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    Instantly Searching Through 45 Million LinkedIn Profiles and Other Stories follow this discussion

    media recruiting social sourcing tools
    started 22 days ago by

     

    Also posted at http://socialmediarecruiting.ning.com/profiles/blogs/instantly-searching-through-45; I am interested what others have found.
     I do sourcing using Social Media and give webinars on the subject, I use some tools and am in touch with many vendors that provide tools for these purposes. There are quite a few tools that 1) help you guess how to search, 2) go to various sources at the same time, including social networks, blogs, etc., 3) help organize, filter and sort through results you get. Some tools are more powerful than the other, or cover different functionality. Some of these tools are very useful.

    What amazes me, however, is how some of these tools are marketed. I imagine that this attracts attention; however, some of these messages are questionable, to put it mildly...

    I got a call a few days ago from someone who has a sourcing product that "can access all of the 45 million profiles on LinkedIn" via a search on Google. Here is the message I got:

    My business partner and I invented a software that is a 1 of a kind passive candidate sourcing tool. This is not a web crawler that grabs resume off active job boards, those work great and might be great for you as well, I'm not sure how you do your sourcing. However, if you are looking for passive and semi-passive candidates and would like to find a tool that gives you a snap shot into their backgrounds, their name, title, location and phone number, we can help. This is NOT for everyone.

    We set up a demo. During the demo, when I mentioned that Google will not get more than 1,000 results at a time, the person said that she was not exactly sure how this was implemented... We didn't even talk about private profiles.

    Other tools tell you that they use "metasearch algorithms" and that you do not need to know Boolean and will do just as well. Yet other tools are semantic which is "better than Boolean".

    Really?

    What has your experience been?

     

    6 replies

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    • 1 point 19 days ago

      Hi Michelle,

      These and other tools have varying degrees of being useful; what I object to is misinforming the user.

      In general, these tools are based on one of:

      1) clever suggestions on search strings for the web using your keywords, and running these searches (check out the eGrabber ResumeFinder for example);

      2) using custom search engines (look at http://www.google.com/cse/);

      3) having additional processing on top of running searches on the web.

       

      Many of the things these tools offer you can do on your own if you learn how to run advanced Boolean queries.

       

      As for the two tools you have mentioned, (this is my own impression after having briefly tried them),

       

      * Sharkstrike is based on top of large collections of keywords from job descriptions. It builds simple Google search string for you. While having those large collections is an accomplishment and would be interesting to use in a way, the idea of putting these same words into your string when you search for resumes is somewhat questionable. I am not sure who and how can benefit from the tool. The user interface, at the time when I checked, was poor, and the tools was buggy. The same company has an excellent tool for posting your jobs.

       

      * Referyes seems to be built as a custom search engine. It would have been better if they were displaying all of the results for a free account, but they start charging if you want to see more results than a few. This might be a useful tool; it would help to compare it with many other similar tools available that have not been advertised as much. As an example, here’s one of them:

       

      cvfox.com

      Hope this helps,

      Irina

    • 1 point 19 days ago

      Thank you Irina.  If one cannot learn advanced Boolean or semantic queries and wants one tool that does all of the 3 you mentioned above, does such a tool exist today? 

      Is there any tool as you mention that allows you to display a certain amount of search at no cost and than offer a premium membership for additional searches?

      Do you know if eGrabber has a large customer base?

      Am I wrong to say, there seems to be a lack of smart tools in this area?

    • 1 point 19 days ago

      Here is another example of misinformation, by the way:

      http://www.ere.net/2009/10/06/a-recruiters-guide-to-boolean-searching-and-the-worlds-largest-free-cv-database/

      The author calls a custom search engine big5hire "the largest free cv database". 

      I understand that you might be shopping for "the" tool but the answer may not be easy to find...

    • 1 point 19 days ago

      Michelle,

      These are all very good questions. I am actually giving a webinar this coming Friday where I will talk about a variety of tools and technologies: Boolean and Semantic Search for Recruiters (click to read more).

      While few are advanced masters of Boolean search, I think, anyone can learn to run advanced queries, staring with an advanced search dialog, making sure that they use proper syntax, and practicing daily.

      Yes, eGrabber  has a large customer base and many products for recruiters.

      There are some good and not-so-good tools out there. I use a number of tools myself. However, I believe that relying on tools only to craft your queries would limit what you can do. 

      Irina

    • 1 point 19 days ago

      I find this very interesting Irina.  What is your opinion about Sharkstrike.com and Referyes.com sourcing tools?

    • 1 point 20 days ago

      Please tell me as we have not had any luck recruiting on the internet besides the job boards.