As businesses move towards a direct sourcing model to find candidates, we've seen an increasing number of bloggers and organisations talking about "X-Ray searching" and Boolean searching sites for candidates as if it's some radically new invention and not a feature of search engines that's been around well over a decade! It seems to be the latest thing to be re-badged with a sexy new name and rolled out to clients in the form of training courses and "technology" to help them do it more effectively.
What is X-Ray searching?
Well, if you've yet to come across it, it's simply using the advanced search tools of either the search box on a social network or Google (which indexes an awful lot of the social site content) to hone in on pages likely to be the profiles or CVs of candidates. Effectively finding passive candidates you can start a dialog with, outside the usual pools of talent like job boards and CV databases.
Don't get me wrong, there are some great products out there using this kind of approach as a basis, but they then take it a step further and add some really useful tools to save, sort and sift the candidates you find, alongside tools to contact them and keep them warm. But increasingly I'm seeing people dressing up what's essentially nothing more than a Google search box and inferring that it's a radical new solution to your resourcing problems!
This came to a head last week when I spotted a few people tweeting that LinkedIn should look out, as Google was about to steal their lunch, having launched a recruiting module for Google+. This struck me as odd, recruitment is a niche space to jump into so soon after the launch of Google+ which is still only in trial mode, it's not even fully launched yet. But things became a bit clearer once I clicked through and saw the "Google product" they were promoting. It was nothing to do with Google at all! Some enterprising soul has registered the domain gplusrecruiter.com and stuck a free Google Custom Search box on it, tailored to search only Google+ profile pages. Along with a quick video tutorial on how to add the candidates you find to your Google+ circles and start chatting with them. A very clever spotting of an opportunity but not rocket science, and not more than a couple of hours of work at most.
Because a lot of the work we do at Chatter is about working with clients to identify their sourcing issues and then use communications to improve on them, we thought it might be fun to demonstrate just how easy it is to create something like this yourself and tailor it exactly to your needs. So, over lunch, I knocked together a quick prototype, and with a (very) small fanfare I present the Chatter One Search for Recruiters. Very much a Ronseal name for it, there's a chocolate bar on offer for the best alternative sexy technology sounding name for it... 😊 One search box, which will return results from user profile pages (or the nearest we can get) on: LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Quora and Xing and then let you filter the results down to any of those sites individually.
Like any search engine, the quality of results depends on what you plug into it. But searching for names, job titles and locations is a pretty good start and the more specific you get the more likely you are to find a useful candidate. A search like "Project Manager Leeds" works well and if you want to find people who've worked at competitor organisations then combinations of job titles, departments and competitor names can yield some interesting results too.
Launch Chatter One Search for Recruiters >> This is just a quick proof of concept example of the kind of things you can do using existing web tools bolted together, add some well crafted communications into the mix and things could get really interesting. As always, if you need help with this kind of thing, then get in touch for a chat!
Note: We have noticed Google Custom Search being a little flaky from time to time, so if you get no results or just an advert, then try again later and do let us know.
