DIVER by Broadlook
Looks like the people at Broadlook Technologies have another winner on their hands. I was happy to be able to download and test drive their latest offering to the recruiter community, Diver. Broadlook, a company whose products have appeared in this column many times over the years, continues to serve this community by offering products and services that make us more and more productive.
Diver, simply put, is a search engine interface. You still run your own searches in Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, and/or AltaVista, but your results are all parsed for you into a grid. Once in the grid, the results are easily accessible by double-clicking on the line entry. The actual results page is visible from within the program. This feature saves any sourcer all the time it normally takes to click on one result at a time, review the result, then click back to the main results page – literally hours if you do a lot of this type of work. Once you have the results from a search in the Diver grid, you can filter the results and keep only those that have some type of contact information, then export your results to any number of destinations, including documents, contact managers, and even ATS’s.
Aside from locating résumés on the search engines, Diver has another service I wanted to mention. They have built-in strings for specialty searches that make it easy for you to find information on companies, lists, member directories, persons, trade shows, org charts, and associations. All you have to do is add a name or keyword or two and Diver does the rest.
Diver is a very simple program and easy to learn and use – my favorite kind. You have your projects on the left, complete with a number of examples you can use in your future searches, the search engine results page is on the upper right, and the grid is on the bottom of the screen. It allows you to take advantage of search strings offered by industry experts, or you can build your own searches and save them in project folders – as many as you like. Anyone who has ever had AIRS training or any other advanced search string training should take a look at this product. Diver can take what someone learns with search string training and take productivity to the next level.
Diver retails for $1,995 per year on an annual subscription but is heavily discounted for existing Broadlook customers. Aside from their free three-day trial, a first for Broadlook, they are also offering a free copy of Diver for each copy purchased. This is a Fordyce Letter subscriber special good until November 14. They are OK with people getting together and pooling resources to get their copies. For instructions to get your three-day trial, visit this Web page: www.broadlook.com/fordyce.
Anyone with an interest in finding out more about this great product can visit the Broadlook Technologies website at www. broadlook.com or contact Brian Galovits, Broadlook’s Director of Client Relations, via email at BGalovits@broadlook. com or via voice at (262) 754-8080 x227.
Sheeee’s Back
– Barbara Ling, That Is
I am happy to be writing about Barbara again as one whose name has appeared in this column many times over the years. I first met Barbara back in my early days as the TFL columnist and remember reviewing her watershed book, The Internet Recruiting Edge, back in the late nineties. I can still recall what a good review the book received. I am happy to report that her new material is just as good, if not better. After an absence of four years, Barbara Ling, one of the original pioneers of Internet recruiting, has returned to the scene with brand-new resources for today’s recruiter.
Barbara has always been and continues to be well known for demystifying the most difficult of technical activities by translating them into simple lessons that any recruiter can implement. Boolean searching, networking with passive candidates, teaching recruiters the easy way to market to their targeted population – she accomplishes the above with humor, plain speaking, and an uncanny knack of dispelling any online confusion.
Currently, Barbara offers several recruiting services mostly relating to recruitment technology and candidate sourcing, areas that all regular readers of this column know are close to my heart. These include emailed seminars for those recruiters who don’t want to leave their offices (offering the added bonus of one-on-one interaction with her) at www.risetrends.com/eseminars.html, a RISE private recruiter knowledgebase at www.risetrends. com/membership.html, simple one-page solution sheets for common recruiting goals at www.risetrends.com/solutionsheets.html, and SEO-friendly website templates at www.rise trends.com/sample/sample.html.
TIP
SearchAllinOne.com
Here is an interesting site that basically is an interface to literally dozens of search engines, many that I am sure you have never heard of. I know I hadn’t. Of course they offer access to all of the big search engines but also allow all-in-one access to many specialized search engines for sports, news, science, encyclopedias, government, financial, education, meta search engines, and directories (which are compiled by humans, not spiders). If you need an answer to almost any question in any category, visit this site. In this case it is true that a picture (website) is worth a thousand words. Take a look at http://www.searchallinone.com/search.html.
Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M. E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His website is www.swatrecruiting.com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.