Articles - Sourcing and Research

Site:Search is a fast and efficient way to search Plaxo, Jigsaw, MySpace—and other social and business networking sites - because you can sidestep many of the rules and restrictions within these sites by tapping into the Public Profile. You will need to be a member of each network you are attempting to search.

Once again, our first step is to build the search string, and a good understanding of Boolean is necessary. If you need to brush up on Boolean go to: Boolean.

Our search will be for a Packaging Engineer. The site we are using is www.plaxo.com. The string will look like this in Google:

Note: When using Site:Search to search Plaxo, use the word PROFILE in your search string. This will eliminate company and other member results not matching our criteria.

There are 201 results for this search string. FYI, to view the person’s profile and contact information, at some point you may need to log into your Plaxo account. Open the profile you would like to view from your results. This option to sign in will be at the top right of the Plaxo screen.

It’s very fast and easy to scroll through the 201 results to find potential matches to your job orders. Keep in mind Plaxo is much smaller in membership than LinkedIn, so it’s best to keep you search strings broad, then scroll through the search results to find potential matches.

Most members in Plaxo include contact information, phone and email. This is a huge advantage over LinkedIn. Sample results below.

Let’s try the same search in Jigsaw - www.jigsaw.com. Jigsaw is a “business card” type website, information being limited to: person’s name, title, company, phone number and email address. There are over 21 million business contacts in Jigsaw.com with 36,000 contacts added and edited daily.

For complete information and instruction on Jigsaw go Jigsaw. Once again we will search for a Packaging Engineer. Because Jigsaw is huge, we will use an industry to better target our results. The Google search string will look like this:

When you click on a name, you will be asked to log in. For more information on Jigsaw membership options, select ABOUT, located on the bottom left of any Jigsaw page.

MySpace.com is one of the few social networking sites that include a public profile that can be Site:Searched. Enter the following string into a Google search box to view the results.

There are hundreds of business and social networks sites throughout the US and globally. Not all can be Site:Searched. Simply enter the name of the network into the search string and see what results.

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BIOGRAPHY

Carol M. Martin CPC, CIR, CSSR** has been an Executive Recruiter for 24 years. Her company, Martin Management, Inc. was created in 1988. The first ten years of business were food industry, manufacturing job orders, from Production Supervisor to Vice President of Manufacturing. The company then evolved to supplier(working only the candidate side)in all manufacturing industries, filling operations positions as well as all types of engineering titles.
Carol holds a BA Degree in Communications from the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point.

You can Reach Carol at her site : http://www.internet-recruiting-toolbox.com/martinmanagement.html

Invite her to join you on LinkedIn martinmanagement@charter.net

Or join her LinkedIn Group - Internet Recruiting Toolbox - Share internet recruiting tips, training, and strategies.

**CERTIFICATIONS:
CPC - Certified Personnel Consultant
CIR - Certified Internet Recruiter
CSSR - Certified Social Sourcing Recruiter