CyberSleuthing!

Jason Elias demonstrates his "Top 10 Way Staffing Firms can Increase Billings in a Down Economy"

Shally Steckerl — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:44:00 -0500

Staffing firms can increase their billings with Jason Elias creative ideas. Jason runs a successfull niche search firm in Australia, where the economy is getting hit as hard (or harder?) than ours.

Jason is Australia's representative to the global NPA organization. Not only is he an experienced attorney, and a well established recruiter, but also has an easy presentation style making it a pleasure to watch him present.

He sent us this summary of the top ten ways he's increase is revenues for his own business in the midst of the worst recession we've faced in 30 years:

Top 10 Ways to Generate More Recruiting Business in a Down Economy

1. MARKET EXPERT
Be perceived as the expert in your niche - find out simple ways to be raise your profile as an expert in your space not merely a recruiter. Be the "go-to" guy for your area of specialty.

2. PLAY THE GAME
Wouldn't it be great if you knew in advance which candidates will result in a placement and which one will just make up the 90% of those you spend time on but cannot place? Recruitment is a 100/zero-sum game, understand the rules and use them to your advantage by maximizing value of your time and leveraging your efforts.

3. REINFORCE YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION
More than any time in recent history, recruiters need to demonstrate their value. Not only are you competing against other agencies but many companies are convinced they can do a better job themselves. Combat this perception by tactics designed to reinforce your value proposition.

4. EXAMINE ALTERNATE PRICING
Just because most recruiters charge as a percentage of salary does not mean it is the best way. Pricing is a great way to differentiate your offering. This does not necessarily mean discounting just offering some interesting alternatives including unbundled services. Hear how cancellation fees will make sure you get paid for your time, every time!

5. OFFER CLIENTS TO UPGRADE THEIR TALENT
Learn how to get placements even with so-called hiring freezes, through encouraging clients to outmaneuver their competitors to upgrade their talent pool in the aftermath of the "war for talent".

6. HOW BEER CAN DELIVER YOU EXTRA SALES
Learn how to use the "pint glass" to monitor your pipeline and learn how to pick up new business using a variety of dynamic techniques.

7. MAINTAIN A HIGH PROFILE
Be front of mind when a client has a requisition to outsource. Learn some simple ways to improve your profile and exposure.

8. IF YOU CALL CLIENTS JUST TO "TOUCH BASE" - YOU WILL STRIKE OUT
Differentiate yourself from cold calling recruiters. Offer something to your clients, don't just ask them for requisitions.

9. RE-EVALUATE YOUR METHODOLOGY AND SYSTEMS
When the recovery arrives, we will be too busy to examine the way we do things. Now is a great time to look at improving systems and efficiencies. It is also a great time to deal with vendors who are also feeling the economic downturn.

10. HALF A LOAF IS BETTER THAN NONE
Learn how splitting with other recruiters can provide increased fees, more client loyalty, a marketing advantage and market intelligence you cannot find anywhere else.

Jason will be revealing the details on each of these tips and a few more on Wed. night at 8pm Eastern (that's Thursday, 27 Aug. @ 10am in Australia). Join him for only $99 and he promises that if you implement even one of his tips you'r more than make up for the admission price.

Cheers, Shally
LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Facebook

P.S. Follow me on Twitter

Why is Semantic Search Important to Recruiters?

Shally Steckerl — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:41:23 -0500

There is just too much confusion about so-called “Boolean search” so I’d like to clarify a few basic things:

The Booleans are simply: AND OR NOT. There, now you know Boolean search.
When recruiters talk about “Boolean search” what they are really talking about is creating search strings using sometimes advanced commands or complex search syntax to query specific fields inside of databases.
Well, that’s the end of my list.

Search syntax has been around since the beginning of databases. Each “database” (lumping in Monster, Goolge, LinkedIn and Facebook under that term) has its own set of field search commands. When searching a database what we search are “fields” like for example “Company Name” or “Email Address” and so on.

You use fields to search your Outlook when you ask for people with a specific name or when you query by “job title” on Monster or LinkedIn. The three “big search engines” (soon to be two if you read the rumors about Yahoo using Bing for search) also use fields, and they share some in common such as intitle, inurl, site, and filetype. That’s what recruiters and sourcers often misconstrue as “Boolean search.” In fact, the only Booleans used are the assumed AND between every search term, the occasional OR as with (intitle:resume OR inurl:resume), and the rare use of the NOT or AND NOT when applying negative search terms such as -jobs or -submit.

Search can be as simple or complex as we want it to be, but at the end of the day we are limited only to words in the fields of a database. That is, until the promise of Semantic Search.

The Problem With Search Engines Today

Most people agree that the biggest problem with online recruiting today is too much available information. Without a good search engine, you simply get lost in all the information. Unfortunately, today’s search engines are still inefficient, delivering mismatched information and requiring complex search string knowledge to use effectively. In an ideal world a search engine would function like a human, understanding the underlying meaning of the user’s search and then matching the search results accordingly. Many expert communities talk about Semantic Search applications being the most likely technology to deliver this kind of result, but few take the time to explain it in plain language. This whitepaper explains Semantic Search for candidate sourcing.

Click here to download my new free white paper on Semantic Search for Recruiters!

Major search engines constantly experiment with ways to simplify search, moving away from complex Boolean queries and the use of advanced field search syntax, in an effort to assist users in quickly finding what they seek. These efforts only begin to approach true semantic search capabilities and today are limited to providing only a basic understanding of associations and concepts related to a search. In contrast, Semantic Search technologies look for the concept that is being searched for rather than specific keyword(s)’s or synonym(s)’s occurrence in a document. The application of semantic technology shifts search from browsing for relevant documents to discovering relationships between content and delivering actionable information with insights. In short, Semantic Search applies grammatical analysis, logical interpretation, and linguistic morphology in the identification of concepts from unstructured data. This is different from the concept of a Semantic Web, which consists of highly structured data such as XML.

What Is Semantic Search?

Semantics is defined as the field of study that focuses on meaning. Meaning, that is, as it is inherent in symbols, words, phrases, sentences and larger blocks of text. In simple terms, a perfect semantic search engine would instantly and automatically take into consideration the meaning behind your question or “search string.” For example, it could disambiguate results that lead to people's profiles from, say, the text in employment advertising: it would serve up only the profiles to recruiters and the employment ads to job seekers. Perhaps an even simpler example would be to tell the difference between Apple the fruit, Apple the company (or products), and Apple the record studio. Search for just Apple in Google and most of the top results will be about the company, not the other two, because most Google users search and click on results about Apple Inc. (and/or its products). This is how antiquated statistically-based, popularity-driven search devices like Google’s “page rank” work. This is not semantic search at all. Popular pages are not necessarily credible, nor are credible sources always incredibly popular.

One of the largest problems with implementing Semantic Search has been that it is difficult for the computer to know who you are (or in the example above, if you are a job seeker or a recruiter) unless the search engine can learn from your behavior and your previous selections, or you are able to manually indicate a category for it to narrow down your results into categories of meaning. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live have been applying technology in an attempt to learn individual search behavior by looking at what people click and where they are located (based on their IP address). Again, however, this only approximates meaning, but does not truly understand it. Another way so-called Semantic Search engines have tried to solve this problem is to ask the user to tag, catalog, sort and otherwise try to “train” the search engine, which is far too time-consuming for the average person.

