By T.J. Ripley
No doubt you've seen those home pages with pictures of kids and dogs and
grandma on a bike. They're reminiscent of those winter holiday letters
telling you everything you didn't want to know about the family of that
college friend you haven't seen in 15 years.
But, don't let these put you off. Home pages are far more than snapshots of
family life - they're portfolio resumes. It all depends on how you think
about them.
What's In A Home Page
Home pages inform you of someone's interests, talents, skills and desires.
They provide links to their friends who share similar likes and talents. And
they provide contact information. These are all traits of resumes, too.
So, now that you're thinking about home pages as the gems that they are,
where do you find these hidden treasures?
One set of treasures is a fresh set of entry-level technical people. Where
to look? Colleges and universities.
Finding College Communities
Traditional recruiting for entry-level people often brings you to college
campuses. So, if you're looking for entry-level technical people, what
better place to search than at the computer science departments of those
colleges and universities? With the Internet, you can stay at your desk and
travel virtually to those colleges and universities, looking for the home
pages hidden inside them.
Try the following Boolean search on HotBot's advanced search page: "computer
science" AND student AND pages.
Make sure you specify only .edu domains so your search doesn't bring up all
the corporate job postings where others are seeking the same people you are.
We conducted this search and got more than 8,000 results. But never mind
that mind-boggling number. Just glance through the first hundred or so.
Within the first 10 results we found the following:
- There's a link to the Illinois Institute of Technology, which has a link
to student organizations and activities, which then links you to the
treasure: a list of about 50 people, their email addresses and home pages.
- A link to the Computer Science undergraduate Lab at Cornell. Here you'll
find links to students who already have home pages and their undergraduate
computer science association. The latter contains an email list and
information for companies attempting to recruit.
- BU's computer science page. One section points to home pages and
directories - of faculty, grad students, undergrads and alumni.
Working the Web
It's a step-by-step process.
You say you need entry-level computer people. Well, think about where they
are. Most often they're just coming out of school so looking at college
pages makes sense. You know that college pages all end in the .edu domain so
restrict your search to those pages.
Since they're computer people and because most colleges organize their
information according to major, it makes sense to look for "computer
science" as one of the terms.
But you don't care about course offerings, syllabi, etc., so you also want
to limit your search so these pages don't appear. Adding the words
"students" and "pages" should help since most people call their Web sites a
home page.
What you'll find are home pages - pages you could think of as resumes.
Finding them is simply dependent on how you define a resume and where you
look.
-- T.J. Ripley is a journalist and Web explorer who contributes to AIRS
research and writing.
About AIRS
AIRS teaches recruiters and high-growth companies to find passive candidates
hidden inside directories, databases, archives and the public Web servers of
over 400,000 companies and organizations on the Net. For more information
about our cutting edge training seminars, publications, or web applications
please call 1-800-466-4010 or check out our web site at
http://www.airsdirectory.com.
