Is There more to Internet Sourcing - Sourcing Techniques in Detail. By Sadakathullah Mohamed Ali

Internet recruiting is slowly but surely catching on in this part of the world. Time is not far off when we will have to increasingly employ internet search/sourcing techniques for finding resumes, but of course this is besides the traditional method of sourcing.

I?ve been doing a bit of research on the net and managed to compile some of the most commonly used techniques for internet sourcing and am glad to share this with you.

Before we try and understand the techniques for internet sourcing  let us first understand what are the search engines that are mostly used by experience sourcers.

Some recommended search engines on the Web:

• http://www.Google.com

• http://www.live.com

• http://www.Yahoo.com

• http://www.MetaCrawler.com

• http://www.Atlavista.com

• http://www.Dogpile.com

• http://www.MSN.com

The search strings for each of these search engines will vary and therefore to maximize your search please do read the tutorials in advance from the respective search engines site.

What techniques to use and when and under what circumstances to use will depend on how well you master each techniques. To achieve optimum success one must also have a fairly good idea about the recruitment industry, the specific job requirement, the key words within the requirement and also differentiate the "mandatory skills" from "good to have skills."

Some of the most common internet search techniques are as given below.

X-RAYING:
A method of looking inside a specific web site to find what's there. Using this technique, recruiters can find documents and web pages that aren't directly accessible via links on the main public home page. When you 'x-ray' a website, you effectively get to examine every document that resides there so long as they are not behind firewalls or password protected.
Example: To find any ?software engineer? - could be a document/file or a word/phrase within a document that resides within the website Google.com.
In Altavista search - host:google.com AND software engineer
In Google search - site:www.google.com AND software engineer

FLIPPING:
Flipping is an effective method used to find the relationships between web pages based on how they are hyperlinked together. This search is especially useful for finding people who have links to the company or have worked for a specific company.
Example: To find any ?software engineer? ? could be a document/file or word/phrase that links back to Microsoft.com.
In Altavista search - link:microsoft.com AND software engineer
In Google search - link:www.microsoft.com AND software engineer

PEELING BACK:
As the name suggest Peeling back is the process of ?retracing the path? of the url especially when one gets an Error 404 (File not found). This process is engage so as to locate the information elsewhere on the site or locate the specific ?root? folder where one can find similar or additional data specific or related to the search.
Example: By peeling back or keying backspace starting from the point where the url ends we can then access the people link from the ce.uta.edu homepage and find the names of all the faculty members.
url: http://www-ce.uta.edu/people/faculty/hoyos/research.html

HARVESTING OR MINING:
Harvesting involves reviewing a document, such as a resume or home page, and finding key words, links, references and locations that assist with subsequent searches.

SEARCH STRINGS USING BOOLEAN KEYS:
By constructing complex search strings and conducting the search in major search engines one can hone in on the exact information/resources with great accuracy.

Some of the commonly used key words for a search string are given as below.
Common resume Words: Resume, Homepage, CV, Vitae, Bio, Qualifications, Objective, Experience, Education, References, "Work History", "Technical skills", "Project duration"
Common words to avoid: Submit, Opening, Recruiter, Send, Benefits, Requirements, Opportunity, Apply, Job, Jobs, Careers, Eoe, Reply, "my client".

Example on how to construct a complex search strings:

Requirement: A project manager with PMI certification or a 6 Sigma black belt having atleast 5 years of project management within an Investment bank in the areas of Equities connectivity or trading software development. Must have good technical skills in J2EE, EJB, Websphere, XML and DB2.

Google:
(intitle:~cv OR inurl:~cv OR intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) "project manager" Java "investment bank" ("equities connectivity" OR trading software) -inurl:~efinancial*
Search result: 87 pages

Yahoo:
(intitle:cv OR inurl:cv OR intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) ?project manager? Java "investment bank" "equities connectivity" OR trading software -eoe -opening -post -preferred -reply -send ?submit
Search result: 1,740 pages

Live Search:
(intitle:cv inurl:cv intitle:resume inurl:resume) prefer:resume ?project manager? Java "investment bank" "equities connectivity" trading software -job -jobs ?careers
Search result: 10,038 pages

The search results from the above three searches gives us different amount of results and the task of sieving through the hundreds of pages sounds rather a dauting task. However, the strings above could still be further refined so as to achieve a much more specific results. For example by including SCJP or Sun certification or SDLC, etc I believe one can derived at a much more accurate results.

Caveat:
If you, by applying the techniques as discussed above expects resumes to pop out every time you hit the search button you might end up disappointed and even frustrated. The internet is a storehouse of information and is just an augment to a recruiting process vis-a-vis bigger and better hunting ground and not a complete substitute.