Shally's Alley Live

Good afternoon, everybody. We are live on Shally's Alley. It is Friday at just after 1 PM, and if you are tuning in and wondering what I'm going to be talking about today, I would like to do a recap of the HRTX Virtual Conference, which was a 2-day event held on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. It was free to attend. The recordings are all available on the HRTX website. I probably should post that, uh, that link somewhere, but if you go to conferences.recruitingdaily.com, conferences.recruitingdaily.com, you should see it there. It was a pretty big deal. It was basically sourcing and recruiting for sourcers and recruiters. So R for R, as they say, recruiting for recruiting. Um, it was about finding and hiring for positions like campus recruiter, junior sourcer, diversity recruiter, technical recruiter, senior sourcer, recruiting operations, recruitment marketing, TA tech, and director of recruiting, director of people ops, head of sourcing, and head of TA. All of those positions. So 12 different positions. And there were a ton of speakers. I mean, like, probably about 32 or so different presenters. Talking about how they go about sourcing and interviewing. And there were also some pretty cool sessions that were sponsored sessions. However, they weren't ads. For example, Eric Jaquith from SeekOut did a really cool presentation on how to find sourcers, and it wasn't about SeekOut. I'm going to share some of those tips today. So if you have a chance, head on over there and check out the recordings completely free. Also, before I jump into the recap here, I wanted to share that on April 1st, I'm going to be doing a master class with HRTX. Let me put the link here on the StudioLive here. There we go. If you go to rdaily.co/shally1, rdaily.co/shally1, you'll see the link, I mean, you'll see the, the registration. What this is going to be, this is a master class where I'm going to cover essentially the workflow. So I'm going to start with building a custom search engine very easily in 10 minutes or less, not a very complicated one, just to get you started with it, building a custom search engine with Google, then how to use a simple one-click scraper to scrape results from it, then put that into a spreadsheet, —could be Google, Excel—how to transform the data with a couple of easy formulas and using Magical, like we talked about before, to copy and paste. Then how to get that into a CRM and set up email nurturing, what to do with your email nurturing. And finally, we'll also talk a little bit about some social media intel or SOCmint, kind of like HUMINT, but for social media. So that's what we're gonna be covering in the rdaily.co/ ShallyOne Masterclass, as you can see down there at the bottom of the screen. So what happened at HRTX? Well, I told you that Jaquith had a pretty interesting session, so I'll tell you a couple of the quick tips that he gave. One of them was on LinkedIn, if you're going to use LinkedIn search, don't use the dropdowns for the job titles. This is for a LinkedIn recruiter. He said it's far better if you actually put the full job title in Boolean and use action words. So the example that he provided was sourcer or sourced or sourcer sourcing in, in the, in the title field or in the keyword field because it's going to provide you much more much broader results. So that was a pretty cool tip that he gave. The other one that he gave that was really interesting, something I've never done before, is an HTML template builder to help you build your templates for email, and these are templates that work on mobile devices. It's free, it's Stripo, S-T-R-I-P-O, stripo.email. Just like Stripe, but with an O instead of an E, stripeo.email, and /templates. There's some free HTML templates that you can use for your outreach campaigns. Pretty cool tip. I went and checked out the templates and it was, um, there were some pretty useful, interesting ones there. These will just help your emails to, you know, be more eye-appealing, kind of using some of those graphic design principles that drive readers eyes to, you know, focus on, on the important tidbits of the page. Um, let's see, what was the other thing that he talked about? Ah, yes, he's— he mentioned something I had forgotten about, in fact, so I had to thank him for reminding me of this. If you're using the free LinkedIn search, there are some limitations to how many Boolean commands you can put in a field. So when you go beyond 5, it actually errors out. So you, you basically get a page of results that shows, um, pretty much shows nothing. So if you go into— I'm gonna, I'm gonna share my screen here real quick so I can show you kind of what's going on. Sorry for the temporary, uh, screen and screen and screen. So I'm going to go into Search, and let's say I want— I'm looking for a sourcer. I'm going