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Which sourcing tool should I use? $00.02 Worth of Advice

In this report, Jim Stroud reviews popular sourcing tools that aggregate results from multiple websites. He also includes comments from peers and online buzz about the tools as well.

A special report by Jim Stroud, The Searchologist www.thesearchologist.com

This works on Google and Ya-hoo and Bing:

intitle:resume "software engi-neer" C++ java -jobs -submit -

apply

© 2010 by Jim Stroud All rights Reserved

You have my permission to post this report on your blog, website or company intranet. You may also email this report to other recruiters you network with and/or print this survey and pass it out at Recruiter Networking functions. In other words, feel free to share this report with anyone you like as long as you make no changes or edits to its contents or digital format. In fact, I'd love it if you’d make lots and lots of copies. However, the right to bind this material and/or sell it without my written consent is strictly prohibited. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT! If you find the information provided in this report to be useful, please show your appreciation in one (or all) of the following ways: 1. Buy The Searchologist Magazine! The Searchologist Magazine is filled with resume sourcing tips

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Jim Stroud has amassed over a decade of experience in the Recruiting field. As a self-described "Searchologist," Jim has consulted for such companies as Microsoft, Google, MCI, Siemens and a host of startup companies. When not engaged in Recruitment Research, Competitive Intelligence and Training projects for the aforementioned organiza-tions, Jim created and sold two online properties while managing an award-winning blog – The Recruiters Lounge. Jim also produces The Searchologist, a website focused on resume sourcing and lead generation strategies for Recruiters.

Jim Stroud has been cited by Monster.com, major publications (i.e. Wall Street Journal, US News and World Report, Globe and Mail, Fast Company ) and several HR publications for being among the top bloggers in HR and as a highly sought after public speaker and trainer; Jim Stroud has presented sourcing techniques to audiences all over the world. When he is not online, Jim suffers severe withdrawal pains that can only be soothed by chocolate chip cookies and family time.

For additional information about Jim Stroud and his various online projects, speaking engagements and media quotes, please visit: http://thesearchologist.com/about/

Umm… okay! Since I launched the original version of the report, I have received numerous comments ranging from “Right on!” to “BS!” (Umm…. Okay, mostly on the BS side.) It would seem that the users of some of these tools have a loyal following (to say the least) and had no issue with voicing their opinions with me and letting me share them (just as long as I keep them anonymous). Okay, I can deal with that. Here is (basically) the negative feedback I have been hearing: Multiple sources complained about the search time with TalentFilter. I have heard that a

search can take up to 2 hours to complete and in some cases longer. (I thought maybe user error at first, but like I said, more than one person told me that speed was an issue.)

I have heard some people call foul over TalentDrive’s claim of 11,000 sources. (Some were quite irate in fact).

Since some of the feedback said “Why didn’t you do a speed comparison?” I am sharing a chart based on comments from readers. (So don’t shoot the messenger.)

Prior to posting this data, I shared my findings with TalentDrive ( because I don’t believe in blindsiding companies ) and they quickly responded. Check out what they said on the follow-ing page.

UPDATE 3.31.2010

“The following is our thoughts, insight and truthful admissions. Peter Weddle’s 2010 Employment Guide states that there are over 100,000 Career sites and job boards. This does not even include the blogs and Twitter sources. To have a debate on whether TalentFilter can access 9,999 or 11,999 is an interesting mathematical exercise and should be more of an intellectual discussion rather than an emotional rant. First of all regard-ing 11,000 resume database sites; we have backed off that claim recently. My sales and part-ner team will claim thousands of sites. I have attached a summary PDF which delivers as much detail as we will provide because we do not want to deliver a list of sites for our competition to copy or incent a new entrant into market. We ask ourselves… do we count Craigslist as 1 site or 500 (for each city) sites? We have many Monster connections to different countries. Do we count Monster as 1 or a 60? On the open web and via Google search…there are thousands. The angst by some customers is that if they are looking for a nurse they will not pull resumes from Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and IBM. The nurses are not resident in thousands of sites. There may only be a small subset of sites (under 1,000) for nurses. In addition, LinkedIn, Craigslist and a few other popular free sites will deliver the overwhelming number of free resumes. These results will often overshadow our results from the thousands of other sites we pull from. Just as Monster and Careerbuilder often times smothers other paid sites. To argue on the semantics of how many thousands of sites; is less relevant than delivering the proper bal-ance of quality and quantity. Because that is our over arching goal. We list almost 1,000 paid and free registered sites on our sourcing page. Jim you would have to agree for us to list (select box) the thousands of free sites would be very unmanageable and wasted energy for both TalentDrive and its’ user base. That is why the user checks one box and can get all free sites that we have connections to. I am making a request to marketing that our materials be updated to thousands rather than “more than 11,000 sites”. A better number to look at is the inventory of an estimated 70 million resumes that are estimated to be accessible in free sites. Jim, over the last couple of months we have had significant infrastructure challenges. We are not delivering the consistency and speed that we strive to deliver. We plan to upgrade from our current “Cloud” provider either this or next weekend at the latest. The upgrade is contin-gent on the pending tests that are occurring while I write this note. The initial results have shown significant speed improvement. We plead guilty to inconsistent speed (return of re-sumes). I think this deserves further clarity. If you look at where we “sweep” there are from the following distinct sources: 1.) We can sweep the clients local TalentFilter database which is fast 2.) We also if selected can sweep the clients ATS database which is also fast 3.) With the major boards we have API’s and they have fairly quick responses 4.) Some of the free sites are not as fast We offer a scheduled search; so while our clients are sleeping we are searching at night. One of our many benefits is the conceptual scoring and this occasionally gets backed up. On our new infrastructure we are quadrupling the number of conceptual engines we will simulta-

UPDATE 3.31.2010

-neously be running.” Talentdrive then gave several assurances that “the slowness issue will reverse course” in the very near future and invited me to take a peek at the new changes at that time. Hmm… I just may do that. ### MORE FEEDBACK REQUESTED Okay, first let me say kudos to TalentDrive for taking ownership and not ducking the issue. (Much respect!) Aside from that, I want to invite TalentDrive users and users from the other tools I cited to chime in with their thoughts. Cool? So if you would, send me a Tweet using the hashtag #sourcingtool and I will in-clude some of your comments in the next update or (more than likely) feature it on The Recruiters Lounge (www.therecruiterslounge.com) Until then, Happy Sourcing! -Jim

UPDATE 3.31.2010

W h i c h s o u r c i n g t o o l s h o u l d I u s e ?

"Hey Jim," they said, "which sourcing tool should I use?"

It was an innocent enough question, but I had to really think about. My kneejerk reaction was to rattle off the names of tools that have served me well over the years and the processes I created around them, but I don't think that would have been the best response. I really did not know the person all that well (the question came from Twitter) and as such, I did not know how skilled they were in the Boolean arts and for that matter, how quickly they can pick up on new technology and run with it. Some tools are more advanced than others, whereas others are simpler but do not provide the volume of search results you might want. So just like that, a simple question lead me to deep introspection.

