By Otis Collier, AIRS Senior Trainer

By now, every recruiter in the world has probably heard of the PeelBack technique. In the past, this technique never failed to lead us to even more great finds. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has now caught on to the PeelBack technique and has put up walls to keep us from getting to those great finds.

These walls are known as the 403 Forbidden Messages. In Internet Explorer, the 403 page displays, "You are not authorized to view this page." In Netscape, it reads, "Forbidden, you don't have permission to access the documents on this server."

No one likes to run smack into obstacles, especially when there may be gold just on the other side! Houdini, a great escape artist, once said that there was no lock on the face of the earth that could keep him contained. He would have loved the challenge of the 403 Message.

I am going to show you how Houdini would have faced - and surmounted - the challenge of the 403 Message. Let's say that you were searching for an engineer and AltaVista returned to you several results, one of which was from:

http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/members/larner

You click on this page and you are introduced to Dan L. who is a software engineer with Xerox. After checking Dan's background out, you decide that he is a fit for your position. However, before going back to the next set of results, you realize that Dan's page is a great page to try using the PeelBack technique.

You see a folder in the URL titled "members." There may be other members of the Xerox team just like Dan inside that folder, so you peel the page back until it reads:

http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/members/

Hoping for a return list of names, you click Enter. Instead, you get the 403 Message.

Not easily dissuaded, you decide to use your Internet recruiting skills to dig deeper. You already know where Dan's page is hosted: parc.xerox.com. You also know that there is a folder titled "members" in the URL. Armed with this information, you decide to do some advanced searching.

If you want AltaVista to return results from that server only, you can X-Ray that site (don't forget to use the Advanced Search). Additionally, you only want the search engine to bring back the pages that also have the word "members" in the URL. So your search string looks like this:

host:parc.xerox.com AND url:members

You run this search and over 1,400 pages come back. Jack pot! Scrolling through your results, you realize that the folder right after "members" seems to be the individual employee's last name. By peeling the pages back to the last name, you often can find the employee's homepage, which usually contains all the relevant information for your candidate search.

Houdini would have been proud!

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