I have been looking at ways to increase the number of subscriptions to my YouTube Channel. Strangely YouTube does not make it that easy to find a link that can be published on web sites to encourage people to subscribe, however with a little bit of research I’ve found this
My next free webinar is today, Thursday the 4th Oct. This 30 minute session will look at a wide range of recruiters techniques to find exclusive vacancies, build your business and make more placements. This webinar is aimed at recruiters, recruitment managers and recruitment company owners.
I’m streaming this webinar right here on my blog page. This means that there is no need to register, simply refresh this page at one of the times below and you’ll see a live video stream of the webinar.
Throughout the webinar I’ll be following my Twitter stream (@1ntelligence) so I’d encourage you to tweet about the webinar ask questions, make comments and I’ll do my best to pick up on all the points raised. Please mention @1ntelligence in your tweets so all can share in the conversation.
If you are having any difficulty seeing the webinar on this page it is also being streamed live on my YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/Recruitmentmanager You are welcome to see it there. If you subscribe to the channel you will be notified for all new videos I post. To subscribe Click Here.
Please click the Like button on the video player.
I’m running the same webinar three times during the day at the following times.
Time Zone
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Australia
6:00pm
9:00pm
South Africa
10:00am
1:00pm
5:00pm
UK and Ireland
9:00am
12:00pm
4:00pm
USA East Coast EDT
7:00am
11:00am
USA West Coast PDT
8:00am
If you would like me to email you about future webinars or give any feedback, please use the form below.
If you would like to embed this webinar into your own web site the embed link is:
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/hEq1M7VCbww" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Last weeks webinar was all about how Recruiters can use LinkedIn to be found by and find candidates. I have spoken at length many times before about searching with LinkedIn so for this webinar I decided to look at some of the alternative ways of navigating around LinkedIn. I also took some time to talk about my own work at Intelligence Recruitment Software and showed some to the ways Intelligence can be used to get more from LinkedIn.
Being Found:
Given that the recruitment industry spends a great deal of time searching LinkedIn it very often does not occur to us that by equal measure peoples profiles are being found. It seems sensible therefore to set an objective of being found is just as important as finding people.
The LinkedIn search is unusual in comparison to a search engine in that it seems to give priority to the number of times a keyword appears on a persons profile. Searching for the keyword Recruiter gives nearly 500,000 results. The first result on my list gives a profile that features the word recruiter over 1000 times. By simply using the keyword you want to be found for repeatedly you will put yourself towards the top of the search results. Search LinkedIn for the phrase “Recruitment Software” and I hope that my profile will be on the first page of your results.
LinkedIn actually creates two profiles for each account. One is the profile that you can access by logging into and searching through LinkedIn. The other is a public profile that can be seen by anyone and is indexed by search engines. It is important that this profile is also optimized and contains the information you want to have there. Given that LinkedIn often hides contact details if seems sensible to ensure that contact details are contained in several different sections of the profile.
The LinkedIn public profile allow you to create a vanity URL. This means that you can create your own URL and share this on emails and your own web site. LinkedIn even gives you the HTML code to create a button to link to you profile such as this.
Assuming that you have optimized your profile, how do you tell if it has been successful? http://www.linkedin.com/wvmx/profile will give you information about the number of times your page is looked at and appears in searches.
While looking at this page it is useful to consider how you appear when you are looking at other peoples profiles. Looking at LinkedIn settings https://www.linkedin.com/settings gives you the option to Select what others see when you’ve viewed their profile. I’d recommend that this is set to Name and Headline and in this way there is a reasonable chance that some of those profiles you are looking at will also visit your profile page.
Finding People:
I have spoken before about the search and advanced search features on LinkedIn so I though I would consider some of the other ways in which you may be able to discover useful profiles. Once you find one profile that looks close to the type of profile you are interested in, this can be used as a starting point to find many more profiles.
I have a range of LinkedIn URLs that can be modified to search based on this initial profile. To use them you will need to know the LinkedIn ID for the profile you wisk to start from. To get an ID you can simply look at the URL in the full LinkedIn profile and it will be there. For example my LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3869500 and so my ID is 3869500
Similar profiles:
Thus used to be a feature that LinkedIn charged for however they now provide this fro free on all searches, Run a search and below each name will be a link saying Similar. The URL to find profiles similar to mine is
http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?viewType=sim&sId=3869500 By changing the ID you can change this for any LinkedIn profile.
