Manta: Business Information on Demand

I've recently been referred to Manta, an online index of business information that is free to use. Manta provides quick, easy access to information about any U.S. registered business including: Corporate headquarters, stock information, address and phone contacts, press releases, current news about that company and any other names under which the company does business.

Additionally, if you register with Manta (also for free) you get access to advanced information such as estimated annual sales, the names of executive officers and more. Registration also allows you to use advanced features on Manta, such as creating company lists for yourself, keeping track of contact information, developing a pipeline and the ability to share information with other Manta users through the system.

Google Experimental Search

Recently, Google has made available some "experimental" versions of their search engine. If you log in to Google and go to their Experiments section, you can join the experiment of your choice in order to get access to the new features.

For example, one experiment allows you to view search results in the context of other types of information-display, such as a timeline, on a map or with additional information (about a given topic) displayed.

Another mode involves keyword suggestions in the form of a drop-down autocomplete box, showing you realtime suggestions based on what you begin to type, sorted by preponderance of result.

Advanced Google Search

Most people know that Google supports Boolean search such as the common AND, OR & NOT statements in order to link adjectives to nouns, join subjects of interest, or to exclude common results which do not apply to your search.

There are a number of other advanced operators, however, that can be very useful for mining the web for specific types of information, web pages or files.

One simple example is a "fuzzy" search. By preceding a word with the ~ symbol, you can tell Google that you are interested in that word, all synonyms of that word, and terms that are intimately related to that word. For example, the fuzzy search "~school" will simultaneously display results for school, institute, college, academy and similar terms.

Searches of greater depth and specificity can be conducted using in-line search modifiers to augment how and where Google attempts to find matching text. For example, using the modifier "-intitle" will display results that have elements of your search string in the title of the webpage (the blue bar at the top of your browser window).

For example, if you're hoping to find a phone number then you might want to look at pages which contain the word "Directory" in the title.

Other in-line modifiers include:

-allintitle
Displays only pages which contain all of your search terms in the title.

-inurl
Searches the text of the web address.

-allinurl
Similar to -inurl, except like -allintitle this search will only return results that include all of the terms.

filetype:
Looks for specific file types, for example filetype:pdf

link:
Displays webpages that contain links to the given page, such as link:www.hudson.com

site:
Searches within a given website (often better than the site's built in search function!)

Mixing and matching some of these variables with your search terms creates search strings which can be powerful ways to pull very specific information that's floating around the web. For example, let's say I'm looking for a candidate in my area (Greater Boston) that has experience with programming in Java?

I bet there are people with their resumes posted on their personal homepages, and Google has probably indexed them. Let's combine several functions to create a search to find them.

(intitle:resume OR intitle:"my resume" OR intitle:documents OR intitle:portfolio OR intitle:profile)
Shows us web pages with likely titles that would contain someone's resume.

("978" OR "617" OR "781")
Common telephone area codes in the Boston area.

("java" OR "ejb" OR "j2ee") and ("developer" OR "engineer" OR "architect")
Names of the skills we're trying to find.

(-writing OR -sample)
Excludes results that are likely resume writing tips sites, or have resume samples only.

Putting them all together:

(intitle:resume OR intitle:"my resume" OR intitle:documents OR intitle:portfolio OR intitle:profile) ("978" OR "617" OR "781") ("java" OR "ejb" OR "j2ee") ("developer" OR "engineer" OR "architect") (-writing -sample -samples)

Getting started with Linked-In, as a Recruiter.

I've recently had a number of colleagues ask me about best-practices for using Linked-In. Specifically, they want to know how to get started, rapidly grow a network and begin using it for recruiting. I am by no means an expert on the subject of Linked-In, but here's a crash course "how to" that should be able to get you rolling with this important online resource.

Step 1.

Set yourself up with a separate email address. Ideally, I'd recommend a Gmail account, because it's free, fast, easy to get and you can set it to forward all mail to your primary business address.

The purpose of creating an email account specifically for use with Linked-In is to create a firewall which protects your primary address in the event that you begin to generate too much email traffic (spam). You can pull the proverbial ripcord by suspending the forward function, and immediately insulate your business address from the "noise".

Step 2.

Go ahead and create an account for yourself on Linked-In by going to www.linkedin.com and following the account creation instructions. Use your firewall email address for Linked-In communications. Also, I recommend that you go through the various profile options and fully complete all aspects of your profile. In order to cultivate an online presence, you should avail yourself of the opportunity to give prospective business partners a full view of your background and who you are.

