People Sourcing Tools Suggestions

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I have posted a draft list for the People Sourcing Tools Survey that I plan to run to run on my sourcing- and social recruiting-related groups and the Ning network. By no means am I trying to create an exhaustive list of tools, but I didn’t want to miss anything “major”.

I have also shared the draft with the active, well-run Google+ Community “Social Recruiting” moderated by the Wise Man Say Hun Lee and by Oscar Mager and got some great suggestions there.

Thanks a lot for all the suggestions! This feels like an exciting project, and a way for many of us to compare notes and to learn about tools that we haven’t investigated yet.

I feel that it might be useful to go over the extra suggestions I got up till now. Of course, this reflects my own subjective views; I am happy to hear alternative views and more suggestions. I am also interested to hear more about some tools I am not as familiar with.

1. Thanks for your suggestions! I am adding these tools for sure:

Some of the tools suggested are excellent tools and I absolutely plan to include them. Those are:

Other suggestions:
  • Followerwonk, a Twitter tool; I do not have much experience but since several colleagues suggested it, let’s include. (I hang out on Twitter quite a bit, but I don’t think Twitter is a top tool for finding target professionals.)
  • More than one person has mentioned Plaxo; I am not sure how widely it is used these days.
  • A note on theSocialCV suggestion: it is now the Dice Open Web and is included.

2. Sorry, I am not including these tools. They do not work:

These sites were suggested to be included in the survey… but are they about matching profiles against jobs? Have a job opening, auto-find profiles? Sorry folks, this cannot work. I can write a blog post explaining, why. But briefly, it just doesn’t. (If there are some other features of interest than auto-matching, please let me know. I might have missed something.)

(LinkedIn also offers “matching” profiles for job posts. Ha!)

I am not including any tools that auto-construct searches, as their main purpose, either:

  • Recruitin
  • Recruiting Bar
These could be good educational sites if they maintain good example searches, but not sourcing sites.

3. I am probably not including these tools; some are rare and some may require to write code:

I plan to survey the mainstream tools, and not necessarily everything there is.

Search Engines. There are several other wonderful general search engines, in addition to Google and Bing. But they have indexed much smaller territories. In everyday practice, I think, we would do better if we ignore DuckDuckGo and Blekko on most days and just use Google and common sense. (Anyone has a story about placing a person found on DuckDuckGo?)

APIs such as Talentdrive/Talentfilter. These sound interesting, but don’t think an API can be considered a sourcing tool. If there’s an app using the APIs, with no need to write code, please let me know.

Andy Headworth has brought this site to everyone’s attention: Mention.net. I’d like to mention it here;  Andy says it is a much better alert system than Google alerts. I have some doubts about its wide usage.

4. I don’t know enough about these tools suggested to me; are these people sourcing tools? Can you look for target professionals using these?

5. These are membership sites, not people sourcing tools: Github; Stackoverflow; IEEE; etc.
Thanks to all the great suggestions so far! If I have missed some suggestions that you feel are important  please let me know.

 

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