Shally's Start.me Page and Seekout Magic Builder
In this Shelly's Alley episode, Shally Steckerl showcases his publicly accessible Start.me start page (srcn.co/start), walking viewers through its organized sections that aggregate a wide range of sourcing resources—including Slack community lists, Golang developer resources, Reddit and online group directories, event host sites, top computer‑science university lists, professional associations, expert‑search portals, must‑have Chrome extensions, web scrapers, people‑finder tools, email/phone lookup utilities, layoff monitoring alerts, keyword discovery and text‑analysis tools, competitive intelligence sources, website monitoring and archiving services, talent‑pool analytics, custom search engines, deep‑web and OSINT tools, and more. He explains the color‑coded, collapsible layout, the labeling of frequently used links, and how to contribute updates. He then shifts to demonstrating his “SeekOut Magic” Boolean generator housed in his Mission Control (srcn.co/mc). This tool transforms plain‑text keyword lists into correctly formatted Boolean strings for SeekOut, automatically applying the platform’s specific search fields (current/past titles, headlines, summaries) and allowing toggling of OR/AND logic, quotation handling, and additional filters (language, location, experience). Shally highlights how the generated string can be copied directly into SeekOut for broad or narrowed searches, and mentions plans to make the tool a clickable hyperlink. Throughout, he promotes the Sourcing Institute Foundation for scholarships, invites community interaction, and wraps up with holiday wishes.
Chapters
Hopefully you guys are taking a nice long weekend, enjoying the Monday off. If not, well, uh, hopefully you have a nice start to the weekend tomorrow. It is the first Friday in September preceding the first Monday in September, traditionally Labor Day, and I am here to help you celebrate. So happy Labor Day and have a fun one time. But safe, stay safe. So today on Shelly's Alley, I'm the guest. Actually, what I want to talk about is I finally was able to put together my Start Me page. I, I had told everybody about it in a couple of episodes ago, but the problem was that it— when I, when I was sharing the public link, it wasn't um, it— when people try to click on it, it would ask for a login even though I had shared the public link. So finally got the public link to work, and I'm here to not only share that with you but also tell you about it and what it does and what's all in there. And for those of you special guests, if we have a few people that come on today live, please feel free to chat on the chat window. I'm also going to show you the SeekOut magic tool that I put into the Mission Control. You might be familiar— a couple of links here. First one is going to be Start Me page. Which is right there. Okay. See if that comes up on screen now. I think it works okay with— yep, there it is. All right, so there's the Start Me page right there, and I'm going to show you that in one second here. All right, let's go to the screen share. Share the screen, and there it is. So if you go to that Start Me page, once again I posted on the caption there, you should see it's srcn.co/start, and that's lowercase. You'll see the Shelly's Alley Start Me page. There's a lot going on here, but I tried to color code it as much as I could so you can, you know, visually separate the different sections. By the way, if you're not familiar with Start Me pages, you can bookmark this page, come back and revisit, you can save these to your own page, etc. You can also collapse these headers if they are too much of an eyesore for you, so you can, you know, shrink them up and down depending on your need. So over here on the left-hand side is the important stuff. I think— see if that works. Zooming in is kind of a little awkward, huh? Um, I think you can see that though. Here's the most important stuff. First of all, there's a link to the future of our industry, the Sourcing Institute Foundation. We're looking for donations so that we can provide scholarships to people have been displaced and help them become recruiters and sourcers. You check that out. Then here's a link to Mission Control, which is where the Sourcing Magic tool is that I'm going to show you. Link to the Facebook group that we're in broadcasting in right now. Here's a link to my book and the LinkedIn group. I suppose those should probably be ordered a little bit differently. There we go. So that's the important stuff. And then what you'll notice is there's sections which I've tried to label as much as possible. This is a labor of love and it's a work in progress. I'm constantly updating it. If you ever find anything in here that is a broken link, just drop me a note, let me know. But there's always websites that are changing. You can see the ones that are the most updated because I've used a label with a vertical pipe, and those are the ones that I am very frequently using. The other ones I just haven't had a chance to double-check