Articles - Sourcing and Research

Fact is...as any accomplished Internet sourcer will tell you, sourcing resumes is just a small part of what you can do to gather resources for your open assignments on the Internet. Having said that, many people do like to start with resume sourcing. It is more fun than basic research, which I sometimes call name or lead generation.

It is less tedious at times, plus, you have a much better feel for whether the resource is a match for your assignment, as you get to see the employment history and education, not simply a name and number or email address in some specific context.

Unfortunately, many sourcers / recruiters I speak with really have no idea how to conduct a proper resume search. To begin with, some personality traits come to mind... tenacity... perseverence... patience... All qualities that will pay off big in terms of results. Most recruiters feel they can conduct a search by running one search string in one engine, collect a few resumes, then call it a day. Little do they know how many quality resumes they are leaving on the table, for their competition to grab.

To begin with, any proper resume search requires multiple search techniques. Your process needs to include field searches, filetype searches, synonym searches, site searches, and link/linkdomain searches, at a minimum. These are all separate searches using separate search strings.

Another pitfall many lesser experienced sourcers encounter is poor results due to improper use of keywords. Most strings are going to include muliple keywords including skills keywords, title keywords, industry keywords, and geography keywords. One must have a solid command of the search engine AND. OR, and NOT operators along with their associated special characters including parenthesis and quote marks. If you don't get the keyword component of the string correct, it doesn't matter much about the resume part of the string...you won't find what you are looking for.

Now, for those of you who use Google exclusively for resumes...not a bad starting point, however, you are also leaving many resumes on the table. It is a fact that if you run the same string in two search engines you will absolutely find resumes in the results of one engine that you do not find in the other. This is due to the ways that the search engine spiders and robots crawl the Internet and log websites and keywords, the full explanation of which is beyond the scope of this blog entry.

Have a plan. Review your recruiting assignment, assemble your keywords, construct your search strings, then run each one in at least three search engines, if not more, taking into account the subtle differences in syntax required for each engine.

Happy hunting!

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BIOGRAPHY

Mark E. Berger; CPC, CIR, has been in recruiting and staffing since 1979. He is currently the owner of Swat Recruiting, a firm supporting the technology needs of the recruiting and staffing industry. He is also a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and its predecessor, M.E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and has become an expert on recruiting and sourcing products and services available to the recruiting industry and also has a high level of expertise in recruiter databases (ATS’s), including how these products add to the bottom line.

Mark started utilizing the Internet for candidate sourcing back in the early 1990s by first running classified ads on the text versions or AOL and Compuserve. Then he was an early user of some of the very first online resume databases including Career Mosaic, Headhunter.net, and Online Career Center. In the latter part of the 90s he learned advanced techniques to source passive candidates from the Internet using the search engines, primarily utilizing Alta Vista and Northern Lights in the beginning and is now an advanced user of today's popular search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

More recently, Mark has been teaching the recruiting community best practices as they relate to the social and business networks including LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, and MySpace and how recruiters can utilize those networks for recruiting, marketing, and branding.

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