By Barbara Ling, RISE Seminars

Have you ever experienced the nail-biting excitement of wondering how your candidates are doing during their interviews across the country? Have you ever had to put them up in a hotel for a day or 24?

When you send your candidates out for interviews, ideally, you know them pretty well. You know their skills, you're relatively confident they'll do well on the interview...all precautions have been taken, all that is left for the candidate to do is wow your client.

Tell me, do you want to provide a little bit of extra customer service? Do you think it would make an impression if you could email to your candidate a list restaurants that provide the cuisine they prefer? Some candidates are vegetarians, some have strict dietary habits... wouldn't it be memorable if you could simply and easily put together a list of phone numbers within a 5 mile radius of their hotel?

Luckily, it's easy to do! Besides all the great dining guides out there, one can also turn to InfoSpace.

Last year when traveling myself, I was seized by a hankering for Chinese food. The Marriott kinda sorta isn't known for such things, so I could have looked in a phone book. Thing is, which listings were closest to me? I wouldn't want to incur a long-distance charge calling a restaurant that was outside the calling distance (paying 80 cents for a technically-free call was enough!). So I logged on and zoomed to Infospace.

Infospace is a great resource for many, many phone numbers - in this case, for finding businesses and judging the distance they are from your location. As well as trying to impress traveling candidates, ever have some who are scheduled to pull an all-nighter, and you'd like to have food delivered to them? And then you realize they work in Arizona and you live in Montana and have no idea where to call for Chinese, Italian, etc. food? What if one of your co-workers was sick, and you were seized by an insane desire to cure her by sending her hot-and-sour soup, but she lives in Dallas and you live in NJ?

Go to Infospace at http://www.infospace.com .

Click on "Search Near Address" .

Perhaps your candidate is pulling an all-nighter in Middletown, NJ. Enter "Middletown" in City, set your State dropdown to "New Jersey", keep the radius at 5 miles, and select "Find" .

If Middletown is a teeny tiny town, that would be sufficient. But it's not - you should add the street name as well.

Because you placed the candidate, you know where the candidate is working (for our example, on Laurel Avenue, which is the Middletown facility of AT&T). Click on "Search Near Address" .

Next to "Street Address", enter "Laurel Avenue". Leave the default to "5 miles" (as restaurants that deliver have to be close by) and click on "Find." The next screen should read "Businesses within 5 miles of 424 Laurel Ave, Middletown, NJ"

Search for "restaurants" .

There's a category called "RESTAURANTS | By Brand/Specialty ". Click on that, and then choose your favorite kind of food. Well, actually, it should be your candidate's favorite kind of food, but I digress. As an example, Chinese food restaurants close to our original address.

Expand this concept! Perhaps you need to find resume-writers close by your business. Maybe you want to deliver flowers and forgot about 1-800-FLOWERS. Possibly you want to list all the businesses that serve the software industry close by a destination so you can cold-call.

I think you can see why this is a very powerful tool. Not only recruiting, mind you, but also for the human- interaction of "I heard you were feeling sick/pulling an all-nighter/enjoying the interview from heck - have some soup from me." :-)

-- 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..