The Semantic Search technology which exists today can be categorized into three main approaches:

Lexicon and Ontological Based Search
Statistical Analysis and/or Pattern Matching Search
Contextual, Vertical and Faceted Search

Read my white paper to find out which search engines fit into the above categories and how each of those categories affects how you conduct your research.

Read my white paper to find out which search engines fit into he above categories and how each of those affects how you conduct your research.

So why is this important to recruiters?

Well, if a computer knows what you mean right away, without having to learn from you or be trained by you, it would give you only relevant results and not show you all that other junk you have to manually sift through in today’s search engines. We’re getting there, but we’re not close enough yet.

The power of Semantic Search becomes clear when you imagine trying to fill a position for a Programmer working on mobile phone games, using the OpenGL programming language. The likelihood of a recruiter knowing which keywords to search with to find all likely candidates is extremely unlikely. However, with Semantic Search, it is unnecessary for the recruiter to know which keywords to search on, because the search engine automatically finds the words needed, making the recruiter a subject area expert on every search s/he does.

Download the free white paper and arrive at your own conclusions about how this affects our future. I'd love to "hear" your thoughts and opinions here on this blog!

Cheers, Shally
LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Facebook

P.S. Follow me on Twitter

Act While Others Wait – the Arbita Recruitment Genome Report

Shally Steckerl — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:23:26 -0500

In May 2009, Arbita revealed the first survey results from the Recruitment Genome Report. The purpose of this multi-year research project is to define the most effective recruitment practices from among the thousands available.

Below are my thoughts about the results, but you can download the full 11-page report for yourself here: http://www.arbita.net/Offer/Recruitment-Genome-Report-Download.html

Why is this important to staffing leaders?

There are so many tools and services in our industry, each vying for your attention and promising to be the only solution you need. However, many of them are mostly "bells and whistles", providing little value to your organization's employment brand or recruitment effectiveness. Don't be alarmed - such is the case among vendors in every industry, not just in recruitment. Our industry has long needed a concerted, vendor neutral, consensus-based approach to answer the question of what works and what is just hype.

Our job as recruiters has always been incongruous. We must be masters of basic human psychology, well-versed in business rules and requirements, savvy in the use of tools and technology, and cognizant of the nuances of the industry and its unique business "ecosystem." All the while, we receive little thanks from the customers we advocate, both our hiring managers with urgent job openings they have a hard time filling, and our candidates who depend on us to champion their cause and provide a good match. Both appreciate us only when we are most desperately needed, and otherwise tend to categorically dismiss us regardless of how often we prove our value.

It doesn't help that the recruitment industry changes so dramatically from day to day. Modern recruiters must truly be project managers. No individual could learn how to handle the multitude of specialties found in all aspects of recruiting on their own in one lifetime. This is why the answer to "what works" must come from a community, not from one single person's biased voice, no matter how experienced or seasoned a leader s/he may be.

The staffing leader's world is extremely complex and not getting easier

Staffing leaders in both corporate and agency roles must contend with the latest and greatest employment branding challenges, online social and professional networks, job boards and resume databases, employment advertising destinations, recruiting exchanges, referral services, leads databases, resume capture and processing technologies, and communication platforms; not to mention contend with organizational requirements around Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs) and possibly even Contact Relationship Management (CRM) Systems.

"Our service economy has given way to a knowledge economy. Our economic survival now depends on the exchange of knowledge, not the exchange of services. Knowledge comes from people, and people are at the heart of recruiting. Therefore, our jobs will be even more crucial to our organization's growth and progress in the years ahead. However, the recruiting industry has not yet dealt with that shift."

As a longitudinal study, Arbita's report is not yet complete but the first stage revealed to me a few surprises and confirmed some suspicions. Perhaps the most salient confirmation is that the recruitment industry, by and large, has not yet realized that our service economy has given way to a knowledge economy. Our economic survival now depends on the exchange of knowledge, not the exchange of services. Knowledge comes from people, and people are at the heart of recruiting. Therefore, our jobs will be even more crucial to our organization's growth and progress in the years ahead. However, the recruiting industry has not yet dealt with that shift.

Decreased Spending on Recruiter Development

Social media is bringing forward unprecedented change in how people network online. Networking is a critical component of career progression, and modern means for networking are evolving so fast that without learning from others, a recruiter could waste invaluable time just keeping up with the changes.

Social media is also disseminating what were closely-guarded secrets in recruiting and sourcing practices, thus making information freely and openly available. Information, however, is not knowledge. In fact, I would argue that what is available is merely data, not even information. The key to translating all that data into information and eventually knowledge is to determine meaning. Knowledge is what happens when we use our experience, and experimentation, to interpret information and make decisions on how to proceed. Expert advice in matters such as Social Media, SEO/SEM and Sourcing Skill Development is critical for survival, lest your recruiters waste too much time sifting through data, experimenting with dead ends, and re-inventing the wheel.

"An overwhelming majority of staffing leadership respondents indicated decreased spending on the development of their recruiters' skill set, on search marketing, and on developing a social media presence. This is disturbing to me because we are in the middle of a digital evolution."

Accomplished vendors, consultants and educators don't just make guesses or relate data they picked up empirically. Instead, they synthesize it, separate what works from what does not, and act as trusted advisors providing significant value through their experience encountering pitfalls as well as successes. Another reason I find this result disturbing is the fact that nearly all responding companies believe that use of the Internet is such a key recruitment strategy that they see the need to keep this skill set in-house, yet almost half of them felt their team is inadequately trained and are dissatisfied with their current sourcing capability.

Recruitment Goals Fail to be Strategic

This finding is already clear to me just in reviewing the survey results from questions around recruiter development. What it tells me is most staffing leaders responding to the survey highly value Internet recruiting, and half feel their sourcing skills are deficient yet they are being directed to spend the same or less on developing those skills among their recruiters. Clearly, this means recruitment goals are not being thought through at the strategic level.

It is a widely held belief that recruitment goals should be tied directly to strategic business objectives. Survey results find most respondents agree with that belief, and in addition 70% report being satisfied that their company's recruitment marketing strategy is driving the achievement of overall recruitment goals. However, being strategic about recruitment is not just something we do in marketing. Marketing is a critical component but it is only one of several which need to be executed with synchronicity and efficiency in order to achieve greatness in attracting the right talent at the right time.

Other components include solid team architecture, the ability to directly source a percentage of critical talent that will not respond to marketing, functioning analytics that clearly demonstrate ROI permitting more efficient spend, grassroots social media involvement, search engine optimization, career web sites providing a good user experience that fully integrates with the ATS and HRIS, and sustainability through a center of excellence that champions internal subject matter expertise. Anything short of an integrated strategy involving all these components remains tactical, no matter how excellently it is executed.

I didn't cover all the points in the survey. Other strategic components of a synergistic approach to staffing are detailed in the full report here:
http://www.arbita.net/Offer/Recruitment-Genome-Report-Download.html

AWOL Metrics

I was not surprised to find 38% of survey participants felt they have the right metrics to support their recruitment marketing decision, until I realized what that means in context with the previous finding. How could this exist while at the same time 70% of respondents are satisfied with their marketing strategy? To look at this another way, 62% of staffing leaders feel they have the wrong metrics, so how could 70% of them feel their marketing strategies are satisfactory? How could anything be proven satisfactory when it is not being adequately measured?