What do I (really) think about the idea of search aggregation tools? What kind of processes would I recommend when using them? What's good about them? For that matter, what's so bad and what's so ugly? And a few other questions that I do not immediately remember. (smile)

Rather than continue to wax poetically like some sort of sourcing philosopher wandering aimlessly in my own meanderings (like David Carradine in the classic TV series "Kung Fu"), I have decided to answer that question with two answers. The first answer is simple and vague, "it depends." What comes next is the long answer. What do I (really) think about the idea of search aggregation tools? My search philosophy is basically this: Automate what you can and spend the most time on what cannot be automated. With that said, I am big proponent of search aggregators (tools that pull data from various sources and present them in one place) and would always recom-mend them in your overall sourcing strategy. However, I do have an issue to discuss concern-ing this. In general, search aggregators are GREAT for broad searches. Since each search en-gine, social network and free resume database has its own method of being searched, there is always room for error. In other words, if I wanted to dig deep into Google and just as deeply into Bing, I could not do that using the same search commands because Google and Bing have search commands that are exclusive to them both. (Make sense?) Just in case I lost you just then, consider these three examples:

However, this works only on Yahoo:

region:europe "software engineer" C++ java -jobs -submit originurlextension:pdf

And this only works on Bing::

prefer:resume intitle:resume "software engineer" -apply -submit -jobs Of course, the work around for this is to create search strings for each website you are extrapolating data from. This is why I lean towards tools that allow me to customize my search strings for each resource and/or tools that take into account the search syntax of each website they pull from. (And how many do that? Not many.) You know the other issue I have are tools that do not allow you to export the data that they help you gather. That's actually a bit of a pet peeve for me because ideally, I should be able to import all of the data that I find with these tools into an ATS (Applicant Tracking System). Why do that? Okay, time for a quick rant on an unspoken evil performed by both Recruiters and Sourcers. Nobody looks at their own ATS for candidates! Okay, that was a broad and sweep-ing statement, but conventional wisdom will support my assertion. Do your own informal sur-vey of your co-workers and more often that not, you will notice that rely too heavily on paid sites like Monster and CareerBuilder. This boggles my mind when (in many cases) many of those candidates are already in your ATS. (I have witnessed this firsthand on several occasions.) Sigh... Your ATS should really be the first place you look for a lead. And another thing, if a Recruiter (or Sourcer) relies too much on a paid site like Monster, what happens when the candidate gets a new job and takes down their resume? If that info is not in your ATS, you may never see that candidate again (or any of their referrals). Get it? Sigh... Okay, I am off the soapbox now. What tools have you used in the past? The short answer is a lot, as I love to experiment with tools and processes. As such, I could give a thumbs up / thumbs down on a lot of them, but I choose not too. If I were to do that I would have to assume that you are every bit the search geek I am (or greater) and that may not be the case. Plus, I don't know how quickly you take to tech and... Hmm... sounds like I am repeating myself. What I want to do instead is pick out a few tools to talk about, think out loud (by sharing my notes) and then leave it up to you to decide which is for you. Sound fair? The tools I am discussing are:

TalentDrive's TalentFilter

TalentSeekr

Talent Spring TalentHook Infogist

ReferYes eGrabber's Lead

Researcher

At first glance, you may say, "Gee Jim, there is no shortage of talent on the sourcing automa-tion front." To which I would reply, "Hardee-har-har. Yes, the term "talent" is popular with these types of tools."

So tell me, what did you think of them?

For what its worth, as I reviewed the various tools I somewhat lost myself in the data and the end result was information overload. Now I know there will be some people who will read this report in its entirety and if that’s you, then God bless you. (smile) However, I also know that many of you will only skim this and zero in on what ever catches your eye. I can dig that too. So to appease both lines of thought, I have formatted this report in the following way.

ORDER OF CONTENTS

OVERALL CHART OF TOOLS

AT A GLANCE: REFERYES ( + DETAILED NOTES)

AT A GLANCE: LEAD RESEARCHER ( + DETAILED NOTES)

AT A GLANCE: INFOGIST ( + DETAILED NOTES)

AT A GLANCE: TALENTFILTER ( + DETAILED NOTES)

AT A GLANCE: TALENTSEEKR ( + DETAILED NOTES)

AT A GLANCE: TALENTSPRING ( + DETAILED NOTES)

AT A GLANCE: TALENTHOOK SPHERE ( + DETAILED NOTES)

PUBLIC (and PRIVATE) COMMENTARY on: ALL OF THE ABOVE

A FEW IDEAS TO SHARE

END REPORT

OVERALL CHART OF ALL TOOLS

As I look over this chart, I am silently praying to God that I am not misrepresenting any company ‘s offering. I believe I have this right, but in the event that I do not and somebody cries foul and says “Jim, you got this one wrong. My company does offer… X.” Well, let me save us both some grief and apologize right now. You are right and I am wrong! However, based on the quality time I spent on each tool, I believe I have it right. Also, let me stress the point of “ease of use.” You will no doubt notice that Infogist is not given that cita-tion in the chart below. For the record, I think its easy enough to use, but I was basing that criteria on what others think about the product and that seemed to be the consensus. (Don’t hate me Infogist!)

Hmm… One thing I am missing on this chart is a speed comparison, of which I was debating anyway. I did not have a stopwatch on me and if I did, I have a pretty fast connection to the internet. So… would my speed test be typical? (Who can say?) I will mention however that the desktop tools seemed to be faster than the web-based tools. (Weird. I would think the opposite.) I noticed that first with the TalentHook tool.

AT A GLANCE: REFERYES

I like the interface of ReferYes. It is really easy to use and produces results quickly. However, I think it still needs work in a couple of areas.

PROS

Allow users to search pay sites from your site. Allow users to input their own search strings and save them. Show examples of what a boolean string looks like. Maybe link to a tutorial. Tinker a bit more with your search strings.

I am digging the interface. I imagine that this would appeal to beginners right away. It is not intimidating, very simple and intuitive. A big plus right off the bat.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that when it came to resume searches, they offered PHP as an option. Very cool as most people overlook refining their search by that filetype.

Hmm... I do like their email search, although it has limitations.

I did a Linkedin search for software engineers in Atlanta and ReferYes returned 29,700

whereas Linkedin returned 16,763. I did another search for VP of Marketing on Referyes and got 4 results. Linkedin returned 5,654.

I did a search for software engineer from jigsaw and got zero results. [Bad]! How can that be? No software engineers on jigsaw? I go to Jigsaw directly and find 25,000+. Hmm…

Hmm… I cannot customize my strings. [Ugh! Pet peeve.] Although, I can save my searches.. Okay, not what I really want, but okay nonetheless.

Below are highlights from my notes about this product. (see page X)

CONS

SUGGESTIONS FOR REFERYES

www.referyes.com

Signing up for the service seemed easy enough. Pretty seamless process. I am digging the interface. I imagine that this would appeal to beginners right away. It

is not intimidating, very simple and intuitive. A big plus right off the bat. [ Cool ] ReferYes lets you post jobs and refer people, but its the "Sourcer" tab that gets my at-

tention. Looks interesting. On the "Sourcer" tab, I have the option of searching for resumes, profiles (social net-

works presumably), college search, business search, blog search, flip search and email search.