Lastly, go through your communications and privacy settings, and lower everything down to the lowest level of contact that you can. For example, I set pretty much all of Linked-In's communication settings to "web only" so that I am not emailed with constant updates, requests and notifications everytime my account is pinged by activity. Combined with your firewall email address, this provides a second line of defense against spam.

Step 3.

Upload your contacts. Follow the website's instructions to upload a copy of your Outlook address book. Once your address book has been uploaded, it is best practice to request invitations only from people who know you, and will accept your invitation. The reason for this is that Linked-In makes a record of invitations which are marked as "I don't know this person" and will take disciplinary action against your account if you have more than a few.

It's very important to make sure that you don't use the service to spam invitations to people who will not respond favorably to them. Linked-In customer service has no sense of humor for that sort of activity.

Step 4.

Register yourself as an Open Networker through the Linked In Open Networkers [LION] website.

Once you've registered and been approved as a LION, you will have access to their resources. Navigate to their Downloads section, and download the list of LIONs who have indicated that they will accept all invitations.

Upload this list to your Linked-In contacts, and send invitations to all of these people, taking care to indicate in your introduction message that you are a fellow LION and that you received their contact information through that network.

Step 5.

At this point, you should rapidly be approaching 1,000 1st degree connections, which will likely give you a total "view" (through the Linked-In search feature) of greater than 5 million profiles. You can now begin using Linked-In to source for individuals who have indicated in their communications settings that they would be interested in "Career Opportunities".

The best way to reach these people is to request an introduction through an intermediary, although there's nothing stopping you from using the information listed in their profile to back in to an alternate method of contact.

Jigsaw

Have you seen Jigsaw?

Jigsaw is an online database for the trading of virtual "business cards". They have an extensive database of contact information within thousands of companies across multiple veriticals including, in all probability, yours.

There are two models for membership: Pay, and Play.

You can either "pay"for access to the information stored in Jigsaw's base, or you can "play" the system by earning redeemable points which you can use to purchase information. You can earn points by updating and/or correcting faulty data, by referring friends to sign up and create accounts on Jigsaw, or by adding information to the database that isn't already there.

It's a nice resource to use in conjunction with a resource that gives you names and titles only, because you can then use Jigsaw to look up more specific contact information.

The Ladders

On the advice of a colleague, I decided to try doing some recruiting through The Ladders. They market themselves as a niche job board for $100k+ annual total comp jobs only.

Currently, they employ a reverse fee structure model: Charging candidates for premium access to the site, with hiring entities and recruiters getting free access. With great (and free) power comes great responsibility, though, and the moderators of the site individually validate any job posting that you submit in order to ensure that it's a real, detailed job description, and that it's $100k+.

I placed an ad yesterday in the afternoon, and received 10 targeted candidate responses overnight. Three of the resumes are close enough to the strike zone that I've scheduled interviews with them.

Not bad for free. Not bad at all.

Doostang for Recruiters?

Last week, after months of resisting, I finally succumbed to the frequent barrage of viral "Join Doostang" marketing emails that hammer my inbox.

I clicked the link, wondering whether sliced bread really had been over-rated, after all. The website looked similar enough to Linked-In to peak my interest, with that whole general networking and synergy theme to it, I vaguely wondered why I needed to start over building a whole new network on a website.

Then I saw it. Post job ads... for free? Are you kidding?

I began to gleefully fill out the form to post an ad for one of my current jobs, being careful to enter all of the information accurately. I checked off the box labeled "I am an Agency" in order to properly identify myself, and I entered the name of the hiring company as Hudson (my company) in order to protect my relationship with the client.

No sooner had I submitted my job ad than I received an automated email response from the system administator. Check it out, complete with grammatical errors:

Thank you for your job posting earlier today. We appreciate your being an active member of the Doostang community, and look forward to being an integral part in your search for talent.

I would also like to take this opportunity to inform you that an increasing number of our members have been complaining recently at the increase in volume of agency postings on Doostang. Keeping the community is not only in our best interests, but also in your's. Indeed the reason many of these members joined, was that Doostang was initially started to enable our friends to share company postings, and we would like to keep that feel to the website as the company grows.

To this end, we have gone ahead and temporarily closed your position (it is currently saved in your "Closed Jobs"). If you can release the company name, please edit the posting accordingly and go ahead and reopen it. If you cannot, then the only agency positions that we currently accept on Doostang are front office finance ones - and those at a maximum rate of one a day and two a week with no reposting.

So, come to Doostang and post your ads. Just remember that if you're an agency recruiter, you'll be treated as a second class citizen and expected to work against your own interests should you wish you use their resources.