Again in the Linkedin Settings you can choose to allow anyone see your connections. Should you have a first of second degree connection that chooses to open their connections then by clicking on the number of connections shown on their profile brings you to this page
http://www.linkedin.com/profile/connections?id=3869500 (again replace the ID)
A friend of mine, Balazs Paroczay (@thebalazs, http://thebalazs.wordpress.com/) recently wrote a blog about another way to search connections of 1st or 2nd degree connections, Try this URL
Again I have used my own ID even though I have not opened up my connections for other to view. However there is actually a very good reason for me to have done this as I find one of the most useful applications of this URL to be able to search my own connections. By using this method I have a different set of criteria that from the connections page. Interestingly it also appears to be giving different results even for quite basic searches. It would appear that one of these searches has a few bugs and so for this reason having several ways to achieve similar things seems particularly useful.
If you find these techniques useful please let me know. I am currently planing my next webinar and am grateful for all feedback. Please connect with me on LinkedIn and share this blog to colleagues and friends on Twitter, Facebook and any other channel.
If you would like me to email you about future webinars or give any feedback, please use the form below.
I promote my webinars by word of mouth so I’d be very grateful if you can share this on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and any other channel you may use.
Today I’m running a free webinar on Advanced LinkedIn Techniques for Recruiters. I’ll be talking about the very many things that can be done with LinkedIn to find candidates, have them find you, build networks, and many other techniques to get the most from LinkedIn. I’ll be focusing on some of the lesser used tools available from LinkedIn and so I hope there will be new ideas for even the most experienced LinkedIn user.
I’m streaming this webinar right here on my blog page. This means that there is no need to register, simply refresh this page at one of the times below and you’ll see a live video stream of the webinar. Throughout the webinar I’ll be following my Twitter stream (@1ntelligence) so I’d encourage you to tweet about the webinar ask questions, make comments and I’ll do my best to pick up on all the points raised. Please mention @1ntelligence in your tweets so all can share in the conversation.
If you are having any difficulty seeing the webinar on this page it is also being streamed live on my YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/Recruitmentmanager You are welcome to see it there. If you subscribe to the channel you will be notified for all new videos I post.
Please click the Like button on the video player.
I’m running the same webinar three times during the day at the following times.
Time Zone
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Australia
6:00pm
9:00pm
South Africa
10:00am
1:00pm
5:00pm
UK and Ireland
9:00am
12:00pm
4:00pm
USA East Coast EDT
11:00am
USA West Coast PDT
8:00am
If you would like me to email you about future webinars or give any feedback, please use the form below.
I promote my webinars by word of mouth so I’d be very grateful if you can share this on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and any other channel you may use.
Shane
Please connect with me on LinkedIn and if you like what I do I’d be delighted to receive a recommendation.
My Last webinar on Sourcing for Recruiters proved massively popular and so I have included a recording of one of the sessions below. I wanted to continue from my previous webinars focusing on Google Operators and looking in detail at how different search engines operate and can give different results. I talk about Bing and some of the cool ways of using it to find very specific web pages. I also look at LinkedIn and see how it can be used in different ways to find useful candidates.
I will be running my next webinar in August so if you’d like me to email you details of this please subscribe to my mailing list of connect with me on LinkedIn.
I run the webinars for free and share what I know through word of mouth. If you find this material useful I would be very grateful if you can share it with others. Please email anyone you think will be interested in this and use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin so share it. Please let me know what you thin, I’m very happy to receive connections and recommendations through LinkedIn.
Shane
Please explore the rest of this site to see my other webinars, blogs and a whole range of material on Recruitment Software, especially Intelligence which is the recruitment software database that I create.
There has been much talk about Cloud computing or SAAS recruitment software and the massive benefits for a recruitment agency to move to the Cloud. I find this quite amazing for two reasons, firstly most people I speak to aren’t really sure what this means and secondly the whole argument seems to have absolutely nothing to do with finding candidates, making placements or anything else to do with recruitment.
For the life of me I can not see what all the fuss is about. I have, on several occasions, seen intelligence people talk about the Cloud, and while they talk they look up to the sky as if, somehow, the computer they are talking about resides in the heavens in some mystical place deserving of its own religion.
According to Wikipedia, ‘Cloud computing is the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a heterogeneous community of end-recipients.’ For most people I suspect that this definition does not help. My definition is that you are using the cloud any time you happen to be using a computer that is not in the same building as you are. What that means in practise, is any time you use the internet, Skype or any other service that connects to some other computer. So if Cloud computing is simply using the internet, why then are people getting excited about the Cloud now when it simply appears to be a new name for something that has been with us for a while?
I write software for recruitment agencies. Writing recruitment software is not easy and I spend a great deal of my time considering how the recruitment process can be improved and then seeing if technology can in some way be used to achieve this. Notice how my starting point is always the recruitment process and not the technology. Strangely, I believe that recruitment agencies also put the recruitment process first. Or at least they put it first when they are recruiting but not necessarily first when they are looking to buy recruitment software. When looking to buy software there are so many other things to consider that often the recruitment process gets pushed to one side.
