My CollegeRecruiter.com | Employers & Advertisers
By Barbara Ling
Ever wake up one morning and swear to yourself, you are going to find more free resumes on the Internet than Campaign 2000 promises in the media?
Luckily, finding free resumes is not that difficult to do. The challenge, of course, is getting the owners of those free resumes to want to work with you (after all, there's a gazillion recruiters and corporations out there!).
Be that as it may (RISE Internet Recruiting seminars teaches many creative techniques of the above), let's touch upon some sure-fire ways of uncovering the resumes you need for free.
Take a search engine. Any search engine. No, not really - Altavista Advanced search at http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&stype=stext and Northern Light's Power Search at http://www.northernlight.com/power.html are the best for this kinda thing.
The key for finding free resumes is to simply boil down the requirements you need, and search for them on the Internet. For example, a good many online resumes will have the word "resume" in the title or URL of the document. That's the first requirement. Next, in what geographic location would you like your future candidate to hail from? A great way to target that is to use area codes and state abbreviations. Finally, what skills are deemed critical? That's your last requirement in building a simple search string to uncover your free resumes.
Let's try this at AltaVista's Advanced search. Perhaps you'd like to find NJ techies with experience in sablime (a software configuration management tool built by Bell Labs).
Ask yourself:
1. What are the area codes I need to use? Visit Newsdirectory at http://www.newsdirectory.com and browse to NJ's newspaper listing at http://www.newsdirectory.com/news/press/na/us/nj/ - you'll find area codes include 201 and 973 and 908 and 732 and ...
2. What are the skills I need? sablime
3. What is the final search string? title:resume or title:resumes or url:resume or url:resumes) and (908 or 201 or 973 or 732 or 609) and NJ and sablime
Now, in the Altavista Advanced Search box, highlight the query string and press <control> C (that copies it to your computer's memory), and then go to Northern Light's Power search. Click your mouse in the "Search for" text field, and then press <control>V (that will paste your original search string. You'll enjoy: http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?dx=1004&qr=%28title%3Aresume+or+tit le%3Aresumes+or+url%3Aresume+or+url%3Aresumes%29+and+%28908+or+201+or+973+or +732+or+609%29+and+NJ+and+sablime&qt=&pu=&qu=&si=&la=All&qc=All&d1=&d2=&rv=1 &search.x=57&search.y=14
As you can see, Sablime is nowadays not a very popular skill (I maintained it 8 years ago myself when I worked at Bell Labs).
What if you'd like to find something a wee bit more popular, say, java and e-commerce? The search would be: (title:resume or title:resumes or url:resume or url:resumes) and (java and (ecommerce or e-commerce))
The above only touches the tip of the gold mine when it comes to finding free resumes online. Can you think of a better way to spend the morning? I didn't think so. :-)
ThankYou Very Much!
-- 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.