yet, but they're all some that I, you know, have used in the past. And so it's a collection of different tools from various sources. Let me give you a little bit of a tour. On the left-hand side, we start with a list of my favorite Slack channels. We had an episode on sourcing on Slack, and this is what we were talking about. So there's some Slack groups that you can join and websites where you can find lists of Slack groups. So for example, here's 1, 2, 3, 4 different lists like the medium.com one, Slowfile, Standup.ly, and a couple of others. And then here's just some select groups that I found useful in my own activities. Below that you have Golang resources. Go development is a fairly rapidly evolving and growing skill set. So if you're looking for Go engineers, Go software developers, these are some really good resources like events, code search for Go, and some tutorials just to know what, what is Go. Then over here we have the Reddit community. Oh, I just realized I need to probably remove that one. This is from Erin Matthew, hat tip from Erin. I borrowed from her, so I left it in its original format and put her name on it. She's got a Start Me page that has a ton more stuff in it, but I wanted to have this specifically because I didn't have a Reddit section. Then there's online groups like you might remember Yahoo Groups and Google Groups and stuff like that. Every once in a while you might notice a duplicate like this one, so bye-bye duplicate, okay. All kinds of discussion groups, online communities for discussion, those types of things. And here are lists of event hosts places where you can go for live events, they make really good sourcing tools. You can use a lot of times the site command for them. So if you were to go, for example, to Hopin, and you see it's the format is just simply hopin.com, look what happens when you just simply put in start— sorry, not start, uh, site. Okay, Shelly, site:hopin.com, and you get all these results. Of course, you'd want to add some sort of criteria, like maybe Golang, see if there's any conferences going on. Oh, look at that. So there you go. Hopin is just one of the ones listed in here. There's a few others. Then I have a list of the top, I think maybe 40 or 50 computer science programs in the United States. I did not have the time to do worldwide, but at least in the US, these are the top schools, or maybe the schools that are talked about the most. If, you know, if your school is in the top 50 and you're not on here, I'm sorry, I just didn't— it didn't come up in my searches. So apologize for that. Let me know and I'll make sure and add it. Then we've got some associations. Many of these you might be familiar with, like the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, and IEEE. And then expert searches. These are places where you can find experts that are in many different fields. You'll see their bios and so on. Back to the top here, my favorite, the must-have Chrome extensions. Here are the extensions that I actually have installed, including, as you might know, Magical and Link Clump and Scroll It. And here's a few others. Actually have all of these installed as well, but these are the ones that I use pretty much every day. And here's some other Chromium extensions. Chromium extensions work in any Chrome-based browser, including Edge, for example. So if you have a browser that is Chrome-based, these will work just as fine. You don't have to have a Chrome browser. Here's some web scrapers. Of course, Instant Data Scraper and Data Scraper, my number 1 and 2 go-to, as well as some of the other ones that you might be, you might recognize here. These are extensions specifically for people lookups like SeekOut and Swordfish and Kendo and FindThatLead. And then here are all of the people finders. All of the lookups. These are not necessarily extensions, actually most of them aren't, they're more like directory and search tools, but there is a ton here. This is one that you could probably minimize if you're not into it. Remember that the top ones are these extensions here, and these first few ranked number 1 and number 2 examples there. I guess I should have ranked them more through 1 through 5, then 1, 1, 1, 1, and 2. I'll update that later. Usernames, so if you have a username, you can see if they're on social media or other places where they use that username. And then here's some email search, phone number search, and international calling codes. All these are the lookups, so we'll call this the lookup section, extensions and lookups. We talked about layoffs, so here's the Google Alerts for layoffs. and layoffs SYI, thelayoff.com, as well as a few companies where you can create some alerts and other, you know, competitive intel like similar sites, sites like, and they'll give you names of websites that are similar to the companies. So it's not just layoffs, I guess this is technically layoffs and comp intel. How easy it is to do this. Then we've got keyword discovery and text analysis. For word clouds and other types of keyword, for expanding