I start off with a resume search for a Software Engineer. I noticed that there is an “Add Criteria” link for building a boolean search next to the search box. Hmm… I think it would be helpful if there were examples of boolean search strings available for the benefit of beginners. Maybe a pop-up video when you click the question mark next to the "Add Criteria" link? Also, do I have to use their boolean tool? I prefer to just do it myself, but maybe that's just me?

ReferYes gives the option (under "Resume Search") to search Google, Yahoo, Bing, Craigslist, VisualCV, ResumeBucket and Emurse.

I choose Google for my first search the words software engineer AND C++. I kept the location as "Anywhere" in the USA and received a lot of hits. The more I zeroed in on cities, the fewer results (of course). I noticed that in certain location based searches, I do not get exactly what I want. I think the system is using the city as a keyword. (No biggie, I would as well if doing a manual search.)

I was pleasantly surprised to see that when it came to resume searches, they offered PHP as an option. Very cool as most people overlook refining their search by that file-type.

ReferYes checks 13 Profiles (Hoovers, Linkedin, Zoominfo, Spoke, Xing, Brightfuse, more… ) What is Brightfuse? Hmm… looks like a pretty decent resource. May look deeper into that one later.

Hmm… Let me try a few more random searches across the options they offer. I did a Linkedin search for software engineers in Atlanta and ReferYes returned 29,700

whereas Linkedin returned 16,763. I did another search for VP of Marketing on Refer-yes and got 4 results. Linkedin returned 5,654. [B ad!]

I did a search for software engineer from jigsaw and got zero results. [Bad]! How can that be? No software engineers on jigsaw? I go to Jigsaw directly and find 25,000+. Hmm… Do I need an account with Jigsaw for this to work with ReferYes? I did not see a signin form anywhere. I do another search for a VP of Marketing and got some good-ness. Hmm… More tweaking needed ?

I did a search for software engineer from Wordpress and got 30 results whereas site:wordpress.com intitle:about "software engineer" returned 2,280 results [Hmm… seems like a tweak is needed here too.]

A search for software engineer from Caltech returned 30 resumes. I try my own search string and get 32 on Google with site:caltech.edu intitle:resume | inurl:resume | inti-tle:cv | intitle:vitae "software engineer" (Not bad ReferYes)

DETAILED NOTES: REFERYES

Hmm... maybe its just a matter of tweaking their search strings? Let me tinker a bit more. Hmm… I cannot customize my strings. [Ugh! Pet peeve.] Although, I can save my searches.. Okay, not what I really want, but okay nonetheless.

Hmm... I do like their email search, although it has limitations. I could not find my email address from past employers, but it did give me a suggestion on what my email ad-dress could have been based on the structure of other emails it found from others who work there. For example, when I tried to look up my old MCI address, it found the ad-dresses of jim.myers@mci.com, cathy.james@mci.com and a few more. Taking that into consideration, it suggested that the email address I am looking for would be jim.stroud@mci.com. When it did find an email address from MCI, it gave a link to where it found the email address as well. [Cool]

CURIOUS: How are they getting around the IP issue of being blocked? Since they are web-based how much longer before they are blocked by all of the sources they pull from? Probably not an issue. I know from earlier days when tools like this were coming on the scene that would be an issue to be concerned about.

ReferYes is showing signs of promise, but I don’t think its as good as I think it should be. I would keep my eye on these guys.

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AT A GLANCE: LEAD RESEARCHER

FULL DISCLOSURE: eGrabber has been a sponsor of my blog - The Recruiters Lounge in the past. I have praised their products long before any moolah changed hands. Just FYI...

Below are highlights from my notes about this product. (see page X)

PROS

Testimonial - Impressive: Using eGrabber's new LeadResearcher product, Marvin Smith, a talent Sourcer for Microsoft, was able to clean up a list of nearly 8,000 prospects with un-confirmed email addresses and produce over 3,200 prospects with confirmed email ID's within 24 hours, resulting in 117 new applicants for a specific project.

This makes the product worth buying alone! Go to Linkedin and research people, then get free emails using Lead Researcher. Inmails in Linkedin are expensive for multiple emails. $5.00 per contact. Big cost savings.

I also LOVE that I can validate the email addresses of those on the list I generate. Sending a ping to an email server for a specific box. If its there, the email is "real.'

Can I add my own search strings into Lead Researcher? If so, how? I would like to be able to add research strings into this (like Resume Finder), then I could source candidates, build a list and then verify their emails, get a phone number and do background checks.

eGrabber answered the above questions by telling me that I can do what I inquired about by using two of their products in concert: LeadResearcher and Resume Grabber.

CONS

A little birdie tells me that a new product will debut soon that will combine the features of Lead Researcher with the Resume Grabber tool. I would be happy to see that as I think it is more convenient to use one tool vs two. When that happens, please put me on your beta list.

REQUEST TO EGRABBER

www.egrabber.com

DETAILED NOTES: LEAD RESEARCHER

On the homepage of eGrabber, I notice that they have 2 testimonials posted from Mi-crosoft and MRI

Testimonial - Impressive: Using eGrabber's new LeadResearcher product, Marvin Smith, a talent Sourcer for Microsoft, was able to clean up a list of nearly 8,000 pros-pects with unconfirmed email addresses and produce over 3,200 prospects with con-firmed email ID's within 24 hours, resulting in 117 new applicants for a specific project.

Wow! Lead Researcher has a LOT of features that are very helpful, but the most im-portant feature is the email validation tool. I like it because it quickly automates and validates emails. This alone is worth having the product. It detects the patterns of peo-ple with emails from that company. It detects patterns of emails from a web domain. It makes a list of all the emails associated with that company. It also extracts phone num-bers related to that company. If it cannot tell for certainty, it will make a guess based on the email patterns it has found. This system is MUCH more robust and returns more results than what I saw in ReferYes.

I can import a list of names and let it find... well, why repeat the Microsoft testimonial. Hmm... what if I was going to attend a conference? I could make a list of all the pre-senters speaking there, then introduce myself to them via email. Once the info is gath-ered, I could export it all as an Excel sheet and import into my contact management system.

Hmm... If I had the name of a few employees at a company (from Linkedin for exam-ple) I could look up their emails and see where other employees have used their com-pany emails online. That means I can track the employees of a competitor online and see what they are doing online. I can also track where they are posting their jobs and make sure my jobs are there as well. I can also track the chatter of employees and cus-tomize my sales pitch so I can better compete when recruiting the same candidates that they are.

NICE! If I switch from Contact View to “Research View,” I can get more information on each person. LeadResearcher gives links to that person's Facebook page, online re-sume, whitepapers they have written and (so much more). So I can do a quick web background check on each person. Cool! Armed with this info, my initial call to these contacts would be a bit warmer. I can also add comments on each contact and classify it by color code as well.

[ VERY COOL ] This makes the product worth buying alone! Go to Linkedin and research people, then get free emails using Lead Researcher. Inmails in Linkedin are expensive for multiple emails. $5.00 per contact. Big cost savings.