The reason is adequate recruitment marketing analytics are AWOL (absent without leave) for most staffing leaders. Even more disappointing is how few leaders expect to improve their metrics in the coming year. Why? Because however critical, measuring marketing strategy is both very challenging and time consuming without the right tools. One example of missing data is that more than half of the surveyed population utilizes direct marketing, yet that method is in no way reflected under their source of hire metrics. Also absent are detailed metrics around responses to search engine marketing campaigns, social networking activity or even results of organic search engine optimization. Via the survey we know smart companies are employing them, but when looking at their source of hire these methods are inadequately represented.

Blogs, SEO, SEM and Social Networks are Underutilized

Measurement is not the only gap, the other large gap is utilization. Only about 15% of respondents are utilizing blogs as a source of talent, yet blogs in all their shapes and sizes are among the largest sources of information online, larger than any one database. Only a quarter of the respondents have effective strategies for optimizing their organic presence in search engine query results, and fewer than that use search engine marketing to have a paid presence among those same results. Just shy of half the respondents have effective strategies to identify talent via social networks, and about the same percentage utilize search engines to identify online talent. It is clear to me that even if they get good at measuring from where their best hires come, employers have still a long way to go in tapping all the best sources of talent.

Job Boards Are Ineffectively Used

Traditional job boards are an area where I would have expected surveyed staffing leaders to have the most established, refined and perfected recruitment practices, yet I was stunned to find almost half were dissatisfied with their performance and less than 10% will spend more on job posting solutions this year. Is this because job boards are becoming less effective? No, it is because employers continue to approach job boards the same way they always have, while the Internet population has grown in both size and sophistication, and become more resourceful. People are seeking ways to connect, not just be "talked at" by an advertisement. Vertical search engines specializing in finding information in only one discipline, such as cooking recipes (allrecipes.com), movies (imdb.com) or jobs (simplyhired.com), are living proof that advertising works when it connects with the community by adding some value.

Employers shouldn't be surprised when response to their job board activity drops because they publish flat, un-engaging, untargeted and unimaginative content, without regard to their readers' interests. Improvements in those areas would increase results.

But job boards offer more than just advertising; they also have searchable databases full of interested job seeking prospects. It may seem a simple function of "enter keyword and find matching candidates" but that approach often misses talent hidden in plain sight. Though it ultimately means the same thing, employees often describe what they do using language different than what hiring managers use to describe their requirements. As a result resumes, blogs, social network profiles and other relevant content seldom contains the exact same language as in job descriptions, and good prospects go unnoticed.

Appropriate Technology

Through my tour of service in the Peace Corps, working in one of the most remote and inhospitable environments in the western hemisphere, the focus was always to utilize "appropriate technology." This term refers to utilization of technology that leverages local resources and is mindful of the population's cultural and social outlook. Rather than forcing the utilization of resource-draining technology just because it is available, staffing leaders would do well to learn from such a highly sustainable approach and utilize the simplest level of technology that effectively achieves their hiring goals.

Initial survey results clearly indicate that not every available solution is appropriate to every environment, and that inexpensive solutions are often ignored while costly ones are ineffectively utilized. Wisdom is in formulating an integrated strategy that maximizes resources you already have, and makes use of a mix of appropriate technology you haven't yet considered. My recommendation to staffing leaders is that they reach out to trusted external advisors who have their best interest in mind, and not just listen to vendors hawking their product or service as "the only solution you need." Now is the time to act, while others wait for things to get better, and when your dollars stretch much further than they do in the midst of hiring frenzies.

Are you curious about any of my conclusions? Would you like to challenge them or find different ones of your own? If so, you can get the full survey report here:

http://www.arbita.net/Offer/Recruitment-Genome-Report-Download.html

Cheers, Shally
LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter
P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

Why, and How, you can quickly find passive talent on Blogs

Shally Steckerl — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:43:49 -0500

Why are blogs still a very important part of our research repertoire?

When it comes to finding passive candidates, today's unemployment reports are a temporary blip in the talent wars. This Sunday's NY Times featured an interesting article about how hard it remains in certain industries and functions to find top talent and that will apply to every industry as the economy rebounds, the huge Boomer generation ages out of the workforce, and new industries requiring unique skills blossom. In-demand professionals rarely have resumes floating around.

So where can we easily find great talent, now or in the future? Blogs. One year ago, leading ad agency Universal McCann published a report that indicated 184 million blogs worldwide were created, with 346 million people collectively reading billions of blogposts globally. Last year, traffic on blogs totalled 77.7 million unique US visitors, vs. 41 million to Facebook and 75 million to MySpace, according to comScore MediaMetrix. All these numbers continue to rise, turbocharged by blog capability being built into the hundreds of millions of accounts on all the social networking sites.

Those online diaries aren't just personal, they're professional, because bloggers reveal what they do on their blogs. There is no demographic slant: Candidates and prospects of all ages, genders, races and professional interests write blogs, and their readers are linked via their comments. If you know how to search them efficiently, you can not only find experts in any topic area, but you can quickly find their colleagues and other experts they respect.

Not only that, you also get early news on hot products, companies and tools they recommend and/or are working on, plus industry news on companies and sectors in trouble. More than rumors, this is insider information because these are the people in the know. Staffing firms find this useful for new business lead generation as well. Talk about competitive intelligence for recruiting!

You don't even need to know how to blog to take full advantage of this.

If this is something you'd like to learn how to tap, register now for a jam-packed, 90-minute webinar dedicated to blog search that my fellow Master Cybersleuth, Glenn Gutmacher, and I are presenting next Wednesday, March 25 at 1pm EDT

Though intuitive once explained, these breakthrough search techniques are surprisingly little-known. Much of it we have innovated after repeated testing for best results. For example, run this on Google (substitute your target niche for medical device):

received|won.*.deal|contract "our team" "medical device" 2009 -"won't deal"

This just scratches the surface of the dozens of great searches and strategies you can do. Blog searching is the perfect environment to apply Natural Language search techniques that find your targets because they are talking to each other. In addition to that you can utilize dozens of blog-specific search engines dedicated to finding current and relevant content in your target areas, which in turn reveals even more passive talent.

Multimedia search tools can be a great source to find relevant audio and video podcasts. People drop the names of similarly-skilled colleages, product teams, or other insider information in these interviews thus providing you with even more hints to reveal your search targets.

Best of all, you can easily set up search engines RSS feeds, alerts, and other tools to deliver fresh results directly to you so you don't even have to manually perform the searches every day. How's THAT for free and easy?

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

Top 10 reasons why mobile recruiting is here to stay and some say if you don't hop on board you'll be left behind

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:27:25 -0500

I started thinking about this list after I wrote a blog post but what really got my juices going are the replies I received after sending out an email invitation to Michael Marlatt's upcoming webinar.

