Shally's Alley Live - Getting First Mover Advantage with Layoff Sourcing

All right, hey everybody, it is pretty much around 1:15 PM on Friday, so that means it's Shelly's Alley time. What are we going to talk about today? Well, my colleague Mike and I have been talking a lot about layoffs lately. There's been quite a few in the news. I don't know if you've heard. You probably have been keeping in touch with some of them, but there's articles on TechCrunch, on Crunchbase, Business Insider, Forbes about all these hiring freezes and impending layoffs and even some layoff announcements. So there's a bunch of them out there. What is going on? Well, you know, I have my theories, but I don't know for sure. I think it's got something to do with, you know, VC funding and how companies got invested in, you know, 1 or 2 years ago. And now that money is— well, the investors are wondering, where are my returns? It may have something to do with other economic forces that I don't really want to dive into now. But the point is, for sure, there are lots of layoffs going on. And how do we take advantage of that in our industry? Because these are good people that are losing their jobs because of, you know, situations outside of their control. And we might as well give them a new home that is a great company to work with. So why not? Right. But we do need to find out what companies are laying off before that is common knowledge. Otherwise, we're not going to have that first mover advantage. So that's what I wanna talk about today is finding those companies and that first mover advantage. You know, one of the things that you're gonna probably wanna do is subscribe to a couple of the big, like TechCrunch, for example, and Crunchbase. They have RSS feeds that you can go to and subscribe to, and they have newsletters. There's news alerts like HR Brew that has an alerts or layoff alerts, but you know me, I like to take matters into my own hand. I don't wanna wait around for somebody to actually send me a message or write an article. Again, as I said, we want first mover advantage. So I wanna find them earlier, you know, pick up on them a little bit earlier. So my colleague Mike and I created a custom search engine that we use to track our layouts, and I wanted to share that with you today. The first part of it though is I want to talk about— let me share with you the kinds of searches that you would do. So let me start with sharing my screen here, and let's, let's see, let's go to a Google search. And do some live examples. Here's that custom search engine I was telling you about, but I'm just going to go to regular old Google. When you think of layoffs, of course, you think the word "layoff," but that's not the only one, or "layoff" or "layoffs," but there's more to it than that. We also want to, of course, add the name of an industry, or a sector or a city. Let's say geographically you can do layoffs in Atlanta. Well, that's going to give you some pretty good search results, but it's not going to be as accurate and you've got a lot of dated information because that's just how the Google search engine works. It's looking at the relevance. It's not necessarily sorting by date unless You make it. You can make it sort by date. So the first tip I'm going to give you is using the tools over here on the right-hand side, right there. You can actually change the timeline of your search to look for content that's been updated in one of these choices here. You can even create your own custom range. So if a week or a month or a year are not good options, let's say you want to look at 3 months and not 1 month, you can create a custom range that would start with maybe March 1st and end with, you know, current date or something like that. I realize that's not 3 months, but let's change this to—

there we go.

