Any self respecting cyber recruiter keeps an eye on all the main search engine labs and subscribes to their newsletters to hear what new products are coming out, or in the case of Google, what new beta release they have up their sleeve. Last week after many years in Beta Google News finally grew up (despite the disdain of the newspaper publishers) and became a fully grown product. About time I hear you say! Here! Here! What's cool about this is it's one more evolutionary step down the road to personalised information on the Cloud! A very powerful tool if thought about carefully and used right.
To date when using Google News you select from a drop down box of countries and a set number of categories. That's changed. Now you can impressively choose what categories you want, from a large list of countries, and, you can create your own categories and apply your own keywords to them. This is great if you want to keep up with cutting edge news on the recruitment market. And if that's not enough, they also have a RSS feeder on it which pulls the information to you. Excellent. I've been waiting for this for along time and now it's here. The future is quickly becoming the present.
Think of the possibilities here. If you want to study a specific competitor just stick in their name and store the feed. On a daily basis you'll be able to see from thousands of news feeds around the world any information that has come out about them in the public domain or discussions that are being held about them. Something I've set up is 'redundancies +Ireland'. I check Google News daily. Usually in the morning when I come to work. When a redundancy announcement happens in the market that may result in new skilled staff coming into the readily available labour pool -the quicker I know about this the quicker I can pounce on them if they have the relevant skills for any of my open reqs. The possibilities are limitless. Track your favourite recruitment agencies, job boards and newspapers. Scour for white papers, blogs, or appointments. Hunt for legal, system and economic updates.
Google has come out with another interesting tool, that if applied right will make you a better recruiter. You should invest your time in learning how to use it.
And if that's not enough, they've also come out with their new toolbar update. I wonder how I can use that to hunt for candidates. Any ideas?