to narrow that down by going into people. What he was talking about is here in the all filters, if you look for example at the title and you did sourcer or sourcing or sourcers or let's see technical recruiter, Is that 4? I think 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay, that's 4, so this should work. But if you go too far and add a 5th one, I'm just going to add perhaps, um, let's see, contract recruiter. Let's see, it should break after this. Oh wait, no, that is the— that is— it's 5 that you're allowed. Never mind. Okay, um, let me add— now I'm gonna go past 5, so here we go. Or see, um, talent acquisition. Okay, now it should break. That looks like it's not breaking. Okay, well, never mind then. I guess, um, that, uh, still works. Well, the idea that he gave us is in the event that this actually starts breaking, um, let's see, I'm going to add recruiter or sourcer or sourcing or— I don't know if this is actually going to break or not. Let's see. Ah, there it is, finally! Okay, so it didn't break at 5, it broke at 6. All right. That's okay. So now we know it will eventually break and it was at 6. So here's what he said. He said, and this is something that I read about some time ago, and honestly I just hadn't used it because I basically am using SeekOut and other places, but if you don't have that and you still use the LinkedIn free, this is pretty useful. The tip is if you put this keyword in parentheses, like that, it fools LinkedIn into not counting that as a Boolean, because it's kind of counting it as a, essentially a nested statement. So we're gonna go ahead and do that, and no spaces by the way. I remember that I had to add a 6th one, so let's go ahead and add a 6th one here. Or talent acquisition and hit search. It still works even though I exceeded that limit from before. So we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 terms in here and it works. So that's pretty useful if you're not using the LinkedIn Recruiter or SeekOut tools. Thanks for sharing that, that tip there, Eric. That was, that was really useful. Let's see, what else did he talk about? Oh yeah, he also said it's a good idea to create an agent to send you the job postings of your competitors so you can keep an eye on what kind of keywords they're using on their job postings so that you can use those as search terms when you're searching. Pretty cool tip. Another one, another tip that I saw that was really interesting was a, um, from Brett Fague, a company that's similar to Owler. You might remember Owler. It's a database of company names, kind of similar to Crunchbase, really good for competitive intel. Well, Brett introduced me to GrowJo, that's G-R-O-W-J-O dot com, and I tried it out. It's actually, uh, pretty interesting. Let me put that on screen here as well. It's free, and I created an account and just kind of started plugging in here. Let me sign in. No, actually, I think I did it with my other account. So sorry, never mind, I'll do it without signing in. But what they're talking about is predicting fastest growing startups, and you can see here that they've got some predictive numbers around funding, employee size, revenue, and expected growth, and there's a lot of data in here. I'm going to put something in here like maybe Rakuten. See if it comes up. There it is. They're saying that there's about an estimated $38 million in revenue, about 238 employees. Then they give some alternative, i.e., competitors here that might help you build a sourcing target list. Now, um, when you log in, it does give you the option of searching for a few other criteria, like for example comp— sorry, not companies, countries. So you're not getting, you know, apps that are from all over the world in case you need to do a geographically specific search. But that's a pretty cool tool. Kind of reminds me a little bit of Crunchbase, but not as involved, and it's sort of more focused on the growth companies that are small startups, maybe getting funding, etc. Pretty interesting. So that's growjo.com. Growjo.com. Rojo. Moving on, a couple of other cool tips. So Glenn Guttmacher, my, my buddy, he and I go way back, and he's been a guest multiple times here on the show. He had a couple of Boolean strings or constructs, Boolean constructs that were pretty useful in finding people in our industry. If you're struggling with finding recruiters or hiring recruiters, sourcing recruiters, whatever, recruiters, sourcers, and so on, his tip was to use some of the action words, something that I talk about all the time, the, the organic phrases or forced phrases or natural phrases and action words that people use to describe what they do. For example, he mentioned dashboard or metrics for people that are, you know, in operations, for example. If you are looking for sourcers, well, what are the sourcer's action words? Sourcing, right? Internet