The responses were all over the place, from dramatically enthusiastic to insanely missinformed! What really amazed me though were the misconceptions and doubt that surfaced are out there about mobile recruiting. I had one particular gentleman reply to state "Oh this would never work in IT" and another lady commented that "response rates to mobile direct marketing are declining."

First of all, let me clarify that mobile recruiting is about finding and connecting with people who use mobile phone, not about recruiting from or through your mobile phone. You don't even have to have a web-enabled phone to recruit on the mobile web!

But I digress. I thought... what better way to evangelize how important mobile recruiting is than to borrow from some of Michael's initiative and write a top ten list with the hopes that it would dispell some of these myths:

1. Your prospects use the web on their mobile phones privately while waiting in line, going to lunch, taking a coffee break, where their employers can't watch them!

2. Mobile phones are portable, well-connected, relatively inexpensive computers providing the primary or sole Internet connection to a majority of the people across the world

3. You�??ll be left behind if you don�??t go mobile. PEW Internet states the mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.

4. By 2020 work and play will be seemles. Well-connected knowledge workers will eliminate the industrial-age boundaries between work and personal time

5. Nielsen Mobile reports that...

a. Text messaging (sending & receiving) is up 450%, in the past two years. In the USA 262 million subscribers send over 75 billion text messages a month

b. Mobile Internet extends audience reach of leading sites by average of 13% over PC traffic alone

c. 87 million U.S. mobile users subscribe to mobile Internet services, more than 1 in 10 (13.7%) actively uses mobile Internet each month

6. IT Facts says that there will likely be 100 million mobile VoIP (voice over IP) users by 2011.

7. Mobile more ubiquitous than the PC. GSM World and the CTIA confirm there are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions on the planet, vs. just 1 billion PC owners

a. 53% of US cell phone subscriber base (or 138 million people) use text messaging

b. If you are reading this on your mobile, so are your candidates! More than 76% of consumers aged 18-24 communicate via this medium.

c. The bag is open, the cats are everywhere! Mobile subscribers now represent 60% of the world's population and quickly growing

d. Today's teens text more than they talk. Those teens are tomorrow�??s interns and salespeople and managers and CEOs�?�

8. Highly relevant content snacks get passed around, this is viral marketing at its best!

a. The average response rate to a mobile call to action is 12%, versus 2% for traditional media

b. Open rates for messages are three times that of email (over 90% of text messages are read by the recipient)

c. Click through rates can be up to 25 times higher than email, and the average time to open a mobile marketing message is 30 minutes while email's average is 24 hours.

d. Most forms of advertising will decline in... but not Mobile! www.jackmyers.com reports traditional media will go down 15% in 2009 but mobile up 15% + another 30% by 2010

e. Mobile rich media advertising to near $2.8 Billion by 2012. Where there�??s money there�??s candidates!

9. 12% of US households have abandoned fixed landlines and moved to mobile phones only

10. Google is now reporting that it is seeing a rapid increase in mobile Internet search and usage

OK so I cheated. There are really 20 items on the list :)

I'd really like your reaction to these data points!

I over did it because I'd really like your reaction to these data points! I've also posed a question about these in several LinkedIn groups and I'll report back here under the comments sections with any juicy replies I get there as well as from my other blog post.

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

How to brand your HR and Recruiting department internally in your organization

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:25:49 -0500

This week we held a free webinar for HR and Staffing leaders to give them a few ideas on how to create, improve or promote their department's brand inside their organization.

Why is branding important to HR internally?

Because with all the restructuring and downsizing HR departments are facing, it is very important to increase your organizational visibility in order to grow your influence and help you stay in business.

To do that, your HR and Recruiting department should not only be well perceived throughout the entire organization, but also have the respect of senior management and not be seen as merely a cost center. Through internal branding and marketing you can ensure everyone knows of the strategic value you and your team have to offer, which could help you avoid budget and headcount cuts. Especially in a down economy, it's important for executives to know recruiting still has value.

Most HR and Staffing leaders have either taken marketing courses in college, or kept up to date on marketing techniques by reading about them, or have earned their departmental marketing know-how by graduating from the school of hard knocks. We at ACES thought that was not enough to ensure survival and achieve success in today�??s difficult environment so we reached out for help from Marketing and Branding Guru, Bret Starr, the Principal & Co-founder of Starr Tincup, an integrated marketing firm for business-to-business software and services companies in the HR space.

What was covered that you may not already know?

Together Bret and I developed a 90 minute course on how to establish and grow your brand by creating a value proposition and getting the word out using tools such as social media. We translated and assembled some strategic and practical advice from both Bret�??s expertise in B2B marketing and my own viral and guerilla marketing experiences into internal HR/recruiting-related marketing. Here are the top three key Takeaways:

1) Put your departmental value proposition on everything you currently use (like your email signature, your LinkedIn profile if you have one, your intranet page, etc)

2) Create a private group on any one of the locations we reviewed (like yammer, Linkedin, or ning) and invite your team and stakeholders to join it

3) Communicate frequently (weekly or bi-weekly) with the members of this group about your activities, achievements, or other information you can share

During the first half of the session Bret defines �??what is a brand,�?? but most importantly what a brand is not, and the difference between brand and branding. He then goes on to explain and who examples of how to create a value proposition which becomes the epicenter of your brand, and how to best market that brand and value proposition through the entire organization. Branding activities such as cohesive communication, exposure to as many eyeballs as possible, permission based list marketing, simplicity of offer, and advertising ideas are detailed.

After that I transition to discuss some ways you can gain public recognition externally and how that translates to increased internal exposure, brand credibility and trust. Chief among the guerilla techniques I cover is how to beef up your profile so it is not just more easily found but also attracts the right kind of people into your network. I�??ll give you a hint: part of the trick is to be clearly approachable, stay authentic, and be more than mono-dimensional.

I then discuss how to leverage LinkedIn as an internal marketing tool using your first degree connections, Answers, Groups, and Polls. Beyond LinkedIn I cover other ways you can build private online groups such as with Ning and Yammer, and how to utilize Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo and Unyk to strengthen your group and bolster your brand equity. Finally I dissect the use of blogs as a departmental marketing tool, particularly tying it with inbound automated RSS content.

Feedback from many of the thought leaders who attended this event was so encouraging that we decided to share the recorded presentation (full audio and video) with the whole world. After a brief registration you can view the recording here at no cost.

Please check it out then drop by here and let us know what you think!

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

LinkedIn now limits you to 30,000 direct connections

Shally Steckerl — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:13:34 -0500

Last week I reached 30,000 connections and found out that LinkedIn users are now limited to having no more than 30,000 first degree connections. I found this out because now when I try to accept an invitation I am told by the system that I cannot because I have exceeded the limit, and so I would have to remove connections in order to add them.

So for those of you that are approaching or would like to approach a network of that size, you may want to be far more careful in accepting invites from now on because once you reach that limit you will be unable to make any additional first degree connections even if you are the one receiving and not sending the invitation.

There are great points on both sides of the argument of having a high quality network versus a large connection quantity, but today I write about neither. I believe that individuals should have the freedom to utilize their profile however they see best fit their online networking strategy. Suffice it to say that some people wish to have large numbers of first degree connections even if a majority of those are barely even acquaintances, and others prefer only to connect with people they already know.