[ VERY COOL ] I also LOVE that I can validate the email addresses of those on the list I generate. Sending a ping to an email server for a specific box. If its there, the email is "real.'

IDEA: Can I add my own search strings into Lead Researcher? If so, how? I would like to be able to add research strings into this (like Resume Finder), then I could source candidates, build a list and then verify their emails, get a phone number and do back-

ground checks. I reached out to eGrabber and this was their (quick) response: LeadResearcher is for people who have the contact information in a database but want to find missing or additional information. It is a RESEARCH tool that scans the internet for additional in-formation. It is not a tool to get new contacts into your database.. Many people have thousands of contacts in their CRM and ATS that don't have email IDs and other contact information. They would buy LeadResearcher. ResumeGrabber is a resume import tool. It is designed to GRAB resumes into a data-base. It does not append any information that is already in the resume. There are recruiters who simply want to find and grab resumes. This tool is for them. A little birdie tells me that a new product will debut soon that will combine the fea-tures of Lead Researcher with the Resume Grabber tool. I will be happy to see that.

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AT A GLANCE: INFOGIST

In a previous life, I used Infogist on a daily basis, so I a m w e l l a c q u a i n t e d w i t h i t . Several of my peers used it to find fresh resumes on pay sites (i.e. Monster, CareerBuilder, et cetera) on a daily basis.

Below are highlights from my notes about this product. (see page X)

PROS

Infogist now allows you to search your web-based email (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) and (some) ATS databases. They did not have this back in the day. It would have been useful. WOW!

Infogist has its own language which I personally like because I can tweak my search strings and really zero in on what I want. The language is simple and easy to adapt.

Find resumes, extract the emails from resumes that score a certain number, send an email to all of those contacts through the Infogist system.

CONS

I cannot target leads outside of the USA. However, I can target free Canadian and Euro-pean Resume Banks

Why can't Infogist allow you to do like what Monster does and lets you search on a job title current or past? You can do that on Linkedin, but not when using Infogist. Unless I missed this? (I don't think so.)

PROBLEM? I am not sure how objective I can be in discussing the UI because I am used to it. I will admit that it took some people a moment or two to get comfortable with it.

SUGGESTION FOR INFOGIST

I have no problem with your user interface, but I hear that it is a bit intimidating to newbies. This is why I think your tool is best suited for intermediate to advanced users. Maybe you could have 2 versions of your interface where version 1) is simplified further for beginners and version 2) could remain as it is now. Just a thought…

www.infogist.com

I used to live by Infogist in a previous life, so I am well acquainted with it. Several of my peers use it to find fresh resumes on pay sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, et cetera) on a daily basis. (Common practice among corporate Sourcers with access to a lot of pay sites.) Note: Needless to say, you cannot access the paysites unless you are paying for them. Duh!

NICE: Ability to search folders locally on your computer. Great option! Why not have resumes you collect in folders on your C:/ and search them along with the resumes you find in other sources? You can do this with Google Desktop and Live has a desktop search option as well, but its cool to be able to do it all from one spot.

Infogist now allows you to search your web-based email (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) and (some) ATS databases. They did not have this back in the day. It would have been use-ful. WOW!

NICE: Infogist has its own language which I personally like because I can tweak my search strings and really zero in on what I want. The language is simple and easy to adapt.

NICE: I like that I can automate my searches and have it run at specific times, so I can (literally) source while I sleep.

NICE: I like that it scores the results and that you can set Infogist to only return re-sumes that meet a certain score.

NEGATIVE: I cannot target leads outside of the USA. However, I can target free Cana-dian and European Resume Banks

I like that it tracks when you have viewed results, which saves you time. I like that I can do a shotgun search on so many sources, get several results and refine

those results even further with additional keywords. I like that I can view the original source of the resume or lead. If I notice that one par-

ticular source is not producing well for me, I would deselect it from the list of sources Infogist explores.

I like that it has made provision for OFCCP. Why can't Infogist allow you to do like what Monster does and lets you search on a job

title current or past? You can do that on Linkedin, but not when using Infogist. Unless I missed this? (I don't think so.)

I like that I can metasearch various searchengines for general info which (ideally) will point me to intelligence I can leverage in my searches.

I LIKE THIS: Find resumes, extract the emails from resumes that score a certain num-ber, send an email to all of those contacts through the Infogist system. Very cool.

PROBLEM? I am not sure how objective I can be in discussing the UI because I am used to it. I will admit that it took some people a moment or two to get comfortable with it. Perhaps I am too much of a geek, but I did not have that problem.

DETAILED NOTES: INFOGIST

AT A GLANCE: TALENTFILTER

FULL DISCLOSURE: TalentDrive has been a sponsor of my blog - The Recruiters Lounge. I have also served as an advisor to them in the past.

Below are highlights from my notes about this product. (see page X)

PROS

Wow! TalentDrive has an API for its tool allowing other companies to private label their tool. Impressive. To date, have not discovered any other companies doing this. I like that I can save my resumes into a database on their server and that I can download those resumes as a CSV file whenever I want. If I use my own ATS as a drive, I could possibly fill it up rather quickly if constantly taking in new data from lots of sources. I like their pretty reporting charts! At a glance I can see which job boards are working the best for me. Also Resumes by Sources YTD, Resumes by Sources by Position, Candidates con-tacted by Resume Source, et cetera.

CONS

System allows you to send potential phone interview dates to prospects. They can then opt for the time that best meets their schedule. One less hassle to deal with. It would be great if this integrated with my Outlook already (a la www.Tungle.com) but I’m not mad. Why don’t other systems offer that? Great time saver.

SUGGESTION FOR TALENTFILTER

I noticed that with your system you can create an email template and send out emails to prospects, although it will look like it came from your email. It will also input the name of the candidate into your email blast as well. However, it does not automatically add CAN SPAM language. (For that matter, nobody does, but I think it would be a good practice.) I suppose that this is easy for the user to inject since customization is possible with your email templates, but I think it would be a nice value-add for your users who do not think about it.

www.talentdrive.com

Wow! TalentDrive has an API for its tool allowing other companies to private label their tool. Impressive. To date, have not discovered any other companies doing this.

They are a web-based tool but they get around the IP blocking issue by setting daily limits on sites you source on. Also, when you login to their tool, the internet sees that as a unique IP address.

COOL: I like that I can save my resumes into a database on their server and that I can download those resumes as a CSV file whenever I want. If I use my own ATS as a drive, I could possibly fill it up rather quickly if constantly taking in new data from lots of sources.

COOL! They offer a concept score (resumes graded on a semantic search of your resume scores from 1-1000) and a concrete score (based on your boolean search scores from 1-100). This is cool because you can compete with the machine to see who finds the most relevant resumes. I like their "clone resume" feature. Good for beginners.

