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Tools

 

Last Updated: April 25, 2013

Here is a List of People Sourcing, Internet Research, and Social Recruiting Tools and Resources. Except as otherwise noted, only listing free tools (or those with useful free options).

“Dream Software” Contenders (all paid):

International Social Networks:

Social Cross-Referencing:

Email Verification:

Automation/Scheduling (mostly for Social Media Management):

  • HootSuite- (supports all major sites, full social media management suite)
  • Buffer- a lighterweight solution than Hootsuite, great for just scheduling updates (Twitter, LI Profile/Group, FB Profile/Pages – no G+)
  • Dlvr.it- Content sharing management to social networks
  • If This Then That- Create automation ‘recipes’ (one ‘trigger’ with one ‘action’) – interesting, but somewhat limited.
  • ZipRecruiter- job distribution
  • Bullhorn Reach – job distribution

Standalone URL Shortening:

File Storage and Sharing

  • Dropbox (also has a link shortener for sharing) – great for videos, images, and anything else (no built-in document editors)
  • Google Drive- seamless integration with Google ‘office’ document editing apps, but weak support for other files (most features don’t work or work as well)
  • Box – a not quite perfect blend of the above (sort of supports document editing with your desktop apps)

Other Productivity Browser Add-Ons (Chrome and FireFox):

Scraping, Parsing, Filtering, and Sorting:

Search Engines:

There is a search engine for every occasion. Take a look at the “Wikipedia article some time, to see if one better fits your needs. Some of my favorites follow:

General Search

Note: this is actually a complete list of general search engines that index web pages globally. DuckDuckGo combines a bit of indexing with sending queries to other places, including Google.

  • Google- still the biggest and best, most of the time
  • Bing- worth a look for some types of search (or side-by side with Google via the various Bing Challenge portals)
  • Duckduckgo- worth noting primarily because it can be used as a ‘search dashboard’ – pass searches from DDG into your engine of choice
  • Yandex- A big out-of-US competitor to Google, still better in Russian than English, but getting there.
  • Blekko – curated, spamless search, comparatively tiny index, extremely interesting public data dumps

Real Time / Social Search

Twitter Based

Past Search

People and Company search

Free Resume Search

LinkedIn-Based

Custom Search Engines (Here are some CSE’s we’ve built)

Please let me know what else should be added to the list. Thanks!