your, your keywords, your search criteria. Competitive information on companies, all of these are really good sources to identify companies, target companies, similar companies, information about companies. You can get reports from the Small Business Administration, lots of intel on their website from places like SpyFu and so on. I'm going to close the alerts over here. Okay, website monitoring. These websites will either push an RSS feed or alert you when a particular page has changed. It's like an alert for, um, well, it's, it's, it's like a subscription to a page that tells you when that page has changed. If you're monitoring competitors, for example, or bios or pages that you want to make sure you don't miss any changes on. Here's some archived pages. Of course, you know the Wayback Machine, but there's a couple of others aside from the Wayback Machine. Website analysis, similar to SpyFu. Here's a bunch of tools like MX Toolbox, and then we've got talent pool analytics, definitions and acronyms. All of my favorite dictionaries are here, and over here on the Fourth column, we begin with my search engine. This is essentially my starting page for searches. So I've got DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Bing, and the Wayback Machine. All you have to do is select one of these and put in your terms in there, and it will go ahead and conduct the search. So it takes you right to that particular search and executes it. I'm going to go back here. So you just choose whichever one you want to use there. I'll show you what the other one is on the right-hand side here. But of course, in honor of search, the ones that are below this are all of the search engines, my favorite search engines, as well as meta search engines, clustering searches. This is where you're looking for similarities between pages. It groups together pages that are similar, and it gives you a way to expand your criteria as well. Some specialized search like Google Scholar and other places like that, database searches. Here are blog search engines and blog host sites as well. Image search, not all of these are reverse image search, I think there's only a few, I should probably label those that are reverse image search, but you know, go through these. Video search, this is looking for text in the comments and sometimes can do audio to text conversion, scan that and see if it can make recommendations, so it's pretty cool stuff. Stuff. Finally, on the right-hand side, the fifth column here starts with my top 5 custom search engines that I've created. Believe me, I've done a lot more than 5, but these are the 5 that I find myself using over and over again. The first of those is a meta search engine of code. So if you're looking for developers, there's no better way to find developers, programmers, than to take a little snippet of code or something that you know they're going to be using, a piece of executable code, and then use this tool or something like it to find other places where that's been covered. So, oops, I got a conversation from Garrett. Oh, never mind. Okay, so let me show you how it works. Let's say we want to do a search for— I'm just going to do Golang because I was talking about Google before. This will take you to the custom search engine, and it's going to search across all the different dev portals, repos, Pastebins, Cloud Docs, code search databases, and a couple of the bigger communities like dev.to and go.dev. Speakers, bios, and also top universities, that list of 50 universities, it searches all of those for examples of code and code bases and, you know, pasted code and so on. So, you know, what, what you want to do here is not use something silly like Golang because that's a language. We want to actually use a little piece of code. So if you were to go to one of these, for example, and look at the actual code and executables, you'd be able to extract something. So make it something related to, you know, if you're working on a shopping cart, your company's working on optimization, or etc. You know, find a piece of code that's related to that and then use that as your search, as your keyword search. The other one that's on here is a people lookup. So this is like a meta code search engine, but for all the websites that have phone numbers and email addresses. So basically pretty much everything on this column here is searchable here, and maybe not everything, but almost everything. So if I switch over to the people lookups, here you can put in a job title and get lists of names that are associated to that. You can put in a company, get lists of names, or you can put in a name and get some contact information potentially. I'm going to put in here my name because I don't want to embarrass anyone else. And here you see how it works. There's contacts, speakers, homepages. I'm just going to use the all results here, and you see it's essentially looked for me in True People Search, uh, Radaris, About Me, ZoomInfo, etc. If you were to use a job title like Golang or Go developer, same thing. It just looks