How does their concept score work? Initially I thought it would be more of what I have seen before, a system that scores resumes based on the number and frequency of key-words in a resume. However, as I dug deeper under the hood (or rather, read some of the technical documentation that actually powered the ranking system) I discovered that their concept score search retrievals are based on a "neural-network based mathematical model that estimates the probability a particular resume/job pair will lead to a placement. This estimate is based on learning the characteristics of placement pairs from over one million actual, historical cases." (Too geeky for you? Let's try that again.) Let's say you made over one million actual placements throughout your career for a myr-iad of positions. Their system looks at all the resumes of the candidates that were hired and uses that as a basis. So... if you are looking for a Software Engineer skilled in Java, the system looks at the resumes of people who were hired in similar positions and says, "Well this job is similar to your job and these were the resumes of people that were hired. If that's the case, you will probably like these resumes. Make sense?"

When a username and password is required for the free sites, Talentdrive will add in the info for you for free. Good customer service.

Their system monitors the freshness of resumes (based on when user added or updated their resume on a job board), they also add limits to how many resumes can be sourced from one... um... source. (But I said that already)

You can also automate your searches so that you can have fresh resumes on a daily basis. COOL: I like their pretty reporting charts! At a glance I can see which job boards are work-

ing the best for me. Also Resumes by Sources YTD, Resumes by Sources by Position, Candi-dates contacted by Resume Source, et cetera.

You can refine your searches by score and then export those resumes via CSV or export to your ATS. NICE!

DETAILED NOTES: TALENTFILTER

You can also create an email template and send out emails to prospects, although it will look like it came from your email. It will also input the name of the candidate into your email blast as well. It does not suggest CAN SPAM language. (For that matter, nobody does, but I think its a good practice.)

They have an easy evaluation system for approving resumes: red light, yellow light, green light and comments. This can be referenced later in a report for OFCCP purposes as well. Good thinking.

COOL: System allows you to send potential phone interview dates to prospects. They can then opt for the time that best meets their schedule. One less hassle to deal with. It would be great if this integrated with my Outlook already (a la Tungle.com) but I’m not mad. Why don’t other systems offer that? Great time saver.

TalentDrive says they are a better choice over their competitors because they: a) have ac-cess to 11,000 online job boards/resume sites, b) only company to offer 2-tiered match-ing: concrete and concept matching for resume searches allowing users to focus on the top 30% of candidates searched and not all the rest. Compelling argument.

Follow Jim Stroud on Twitter: @jimstroud @isearchologist

AT A GLANCE: TALENTSEEKR

FULL DISCLOSURE: TalentSeekr and I had a long chat about their tech while I was writing this piece and when it was all over, I was invited to sit on their board of industry experts.

PROS

Let me first say that I am (insert expletive here) amazed at the very concept of Talent-Seekr! I saw a demo of it at the DirectEmployers conference last year and my mouth dropped to the floor. In a nutshell, TalentSeekr advertises your job on the web in a variety of ways (geo-targeting, Behavioral targeting, contextual targeting, profile targeting), tweaks your ads in real-time for maximum effectiveness, sends them to a tricked out land-ing page and then as passive candidates apply (or ask for additional info or respond to some call to action), you can monitor it all in real time. (Add another expletive here) COOL!

WOW! You can target your ad down to a specific building. Imagine serving up ads to em-ployees of your arch rivals. WOW! WOW! WOW!

TESTIMONIAL: Novell did a cost per hire comparison with TalentSeekr and cited a 92% sav-ings over industry average.

TalentSeekr also monitors the user behavior of people who visit landing pages with a heat map. This will help you optimize your landing page to the Nth degree.

CONS

A quality score is also added to applicants. Manual now, but will be automated soon. Hmm… Is that a bad thing? Not so sure. I suppose it could slow things down somewhat if a human being is evaluating things, but wouldn’t that make the results better?

SUGGESTION FOR TALENTSEEKR

A lot of tools rank the leads that they generate, but none seem to track how many were hired. I suppose that such would be an added bit of work for the user, but if you could integrate your results (to an extent) with an ATS… Hmm… I think I am rambling here. (I do that some-times.) This is what I would like to see with the other pretty charts your system creates: A chart that shows how many hires your system has generated. I suppose that you could simply survey your customers, at the end of the year and write a whitepaper on that. (I rarely see , actually, I have never seen a company post a running tally on their homepage that says. “In 2009 our product generated X hires for X clients.” Maybe one day…

Below are highlights from my notes about this product. (see page X) www.talentseekr.com

Let me first say that I am (insert expletive here) amazed at the very concept of TalentSeekr! I saw a demo of it at the DirectEmployers conference last year and my mouth dropped to the floor. In a nutshell, TalentSeekr advertises your job on the web in a variety of ways (geo-targeting, Behavioral targeting, contextual targeting, profile targeting), tweaks your ads in real-time for maximum effectiveness, sends them to a tricked out land-ing page and then as passive candidates apply (or ask for additional info or respond to some call to action), you can monitor it all in real time. (Add another expletive here) COOL!

You can see which ads are performing well. Turn off the ones that are not and pump more attention to the ones that are.

TalentSeekr is GREAT for sourcing passive candidates!!! Imagine that you are looking to hire a robotics engineer and just when your perfect candidate is browsing books on Amazon, your ad appears. How cool is that?!!!

WOW! TalentSeekr makes creating a job ad easy and adapts the ad to fit the online environment its in. It constantly tweaks itself by changing pictures, video, text, colors, et cetera, to see which ad works best and where. It also VERY closely monitors site topics, page content and candidate response on 16+ million websites.

WOW! You can target your ad down to a specific building. Imagine serving up ads to em-ployees of your arch rivals. WOW! WOW! WOW!

WOW! TalentSeekr tracks all users that ventures across its network. For example, if some-one looks at a profile on Linkedin, goes to Amazon to look at books on robotics, goes to their personal page on Facebook where it says that they are an engineer - BINGO! TalentSeekr serves up an ad that best fits them.

TalentSeekr sends results of your campaign to your email or ATS (you decide) The dashboard makes it easy to monitor stats. A quality score is also added to applicants. (Manual now, but will be automated soon.) TalentSeekr also monitors the user behavior of people who visit landing pages with a heat

map. This will help you optimize your landing page to the Nth degree. TESTIMONIAL: Steve Fogarty, Recruiting Captain with Adidas said: “TalentSeekr found a

needle in a haystack for us.” ( When describing how TalentSeekr performed in only a week’s time when looking for a difficult-to-fill engineering position.)

TESTIMONIAL: Novell did a cost per hire comparison with TalentSeekr and cited a 92% sav-ings over industry average.

This video says it all ( and in a very slick way): www.talentseekr.com/intro I was fortunate enough to have a demo of this product and witness a campaign in real time

and was impressed by the level of sophistication behind the scenes. (What can I say? I'm a sucker for pretty graphs and data.)

DETAILED NOTES: TALENTSEEKR

AT A GLANCE: TALENTSPRING

TalentSpring has some very compelling se-mantic search technology. They are not an ATS, but a search tool that (primarily) searches your ATS and ranks the resumes therein.

PROS

TalentSpring pulls and ranks and for that matter learns your preferences based on the re-sumes and jobs you feed it. Their system is not an ATS! It searches what is in your ATS for the top candidates you are looking for.

TalentSpring says that their competitors match and rank resumes based on number of keywords on a resume. However, TalentSpring looks at a job title, years of experience and similarities to other resumes in your ATS. In this way, you can find more relevant resumes in your ATS than with the standard keyword search you would commonly employ.