Using recruitment software and buying recruitment software seem to be two disconnected activities. As a Recruitment Software sales person I know the features customers talk about in the sales presentation are never the features they talk about in the first training session. The flashy cool tools disappear and the more mundane and more important become the top priority. As the developer of both the cool and mundane I hope that on both occasions we exceed expectations however I often feel that even then the main prize is being missed. My objective is nothing to do with software at all. I achieve my true goal when the software fades into the background and becomes the backbone of a better more effective recruitment process that is fundamentally different to what went before. Ultimately the technology is only ever there to facilitate the process and it’s that process that brings success to the recruiter.
When recruiters talk about Cloud computing I just get the sense that they’ve missed the point. Let the techies talk about the Cloud, the recruiters need to focus on the more complex task of inventing better ways to recruit.
Shane McCusker
Former Recruiter and MD of Intelligence Recruitment Software
ps. For the record, Intelligence Software can be operated as either Cloud or non Cloud but I’m hopeful you wont care about that.
I’m running an experiment to see just how fast Google can index my Recruitment blog. Watch my video to see what happens.
This video shows that it really is only a few seconds from creating a new post until Google can find it. This has big implications for a recruiter when posting to a recruitment site. Firstly, Google loves original content so re write all your job descriptions don’t cut and paste then from some other internet source. Secondly, make sure that your own web site is the fist place that original content is published. Do not post first onto a Job board because then the Job Board will get the benefit of what you have written.
I regularly run free recruitment software and technology webinars and yesterdays, on Advanced Sourcing, proved more popular than most. This is a recording followed by my notes on what happened.
I wanted to convey the shear scale of the subject of recruitment sourcing while also focus on some useful techniques that can give immediate benefit. It’s really mind blowing the number of sources of information available to recruiters. Their own database, Job boards, Social media sites, every other internet site, the dark web and all those other places that aren’t even in the internet.
As a developer of recruitment software I may be a little bias but I do firmly believe that the most important of all of these is a recruiters own information management system. It should have the best quality of data, the people in it are the easiest to contact and happiest to speak to you and it should provide the very best search tools. If it doesn’t then you are doing something wrong and that is a problem that needs fixed long before you start to think about clever Boolean strings to try out on Google. Glen Cathy, the Boolean Black Belt, wrote a great blog post about this topic called ‘Is your AST a black hole or a diamond mine’.
Simple Boolean Search
My first demonstration keeps things as simple as possible. I simply typed ‘Accountant Belfast CV’ into Google to see what would come up. No surprise – I got a lot of results. This is the much overlooked problem of search, the difficulty is not finding useful stuff, the difficulty is getting rid of the other stuff that you just don’t want.
I’m running the risk of moving from an advanced webinar to a basic one but there are a few fundamentals to Boolean search that it is always worth focusing on.
Google assumes the word AND between each of your words so my original search could have been written
Accountant AND Belfast AND CV
Strangely if you try this, Google does give slightly different results, I have no idea why this is.
It may be obvious, although easily forgotten, but there are very many alternatives to each of these key words so I can improve my search using the OR operator.
(Accountant OR Accountancy OR Accountants OR ACCA OR CIMA) (Belfast OR “Northern Ireland”) (CV OR Resume OR Vitae OR Vitea)
Most important in this phrase are the brackets. If you are using the OR operator you will almost certainly need brackets. The ANDs are assumed by Google to be between each set of brackets.
Notice my deliberate spelling mistake, I make this mistake all the time so there is a good chance there are accountants out there who may do the same. Also notice the “ characters around Northern Ireland, this tells Google I want that exact phrase and not simply the words Northern and Ireland
I could at this stage use the ~ character in front of any of my search terms to tell Google to include any other words it thinks are similar or related.
This type of search is designed to get as many results as possible. Generally it works best to start as wide as possible and then start to reduce the list down.
First off, a lot of the results were job adds. To remove some of these I can add -job –jobs –recruitment
into my search string and immediately I see an improvement.
If I really want to cut down the results I can be very focused and use the intitle: Google operator to just look for web pages where the page title rather than the body text refers to a CV.
(intitle:CV OR intitle:Resume OR intitle:Vitae OR intitle:Vitea)
Images
One of my favourite ways to find people is to switch to the image search on Google. There is a refinement on the search to only find faces but often this is not necessary. I first started looking at this for the South African recruitment market. Recruiters there are in the unusual position of having to select candidate by race early on in the process and photographs are a good way to do this. That said, photographs are a great way to find sites that reference real people, clicking on the image or even hovering over this image is often enough to tell if there is something worth further investigation.
