When you’re looking for a needle in a haystack – and what recruiter isn’t? – use a magnet. The same goes for sourcing candidates and getting a quick primer on who they are and where they’ve worked. In this case, the magnet is an 8-year-old specialty search engine with the appropriately descriptive name ZoomInfo .

Scouring the Web for information on individuals and companies, ZoomInfo gathers it, indexes it, compiles it and presents it in a neat package. Like many search engines, the work is done entirely by computer. So it has limitations. Still, ZoomInfo makes it a snap for recruiters to develop candidate lists simply by entering their criteria.

But, says Tad Goltra , VP and GM of ZoomInfo’s recruiting business unit, recruiters have found plenty of other ways of using what is rapidly becoming the largest business search engine in the world. “Recruiters are a big part of our business,” says the former Monster exec.

Talking with ERE recently, Goltra shared these innovative uses and talked about plans for making ZoomInfo even more accessible to non-corporate recruiters.