By Barbara Ling

Ever wake up in the morning and tell your significant other, "What, an all expense-paid cruise to the Caribbean? But I'd have to give up searching for resumes when we're at sea!"

I certainly can understand, because sites like Northern Light make finding resumes easier than passing out at airline ticket prices.

Northern Light is a rather comprehensive search engine that is superb for recruiters and HR professionals alike. As well as indexing a tremendous number of web pages on the Internet, it also allows for the searching of special materials such as periodicals, newspapers and more.

Visit Northern Light at http://www.northernlight.com. You'll see at the top several options, including a Business Search at http://www.northernlight.com/business.html, a Power search at http://www.northernlight.com/power.html, a Geo Search at http://www.northernlight.com/geosearch.html and more. All these choices...your first reaction might be, what to use? And when? Not to fear - remember from earlier RISE ezines your first step when using a new search engine is simply to read their Help section. Look to the left of the Northern Light Page - you'll see a button entitled HELP at http://www.northernlight.com/docs/gen_help_where.html . From there, it's a simple matter to zoom over to their resource for Search help at http://www.northernlight.com/docs/search_help_optimize.html . Please read over this material before continuing with this ezine.

Now that you have an excellent idea of Northern Light's capabilities, let's put it to a test drive. Go back to their main page and enter some keywords of interest. For example, perhaps you'd like to find Purchasing professionals.

Search for purchasing resume like so:

http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?cb=0&qr=Purchasing+resume&orl=

Note on the return page the left hand side. Several folders appear that further categorize your results! This can make it easier to zero in on your targeted results. For example, selecting Careers & Occupations at

http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?ho=larry&po=5122&qr=
Purchasing+resume&cb=0&cc=for+Careers+%26+Occupations&cl=
1&clsub_1_0=5440&cn_1=Careers+%26+Occupations&orl=

will bring you to an article by the magazine "Purchasing Online". Thing is, though, that's an article for which you have to pay money (it's part of Northern Light's special collection). Return now to your first result, and instead of selecting "Careers & Occupations", choose Materials Procurement at

http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?ho=larry&po=5122&qr=
Purchasing+resume&cb=0&cc=for+materials+procurement&cl=1
&clsub_1_0=5981&cn_1=Materials+pro curement&orl=

You'll see a direct link for About.com's Purchasing Employment resources at

http://purchasing.about.com/industry/purchasing/msub-employment.htm

From there, a path is blazed to the National Association of Purchasing Manager's Employer's Corner at http://www.napm.org/CareerCenter/employerscorner.cfm , Buying Jobs at http://www.buyingjobs.com and more.

This are great sites for locating resumes, but we found them off off Northern Light. What about resumes indexed by the search engine itself? It's now time to turn to itsPower Search at http://www.northernlight.com/power.html .

On Northern Light's Power Search, one can choose where keywords should appear (in the page, in the title, etc.). Not only that, but one can scroll to the "Limit Documents To" category for speciality searches. Scan the choices now - you'll see a checkbox for "Personal Pages!". Select that, and search for

purchasing
and
resume

in the title.

You'll be returned http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?dx=1004&qr=purchasing&qt=resume&pu= &qu=&si=&orl2=2%3A2&la=All&qc=All&d1=&d2=&rv=1&search.x=51&search.y=21

These are now mainly those of individual resumes that contain the word "purchasing" in the title.

And did you notice that the left-hand side of the page has a link entitled 'Alerts'? I'll leave it as an exercise for you to see what that would be really quite great to explore!

The above is only a smattering of ideas about excellent ways of using Northern Light. By experimenting with the Power, Business and other searches available, you will soon be able to reap the benefits this search engine offers. Take advantage of that.

-- Article courtesy of Barbara Ling. For more information, please go to RISE seminars at http://www.riseway.com/ or The Internet Recruiting Edge at http://www.barbaraling.com/recruiting.html.