Passing no judgment on where anyone decides to place themselves along that spectrum, this new limitation is significant and should be openly discussed. Certainly LinkedIn�??s management has made this decision after carefully calculating that a network without boundaries would make it such that geometric growth would significantly impair the user experience for the majority, to the detriment of all.

I assume that is why such a limitation is in place, therefore people who seek large networks must employ a different tactic other than pure growth of first degree connections.

After contacting LinkedIn Management about my concerns regarding being �??limited�?? in my first degree, they confirmed that this indeed was a newly effective limitation, and I was offered the alternative of utilizing my Group as a connectivity conduit.

And you know what? That makes quite a bit of sense! Particularly after I just finished evangelizing on my other blog about �??Top 10 Reasons Why Recruiters Need Their Own LinkedIn Group�??

So here�??s my suggestion to you

Learn from my experience and use your own group to grown your network instead of inviting or accepting first degree connections. As a matter of fact, I even changed my profile to state that I no longer accept invites �?? it now states:

IMPORTANT PLEASE READ: Due to LinkedIn's limit of 30k first degree connections I am unable to accept new connections at this time. However I can share my network with you via the CyberSleuths Group so please join: https://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/742/47ED820E8D6B/

I even added that in my contact settings. Under Account Settings in LinkedIn I also opted in to receive individual emails when someone invites me to connect so I can have an automatic reply to stating the above as well.

Beyond the benefits I listed in my other post, there are a few advantages in having people connect to your group instead of connecting to you directly:

There is no limit, therefore you won�??t run into the same situation I ran into with topping out at 30k
You still get to enjoy the benefits of being connected with those people even if they are not in your 1^st degree
Once they join your group you then have their email address, so you can communicate with them either via the group or externally as well
If you are connected to someone via a group you can send them InMail at no cost
The network of members in your group is searchable
Your group can be found in the Group Directory and when people search for your group�??s topic
You can �??Share�?? your group - instead of sending out direct invitations to connect with you personally you can invite people to join your group. If the invitation is rejected there�??s no negative consequence like there is when someone clicks �??I don�??t know�?? on you.

OK so that is my position on this new limit, but I�??d also like to hear from others about how the feel, particularly anyone who is or will be directly affected by this.

LinkedIn Corporate Recruiter Upgrades to Talent Advantage - now with Custom Company Profiles

Shally Steckerl — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:48:46 -0500

It's not just a new name: LinkedIn Talent Advantage offers some cool new functionality that should be of particular interest to companies seeking to use LinkedIn for sourcing and employer branding. FYI, Talent Advantage includes: LinkedIn Recruiter (candidate search across the entire LinkedIn network, multi-recruiter team collaboration/project management, and related communication tools), Jobs Network (targeted job posting and viral distribution), Talent Direct (highly targeted InMail campaigns), Custom Company Profiles and Employer Advertising (targeted online text and display ads).

LinkedIn gave JobMachine a sneak peak last week at what was released today, but I'll focus on a couple that Glenn and I were most excited about.

· From an employer branding perspective, the just-launched Custom Company Profiles are worth a look. It lets you showcase certain recruiters by function (as well as other employee profiles), insert a streaming video, poll question, special links, etc. The best part is that you can have different versions of page content that only display desired elements based on the industry, job function, level, location, etc., of the potential job-seeker who visits your company's page. See Burger King Corporation as an example of custom profiles out there today. For those of you at staffing firms, note that Robert Half International is also using Talent Advantage as a platform to find client sales prospects.

· From the sourcing side, TalentMatch generates LinkedIn member profile recommendations geared to your openings within 48 hours of posting your job on LinkedIn and lets you contact them, as well as send job notifications to people in your first and second degree networks to get the word out virally to spur more referrals.

BTW, a few interesting stats about LinkedIn: Of its 35 million members, 530,000 are recruiters. The network is growing by 2 million members monthly, or about one new member per second! The geographic split is about 50/50 for the USA vs. rest of world. Over 900 companies are using at least some paid components of the Talent Advantage platform (this represents thousands of recruiters, since many companies have purchased multiple seats).

Shally's Rant about so-called "Cloud Computing"

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:54:25 -0500

I've been getting lots of calls from vendors who want me to review their product, help them promote it, resell it, link to it from my website, blog about it, etc. In other words, they are trying to convince me that their particular brand of snake oil is the best and will cure all my client's recruitment ills.

But here's the thing, more and more of them are talking about "cloud computing" as if they know what it is. My problem is that most of them are just throwing around the term "cloud computing" cluelessly, like folks used to talk about Web 2.0 (and still do) without understanding the first thing about it. And now those folks are talking about Web 3.0 and they still don't even know the basics of Web 1.0!

Hey, lets face it, "cloud computing" is nothing special, in fact its been around for nearly 30 years, and its just another buzz word. Wasn't it just SasS that we were talking about? Cloud Computing is no more than today's SaaS, and guess what, SaaS is yesterdays ASP (application service provider).

And before that, when I was in college in the 80's it was "thin client." We never outgrew it, we just called it a bunch of different things because the screens are no longer green on brown, and the "services" are taking place on "the internet" instead of on the mainframes. Think client is when the "dumb terminal" (i.e. your modern browser) doesn't run software of your disk but off the mainframe or server (i.e. "the Internet" now a days). See what I mean? So this whole "cloud computing" just means "stuff that runs on the internet not off a disk" which my old VT100 terminal did in 1989...

So, vendors who think you are "champipons of the cloud"... welcome to 1989. Its nice here, I think you will like it. Stick around, things may get a bit interesting when we actually start USING this cloud you keep talking about... oh, wait, that would mean all your systems would need to talk to each other, right? Oops. I guess we're not going to be leaving 1989 quite yet, as we're still yet to figure out this whole "integration" and "portability" headache. Sorry. Call me back when your product does more than hyperlink to another product, how Web 1.0!

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

Two LinkedIn Hacks

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:12:16 -0500

In these turbulent times many recruiters are finding it necessary to reduce costs so free sources of leads are becoming more important than ever but the challenge is in learning how to use them all. Subscribers to the JobMachine.net newsletter recently got two LinkedIn tips in their inbox that may save them a bit of money so I thought I should also share them with you here. The first one is Glenn Gutmacher's new and improved LinkedIn hack for Google (BTW for those of you who may not know, Glenn is now a partner in JobMachine and VP of Arbita!). From google.com enter:

site:www.linkedin.com intitle:linkedin YOUR KEYWORDS HERE -intitle:answers -intitle:updated -intitle:blog -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs -inurl:megite.com

Yahoo has different way to help you find people on LinkedIn by locating those who link back to their LinkedIn profile from somewhere on their blog, resume or other webpage. At the yahoo.com search box enter:

linkdomain:linkedin.com -site:linkedin.com JOB TITLE "at COMPANY NAME"

To learn just how to use these and similar tips see our LinkedIn recruiting cheatsheet or get more tips by subscribing to our newsletter featuring a new tip every other week. Our upcoming newsletters will include some Web 2.0 recruiting tips but meanwhile check out our new (and free) Twitter resources page and please leave us a comment or question: http://jobmachine.net/sourcer/communities/twitter

You may also be interested in three new webinars we are launching at JobMachine.net. Two are by our newest Adjunct Faculty and long time friend Mark Berger:

And the third is all new information on Web 2.0 recruitment techniques using networks that are far larger than LinkedIn where you can source, network and build your employment brand at little to no cost:

Social Network Recruiting Beyond Linked (Web 2.0)

And with that I'll leave you with my observations from a recent trip to Singapore where I learned quite a bit about Asian culture and recruiting in the Far East. I call it:

If YouTube MySpace I'll Google your Yahoo! (click to read)

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

Sourcing prospects from local events

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:59:30 -0500

Local events are a fantastic source of leads for prospects in fields where there is otherwise little online footprint. For example, in fields such as Accounting, Finance, Nursing, Law and Medical, among others, you may find individuals who occasionally blog or participate in online communities, but such individuals are not as plentiful as in other industry sectors.