search or finding candidates or, you know, those kinds of words. So look for those word phrases instead of limiting your search by job titles because job titles aren't always going to be accurate. Somebody might be calling themselves a research consultant or a talent advisor, and their job is to be a sourcer, right? The, the job title can be whatever you want. So use the action words that describe what the person does that might be somewhere in the profile. By the way, this isn't just useful for LinkedIn, this is useful for Facebook or Twitter and all kinds of other places as well. So what is it that your candidates say they do? They find candidates, they search for candidates, they source candidates, they create dashboards, they track metrics, you know, those kinds of things. So that was a really good tip by, by Glenn. And another tip that came in, actually this was mentioned, I would say, I would say probably more like 5 times. So it was a very, very oft-referred tip, was for finding people in our community, sourcers and recruiters, Quite a few folks recommended the Recruiting Brain Food website, and there's actually a few different sources of information there. One of them is, it's actually a community. So there are discussions, and you can find, you know, people talking about subjects and so on. But another one is in the resources section, a list of online recruiting communities. And so essentially it's like a directory of recruiting communities, like groups on Facebook and meetups and tweets and all that. Let me actually share my screen so you can see how extensive this is. Pretty impressive library of communities. So like in any other sourcing, if you're trying to find people in a particular, um, you know, group looking for the communities to which they subscribe or belong is a great technique, and you can see here there's associations, there's Facebook groups, there's Twitter groups, LinkedIn groups, and just straight up, you know, websites. There's a bunch of them, these are Google Sheets that are listed in here. Another resource in here is a place, sorry, not a place, a list of places to post jobs. So these are just kind of like job advertising destinations from all over the world, very useful. And then there are events. So the first one is communities, like groups, and then this one is actually events, which are conferences and all kinds of others. Now this hasn't been updated, um, I think since, uh, in the last couple years, but it's a very comprehensive list of events. Many of those are still in, in, um, existence, like Elevate, for example, Leap, obviously SHRM. There you go. So these are some pretty cool resources that might help you find people in our community or just network with folks in, in, in our industry. Thanks for that. Hong Lee is the owner of this website, and that is recruitingbrainfood.com, recruitingbrainfood.com. Go check that out. That was actually mentioned, I want to say, at least 5 times that I can remember in the different presentations that were going on. Let's see, there was another, another really cool tip that was a suggestion to use natural language in a Twitter search, and you've probably seen me do this before, and it's essentially finding people that were formerly at a company by using the x-. So for example, xMicrosoft or, and so on. And that's pretty, it's a pretty simple, easy, straightforward search to do. Twitter has its own search engine, by the way. So it's just search.twitter.com, in case you didn't know that. You can obviously search from Google as well, but it's got its own built-in search where you can choose. I'll show you in just a second here, but the idea is to look for something like #xMicrosoft. And this is a phrase that would really only be used by people who were formerly at Microsoft. So you'll find posts, and also you can see bios as well. So these are tweets. These are popular tweets. That's what the top means. Here are the tweets listed in essentially by date, by latest. So this is going to be not necessarily popular ones. This is better than the other one. Because it's gonna be more, you know, real-time. Like you see it's a couple hours ago, as opposed to the top tweets are gonna be the ones that are frequently liked and reposted and so on. But you can also do a search for people, which is gonna look for this phrase inside of the little bios there. And you can see people that used to be at Microsoft, ex-Microsoft, ex-Google, I think was the example that we've shown. You can even add another keyword like engineer, or maybe you're looking for recruiters. Pretty sweet tip, right? I thought that was useful. The same thing would work obviously on other social media. I mean, this same exact thing could work with Instagram, for example. Now for Instagram, you might want to use Google to search, just simply adding the