By Susan Oxford, AIRS Senior Trainer

Specialty sites for searching the Web are gaining in popularity. Coupled with an increase in international recruiting, these specialty sites can really help pinpoint the search process for foreign candidates.

What if you were charged with the task to find "canadates" - candidates from Canada? I've found that Canadian Web sites are particularly lucrative when looking for clients outside the continental US.

In the past, I used a search engine like AltaVista www.altavista.com to conduct my search. To limit my search to only Canadian sites, I included keywords like "Canada" or "Ontario" in my search string. However, these entries only returned results of Web pages containing the words "Canada" or "Ontario." I found a few candidates, but I needed a more targeted way to search.

Another way to limit my search results to Canadian sites would be to use a search string that would only return the domain extension ".ca." A domain address that ends in ".ca," is a site that was registered as a Canadian site.

How, do you find only ".ca" domains at AltaVista? Very simple: you use the "domain:.ca" command (without the quotation marks). However, the downside to this type of search is that you miss candidates who are living in Canada but have homepages located at a ".com" (a company), an ".edu" (a university), or a ".net" (an ISP or network related site).

Neither of my tricks to find Canadians on AltaVista returned as many "canadates" as I knew to exist on the Web.

Luckily, there is another way to conduct this search. Take a look at AltaVista Canada at www.altavista.ca. You will notice that you have the option to search the entire world or only search for results from Canada. When you select only "Canada" from the site's "Find results on" option, you will see that your search results come back from all types of domains - dot.coms, dot.nets, dot.ca's and so forth. And like AltaVista, AltaVista Canada allows for advanced searching… an essential feature when using complex Boolean search strings!

The "Advanced Search" option lets you create a great search string without having to put in the word "Canada." You still can narrow your search to specific locations by adding keywords like "Montreal" or "Ontario," and you're guaranteed to have Canadian results.

Other specialty search sites to check out are:
Excite Canada at www.excite.ca
Yahoo Canada at http://ca.yahoo.com
Canada.com at www.canada.com
Looksmart Canada at http://canada.looksmart.com

These sites make searching for candidates from the North much easier.

One More Tip: If your plans call for relocating a candidate to Canada or moving a person from one part of the country to another, be sure to take a look at Canadian Relocation Systems at www.relocatecanada.com, an online relocation guide.