Toolkit Addition

ToolKit: Early Summer Newsletter

You'll notice that we've added yet another edition of our paper newsletter to the archives. At 16 pages, it's our biggest issue to date. Last Friday, we shipped it to over 80,000 recruiting professionals. As usual, you'll need Acrobat to read it.

This issue includes the following articles:

• Do Nothing Recruiting
• Spiders Don't Bite
• The View From 35,000 Feet
• Free Resume Databases
• Useful Spiders
• Recruiting With Mailing Lists and Usenet
• The Summer 1998 Seminar Schedule
• and much, much more

Of course, the downloadable edition has all of the links enabled. You can click to view all of the sites and tools discussed in the newsletter.

If you have a moment, please download it and forward it to a friend. At about 450K, the file should take about 5 minutes to download. Just save it to your hard drive and attach it to a piece of email.

In the center of the newsletter, you'll find our 1998 Electronic Recruiter's Survey. We're excited about the prospect of developing a quantitative view of online recruiters' experience and requirements. If you take the time to fill out the survey and mail it to us, we're offering the following incentives:

• A $100 Discount on our Seminars
• A copy of the Recruiter's Internet Survival Guide (limited to the first 500 responses)
• A copy of the executive summary of the survey (in late September 1998)

The paper version of the material should be arriving in your mailbox this week. If you have a coworker who would likw to receive the newsletter, have them "click the OK button" on the daily Electronic Recruiting News

Search Tips

Search Modifiers

Hot Bot calls them meta words. Alta Vista refers to them as special functions. Either way, understanding a few simple terms can cut through the messiness of searching.

Anchors Anchor text is the stuff that appears as a hypertext link in a Web document. Often, the phrase consists only of click here. In better designed documents, though, the anchor text is a word or phrase of meaning. It could be resume, advanced programming skills, or anything else. The point is, you can search for these types of links.

Alta Vista
• In Alta Vista, use the format anchor:whatever.
• Try anchor:skills +computer. You'll get more than 19 million pages as a result, each with a hypertext link to a file called resume and each with the word computer in the text of the page.
• With anchor:skills +computer writing the results are cut in half.
• And when +resume is added, the results are narrowed to a bit more than 150,000.

HotBot
• The anchor function doesn't work with HotBot.
• You can try linkdomain:resume.
• This brings up one reference only.

Domains You can also search by particular domains, such as .edu, .org, .com, .mil, us, .de and so on. This can be helpful if you are looking for people with non-profit experience (.org), educational affiliation (.edu), military expertise (.mil), or to check up on sites outside the US.

Alta Vista
• Search for the education domains by typing domain:edu.
• You'll get almost 8 million edu pages.
• Type domain:edu "resume.html" and you'll get 210,000 resumes from educational institutions.
• You can modify it even further to narrow the search. Use additional keywords and Boolean operators.

HotBot
• Use the same format.
• Type domain:edu.
• You'll get more than 9 million pages.
• A search for domain:edu resume.html brings up only a few more than 5,000.
• You can add additional qualifiers, also.

URL Want to know who's linking to your competitors? Or, want to find how deeply buried resumes can be? Look for links. You don't need to know the domain, or the person's name. What you need is a creative way of looking for what might exist somewhere.

Alta Vista
• Alta Vista allows you to find all pages with your search word as any part of its URL, including file names.
• Type url:resume and you'll get 147,000+ results with the word resume somewhere in the URL.

HotBot
• Use the pull down menu at the search box.
• Type in the search, in this case resume.
• 153,000 resume pages will be returned.

Titles You can also search by the title of a Web page. This search is similar to a standard keyword search, except the keyword will no longer be buried in the text of the page. Rather, it will be a major component because it will be part of the page's title.

Alta Vista
• Type title:whatever
• Try looking for title dealing with PERL.
• You'll find about 5600 of them.

HotBot
• Use the pull down menu at the search box.
• Type in PERL
• You'll get back 20000 pages.
• Modify more.

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