Shelly demos workflow tools for recruiting: building custom search widgets on Start.me to link PeopleLookups, LinkedIn, and Gmail, plus Magical, an automation tool that handles copy-paste and keyboard shortcuts. She also mentions a forthcoming 5-hour HRTX masterclass.
Chapters
This is Shelly coming from Shelly's Alley and coming at you live. I know it's a little late, it's Friday and it's supposed to be 1 PM, but it's actually 1:15. And you can't see me, but you can hear me. The reason for that is, well, you just don't want to see what's going on. It's something you just don't want to see. I am laid up and that's why I haven't been on Shelly's Alley for a couple of weeks. I slipped on the ice as I was skiing downhill and busted my knee. So I've got a bum knee, had to have some surgery. Now I'm in recovery and able to, you know, start getting back to work. So I thought I would check in with everybody, just say hi. And in case you're wondering what I've been up to, I will tell you. I have been preparing for an HRTX masterclass that's going to be 5 hours long, and it'll be coming up sometime in March, I believe. So what am I going to be doing? Well, it's going to be a 5-hour intensive workshop on my workflow, and in preparation for that, there are 2 things that I wanted to share with you. The first of those is, you guys know all those Start Me pages? Well, I've been a big fan of them, but I never really had the time to sit down and actually plug away and put one together, so I did. and I discovered something kind of cool that I wanted to share with everybody because you might have a Start.me page or you might simply want to create one and just don't know where to start. Well, I'm going to show you something that might actually want— make you want to have your own Start.me page, even if it's just for this one simple thing. Basically, you just go to start.me, create an account. It's completely free. You can have premium features, but the free account is what I'm using right now. And then you can create these things that are called widgets. I'm going to show you from the beginning here how to make this cool widget that I discovered. Click on the plus button and you see here there's the basic widgets: bookmarks, which are the ones that you see with all the links in them; news, which is the one that I have over here for sourcing news; then there's some notes, to-do list, and you can basically embed anything else you want with an embed code. But if you go over here to the more widgets, you'll see a Search right there. What's so cool about it? Well, check it out. You click on that and you basically can create your own search engine. So I'm going to call it Shelly's Alley Search, just to call it something. And then I'm going to paste the URL of a search engine. All you have to do is put a variable, which is %s, at the end to create your own search. So for this, I'm going to go to one of my favorite custom search engines and we'll just pick that one. So there's this PeopleLookups custom search engine that I've been using. I'm gonna grab the public URL for it and I'm just gonna put in here test so you can see what happens to the URL. There is the word test on the URL. Copy the whole thing with the word test in it, then go back to your Start Me page and paste it here. And where it says test, replace it with %s. That's it. Now you have a People Lookups custom search right there. In fact, I should probably call this Shelly's Alley There you go. And then I'm gonna call this People Lookups. So now when I come to my, you know, start page, which is my new landing page, when I open a new window, I can simply type in my name or my candidate's name, whoever it is that I'm trying to find, and hit enter. And this takes me to my custom search engine and it does the search through all of the contacts. As if that wasn't cool enough, there's another thing you can do, and that is that from the Start Me page— from the Start Me page, you can add to this search. It's actually pretty easy. Just click on the button for editing, and then you can add another search engine. That's right. So let's say you're a big fan of DuckDuckGo. Well, you just go to DuckDuckGo again, test, or whatever keyword you want to use so you can see where it is. The query is— if you know where it is, you don't need to do this, but if you know where it is, you just paste it there. So now we're going to call this DuckDuckGo, paste, replace the word test with %s. And now there's— you're wondering, where did it go? Well, it's right here. There's a dropdown, and I can just switch to it. So what's really cool about this is that you can build a list instead of having links to these searches. You can build a list that you essentially can just drag and drop in here and then activate. So, um, and you know me, that's not cool enough. I figured out you can do this with search engines, and I figured out you can do this with custom search. But let's say that you have another search that you want to do. Perhaps you want to search your inbox or your CRM or your ATS or your LinkedIn network or whatever. Basically anything that has a search box, you can do this with. So if I wanted to say search my Gmail, I I could just go to the Gmail account, click on the search box essentially, and do the same thing. As long as I'm able to get a result that has a URL in it, I can then— um, yep, it's that easy, guys. So this is my Gmail, paste, and then again, %s, add. So now I can do people lookups, Google, my Gmail. You can do your CRM, uh, your ATS, anything. Now if it's password protected, of course when you hit enter it's going to take you to the login screen unless you already have cookies activated. So with this you can build a page that has all kinds of already built search engines in it, and that's what I did over here. All of these have dropdowns. So this is SeekOut and Indeed. This is all my favorite custom search engines. This one's DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Startpage. And this one's just archive.org. I can even search my own internal data, my CRM, everything. Which brings me to the other thing that I wanted to show you, and then I'll leave you alone. That other thing is a new tool that I'm going to be talking about at HRTX that's called Magical. Used to have another name, but now it's called Magical, and that's this tool right here. What it does is it's an infinitely configurable copy and paste tool. So all of those shortcuts that we're used to using keyboards for, Magic Keyboard, um, all those other automations, now you can do it just by simply editing a file. And all you have to do is activate it by clicking slash slash and it comes up. So here you can see all of the different variables that I have set up. And basically what it does is it allows you to expand any text that you want, any text at all, by just using some codes. So for example, you want to paste your signature on, uh, LinkedIn or whatever you do, s slash S, S, and then it pastes it. Oh, looks like I'm offline. Nope, never mind. Sorry about that. It pastes your, um, whatever the text is. So I'm going to click on that page again. There it is. So all of these little windows are basically, you know, boilerplate messages, icons. I've got a bunch of words that I frequently misspell, so if I start typing that word, it'll actually spell it out correctly. and so on. So basically it's keyword shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts. Um, but the other thing which I'm not going to show you here, I'm going to show you at the, at the training, is that you can also copy and paste. So right now I just showed you the slash slash will activate whatever boilerplate and even have variables in it, but there's another one that when you click it will absorb or scrape information from one place and immediately paste it somewhere else. So you have a single keyboard shortcut, like, I don't know, slash slash 2 or something, that will take data from a page, copy it, store it, go to another page, and paste it all in the proper fields. So all that automation that I was showing you how to do with Microsoft Power Automate basically is now pretty much obsolete because you can do it with this magical— so stay tuned, and hopefully I'll be able to see you in person, face to face at least, @thehrtx. All right, that's it for this week's edition of Shelly's Alley. Please tune in next week. I will be much better then and be able to, um, you know, put on a little bit better of a show. Thank you so much. Have a great weekend, everybody. Enjoy. Bye-bye.