When I was taking a demo of their product, I was impressed with how well the system ranked a candidate we were looking for. The job we were sourcing on was a Nurse and the system gave one resume a low score although it had all of the keywords. I was a bit con-fused, but soon afterwards was amazed as I realized that the resume we were looking at was a sales professional who sold health related items and (understandably) had many of the key terms, but was not a nurse. W

CONS

To fully leverage TalentSpring for what its worth, it may take a cultural shift inside of an organization. Perfect case scenario: A recruiting team of 10+ use TalentSpring to rank re-sumes in their ATS. They give feedback to the system and overtime, the TalentSpring is tweaked to perfection. New recruiters who come in do not have to work so hard to find top candidates because they would benefit from the efforts of the recruiters who put the time in to train the TalentSpring system what is good and what is not so good. Personally, I think this is great and could pay off huge dividends to any organization willing to invest in it. However, this tool (like any other tool) is only as good as the user. If the recruiters in the organization only give lip service to using it and remain slaves to the "post and pray" method of mining job boards and do not invest the time to tweak their system, the results will not be stellar. As a result, TalentSpring would get a bad rap when they did not deserve to get it.

Below are highlights from my notes about this product. (see page X) www.talentspring.com

TalentSpring's strength is in their semantic search technology. In case “semantic” is a new word to you, let me explain. Imagine that you want to search for spies. Doing a semantic search on "spies" would mean that you are not only looking for the keyword spies in your search results, but also related concepts such as James Bond, Jason Bourne, Mata Hari, John Steed, Emma Peele, et cetera; although you did not add those terms in yourself. It would also look for spies that you might not have heard of, but still relevant to your search. Semantic search saves time and is advantageous because you can find things that you might not have otherwise because you are only looking for specific keywords and not keywords that you might not know about.

TalentSpring pulls and ranks and for that matter learns your preferences based on the re-sumes and jobs you feed it. Their system is not an ATS! It searches what is in your ATS for the top candidates you are looking for.

TalentSpring can search the open web and reach out to a lot of places (like so many oth-ers) but they are positioning themselves as the best ranking engine for your ATS. Their phi-losophy is that it is better to find and review the top candidates instead of examining all of them. (Something busy recruiters can appreciate.) The other advantage to their strategy is that you are not tripping over other resumes (as much) that your competitors are.

Their ranking system is top notch, invented by PhDs and ex-Microsoft techies. (It reminds me a bit of Trovix which was bought by Monster.)

CONCERN: To fully leverage TalentSpring for what its worth, it may take a cultural shift in-side of an organization. Perfect case scenario: A recruiting team of 10+ use TalentSpring to rank resumes in their ATS. They give feedback to the system and overtime, the Tal-entSpring is tweaked to perfection. New recruiters who come in do not have to work so hard to find top candidates because they would benefit from the efforts of the recruiters who put the time in to train the TalentSpring system what is good and what is not so good. Personally, I think this is great and could pay off huge dividends to any organization willing to invest in it. However, this tool (like any other tool) is only as good as the user. If the re-cruiters in the organization only give lip service to using it and remain slaves to the "post and pray" method of mining job boards and do not invest the time to tweak their system, the results will not be stellar. As a result, TalentSpring would get a bad rap when they did not deserve to get it.

A lot of search aggregators are keyword based and not semantic-based. Of course, you could spend time researching keywords with too ls like Sharkstrike ( www.sharkstrike.com ), but this tool is supposed to simplify things.)

TalentSpring says that their competitors match and rank resumes based on number of keywords on a resume. However, TalentSpring looks at a job title, years of experience and similarities to other resumes in your ATS. In this way, you can find more relevant resumes in your ATS than with the standard keyword search you would commonly employ. Some searchengines let you refine your searches with suggested dropdowns and additional key-words but end of day, its still keyword matching.

TalentSpring ranks resumes from 100-150. You can pick a source: Social web, job boards, et cetera and rank the scores individually and thereby evaluate where your best candi-dates come from; but end of the day, (please) stick them all into your ATS.

DETAILED NOTES: TALENTSPRING

THOUGHT: 80% of sourcing tools out there do keyword searches. A smaller percent does semantic search for recruiting. Why? Semantic search is VERY difficult to pull off and it takes time to train a system to perform to your liking. Semantic search is a concept that is new to a lot of people. TalentSpring does not search as many of the pay sites as their competitors, but they do cover the major ones like Monster, HotJobs, Dice, JobCentral, etc. I LOVE their User Interface. Very intuitive. When I was taking a demo of their product, I was impressed with how well the system ranked a candidate we were looking for. The job we were sourcing on was a Nurse and the system gave one resume a low score although it had all of the keywords. I was a bit confused, but soon afterwards was amazed as I realized that the resume we were looking at was a sales professional who sold health related items and (understandably) had many of the key terms, but was not a nurse. WOW! I thought the way you entered data for searching was kind of neat as well, although it does take a different type of mindset. You do not enter keywords per se, but rather "critical con-cepts." Sticking with the Nurse example, this is what we did: (1) Cut and paste in a job descrip-tion, (2) add in data like location and experience level, et cetera, (3) I add in "critical concepts" which are broad terms related to the job I am searching on. In this case: Behavior Health, So-cial Health and Radiology. And keep in mind that these concept words represent dozens of other keywords that are related to them. (4) I refine my search even further with more key-words as sub headings to the concept words. For example, under the concept word - Social Health, I may add the keyword "RN" and tell the system that it is of high importance. (Or for that matter, medium, low or no importance, or block it all together.) NICE: The system was pretty fast as well. It pulled back compelling results in a matter of seconds. I also liked that once you have a good subset of resumes, you can refine them even further with "common filters" which is a sliding bar indicating years of experience, change education preferences with a drop-down, location with a drop down and you can customize these filters as well.

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AT A GLANCE: TALENTHOOK SPHERE

FULL DISCLOSURE: TalentHook Sphere has been a sponsor of my blog - The Recruiters Lounge in the past. FYI, this was my first time using their product.

PROS

Talenthook Sphere lets you post a reason for rejecting each candidate (when OFCCP is on). You can pull an OFCCP report at anytime on how you have handled all of your candidates within moments. Reports can be customized to be specifically set to honor OFCCP's re-quest.

TalentHook Sphere allows you to sync your workflow with your co-workers. You can track who has seen specific candidates and spoke to them. Real time tracking so you don't have to worry about bumping over the same people your co-workers have spoken to. You can also track where a candidate is in the workflow; so if they call you out of the blue for an update, you can see what was the last action taken on their resume and who else in your office might be considering them.

Their FlipSearch tools allows you to search resumes that link to companies and profes-sional associations. Another nice feature. Is this exclusive to TalentHook Sphere? (In case you don’t know, FlipSearching is the sourcing method that lets you find resumes based on companies that they may be linking to. )

TalentHook Sphere helps you comply with OFCCP rules by letting you track the progress of candidates in your system and setting how long resumes are kept. Another unique feature?

