My Favorite Posts
My favorite quote this week comes from Brian Tome, one of the senior pastors at my church. He said this morning, “You will get a person’s best when you encourage and uplift them; you will not get their best when you criticize and belittle them.”
“I’m sorry I don’t mean any disrespect but I’m a little confused.
In response to your message however, with all due respect researchers should not be viewed as the low man on the totem pole, but unfortunately many recruiters like to place them there. I myself have made a 5-year career out of researching, and I have no desire whatsoever to “grow up” to be a recruiter. Ask folks like Maureen Sharib, Shally Steckerl, Jim Stroud, Rob McIntosh, Glenn Gutmacher, etc., all of whom have made very successful careers out of researching and sourcing, with Maureen and Shally being self-employed doing just that. There are entire training programs, such as AIRS, dedicated to training on research techniques. There is even a national conference that is being held in Atlanta later this summer entirely focused on sourcing and research. It is not simply the ‘entry-level’ position and the stepping stone that everyone takes to become a recruiter. Yes I will agree that many people who start off as researchers do move on to become recruiters. But there are a great number of people, myself included, who have found that our love is in research and are interested in learning what it takes to become really great.
I see that you have a long-standing history working in executive level positions in electronics. I would imagine that being such a senior level person, you encourage the people who work for you, no matter what level they are at in the organization, to strive for excellence in whatever they do. Regardless of whether a researcher is simply an entry-level employee or if that individual desires to make a career out of it, I would hope you would encourage that person to be the very best researcher they could be, even if in your eyes that is as “low-man-on-the-totem-pole”.
I appreciate your thoughts, and I hope that my viewpoint on this will help clarify this misconception of what researchers truly are.
Experience.com provides information on entry level jobs.
Filed under: Research
A good resource that is available to us is the educational institution(s) listed on our candidates’ resumes. Lots of recruiters don’t know that many colleges and universities have online resume books, many of which are available at no cost! One of my recruiters asked me this morning how to go about finding these resume books, so I thought I would share a couple of ways that I like to use:
inurl:resume book filetype:pdf .edu (college university) (financial banking) MBA – this one gets a little more focused, based on some of the additional keywords
inurl:~CV book site:edu filetype:pdf
inurl:~CV book site:edu filetype:pdf 2007
Kevin Wheeler wrote about QuietAgent way back in December 2006 on ERE. QuietAgent is an exciting new passive recruiting tool! Click here to view the video specifically for recruiting agencies. There is also access as a job seeker and as an employer (corporate).
Here’s the basic breakdown. You can:
- Access anonymous employed people who may consider a better offer
- Search for your own inventory or on behalf of your clients
- Have the convenience of seeing the best matched & willing career seekers
- Perform profiling and benchmarking
- Get a year’s unlimited searching for the cost of about two job postings!
Costs:
Boutique License:
- Up to 50 Users
- Unlimited Searches
- Unlimited Candidates
- Monthly Credit Card Billing
- $84 a month p/user
Enterprise License
- Boutique License+
- Unlimited Users
- Multi-Office Licenses
- Enterprise Licenses
- Corporate Billing
“Women are a blogging powerhouse. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 68 percent of men are Internet users, compared with 66 percent of women, but since women make up more of the population, the total number of women online is now slightly larger than the number of men.
A survey by Perseus, a marketing research services company, indicates that 56 percent of all blogs are created by women and that women abandon fewer blogs than men do.”
- Boston Globe, July 2006
(updated statistics show that 71% of men and 69% of women are now Internet users)
“According to a recent survey, young women (between the ages of 18 and 34) dominate the world wide web and experts say that this trend will greatly influence the future of the Internet as we know it….Young women are now the most dominant group online, accounting for nearly a fifth of the internet population in the UK. NetRatings found that 18 per cent of active online Brits were females aged between 18 and 34 in a recent survey. Burmaster said that this shift indicated a significant change in the internet and would dictate the kind of content and advertising we would see online in the future. “There is little doubt we are entering a new era of the internet… the internet landscape is shifting; a shift which is sure to send shockwaves through the entire online industry.”
- TrendHunter, May 2007
“[According to] Sheila Greco Associates, an Amsterdam, N.Y.-based consulting firm… the company’s research indicates that the percent of female chief information offers–the top IT rank at most companies–increased to 9% in 2007, up from 7% in 2000.”
- Forbes.com, May 2007
I’m certainly not a feminist, but I think it’s cool that we women are making our presence known out here in the blogosphere as well as the IT world. There’s even a site dedicated solely to the promotion of female-authored blogs called www.blogher.org. Also check out the Blogger Pajama Party, an interview that was done with six of the most talked-about women bloggers back in February 2006.
For those of you who frequent ERE, there has been a great discussion going on the topic of X-ray searching. I think this is a neat and quick way of running some in-depth searches, and anyone can use it.
Live (MSN) – domain: or site:
Yahoo – domain: or site:
Adding the -inurl:classifieds will eliminate the job posting pages that MySpace has available, and will only give you the MySpace profile pages of people who have the terms .NET and developer on them. By the way, you do not need to have a MySpace account in order to run a search like this.
