By Barbara Ling, RISE Seminars
Have you had an insane desire to find resumes of professionals who worked at AT&T or Lucent or Shell or Pfizer or Motorola or any one of the other 3,209,199 companies out there?
It's actually quite simple. In past RISE ezines, I've demystified how one finds resumes in search engines (simply search for the word 'resume' in the title or url of a document). Things like the title tag or url tag are called "web elements" - they are just different components of web pages (Altavista's help has a great description of them at http://doc.altavista.com/help/search/search_web_elements.html ).
There are several ways of ferreting out resumes of folks from different companies. Sometimes, people will include direct links their places of employment! This requires utilizing the link: tag or web element.
Visit Altavista's Advanced search at http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&stype=stext . Let's say we want to uncover resumes from folks who have worked at AT&T. Consider the following recruiters' logic query:
(title:resume* or url:resume*) and link:att.com
Wasn't that simple? You can add other flourishes, of course. For example, perhaps you'd like to find folks who worked at Ford Motor company. Doing
(title:resume* or url:resume*) and link:ford.com
will yield about 133 pages. But what of the resumes that include the name of the company, but not a link?
(title:resume* or url:resume*) and (link:ford.com or "Ford Motor")
will uncover several hundred more pages as well.
As you can see, using search engines to uncover resumes online can be broken down to simple, common-sense steps. What are the characteristics of the resumes you need to find? What's the URL of the company? How can you boil everything down to simple queries that take advantage of the power of web elements?
When you reduce everything down to simple steps, your success rate can increase dramatically. 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..