CONS

Before I could download the TalentHook Sphere product I had to take an online class. It was a good training video that gave sourcing tips as well. The Pop Quiz portion surprised me. (smile) I’m not really sure that this is a negative, unless you are as impatient as I was when I wanted to dig into this tool. I will say that watching the overview saved me a little time in grasping the nuances of this tool.

www.talenthook.com

DETAILED NOTES: TALENTHOOK

Before I could download the TalentHook Sphere product I had to take an online class. It was a good training video that gave sourcing tips as well. The Pop Quiz portion surprised me. (smile)

I like their pay board search feature. It allowed for the restricting of results so that you do not overspend your resume budget. (Hmm… This seems to be a trend with these types of tools.)

I like their linked search capability. Assign jobs and searches to specific people for report-ing purposes is great for OFCCP compliance.

Flipsearch - Resume search for companies that link to a company website. I can also cus-tomize this . (You know I like that!) Nice feature.

OrgFlipSearch - Allow you to search resumes that link to a professional associa-tion. Another nice feature. Is this exclusive to TalentHook Sphere? (In case you don’t know, FlipSearching is the sourcing method that lets you find resumes based on companies that they may be linking to. )

NICE: I like that I can section off candidates to a reject list so I will not see them again when I search on the same criteria, provided they use the same email address. I also like the worklist (possible hire, need to screen them some more) and hotlist (call these people now!) options. Very cool.

Keyboard shortcuts is something I have not seen with the other tools. Cool if that's your thing.

Talenthook Sphere exports data into a spreadsheet and an ATS. Useful. NICE: I have seen the option to email candidates through the system before, but what

catches my eye here is that they suggest a CAN SPAM message in one of their templates. (And here I thought that nobody did that.) They are also careful to time the delivery of emails so you want get pinged for spamming by your ISP.

TalentHook Sphere helps you comply with OFCCP rules by letting you track the progress of candidates in your system and setting how long resumes are kept. Another unique fea-ture?

KILLER: Talenthook Sphere lets you post a reason for rejecting each candidate (when OFCCP is on). You can pull an OFCCP report at anytime on how you have handled all of your candidates within moments. Reports can be customized to be specifically set to honor OFCCP's request.

NICE: You can set up additional reasons why a candidate has been rejected. (Yeah, I really like customization.)

STANDARD: Once you’ve set up a search you will probably want to run it again. This is called Refreshing a search. TalentHook Sphere returns only new results when a search is refreshed, so you won’t see candidates you have already rejected or who remain in your search results from a previous run of the search. You can also set searches to run auto-matically using the Agent.

With “Purge List,” you can reject candidates for certain jobs so that they do not return again in the search results for that job when looking for new resumes.

STANDARD: I like that TalentHook Sphere sends email notification of new results from its automated searching. Great time saver.

I like the way their tool handles bulk email. Personalizes each email by sending them out on time delay and with first name of each candidate. You can also have it so that a candi-date is never emailed again from TalentHook Sphere via an exclusion list.

VERY COOL: Their boolean search builder is cool because it spells out the string as you make it.. This is something I would have liked to have seen on ReferYes.

KILLER: TalentHook Sphere allows you to sync your workflow with your co-workers. You can track who has seen specific candidates and spoke to them. Real time tracking so you don't have to worry about bumping over the same people your co-workers have spoken to. You can also track where a candidate is in the workflow; so if they call you out of the blue for an update, you can see what was the last action taken on their resume and who else in your office might be considering them.

Search results are ranked by how many times a keyword is in a resume. Worked pretty well and fast. OBSERVATION: I noticed that the desktop tools typically returned results quicker than the web-based tools. Weird. My assumption is that it has something to do with how data is transported online verses how it is sent to a desktop tool. At least, that’s my guess anyway. TalentHook Sphere’s speed was formidable in comparison to the other tools I evaluated.

I like that I can export my data to an ATS and even link the exported data to a req in my ATS. Another unique feature.

TalentHook Sphere also integrates into certain ATS systems. However, they do not allow other companies to private label their product.

Connect with Jim Stroud on Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimstroud

Do you use TalentHook?

What about eGrabber?

Is Infogist worth the money?

Despite what my wife may tell you, I do not know everything, so I decided to post a silent query to the internet and began search out comments from Recruiters and Sourcers about the various tools they used. I also quietly asked the opinion of my peers on these tools as well. Here are some of the comments that stood out to me.

It didn't work when first purchased and tried with ACT 2010 - but eGrabber support was great about rolling out changes for the new ACT version to get me rolling. Source: http://tinyurl.com/sourcingcomment1

Also try TalentHook. Using it now. Pretty good. Only limitation is in the selection and classifying of candidates as either "hot", "working" or "rejected." You cannot select a group of candidates and "reject" them all at once. But I found a work-around. Source: http://tinyurl.com/sourcingcomment2

I would agree with you that Diver requires one to have advanced Boolean search skills. eGrabber has a combi-nation of ResumeFinder and resumeGrabber that is more friendly towards intermediate level users (each prod-uct can be used individually too). Source: http://tinyurl.com/sourcingcomment3

...there are quite a few (700) new sites that TalentHook spiders and finds resumes from, but, to me, and I think for most recruiters, the most useful and impressive one is LinkedIn. I spend a proportionally greater amount of time on the social networking platforms as a part of my work these days and being able to search and organize profiles from LinkedIn through this tool is a huge bonus. Source: http://tinyurl.com/sourcingcomment4

TalentHook now supports multiple recruiters on a network. I asked whether this were some sort of SaaS setup and they explained that it is not but a client-side install of the soft-ware with data sharing that syncs up when someone is connected to the company net-work. I'm still a little bit unclear as to how that would work out exactly if I were outside of my company's firewall and just connected to the net, but it is an intriguing way to ensure that if a recruiting team is using TalentHook as their ATS they will be able to see whether someone from the team has existing relationships and prevent downloading duplicate re-sumes. Avoiding duplicates is the bigger deal, considering the draconian protectiveness of the job board databases that count each downloaded resume. Source: http://tinyurl.com/sourcingcomment4

I have used both egrabber and broadlook tools. If you are a beginner-intermediate sourcer I would recommend egrabber (they also have a really good lead generation tool), if you're a intermediate-advanced sourcer I would recommend using the Broadlook suite. Source: http://tinyurl.com/sourcingcomment5

As a researcher and sourcer, I have tried a lot of tools as many of you have and it is unfor-tunate that there is no silver bullet out there, but eGrabber does a very good job of simpli-fying the boolean process and takes the hard work out of developing search strings. It can net strong results when used properly. I also use the Broadlook tools and find they still re-quire a lot of messaging. Talent Hook is a good tool combined with an ATS. Source: http://tinyurl.com/sourcingcomment5

TWITTER QUOTES @BostonRecruiter ditto on that. It's just been easier and more efficient using google to

source into LI and egrabber to extract #talentnet @braingain eGrabber LeadResearcher is a fantastic product. Just had a demo. @researchgoddess Just demo-ed some of eGrabber's products - a-a-a-a-a-mazing!!!! @stevesill Reading up on "eGrabber". It requires IE. Hmmm not a good sign. @researchgoddess WOW, hey sourcers if u haven't looked at @ReferYes I suggest u do.