In this case, I noticed when I ran the search without -inurl:find, I was getting a lot of pages with directory results (just a list of names and not individual profiles) so I examined the similarities in those particular “noise” pages and added in the -inurl:find to eliminate them and bring up mostly just profiles.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Wanted to send a birthday shout-out to my friend, Mike Notaro. He’s 25 today. So young!!
Please feel free to drop him a Happy Birthday at mnotaro@thg.com!
Filed under: Blogging
Worst Boss. I can’t remember her name (shows how ‘awesome’ she truly was), I think it 
was Michelle. She was my boss at the fitness club I worked at in Tampa. She had it in for me from the day I started. I always got the crappy leads and the bad hours. She didn’t hide her pleasure when I told her I was quitting either. That’s always something you want to see come from an employer!
Best Boss. Hands-down, my boss when I was a lifeguard. Bruce had also been my first 
swim coach when I was 8 years old. Later, he became my boss when I got certified as a lifeguard and I worked for him for 4 summers. Great guy – lots of fun (how could lifeguarding NOT be fun!?) and he always treated us with respect. If/when he needed to discipline any of us, he would always do it privately so as not to embarrass us in front of our peers, and he always praised us not just in front of each other, but in front of our pool patrons as well so they knew they were in good hands.
Most Innovative Colleague. This is a tough one because I have worked with a lot of unique 
individuals. I will give this honor though to a girl who is still my good friend today, Jennifer. She was a host at a restaurant I worked at in college, and she was just such a shining personality; she was always coming up with fun ways to entertain our patrons while they waited to be sat, and everyone loved her.
Most Rewarding Task. This would be a toss-up between teaching swimming 
lessons as a lifeguard or helping high school kids get athletic scholarships to college. I taught swimming lessons to children from age 3 up to teenagers. The teens I was more of a swim coach than I was an instructor. I loved doing that. I worked as an athletic recruiter for a few months back in 2001, and in that position I would help high school kids with mediocre grades and decent athletic ability find athletic scholarships to DII and NAIA colleges. These were mostly basketball kids. I loved helping them out and they were very thankful for our help.
Best Item You “Permanently Borrowed”. This would have to be my little Monster 
squeeze toy. He is a stress reliever for me and a trophy from my first researching job. The box came to my desk addressed to my boss, but I figured he couldn’t possibly get as much enjoyment out of this little guy as I could, and have!
Most Embarrassing Moment. I must do a good job at blocking those from my memory 
because I can’t remember any offhand. I’m sure there were some goofy lifeguarding moments, or some incident where I slipped in the kitchen and landed on my rear. Sorry 
Lowest Pay. If we’re going by ANY job, it would have been my first job ever which was 
as a kennel ward in a veterinary clinic. I made $4.25/hr. there when I was 15. If we’re talking post-higher education, then it would be my first job after moving to Tampa, FL. I worked as a sales consultant for a fitness club and I made $7/hr. I left that position after a month because I could make better money waiting tables.
Worst Holiday Gift or Bonus. I guess I could say ‘no bonus’ is the worst. But 
as for years when I’ve actually received a Christmas bonus: when you go from $500 cash down to a $30 popcorn box, that’s pretty bad. A few years ago, my Christmas gift was one of those popcorn towers. We weren’t even given them individually; we each found them on our desk one morning with no note or anything. I don’t even know if that WAS our Christmas “bonus”; I just assumed it was because we never received anything else that year. I don’t even like popcorn….I think I let my mother have it when she visited me.
Bonus: Your Typical Day. I won’t write all of this out here! Instead, I will 
shamelessly refer you to a post I made on recruiting.com several months ago – here’s what I do all day.
I received an email from one of my LinkedIn connections, Steve Sammons, last week. After reading the content of his email, I realized what a great life lesson Steve is teaching his stepson. Read here:
I don’t know if Steve’s stepson has reached his financial goal yet, but I would still encourage you to check out this young man’s website and support him. In fact, I would encourage everyone to buy a candy bar or a box of cookies from the kids who are selling outside the grocery store instead of passing them by saying “I’ll catch you on my way out” or “I don’t have any money” (oh please – come on, we’ve all blown them off with this line at some point in our lives!) If you don’t want/need what they have, give them a couple of bucks anyhow and encourage them. Stop at the neighborhood kids’ lemonade stand this summer and when they charge you a dollar for a glass, give them ten and watch their eyes light up. Ask them what they are earning money toward. Encourage their work ethic and entrepreneurship; they are the ones who will not grow up stricken with victim mentality, always looking for someone else to foot their bill. They are the ones who will value the things they have in life because they worked to earn them.
Jim Stroud has taken the time to develop some wonderful sourcing tools! Please take a look at them; they are worth the investment!
Video Tutorial: How to source resumes with Google
Video Tutorial: How to source resumes with Yahoo
Video Tutorial: How to automate (some of) the sourcing process (for more advanced sourcing techniques)
