By T.J. Ripley
Keeping tabs on all the activity on the Web can seem like espionage work. Monitoring sites, digging through directories and searching for people is a time-consuming and often laborious task. Wouldn't it make your job easier if you had an undercover agent who could do all that and simply report back to you?
Well, believe it or not, there is a service that does just that. It's called Spyonit (http://www.spyonit.com) and it's completely free.
Though a cursory glance at the site's homepage might not reveal much that is useful for recruitment purposes, you just need to dig a little deeper to find some valuable tools. The same technology that monitors sites to track stock prices, airfares or the availability of concert tickets can be employed to help you conduct counterintelligence work.
Say, for example, that you want to know whenever a particular source company is mentioned on the Web. Rather than visiting your favorite search engine each day, conducting a search and trying to figure out which if any of the results are new, just set up the Competitive Intelligence (CI) spy located in the News & Current Events category. Enter the name of the company you want to track and the spy will report back to you with links to new pages that have appeared on the Web in the last week.
The News & Current Events category also contains a number of other useful business spies. If you're looking for the mention of a company at one of the major business and technology news sites, set up the Cover Story spy. Another spy lets you know when Walter Mossberg's Personal Technology Column is posted and one looks for the word or phrase of your choice in one of 40 different VerticalNet communities.
The other category you'll want to check out is "Swiss Army" Spies, which contains multi-purpose tools. Here there are spies that check the Airborne Express, FedEx, UPS or the USPS Web sites and let you know when your package has been delivered. There's a Generic Page spy that alerts you when any change is made to a particular page that you have specified or when certain words are added or removed from a page. This is good for tracking changes on a company's press pages, an events calendar at a user group site or updates to an association's list of committee members.
Two other useful spies in this category are Vanity Spy and PermaSearch. Vanity Spy tells you when the name of a particular person appears on the Web. This is great for finding the latest pages on which someone appears and the names of other candidates mentioned on those pages. PermaSearch reports when new matches are found for complex Boolean search strings. The strings are submitted to both the Northern Light and AltaVista search engines which means they'll cover a lot of territory with precision.
One of the most powerful features of the site is the way it alerts you about changes. As with most search agents, if you sign in on the Spyonit page or check your email, you'll see messages from your spies. But Spyonit can also alert you via a wireless device, such as a Web phone, a Palm VII or an email pager, or through a number of popular instant messaging programs, including AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger.
The reports you get from your spies are not detailed analyses. You simply get links to the pages where the information appears and maybe a mention of what has changed. But that's all you really need. It's up to you to put the page to work for you.
So indulge in a bit of cloak-and-dagger work and put Spyonit hot on the trail of your next recruitment search.
-- 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.