Many continuing education companies employ local experts to teach recertification courses. These courses can be found online but frequently behind dynamically generated content which makes it �??deep web�?? content not picked up buy regular search engines. However, the content of those sites can be easily found with just a little bit of digging around.

Take, for example, Tax Accountants. Lorman.com is offering 98 local training events over the next three months in just about every state in the US and province in Canada. If you are looking for someone in Sales & Use Tax in Arizona, look no further than here: http://www.lorman.com/seminars/seminar_faculty.php?pid=186496&tid=&sid=. Each course lists a bio on the faculty presenting the course, and there are hundreds of people listed in these bios. Simply find the topic or city of interest, and look up the faculty.

Lorman.com teaches other course as well, in areas such as: Employment & Labor, Workers Compensation, Payroll, Benefits, Constructions, Environmental Services, Water Law, Public Works, Land Development, HV AC, Medical Records, Nursing, Insurance, Banking, Collections, Sales, Manufacturing, and a few others.

If instead you seek Financial Attorneys specializing in Probate Law, check out this event

http://www.nbi-sems.com/seminfo/nbi-moreinfo.asp?session-id=46101 and look at this faculty http://www.nbi-sems.com/seminfo/nbi-EvtBio.asp. Or maybe you are looking for Nurses? http://www.crosscountryeducation.com/cce/conferences/bootcamp/faculty.jsp. Or say you work for a Children�??s Hospital and need Coders: http://www.codingconferences.com/pediatric08s.htm or Speech Pathologists like Julianne http://www.audioeducator.com/industry_conference.php?id=1009.

Yeah, it is just that easy.

Oh and sometimes you find not just the instructors but also participants, particularly when the training company publishes �??testimonials�?? such as the dozens found on this HV AC training company�??s page: http://www.americantrainco.com/about_Company.aspx.

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

P.S. Sign up for our best-ever webinar June 25 1pm EST (next week): "A Deep Dive on Advanced Sourcing Search Strings!"

The Sourcer's Daily Dozen by Glenn Gutmacher, King of the Search String

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:21:33 -0500

Glenn is the undisputed "king of search string." In the ever changing fast paced world of Internet sourcing there are those who are highly skilled in applying techniques, and with that gain a competitive advantage, but among those there are a rare few with the ability to adapt and create new techniques on the fly. Glenn is chief among them and has been practicing what he preaches for many years, creating and testing new techniques which have become the gold standard of Internet research. He has been right there with me since the very first moment I realized there were others out there who shared my passion for recruitment research. We have collaborated vastly over the years, with the end product of such collaboration undoubtedly being greater than a sum of its parts.

This is why I am very pleased that ERE has made it possible for Glenn to share his wisdom with all of us during a one-of-a-kind webinar, "The Sourcer's Daily Dozen: E-Sourcing Methods from a Recruiting Research Guru." There is no cost to attend this event because it is underwritten by ERE and the sponsor, Jobscience.

If you have any interest in sourcing, this is an event you absolutely must attend. Glenn will be demonstrating the fastest no-cost methods to find resumes outside of the job boards by geography, # of direct reports supervised, and other criteria. He will show you how to find relevant, unblinded LinkedIn and other social network profiles quickly, even ones beyond your 3-degree network.

Over the last five years Glenn and I have collaborated on a number of effective bookmarklets, or browser scripts, that make is possible for you to run complex strings without having to remember all the boolean syntax and special search engine commands, and get ongoing, new relevant results automatically. During this event Glenn will be highlighting a few of those and letting you know how you can install them into any browser. Also during his session you will learn how to find alternative company names, job titles, and jargon that will reveal hidden leads.

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

Arbita and JobMachine Join Forces

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:48:26 -0500

ERE scooped the story before we had time to send out the press release! Big news, my gentle readers, JobMachine and Arbita are merging.

Late in the end of the 20th century I arrived at the conclusion that sourcing was more than merely a way for me to meet my recruitment goals by finding talent unavailable in mainstream sources, it was to be my chosen career.

When I started at this Sourcing hardly existed as a function, much less a dedicated role. Back them many though it was impossible to build a successful career entirely upon sourcing. I recognized early on I wanted to leave a professional mark in this world by inspiring a generation of sourcers, and raising the overall level of our industry. I am fortunate to have had so many friends and mentors who have lit the trail I follow, and have lent to me strong shoulders on which I stand.

Since the summer last year (when we found out Sammy Jo was on her way, I began soul-searching to decide which of three directions I would take. As I did that I also began having conversations with my close friends, business advisors and mentors and asked them for pros and cons on each of my three choices. My choices were:

1. Continue growing organically and slowly

2. Merge with an organization that could provide us the infrastructure we needed to grow

3. Scale back to a more manageable "lifestyle" business that made just enough to live on but would not grow

As I had conversations with my advisors it became painfully clear that Option 1 - organic growth - was potentially disastrous because my small company of five employees was already suffering from diminishing bandwidth and serious growing pains which would only increase. Several of my advisers had taken that option in their own businesses and each of them inevitably crashed and burned out.

Option 3 was scary because I had the desire to continue on the trail and shrinking just did not go along with my goals. That left Option 2 but the few I approached wanted to ?buy? me and as many of you know I am just not for sale. When I brought up this topic with Don Ramer he never offered to buy me. In fact, he said ?Shally, you don?t need me, and I don?t need you, so if we were to join forces it would be perfect!? which lead to a conversation about our core values and business models. We arrived at the conclusion that our two organizations had a chance of affecting a sea change in the industry if we banded together. That kind of change is something in which we are both deeply passionate. After a couple of visits to each others? HQ and collaborating on a few joint projects it became obvious that a merger on the level of true partnership and collaboration was the obvious choice.

So here we are today ? and I would like to use this blog as a way to have a conversation with my friends out there in Cyberspace who may have questions about what, if anything, this means to them. Please also read our official Press Release: http://jobmachine.net/merger along with John Zappe's scoop on ERE's InsideRecruiting here:

http://www.ere.net/inside-recruiting/news/arbita-and-job-machine-merge-182329.asp then come back and let me know your thoughts on all of this.

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

Shally's tips on how to not let your email inbox bring you down

Shally Steckerl — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:36:48 -0500

You inbox can get out of control, particularly when you are traveling to conferences and away from your office for a few days. Since I just got back from the Spring ERE and am now headed out to the Australasian Talent Conference I thought some of my fellow travelers would find this blog post timely.

