Review: The Internet Recruiting Edge by Barbara Ling

Once again I have had the pleasure of reviewing this book, now in it's 6th edition. I last took a look at this material for the September, 1999 issue of Fordyce Letter. It received an excellent review then and read on for more of the same.

The first thing I notice is that Barbara has expanded the book from two to three volumes. Also, although there is a charge for the book, of course, all of the resources discussed in this book are 100% free, available to anyone with an Internet connection. In Volume 1, Sourcing Candidates, she starts out with a brief on Internet recruiting in general, where she writes about recruiting destinations (including some I haven't used - ever used ICQ to recruit someone?), Internet culture, and recruiting ethics. A lot is written about adding value to your recruiting service, both to the candidates and employers. She teaches you how to beef up your Web site with content of interest to both parties, how to create a solution to the needs of your visitors that keeps them coming back to your site and referring their friends. There are also many examples of example emails you can send to prospective candidates and other types of contacts that get results. Do you use autoresponders? I never have but will start immediately.

My favorite part in this first section is the 82 pages of search engine specifics for twelve large public services including detailed information on about.com, altavista.com, alltheweb.com, excite.com, and a number of others. Included are detailed examples, where you are walked through a typical search, for using these sites for recruiting purposes, both searching for resumes and developing candidate and job order leads. These pages will provide hours of fun for any serious student of Internet recruiting and alone are worth the price of this book. She doesn't stop at the search engines. Many specifics searching the newsgroups (groups.google.com), or you can try the communities (www.aol.com) are included as well. There are many great ideas in this section worthy of a try.

To round out the first volume, you learn a bit about posting jobs on the Internet. If you were looking for jobs on the Internet, would you be more apt to apply to one with the subject line:

Subject: Web Administrator

Or

Subject: NJ - Middletown - Web Admin. - Cutting-Edge Technologies

See what I mean? There is also a lot of information on singling out specific newsgroups to post messages (not ads) to induce qualified people to check you out, regional job Web sites, career-focused Web site, association/organization Web sites, classified ad Web sites and your own company's Web site. Included is a template for posting jobs on the Internet.

Volume two is titled: Becoming the Recruiter of Choice. She starts out by writing about a very important topic that Wade and I wrote about earlier this year, and one that will probably become more and more a part of our column next year, the Invisible (or Deep) Web. This is another way for us all to stay ahead of the client-knowledge curve. Here are some of the specialized search engines and other tools that you can use to search the un-indexed portion of the Web, find those resumes that do not show up on AltaVista, AOL or other typical resume hunting resources.

How do you locate company directories or other employee lists from a target companies site? What about corporate alumni? Does your target company have an employee association? How do you locate Executive biographies? Ever subscribed to a mailing list for recruiting purposes? Do you have a need for diversity recruiting sources? What about ex-military candidates? How can forums and bulleting boards help? Where can you run free classified ads on the Internet? Can you locate a user group for your target candidate's skills? What good are online magazines? How do I locate a specialized professional organization or association? All these questions and more are fully answered in this section. A lot of information for sure but you don't have to memorize it all. It sits on the shelf until you need it.

The targeted email section has an excellent example letter we should all use for initial contacts with prospective Internet recruits.

It is going to be hard to cover everything is Volume II as Barbara goes on and on with one good Internet recruiting idea after another, many I have never tried myself. Almost every page has a Web site to visit and an example of how to extract the information you need from that site, be it a resume or a lead of some type, or sometimes raw information that gets you to the next place more quickly.

A few more, though. Do you have a phone number on caller ID with no name, go to www.anywho.com and find out who it is at the Internet White Pages? Robots? Why leave all the fun to the big guys. Use you own robots to locate anything you want on the Internet. OK, I'll stop but I could go on and on.

A lot is written on the recruiter Web sites. Do you have the correct design, the right message, attracting the right audience? Additional information on text and graphics; interactivity; content; search engine visibility tips; keyword tips; header text; image tag keywords; customer testimonials, site hosting options; domain name selection and Web site security. If your site is lacking in any of these suggested items you are probably not getting everything you could out of your Web site as it pertains to recruiting new candidates and better establishing you Internet identity. At the end of Volume II she suggests hiring your own Internet specialist. Leave the recruiting to the recruiters and leave the computer knowledge, site publicity tips, advanced recruiting techniques to the specialists. Food for thought.

Volume III, The ZEN of Internet Recruiting, ties everything together and talks about how you actually make a profit with all of this. She stresses long-term networking strategies versus short-term quick fixes. One chapter, Step-By-Step Zen, actually outlines a detailed process you can follow all the way from obtaining your job order through sourcing and recruiting your candidate, assuming you know what to do from there. Last but not least is the 10 page Internet glossary and 111 pages (3600+ sites) of Internet links and resources of interest to recruiters. By itself, another feature worth the cost of the entire set.

Thankfully, a companion CD-Rom is included with the set that contains hyperlinks to all of the resources listed, plus references to many of the items written about in the hard copy including the examples of email letters, which is very helpful.

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