site:instagram.com and then use the, you know, @Google or the @Microsoft, and it'll bring back profiles that have those phrases in there. Same kind of idea as well as Pinterest and Facebook and so on. Just use the site: command. Only reason I picked Twitter search is because their search is pretty pretty good, and it also is— it does allow you to do that people only, which is— you can do it with Google, it's a little bit more complicated though. So I'm sharing all the best things that I heard on the event, all the best tips that I saw on the event. Another one was to look for SlideShare. There's a lot of resumes and PowerPoint presentations on SlideShare. So just simply site:slideshare.net and then put in, you know, recruiter or those kinds of keywords. And what was another one that I wanted to share with you? Oh yeah, towards the end Brian Fink and I kind of got into a little after-event sort of banter about some things that we wish we had seen, and one of them was Brian mentioned a technique that he talks about on his presentations, which is to look for authors on Amazon and also look for reviews on Amazon. So he actually uses Amazon reviews to find people that are reviewing books on a particular subject matter. So let's say that you are looking for people that are, I don't know, Golang developers or something like that. It would be site:amazon and then looking for the reviews section on these books, you could start by simply going to an actual book itself, like maybe a book on Go programming, and then take a look at the reviews, or you can actually just specifically focus in on sourcing for those reviews. The idea being that people who are posting these reviews are more than likely either learning or interested in, in Golang, and they themselves could potentially be candidates. When you click on someone's review in their profile, you click on their profile, you can actually see a little bio about them, and there's sometimes some revealing information. But even if there isn't any revealing information, you can still do a couple of things. So basically, check that out if you're looking for that to be a search It is the amazon.com/gp/profile, so it would be something like site:amazon.com/gp/profile like this, and then you would add some keyword. Oh, I forgot I'm not sharing my screen. Sorry. There it is. Okay. That's what I'm talking about right there. Zoom in on that a little bit. So this is the basic search or the beginner search. Essentially, you need to add to that criteria, of course. So amazon.com/gp/profile will bring back profiles of people who, um, essentially are writing reviews and so on. Then you would need to narrow it down to a particular subject matter, like say, um, I don't know, PHP maybe. And then it'll bring back some results. That doesn't look like a whole lot of results, curiously. But I'll click on this and show you here. Oh, that's interesting. Hmm. So the other way that I got to this is by simply just going to Amazon. This is what I was talking about originally is, and then looking for, for example, for Golang, and you find the book, pick a book, any book. So maybe like an advanced book or something like that. RESTful Web Services with Go. All right, that sounds good. Click on that. And then towards the bottom here, somewhere down the page, you'll see the review section. And the idea is that these people are more than likely developers or people who are learning or have something to do with, with the language, and you can actually see what other topics they're reviewing as well. Gives you a little bit of a kind of like a mini resume of sorts. So there you have it. Those are some of the best tips from the HRTX virtual conference that just occurred this past Wednesday and Thursday. Again, I encourage you to go back and read— uh, not read, sorry, uh, view the, the recording. You can just go to recruitingdaily— sorry, conferences.recruitingdaily. I was going to say recruitingdailyconferences, but it's actually conferences.recruitingdaily.com, and the recordings will be available. By the way, the recordings for previous conferences are also available. These events are free. They're, they're paid for by sponsors, and that's how come they can actually have a free event. So check it out, and don't forget to register for my masterclass. The URL is right down there, rdaily.co/shelly.one. For those of you that hadn't noticed, I'm actually also wearing an HRTX t-shirt from HRTX Virtual. This is a purple squirrel. Hope you like it. All right, post questions and comments. Let me know what you're interested in talking about. And by the way, if you want to come on the show and do some live sourcing with me, you're more than welcome to. Just leave me a note and I will reach back out to you and set you up to, um, come and co-host with me. Hope you have a fantastic weekend. Thanks everybody, bye-bye.