With a daily average fluctuating between 500 and 700 new messages in my Outlook, Auto responders, Junk Mail and Filtering are simply survival tools for me, specially after long trips when I'm officially working but away from my computer during large parts of the day.

The SEND button is overused and much of what skirts around your spam blocker and manages to land in your inbox is fluff. Some mail you?ll definitely want to keep, even a bit of ?resume spam? can be useful in the future, but other mail is total junk you want to delete unread. However, what about all those messages which require your action? Like good resumes among the bad spam, solid business opportunities could also be lost to inbox bloat.

Like me you may use Outlook but most advanced email programs today offer you solutions to help with inbox bloat. I have been using Outlook for the last ten years and have developed quite the expertise on filtering email using the Organize function and the Rules Wizards. Most email providers, like mine, employ robust, top of the line enterprise grade spam filters, which capture a vast majority of the real trash. What I need is a system that helps me organize and prioritize the pieces that are not clearly trash so I can quickly pick out the real opportunities from the marginal.

For that, I use Folders, Colors, Views and the Junk Mail feature in Outlook. These features are available by selecting Tools in your Outlook, and from that menu choose Organize. Here are some efficient ways to deal with professional, non-commercial, inbound mail, whether it is resume spam, solicited leads or unsolicited ?announcements:?

FOLDERS

I use the folder tab to select from specific senders to go in designated folders. Messages from friends and family go in the Private folder, messages from newsletters I subscribe to go in their respective folders for each newsletter. I do the same with emails from LinkedIn and other online networks. I even create folders for each campaign and automatically move all incoming reply?s to that particular campaign folder.

COLORS

I filter messages from specific senders by coloring them in groups like gray for pseudo-junk, red for internal messages from my co-workers and anything marked Urgent, blue from my close friends, yellow for news, green for external business and so on. You get the picture! It is much easier to distinguish the messages this way and take appropriate action.

VIEWS

I set aside a period in the mid-morning just before lunch, with a cup of coffee, to go through my email and start with selecting my views. I select the view by "Conversation Topic" or ?Thread.? This lists messages with common subjects all together, and this way can take action on or delete entire threads at once without having to comb through the whole mess. Next, I go to the view by "Sender" and again can review all the messages from one person and either take action, move to a folder for later or delete them. Finally I choose the "Sent To" view which sorts all of what's left in a list which lets me view if they were sent to my work or private account, or if I was just copied on a message to someone else, or if it?s a message to a list or group. This is a great view because I can see whom the message was sent to ? and it is not always sent directly to me. If I am not the only one in the TO: box then it is quite likely that the message is of less priority, unless of course it is from a client, co-worker, or someone I know well. For example, messages to a list are addressed to the list and sorted that way unless they were private messages sent directly and only to me. I then take action on all the ones where my primary address is the only one in the TO: box, then I look at my other email accounts, then I sort through the ones where I was copied, and finally I glance through the ones that are from services like lists, groups, LinkedIn, Plaxo and so on. This works best if you have or can set up aliases like jobs@yourcompany.com. It also works great with multiple email accounts.

There are three other organizational aids to help you control inbox clutter: the Junk Mail processing feature, flags, and the built-in Rules Wizard.

JUNK

To access the Junk Mail settings simply hold down the right mouse button while you hover over an email message. You will see a menu where one of the choices is the ?Junk Email? organizer. Select this and you can enter Junk Email Options where the systems lets you manage junk messages and ?adult content? that makes it through your spam filters. I choose to move them - they go in a Junk Email folder so I can keep them on record in case A) it gets out of hand and I want to take action or B) it turns out later they were erroneously marked as spam and it is a real email. You can also right click on a message and mark the sender as a Junk. This way you build your junk sender list on the fly. You can always edit this list yourself and download updates from Microsoft.

When you right click on a message in your inbox one of the Junk Email choices immediately accessible is ?Add sender to Blocked Senders List.? What this does is move that email address to a list of addresses that you are Outlook will block. In the future, any messages from that sender will be treated as junk and either deleted, or moved to the Junk folder depending on what you choose under Junk Email Options.

FLAGS

Some time ago, I took a course in time management where I learned that to be effective handling items on my desk I should only pick them up once and either A) delegate, B) take action or C) create a task. With Outlook Flags, I can do the same thing in my inbox. I can sort by flag status; assign flags with one of six colors. By right clicking on the flag icon on my message in the inbox view, I can quickly assign a color, create a task reminder, or delete the flag. You can create your own arbitrary ?category? for each color. For example, mine are:

Red: Urgent Action pending on my part, item requires my attention and has a tight deadline
Orange: Action required on my part, and there?s a loose due date but it is neither firm nor impending
Yellow: Item requiting further discussion with someone else before I can take any action
Blue: Item where I am awaiting response or feedback from someone else and the item needs my follow up before it can be completed
Purple: anything that is ?for the record? or FYI like info to read or look at but such that it doesn't require any action on my part
Green: item that has received an automated response via my Rules Wizard

In addition to colored flags for messages, I can also add a reminder to the flag. This reminder can have no due date, or it can pop up a notification at a date and time I choose. Once the alert comes up, or at any time once I take action on the item I can mark it completed, clear the flag, or even change the due date. Some default tasks are built into the flag interface. The ones I find myself using frequently are: call, follow up, FYI, reply and review, but I can also type in my own reminder text like ?Call Bob to see if he?s still interested? and so on. Finally, you can sort your inbox by color of flag, or use views to see only specific flags and even sort them by due date.

RULES WIZARD

Spam will never completely cease but with the Rules Wizard, you have quite a bit of control. You may know some of the more common features like the Out of Office Assistant, which is actually a preset rule, but there are a vast amount of activities you can manage with the Rules Wizard, limited only by your imagination. Here are a few ideas on things the Rules can do, taken from my own settings:

You can use Rules Wizard to:

Create alerts that show up on your desktop
Create tasks and ?to do?s? or reminders for specific messages, senders, subjects, emails with certain keywords
Craft automatic replies (auto responders)
Distinguish internal from external mail
Expire or move mail after a certain number of days
Filter all the items from a mailing list, group or source like Linked, Plaxo, newsletters, etc.
Filter junk mail that makes it into your mailbox
Flag items for future activities
Forward specific senders or topics to your mobile phone or to an assistant
Handle messages forwarded from another user's mailbox
Mark specific emails as read
Search for phrases in messages
Sort messages by mail account
Turn emails into tasks, contacts or calendar items

Windows Library offers a great ?primer? on using the Rules Wizard here: http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/191/17/toc.html

The list of people who use email grows so quickly that we will have to deal with ever-increasing volumes of real email, never mind the Spam. Many of these features are also available in other email clients besides Outlook. Look under the Help menu of your program for items relating to ?Organization? or ?Rules.? Please visit jobmachine.net for hundreds of other recruitment and sourcing tips and if you have any questions send me an email and it will be colored green, marked urgent, moved to a folder and selected under the unread messages view ;)

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

P.S. New - our three best-selling Webinars on one DVD!

Competitive Intelligence now on LinkedIn for 160,000+ companies!

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:49:55 -0500

I'm very excited about LinkedIn's new release from last night.

