By T.J. Ripley
Phone directories are terrific - if you have a name.
But, what if (like in most instances) you're looking for someone, but don't
know who they are or where they live? What good is a phone directory then?
Well, a typical white pages phone book won't help. But there are other phone
directories on the Web that can. Creative searching is what counts.
Employee Directories
Many organizations keep staff or employee directories in a database and many
of these databases are available on the Web. Most often, though, such gold
mines aren't clearly visible from a company's homepage. It takes a bit of
searching and a bit of creative thinking to find them.
Let's say you need a fresh list of engineers. Try a search for engineer AND
("staff directory" OR employee) on HotBot. We did and got more than 33,000
results. Of course, we don't want to look through 33,000 listings. And, we
can assume that many of these results won't give us the names, titles and
phone numbers of a great many contacts.
But, in the first 100 results, we did find company directories of
engineering departments, academic institutions, biomedical organizations,
nuclear technology companies and more. A more focused search could refine
these results further.
Page Titles
Think for a minute. Some large companies have absolutely gargantuan Web
sites. And, as you know, each page on a Web site is a separate file and each
file has its own identifying name.
Most of us aren't very good at remembering names that have no contextual
meaning. So most of us name our files something that makes sense. For
instance, if we create a resume, we often title it "resume." And, if we
create a phone directory, chances are we'll call it "phone" or "directory"
or "contact" or some other word that clearly describes the file.
So, try some advanced search features. In addition to looking for keywords,
limit your search to page titles.
For instance, a search in
Alta Vista for asp and any file with the title
staff, produced about 300 results - the first 10 were staff directories in
large HR departments and advertising agencies - complete with contact
information.
A search for "phone list" +.com brought only 1600 results, including CBS
Studios (with names and extensions).
Limit Your Sites
Several search engines let you limit your search to a particular domain. If
you want quick access to numbers within a particular company, try limiting
the search.
As an example, we searched Infoseek, for site:sgi.com and got 9000 results.
But, then we searched just within those results for phone, and got only 8
results. One of those pages was MIPS
(
http://www.mips.com/whoWeAre/index.html), which had a contact page listing
names, titles and phone numbers.
Creative Thinking
Consider the possibilities. When you don't have a name, think of what you
want.
Most large organizations keep track of their employees in a database. Will
they call it staff, employee, employ, people, engineer, staf? The more
people who use the Internet to recruit, the more HR departments are wising
up. You may need to purposefully misspell or abbreviate.
There is no easy way. But creativity in how you look at things and imagining
how someone would try to hide a phone directory and still remember what it's
called can help. Be creative, you'll find.
-- 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.