for people that have that in the directory lookups and all these different places. So it's like a people search engine, if you will. It's a people meta search engine. Third one is a cloud doc. So I'm not going to demo this, but if you choose this and put in a keyword, it's going to find all of the documents from the websites that are cloud hosts like Box, Dropbox, SlideShare, Google Docs, OneDrive, all of those. So use basically any keyword you want, including, oh heck, why not? Let's do resume. So you can see what I'm talking about. These are all the different hosts essentially. And you can also look for file types, spreadsheets, PDFs, even images as well. The fourth one is my One Source Mega Search, and this is a combined search engine that essentially tries to target all profiles, not just people lookup databases, but LinkedIn, Facebook bios, all of the bios. And you can play around with that one. And the layoffs, this is a search engine for finding layoffs. So let's put in here, um, let's say Wayfair and see what's been going on with them. So it looks through all the layoff websites and announcements and brings you back any information about layoffs that quote Wayfair. You can also use an industry keyword like, for example, travel or hospitality, and it's going to look for layoffs in the hospitality industry, healthcare, etc. So that's that. Now below that, we have some pretty advanced stuff. We have a list of some of the better custom search engines. Some of these are mine, some of these are borrowed, but they're definitely search engines, custom search engines that I use, and I haven't had time to put them up here, but they're still really good. And some black hat sourcing, things like Census and Spyce, Spiderfoot, and Malteo. If you don't know what these are, reach out to me. We've done some demos on these in the past, but there's a bunch of other things here that are, um, they go into much deeper sourcing than what you normally see out in the forums. So we've got that, and then we've got some additional code search. These are places that are independent code search, search engines and communities like DevTool is in here as well. Deep web resources and a list of search hacks. This is literally my playground as I test things out and I find a template that works for something, I'll put it in here. And sometimes these become obsolete, but it's an experimental area, if you will. And then lastly, I've got my OSINT tools, open source intelligence, as well as SOCMINT, which includes all the cloud docs, patents, and all that. So that is the entire thing. If you're wondering what I'm talking about, this is my Start Me page. And you can see right there below, it is srcn.co/start. That's the public view, and I know it works now. Apologies, last time it didn't work. It was, uh, still asking you to log in. Doesn't do that anymore. Go ahead and bookmark it and have fun with it. The other thing that I wanted to show you today is my sourcing magic for SeekOut. Now this is just for SeekOut. Y'all know I'm a huge geek about SeekOut. I use it pretty much every day, big supporter, have contributed a lot to, to their, their code base and to developing the, the suite of solutions. But I want to show you this one thing that I created. This is part of my Mission Control. So going back to Shelly's Alley, you'll see it on the important stuff. It'll say the sourcing method Mission Control. Or you can just go to srcn.co/mc, just like the srcn.co/start, it's srcn.co/mc for mission control. That's gonna take you to this mission control here I'm going to share just now. You'll probably land on the start page right here. Now keep in mind, you cannot edit this because if you edit this, you'd be editing the original for everybody. We lock it down. If for you to use it, you have to make a copy for yourself. So that's why I have people land right here and highlight this. Simply go to the file and make a copy, and this now saves it in your Gmail or your Google Apps, and you can do whatever you want with that version. It doesn't edit this one, but you cannot edit. So if you ask me for permission to edit, it will be denied. I'm not going to do that, but you can make a copy. So what I'm here to show you is the new one, which is this SeekOut Magic right here. And I'm going to highlight it. Ooh, that's a terrible color for highlighting it. How about that? There we go. There's my SeekOut Magic. So you can tap this, click this, whatever you want to call it. And it'll take you over here to the tab. All of these tabs will take you over here and here's the SeekOut Magic. For those of you that might've been familiar with my Mission Control before, there's the Boolean creator, which if you paste in plain text keywords, if you have a list of keywords from your job titles or company names or locations or jargon or wherever you get it, it actually builds your Boolean syntax for you, your logical conjunction or your logical disjunction. It builds it for you so that you can avoid mistakes. Mistakes like not having the right parentheses or not