Okay, so now I hit that and this is much more current. You can see I'm starting to get some pretty good results. So this is something that you can very easily do. You just have to execute this search all the time, and you have to run it all the time. Well, a better way to do it is to look for, uh, to create alerts. So I'm going to show you how to do that, but before I do that, I'm also going to show you that you can do the same thing in news. So this is a little bit different. It's not the Google search, it's more time-sensitive, but it is a pretty decent search. As long as you get the right combinations of keywords, you might want to add some industry keywords so you don't get, you know, all the layoffs. Once you've figured out a good search that works, then what you can do is you can go to Google Alerts and create it as an email alert or an RSS feed. So for example, let's say this is the one that you want to search for. We can take this and just simply go to alerts.google.com or google.com/alerts, paste it in there and create the alert. But I wanna remind you that there's some options you probably want to take advantage of here. You might wanna get this daily or weekly or even as it happens. If you're wanting to do a search for news, then change the source here to just news. You can also limit it to a particular region if you want. That should narrow down some results there. And my biggest recommendation, my, my strongest recommendation is don't wait for only the best results. Get all of the results. Finally, there's a decision of whether you want to do this as an email or an RSS feed. Way at the bottom there, you'll see I have way too many email addresses. There is a choice for RSS. Now that it's there, it'll publish it as an RSS feed. So choose an email address. My recommendation once again is to use an email address that is not your work address. Create a Gmail account, which is free. That way all your news alerts go there and you can actually search them there. And it's not going to clutter your, your, your work account. So, but be sure that this here is what you want to look for because it's, you can always change it later, but it is only going to send you results that are new. Anything that is currently today, right now, when you create this alert that is currently on a search result. So if Google were to find it, when you go to Google right now and search it, it will not send you that. It's only going to send you anything it finds from now on, assuming that you've already looked through the current content. So it's fresh alerts, but I said there's more to it than that. Yeah, there is actually. Believe it or not, those are not the only words. There's a lot of other words that people use. For example, here's a few more. Besides layoff or layoffs, also search for laid off or laying off or lays off, downsize, downsizing, downsizes, downsized past tense. What about restructuring? What about hiring freezes or cutting back on hiring? And things like that. So I made a whole bunch of them here. Let's grab those and put those between the parentheses here. See if we can capture a few more results. All right, looks like restructuring might be coming back with a lot of sports stuff. So maybe you don't want that. Let's get rid of that. That's okay. The whole testing and, uh, trial and error. That's in the scientific method. You know, you've got a hypothesis and you try it out. There we go. So this is much more accurate. So we'll get rid of that restructuring. It was giving us a lot of contract stuff from sports. Remember that I had actually used the timeline search here so that I'm not getting old news, if you will, but this also works in other search engines or just in a regular plain old Google search. You can even use this with keywords that are industry related. I would put those first to make sure that they're being included in your search. Let's say that you're looking for technology or tech startup.

Pretty cool, right?

