By T.J. Ripley
People save lists of the sites they go to most often and that they find most
useful. If you’ve ever run across pages of bookmarks that candidates have
saved on the Web you know how enlightening such pages can be. You can find
links to the professional groups and associations that they belong to, their
employers, the industry insider sites they visit regularly and the resources
they draw upon to stay informed about new developments in their fields.
Finding such pages can provide you with lots of additional resources for
finding more candidates just like them.
Now imagine if there was a Web site that let people store their favorite
links on a Web server and let you search through those pages for specific
keywords or skills. That would be pretty useful, wouldn’t it? But also
imagine that you had could access information about the individuals who
stored those links. That would be immensely useful.
Believe it or not, there is such a Web site. Of course, that’s not exactly
how it advertises itself, but we can use it that way.
The site,
HotLinks, serves as a place where
people can find, save, access and share their favorite links. People sign up
for this free service, import their links and then manage them as sites come
and go. Whether they’re in the office, at home or on the road, they have
access to their lists of favorite links.
Besides giving people access to their favorite links, the site also compiles
master lists of the most popular sites based on these submissions. These
lists, organized into a directory called the
Hotlinks Guide, are designed to help point people to
the places on the Web that others have found helpful or informative.
If you’re looking for general information about a subject, taking advantage
of this popularity approach can be useful. However, the best way to use the
site is to conduct searches for keywords related to your candidates. For
example, if you’re looking for a hardware engineer you might want to search
for links related to FPGA or ASIC. If you’re looking for a Web developer you
might look for links related to ColdFusion or Active Server Pages. You could
also search for links to specific companies or skills.
The results of such searches return links to everything on the HotLinks
server that contains those words. For example, a search for Java can return
links to folders named Java Resources, as well as to pages such as the
Java
Developer’s Journal.
If you haven’t yet come across some of the sites your search returns, you
may want to check them out and save them in your own list of favorites.
These sites could lead you to more resources and to more keywords.
When you find groupings of sites that are related to the keyword you
entered, be sure to take a look at the other links that that user has saved.
For example, if you find a folder of ColdFusion resources, see what other
folders this person has created. If you find a folder of ASP links and one
of Perl resources, you could safely surmise that this person is interested
or conversant in Web development work. In such a case, click on the user’s
member ID link to go to his or her top-level page. Depending on how much
information that person submitted when he or she joined HotLinks, you might
find links to the person’s homepage and email address. Then you’re just a
click away from getting more information about the person or sending an
email message.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll find contact information here, but you can
find lots of resources to use and you might even want to use the site for
its original purpose - to save your favorite links.
-- 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 go to http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com/pages/airs.php.