capitalizing the OR or not using quotation marks. So you can add quotation marks simply by adding them here, and it will add them all throughout if you need them or remove if you don't. You're going to really only need them if you have phrases. So if you were going to do something here like software engineer or Go developer or Java, Japa, programmer, and so on. You can see how it starts to build that out, and it's using the quotation marks. You can toggle from OR to AND and require these all to be included in your search, and you can also use NOT if you're trying to remove them. However, that's not very practical. Usually I'm using this for OR statements. Now that's all fun and dandy. You might remember this, but but here's the cool part. I've built a clone of this that's specifically for SeekOut, and I changed the color so you can tell over here, it just says for SeekOut use only. The reason that it's for SeekOut use only is that it uses the exact same logic, but it includes my magic formula for SeekOut. So I'm going to go ahead and remove, I don't know, most of these so that you can see it working and zoom in a little bit here once again so you can see it working. What this is doing is it's putting in the position description or current title or past title or summary or headline logic into the search, and then it's repeating that logic for every one of the keywords. So if you had in here, let's say software engineer, computer programmer, web developer, or application developer, for example, it's going to use that same phrase in all of these iterations. Remember that when you use phrases, you probably need to add the quotation marks. So what's really impressive about this is that you just copy this from here and go directly into SeekOut and type it in as a search. And it works. Now, keep in mind, this is the magic search. So this is including current and past titles, headlines, summaries, et cetera. It's going to be a little bit more all-encompassing, casting a bit of a wider net than you might be used to. If you want to do only current title, you probably don't need this, or you can adapt the formula. Let me know if you have any trouble adapting it to, you know, to use just the commands that you want. But I use this as a way to cast a wide net when I'm already kind of running out of leads. And in order to narrow this very broad search, what I would do is I would add additional criteria like some keyword that might be relevant to maybe the technology or the industry or something like that. Looks like I left an open quotation in here somewhere, so I'm going to fix that in a minute. There we go. What was I going to add? Oh yeah, a language. That's right. You can add a language here or something like that. Let's add Python and that'll narrow it down a little bit. Actually a lot better. So you can do something like that. Now, you know, you want to narrow it down a lot more, which you can use are some of the location filters, some of the experience filters, etc. So have fun with it and, you know, try different things. I just realized I told you I was going to fix it and then I didn't. Uh, you know what, I'm going to fix it later. But, you know, here's the source code if you want to look at it and just essentially tweak it to have different commands. So the magic is you put in a couple of keywords or a couple phrases and it becomes a powerful instant search for SeekOut. How cool is that? Next up, I'm working on making this a hyperlink. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it, but I'm going to try. It's a lot more complicated because you have to not only build a hyperlink, but you also have to build the equation for the hyperlink, and that might break things, but it's probably worth doing so that I can just click it and it'll essentially take me right into— see, yeah, I'm that lazy. I don't even want to copy and paste. I just want to click. That's how lazy I am. But anyways, so that is my sourcing magic in SeekOut. Coming back over to Shelly's Alley over here and see if we have anything coming up on chat. Let's see, not a lot of questions. If you're wondering where my start page link is, it's on the video right there, Shelly Start Me page, right underneath that, right there. So if you're just joining us, uh, we're about wrapping up. We talked about the Start Me page that is finally public. and we talked about the sourcing method magic string for SeekOut specifically. Also, the sourcing method has the, you know, regular Boolean magic tool as well. Well, that concludes Shelly's Alley for today. Uh, I'm— hopefully you guys are ending your day early or you've already ended your day because we're headed into a long weekend here in the United States. Happy Labor Day. Stay safe. Love you guys. And if you want to be a guest on the show, you know where to find me. Drop me a note. I'm taking requests. Talk to you guys. Oh, somebody's asking about the money. sourcingfoundation.org. sourcingfoundation.org. All right, talk to you guys next Friday. Bye-bye.
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