So these are the words that I would search for. And add, you know, whatever product, industry, you can even track a particular company if you want and create it as an alert in your Google search. I've done one better. I've actually created a custom search engine because I don't want to keep track of all of this stuff here, and I'm going to show you how that works. Let's say that I want to look for tech startup. And this custom search engine, I've created two tabs or refinements. The first of those is just news. So these are news websites, TechCrunch, Crunchbase, those kinds of websites. I guess Crunchbase is not technically not a news site, but you know what I mean. You can see how it's coming up. But why is this pulling up layoffs and hiring freezes? Well, I'll show you that in a minute. And then the other one is layoff sites. Layoff sites is searching just the websites that announce layoffs. Like for example, you might be familiar with Layoffs FYI, or I think the other one is called layoffs.com or something like that. Let me pull it up here in a minute, but here we go. This is Layoffs FYI, and it's got a list of announcements and companies. You know, you can, you can pretty much come back here and check on this all the time, but I've included it in the custom search. So, and the other one is, I think it's layouts.com. Anyway, I'll show you in just a second. When you click on all results here, it's looking for everything in all of that. This is not a worldwide web search. This is only searching Yahoo's website. It's a limited search. How does it work? I'm glad you asked. Let me show you. It is working like this. I have about 20-ish, 19 websites here. Some of the ones that you might recognize: USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, MarketWatch, and so on. And then there's layoffs.fyi, thelayoff.com, and trueup.io/layoffs. Those are the 3. There's others you can add as well, but you can see that these are labeled differently. However, that alone doesn't refine the results enough because if you were to just look at Forbes or USA Today, there's hundreds of thousands, probably millions of pages, and they're not all gonna be about layoffs. So in addition to that, what I did was create some advanced, um, sorry, I'm in the wrong advanced there, some advanced settings to expand the, or not expand, but to, to hone in on or refine the results. And this is where I put that search that I told you about before. So layoff or layoffs or laid off and so on. I know it's, uh, pretty small, but while I'm here, I'm going to reduce it by restructuring because we saw that did not give us very good results. And so, all right, save it. So this is in the extra query terms. We'll be adding those. And in addition to that, so it's, it's there, right there. But in addition to that, it is also added as a search, an extra search in one of the labels. By the way, while I'm here, might as well remind you to turn the filter off. Because you don't want what's called site compression. You don't want Google to make a determination on which pages to bring back from one website because there are only a few websites. So you want to get all the pages that match from all the websites that are on your list. Now let me go back and show you the labels. So the news one, of course, is just going to search those news websites, but that's the one that has additional keywords. And I put those keywords in here as well. Once again, I want to make sure that I'm only getting content that has that. That's why it's working that well when you do the search. The other one is just a— sorry, click the wrong one there. The other one is just a collection of sites, which is those 3 sites, and that's it. I do have facet refinements on. That's where it allows me to hone in on, let's say I'm getting Carvana. Facet refinements will show me if it's under news or if it's under layoffs. So it tells me which of the labels the result would fall under, and it helps me better construct my search. Obviously, if I click on layoff websites, it's going to be labeled layoff websites because that's where I am. But if you had multiple labels and you could then figure out where this is. Now, I'm not just going to search for one particular company. I'm going to search for, you know, keywords that are related to industries and so on. I also went ahead and built synonym called layoff because that's going to search for all of those words across everything. And that one is not applied to news. This already has those applied, but all results doesn't. So when I'm doing example e-commerce and I add the word layoff, it's going to add it here. So now I've got it insured website-wide. I've got it insured here and I've got it insured there. Let's do biotech. See how that works. So here's that list again. And if you're wondering where the, um, search engine is, Let me put that in the chat because of course I'm going to give you access to that. And there it is on the right-hand— left-hand side of the screen. It's right-hand for me, but left-hand side for you. srcn.co layoffs. You can use the search as much as you want. Won't be able to edit it with that link, but you'll be able to search it just like I did and take advantage of it. The only synonym that I have in there is the synonym layoff. So everything else is pretty much just those two refinements. And as I add to this, my colleague Mike and I are going to be continuing to develop it. You'll, you'll see it improving. And, you know, we might have other, other labels and we'll add more sites and so on. So have fun with that. Since I'm on the subject, I also wanted to share something else with you. And that is that I can actually, for those of you that are fans of the Start Me, you might've seen my Start Me page from before. You might be fans of, of constructing Startmes. Maybe you remember that you can actually use a custom search engine as a widget in a Startme page. Let me show you what that looks like before I let you go for the day. All right, here it is. Over here on the right-hand side, I have a widget that is essentially a custom search widget that you can create just by simply adding a widget and clicking on search widget. But you can see this one has a number of search engines attached to it. It's got the MetaCode and the developer Pastebin search and all that other stuff. There's the MetaPeopleLookup with all of the people lookup websites that you have there. There's the Cloud Doc search and my one source that I've been working on for, gosh, I don't even know, maybe 14 years or something like that. I don't even remember if it's been that long. Ever since Google Custom Search came out. And finally, I just added the layouts. So you can even just add this as a search in your Start Me page. Since I'm here, of course, I added the layoffs.fyi and layoffs.com here as well, along with some company intel. So these are websites that will give you other websites that are similar, for example. So similar sites here, Just let's say layoffs.fyi and what do you mean? Oh, it's not part of our database. Okay. I believe that the layoff.com, maybe let's try that. Ah, it needs two Fs, not an F and a D, two Fs. There we go. Okay. Oh, there's Team Blind, Fox Business, Seeking Alpha. Okay, good. Now I know I've got a few more that I can add in here. So that's similar sites, but there's a few others in here. There's a similar site search, there's Spy on the Web, and another one that I just recently added is a Twitter feed. So you can actually just go over here in more widgets and add a Twitter timeline feed and then tell it which account to follow. That basically is in the, if you're wondering how to do that, you go to the display settings right here. So you click on the ellipsis, then go to display settings, and that's where you put in. So I put in the layouts FYI. You can choose whether it's a small, medium, or large. If they scroll, so the small one I found was just a little bit too small, just one tweet. The medium one is essentially, roughly about 2 tweets. And I think that's good enough for me to scan. I tried the extra large one and it's like, you know, really you're scrolling the page and you're scrolling. It's like you're scrolling inside of a scroll and it got a little bit confusing. So I stuck to, you know, this one here. So that's a really cool, cool addition to your, your layoff dashboard, if you will, because they tweet about layoffs there as well as on the RSS feed and everything. So you've got, a way to add a Twitter widget. You've got a way to add a custom search engine, and you've got a custom search engine itself, as well as some pretty decent search techniques. And as I discover more of these websites, I will be adding them to the custom search engine. So let's see if we have any chat questions or anything like that. I'm going to check out the chat, see if anybody's asking me anything. I'd love to hear from you though on the reason why, why you think all these layouts are happening. So what do you think are the, the reasons why, um, there are so many of these? You heard my thought on it. Let's see. Don't have any questions on— no, none on social media so far. Okay.

All right.

Well then, uh, without any more questions, and, uh, I bid you farewell. Have a great weekend, everybody, and start sourcing some layouts. Take care. Bye-bye.