X-Ray Searches
I’ve often spoken about using the site: operator in conjunction with LinkedIn searches. In the webinar I wanted to show how this operator can be used for any site and give really interesting results. I chose to show a Google Plus search which in hindsight was not that adventurous but at least if gave some instant results.
site:plus.google.com Accountant Belfast
Using the site: operator is really very powerful and can be used on any web site. I’ve often used it on job boards as very many of them have profile pages for each of their clients and this gives me quite in interesting prospect list.
Used in conjunction with the inurl: operator it is very effective at returning a very clean set of results.
inurl: tells Google to return only pages with certain text in the URL of the web site. Putting a – sign in front of it asks Google to give you everything other that that text. For my initial search therefore I can remove career pages by adding
-inurl:career –inurl:careers
For users of Bing, the other main search engine. I had long though that there was not an equivalent to the inurl: operator, however I was recently at Geoff Webbs Radical Planet event in Toronto and there Johnny Campbell of Social Talent, told me about the operator instreamset:(url): which seems to work really well.
File Type Searches
Perhaps of all my webinar examples it was the use of the filetype: operator that received the most reaction. It really is quite amazing what some people put on the internet and when you look for excel spreadsheets in particular there is almost a sense of am I rally supposed to be seeing this.
I wanted to find lists of people and tried this search filetype:xls email (surname OR “last name” OR Name) (“job title” OR position)
Adding in a few keywords to focus my search and I can pull down thousands of names and contact details. Is it any wonder there is so much spam in the world.
Of course this is only the most basic use of the filetype: operator it can be used for any type of file. Other common file types include
(filetype:xls OR filetype:xlsx) for MS Excel (filetype:xls OR filetype:xlsx) for MS Word (filetype:jpeg OR filetype:gif OR filetype:tif) for images (filetype:mp3 OR filetype:raw OR filetype:m4p) for music (these techniques don’t have to be used just for recruitment)
Martin Lee, of the LinkedIn Group Cool (free) tools for recruiting, suggested I look at filetype:com This seems to return web pages within web pages so there really is no limit to the uses of this type of search. Martin is an expert sourcer and an inspiration to me in learning sourcing techniques. I have not been able to find any practical application for this particular search but I have no doubt that Martin has.
Google Custom Search
Finally I wanted to talk about something that really is for the advanced sourcer. Not that Customer Searches are difficult to use but just that they are not commonly used. This is a pity as it is a really good way to share clever searches and make complex searching very easy and very repeatable. I used a Google Custom Search when I was investigating the problem of finding new vacancies before everyone else. I first created a search to give just Linkedin profiles and then added a refinement to find just the profiles of people who had just changed jobs. My theory being that their previous employer is now in need of a replacement employee. In this way I can very quickly run quite a complex search but I can also allow anyone else to use this complex search without them needing to know the detail of the Boolean search string I am using.
For a demonstration of how easy it is to create a customer search please watch the video of the webinar. If you’d like to try my LinkedIn/Vacancy search is on my web site http://www.intel-sw.com/search
Google Custom Search can be a very simple tool however it provides a platform to do really clever things.
If you like this blog or any of my videos I would be very pleased if you share this with your community. Please share on Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pintrest and anywhere else you can find. Please connect with me on Linkedin, follow be on Twitter and subscribe to my YouTube Channel. I run regular webinars so if you’d like me to notify you of the next one by email, please let me know.
I earn my living developing recruitment software systems for recruiters. If you feel that sourcing techniques give you an edge on your competitors then you are very likely to feel my software system will also give you a very significant advantage. If you’d like to learn more about Intelligence then please call me at any time and I’ll be delighted to talk.
My next free webinar in on Thursday July 19th 2012. If you would like me to email details of this and future webinars you are welcome to subscribe to my mailing list below.
On Thursday the 21st June I’m running a free 30 minute webinar talking about some of the clever internet sourcing techniques that are available to recruiters. I’ll be demonstrating some of the tools and techniques that are used by professional sourcers to find very valuable recruitment information. This webinar is for any recruiter who wants to learn more about sourcing and get an understanding of some of the techniques to use and sources of more information.
My webinars are becoming quite popular so I am running the same webinar three times on Thursday the 21st of June. Places are limited so please select the time slot you’d like and register below. I have an international audience so please check the time zone that is relevant to you.
This week Shane McCusker is talking about business information, how to get it and what to do with it that will really make a difference to your recruitment business. Businesses succeed when there is visibility and clarity about what is going on inside the business and outside in the market place. Very few recruiters however have systems that can clearly and automatically give them this critical information. Shane will be taking about the critical information to look at and how to quickly make decisions for the benefit of your business.