They've added an email search & it's pretty SWEET: RT @theredrecruiter: Hey guys/gals... great tool for sourcing! Check it out! #recruiting #hr

http://bit.ly/zkeo8 (referyes) @petergold99 TalentSeekr Demo - great video but typical volume related stats - what

about hires? http://bit.ly/72bN3Z @cisco_mobile Google, Dell, IBM and Cisco Select Talentseekr Platform http://

tinyurl.com/yb4wr6f @chrisstanchak Really impressed by this video by TalentSeekr - great concept! http://

bit.ly/MBCzX

@peopleshark Sharks! Welcome @csilver2 (Craig Silverman) VIPE, Infogist, SendOuts, are a few recruiting tools he can't live without

@researchgoddess Loving how TalentSpring tells u in BIG BEAUTIFUL NUMBERS how many years' experience a prospect has... TalentSpring, u need 2 get on Twitter

@peopleshark Sharks - have you checked @BryanStarbuck 's recruiting engine www.talentspring.com? He hired PhDs to develop algorithms for recruiters.

@kmerritt Seriously, check out www.talentspring.com. Semantic search for resumes solves the recruiting problem of sifting through too many bad ones

@jasongorham I just tried talentspring semantic search and not impressed. QUOTES FROM PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS I don't like semantic search because I've been doing this long enough that I can build a

search string better than any machine, I can adapt my strings on the fly. However, seman-tic search is good for newbies who don't know any better (and might not want to learn.)

TalentSpring should have 2 versions: One with training wheels and one that is advanced so I can do my own search. Since its one size fits all, not a fan.

(TalentSpring) should allow for multiple credentials and timed searches, but its still in its infancy. Give 'em time.

I like the concept, but I'm too lazy to make it work. (TalentSpring) Some of the sourcing tools spider 500+ sources, but is that really attractive when so many

of those sources do not get new data on a regular basis? If you do a daily search you only get a few resumes because say its an alumni site and it does not change that often. So what good is it to fish in a pool where new fish do not come along that often.

Infogist and Talenthook (certain versions) allow you to use multiple credentials, a lot of tools do not. This is good if you are sourcing for multiple clients and you want to offer the service of mining their paid accounts for them as well.

I want all (the resumes) I can get. If it’s a little or a lot, just give’em to me. That’s why I like tools like this.

It has taken me a while to make Infogist “sing.” Its not for new users because the layout may be confusing to them. Its makes perfect sense to me ‘though., but it took a while for me to “get it.”

I use these tools a lot but for me, its all about the ATS (and how well it imports data retrieved from these tools) because all that I find gets stuffed in there for later.

NOTE: There is nothing much there (today) but here is a forum dedicated to reviewing recruit-ing tools of all sorts. http://www.recruitingtools.com/browse.asp?cat=28

That's a lot of data Jim, can you summarize? Sure, I will do it with bullet points: I feel that sourcing tools are a must! Use them to suck in all they can, then export your data into your ATS.

For some unknown reason, Recruiters prefer to live on job boards rather than mine their own ATS. I think the sourcing/recruiting process should revolve around the ATS in practice and not just theory. I looked at 7 products and jotted down my thoughts as I looked them over. I thought ReferYes was made for newbies. I thought it had a nice interface and was very intuitive, but did not give as many results as other products. I liked their email search capabili-ties. My biggest peeve was that I could not add my own customized search strings. Be that as it may, I think ReferYes has promise and I am curious as to how it will evolve over the years. I thought eGrabber's Lead Researcher tool was great. I thought it had a lot of useful fea-tures, but felt that its greatest value was the fact that I could source leads from Linkedin, then use Lead Researcher to find their contact information. A HUGE cost savings when you consider that Linkedin charges $5.00 USD to contact someone through their system. (See Linkedin' Business Plus Plan) I thought InfoGist was still a very useful tool. I was wowed by the fact that I could use their system to search not only resumes retrieved from the web and on my desktop, but also my ATS and web-based email as well. Some users however, have a problem with its interface and think its complicated to use. I liked a lot of things about TalentDrive’s TalentFilter, the least of which is that they had an API for their system allowing other companies to private label their services. I was also sur-prised that their "concept score" mechanism used to search the resumes in their database did not rely solely on keyword frequency, but was instead based on one million actual cases of matching resumes with jobs. Impressive. I thought TalentSeekr was an amazing product and a gamechanger for the industry. I thought TalentSpring was intriguing and could go a looooong way towards helping a com-pany find qualified candidates that would normally be overlooked by recruiters. However, I was concerned that a company would need a cultural shift in how recruiters typically work before it would be able to get the respect I think it deserves. I thought TalentHook was an overall good product fit for newbies and intermediate users. If OFCCP is a major concern for you, this is a product you have to look at. I was wowed by how fast I could create a detailed and customized report on my workflow. (And speaking of work-flow, managing candidates was pretty easy as well.) I also had love for how their product allowed me to sync with other recruiters so that we do not trip over the same candidates.

So , have you seen it all Jim? The short answer of course, is no. After looking at these tools, I saw several similarities and differences. I also saw things that were not included in these tools that I think would make an awesome addition in later versions. For what its worth, I will share them now. Create a semantic feature for keyword based tools.! What do I mean by that? Well, of course, it would (probably) not be as robust as TalentSpring, but I have a humble suggestion.. Let's say that I want to find a programmer. I would like it if I could input a list of terms that I think are synonymous with programmer, say... "software engineer" or "software

developer" OR... any number of other job titles that essentially mean the same thing. I would then do a search on "programmer" with C++ and Java, but because the term “programmer” has extra keywords attached to it, the tool automatically performs the following searches:

Programmer C++ java “Software Engineer” C++ Java “Software Developer “ C++ Java

Make sense? (I hope so.) If this could be done with companies sharing the same NAICS code, that would be swell too. I also would like to see a Diversity component that will allow me to search certain chan-

nels like Historically Black Colleges and Universities, associations that cater to diverse demographics (i.e. Grace Hoppers) and Fraternities and Sororities.. You know, actually, I can do this already with eGrabber’s products because I can customize my search strings.

However, I would like to take it a bit further by integrating Image Search with popular baby names. For examples, what will you get when you search for the term CTO and Kumar in an image search? Yup! CTOs whose name is Kumar (and possibly of Indian descent). I demon-strated how to do this in on e of my classic “The Recruiters Lounge” videos. To see for your self, go to: http://tinyurl.com/diversitysourcing

Add additional filetypes to your back end searches. PDF and Word documents are cool, but with the exception of ReferYes; everyone seems to be sleeping on resumes with PHP extensions. For example: http://tinyurl.com/resumefiletypes

Uh oh, I feel myself revving up for another rant and you have suffered enough. (Haven't you?)

Well, if you are reading this, you are either a glutton for punishment or genuinely interested in what I wrote. Either way, I appreciate your being here and welcome your feedback on my thoughts. E’ ya’ later… Jim Stroud The Searchologist www.thesearchologist.com p: (404) 939-5752 e: jimstroud@jimstroud.com

www.TheSearchologist.com

Lead generation strategies for Recruiters.