUT for all attendees at the conclusion of the webinar that will detail all the sites covered in addition to more tips and techniques to put to good use.

Additional information on this webinar can be found here.

To register for the webinar, click here.

I wrote about Twitter in StaffBytes back in October of last year that I was “still trying to ‘get’ it”. I was a new user to Twitter at the time and was trying to get my arms around how Twitter could benefit recruiters and sourcers, not to mention what to do with it. After a few months of being on Twitter, I have turned into a Twitterholic. I love it!

I put together a short video recently on using Twitter and posted out on RecruitingBlogs. I wanted to extend this video to StaffBytes as well after receiving very positive feedback. Take time to check it out. There is lots of good Twitter coverage here. I think you will also “get” it after watching. In addition, check out Koka Sexton’s blog. I found a fantastic article there which runs through the in’s and out’s of Twitter and shows some very advanced techniques not covered in my video.

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