When you do a search and see someone's employer in their profile, you can now click on some of those companies and see a summary page of competitive intelligence!

Over 160,000 profiles of companies will show this feature and any user can see them. The company profile contains a succinct overview of a company's industry data in combination with LinkedIn data, and it pulls information from Capital IQ.

What do you see here?

A list of all that company's employees to which you are connected
A list of RECENT HIRES from that company! (also from your network)
A list of people RECENTLY PROMOTED at that company! (also from your network)
A list of companies were people CAME FROM before they were hired to this company!
A list of companies people GO TO when they leave this company!
A list of companies that this company's employees are "most connected" to!
What locations do most of the company's employees live in!
The company's most common job titles
From what universities the company hires the most
The average tenure for people at that company (how long they last)
And a distribution of AGE and GENDER at that company!

And soon you will also be able to add, to your company page, the following:

A list of targeted jobs, recruitment videos, and other promotional material for recruitment efforts
Information about your company's products and services
Company images

WOW!!!!

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

P.S. Our LinkedIn master class is now on DVD! And check out all these free resources on LinkedIn.

Do you like LinkedIn's new face lift? Shally likes the new pervasive search feature!

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:10:30 -0500

If you haven't logged into LinkedIn lately you will be surprised when you do because they have now activated their new interface which had been in beta testing.

I find it easier to navigate LinkedIn now, with less clicks to get to what I want. In fact, you can now add a people search module right to your LinkedIn Home Page that shows you any new profiles matching your criteria! This is effectively a "pervasive" search meaning that it acts as an agent and will show you any new results matching your criteria. You can search by Company and Title.

How?

When you log in, on the right hand side right below the advertisement you should see the default modules "ProfileViews" along with a few others like "People" and "Answers." Below that there's button to "Add a module" with a plus sign to the left of it. Hover over that button with your mouse and click on "People Search" and this will now display a search by Company and Title right on your home page. Enter the criteria then click the save button and this new search will always appear on your home page. You can add a few of these to match your most critical research projects.

I'm still holding out for the ability to search through my incoming requests though...

How do you feel about the new face lift?

Cheers,

Shally

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

P.S. Our LinkedIn master class is now on DVD!

Do you like LinkedIn's new face lift? Shally likes the new pervasive search feature!

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:10:15 -0500

If you haven't logged into LinkedIn lately you will be surprised when you do because they have now activated their new interface which had been in beta testing.

How?

I'm still holding out for the ability to search through my incoming requests though...

How do you feel about the new face lift?

Cheers,

Shally

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

P.S. Our LinkedIn master class is now on DVD!

Randy Bailey is a LinkedIn Group Maniac!

Shally Steckerl — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:14:12 -0500

You could learn from this fellow Open Networker!

Amassing more LinkedIn Groups on his profile than any other recruiter alive, Randy has assembled what has to be the most impressive LinkedIn Groups collection I have ever seen.

He started with a few tips he picked up from my LinkedIn webinar where I teach some hacks on how you can find groups to join, but it seems Randy took my advice very seriously and in fact has taken it to a whole new level. It appears he has pretty much mastered the art of joining groups. In addition to my hacks he also started looking for profiles with large lists of groups, and adding those groups to his profile.

As a result, Randy is now a Power Networker! With such a broad network, Randy would be a great addition to your list of contacts. You can invite him to connect with you here just enter his email address (rbailey AT stephire DOT com) and click send, then check out his profile.

HINT: How did Randy add all those groups? He right-clicked on each of the icons under the Additional Information section of a profile and selected "Open in new tab" or "Open in new window" then simply accepted the invitation to each of those groups :)

Want more groups? You can find a comprehensive list here: http://mylinkgroups.com/ and a bunch more LinkedIn resources here: http://jobmachine.net/sourcer/communities/linkedin

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

P.S. Take this master class about LinkedIn!

Sourcing at Lightspeed with Shally's Super Sourcing Shortcuts for Broadlook Diver

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:42:52 -0500

On February 8th at 1pm US EST I will be presenting an exclusive 90-minute "how-to" webinar on utilizing the most advanced search strings I have ever created. NOTE: You don't need Diver to take advantage of this webinar, and... I don't get any commission for copies sold, but after this session you are going to wonder how you can get by without using this amazing sourcing automation tool.

This is NOT a software demo! This is a very advanced search engine sourcing class for serious researchers who want to automate the time-consuming, repetitive, and tedious task of downloading resulst from search engines.

During the session I will go over how I build advanced deep web search syntax to source resumes and prospect ledas. This is unlike anything you have seen me do before (unless you went to SourceCon).

For example, did you know you could use Diver to download a big list of names free from JigSaw using a simple Google hack?

Try this in Diver (of course, replacing with your own target company):

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's "COMPANY NAME"

Just one page of results will get Diver to click through to JigSaw and inhale a bunch of results. They don't have phone numbers but those are easy enough to get once you have the names :)

When: Friday, February 8th 1-2:30 pm US EST

Should you attend?

Yes, if you are an advanced researcher interested in honing your skill with the most effective passive lead generation search strings available anywhere...
Yes if you are a busy recruiter, sourcer or researcher interested in automating the trivial nature of downloading contacts results pages
And DEFINITELY YES if you are considering purchasing Diver and want to know its true capacities
And ABSOLUTELY YES if you are already using Diver and want to get the most out of it

What you will learn:

How to use search engines to find hard-to-find candidates in seconds
How to reduce 8 hours of finding r�sum�s and online prospects to 15 minutes
How to source hard-to-find leads direct from within specific companies
How to apply laser focused search techniques that you can use on just about any search engine

For attending the webinar, you get:

A free 14-day trial of Broadlook Diver (this is double the regularly available trial period)
$150 off of the regular purchase price of Broadlook Diver (cannot be combined with other offers)
One year of Contact Capture for free (a $209 value)
Plus, a special custom set of my Super Sourcing Search Strings you can load right into the Diver application

Cost (incl. training materials) is only $149.97 per line!

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

P.S. Check out my new Video Wall!

The Guru's Guide to Sourcing on LinkedIn

Shally Steckerl — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:00:27 -0500

So I was invited to do a workshop about LinkedIn for a group called NPA (a worldwide split-fee placement network). and it sold out. I guess LinkedIn is quite the popular topic! To compensate I dediced to host the event again, this time with GoToWebinar, so we won't run out of seats.

I plan to cover some LinkedIn hacks, tips and tricks. Plus. if its anything like our last event then we'll get some very good questions so I plan to also do tons of Q&A after the 60 min presentation.

One thing I'm going to go over is how to find LinkedIn Groups. With the new release groups are easier than ever to create, and of course they have become easier to join. For example, here's a nice listing: http://MyLinkGroups.com. But with groups added every day there's a few things we can do to find them using search engines. One example of that is just to Google this:

intext:www.linkedin.com/e/gis

But come to the webinar and we'll go over how to use the above, plus a couple of other techniques to find groups.

BTW I also have an extensive "library" of LinkedIn resources here: http://jobmachine.net/sourcer/communities/linkedin

Its $89 per line, 60 min plus plenty of Q&A after, and we may also be able to recor it so we can make a DVD available! See you there.

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

P.S. Check out my new Recruiting Industry resources page!