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Apologies everyone for the drop off in blogging of late. I'm working hard to build a global recruitment strategy for LinkedIn. I've also went into over-drive to hire a world class team of recruiters in Dublin, London, Mumbai and Sydney (to start!)to help develop and execute on the strategy!

In the meantime here's a little something to try out:

Ever have too many tabs in your life

I'm constantly looking for ways to speed up my productivity - anything no matter how big or small. It could be a new macro that you write in Bing to automate a search, a new alert you create to track a certain feed or hastag, it could be how I take advantage of the new 10gb email attachement functionality in the new windows live hotmail client to share files with friends or member of Irish Recruiters, or, it could be as simple as how I manage my tabs in my broswers more effectively on Firefox.

That's where Tab Candy comes in. This reminds me a little like the new bunching functionality for apps on the the new iPhone O/S that saves me a lot of time scrolling from page to page. Like that Tab Candy allows you cluster your tabs and then place them in easily accessible locations. Just one of many extensions that is helping me win the race for inches and seconds and helps me get out of the office that little bit earlier and off the grid that little more often.

Im looking forward to learning more about the next release of the project with co-browsing and extensibility high on the development teams functionality road map.

New LinkedIn Features

The Google Real-Time Search Tip

The race for real-time search is gathering pace and Google for quite some time have been very worried about the dominance that Twitter have been making in this space.

Google introduced in May a change to their "Search Options" and amongst others one of the things they offer was the ability to search within 24 hours. This is a nice addition but far off real-time search.

However, there is a hack around this that can let you search in the past minute or event the past second.

The trick is to know how to understand what constitutes the parameters in a URL. A topic very rarely discussed in recruitment circles. Most search engines use different priority parameters as well as sometimes different operators and modifiers to search their index. The tilde search being a good example in Google.

However, something I've learnt about this week is the Query Date Range or qdr:d parameter.

All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s.

For example, this weekend I was searching for real-time Lisbon treaty information.

http://www.google.ie/search?q=%22lisbon%20treaty%22&hl=en&sa=G&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:d

Take the end of the URL and the qdr:d parameter and change the d for a n and you then get the engine to display in minutes not just within 24 hours.

http://www.google.ie/search?q=%22lisbon%20treaty%22&hl=en&sa=G&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:n

Big difference in what the index returned and much closer to real time.

If used properly could be used to help study the market you operate in with all the breaking news indexed by Google's search engine as soon as possible. Helped me greatly this weekendto study what was being posted about the Lisbon treaty and proved much quicker than Google news and other news aggregators for certain themes I was searching.

Real-time search will be discussed at the Future of Recruitment conference this week when Bill Fischer gives his presentation on Twitter Jobs Search.

Hope to see you there. Happy Hunting!

PS - To hear more about tips and industry news you can follow my #irishrecruiters hashtag on Twitter

LinkedIn's new Profile Organiser

Ever come across a LinkedIn profile and wanted to save it to a location to review afterwards. I used to just use the built in pdf function when I wanted to save a profile but now LinkedIn is offering a new feature that lets you save profiles, organize them into folders, and add notes. Anytime you find an interesting profile, simply click “Save Profile” and the profile is bookmarked for you within LinkedIn.

You can learn more here.

Try the New Free Irish Recruiters Toolbar!

Do you use toolbars to help your recruit? I love them and use them every day for various different reasons and see them as being an integral part of being an Internet Recruiter. The main reason I use them is to help me navigate in one or two easy clicks to a given program I want to use thus saving me time. Toolbars are not a new phenomenon they have been around for a long time as far back as the Xerox Alto computer in 1973 but most of us probably first came to use them most with programs like Adobe Photoshop, Word and Netscape.

When I think toolbars I nearly automatically associated the phrase with browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Safari, etc. I like to use a variety of toolbars on the multiple computers I use: desktop, laptop and mobile computer, and nearly all of them let me use pop-up blockers, auto fills. translators and email checking to be more productive, etc

I like toolbars so much I decided to build a toolbar for the Irish Recruiters community! In doing so I designed it thinking about what I would like to see added to my already configured Google and Windows Live toolbars and musing over what I think an Internet Recruiter in Ireland would want to help them keep up to date with some of Ireland's latest recruitment news and help them be more productive in their day job.

The answer I've come up with is the Irish Recruiters Toolbar!!!

Maximise and watch the following video to learn more and then give it a go (apologies for the poor zooming but I only got one shot at doing the recording last night!). You can download the toolbar here, It's currently only available on Internet Explorer and Firefox. It's really easy to configure to other setting you may want and also to uninstall if you don't like it.



I hope to improve it in the coming months and all you have to do is hit the drop down box at the start of the toolbar near the Irish Recruiters logo and hit "update" to stay on top of any advancements it makes and get the most up to date release. There may be a way to actually auto-update your toolbar as well so watch out for that. I may be able to make changes to the master toolbar and it will automatically populate on your toolbar and you'll see the changes without having to lift a finger.

Let me know what you think @irishrecruiters. I'd appreciate the feedback. If there other features you'd like on the toolbar which you think I've missed let me know.

Happy Hunting!

Disclaimer: Although the author has attempted to find and correct any bugs in the free software program, the author is not responsible for any damage or losses of any kind caused by the use or misuse of the program. That said the software is using etrust technology like thousands of other software programs and so far has been proven to be 100% safe from any form of security threats.  Enjoy!

Ever use toolbars, widgets or search engines to search in two languages

Well, if you do, then you'll like this.

2lingual,has a front page with two search boxes. Choose the language you want to search in from the drop-down boxes and start typing your query in the left box.

Today I was looking for a Brazilan recruitment blog from Sao Paulo and it helped a lot!

Who wants to learn to build an iPhone job app?

I've gone to a couple of iPhone app conferences now and it's very interesting to see the variety of business men and women from all different types of industries that have been at them to learn about harnesssing the power of the iPhone platform. For those of you who know how to code and have been scratching, and twitching to know more about iPhone's fastly growing ubquitous platform  than more than likely you'll be very glad to hear about the launch of Apps School which will run its first course from the 20th to 24th of July in Dublin and is built for programmers with strong object-orientated programming skills to teach how to use Apple's iPhone Software Deveroper Kit.

The course, co-designed by the very talented Patrick Collison, co-founder of start-up Auctomatic, will be taught by SQT training with Havok intern and Intel Open Source Award winner Daniel Heffernan on board as tutor.

The course is very reasonable at €1,500 euros and the syllabus looks great for beginners. So far those recruiters amongst us that know a little C++ or Java or have access to a developer who you can afford to send on this course it might be a very cheap way to enter into the world of phone apps and launch Ireland's first Jobs App!

Who knows maybe you'll even better the iTie iPhone app that teaches you how to prepare you tie before an interview :) And it's free. Thank God for that!

Have a great w/end

Is the Irish Recruitment Industry Rebooting itself?

For those who couldn't make the first Irish Recruiters Future of Recruitment conference I am sharing out the introductory presentation which I used to spark the debate and learning on the day. Also for those of you that don't already know i've added a small section on what "Irish Recruiters" is all about and a small number of slides on Prima.ie who sponsored the event.

For those who did attend I will be getting out the rest of the presentations to each of you including my "Cloud Recruitment and what is an Internet Recruiter" deck as soon as I can.

Facebook Connect and an interesting new API

The App Wars continue and today I came across an interesting article about the new Facebook Connect App which connects with the iPhone.

This is an interesting move as App Store developers will now have access to a new Facebook API which will be a big win for Facebook and help it expand into the expanding social network mobile world.

Job Boards are already beginning to see the advantages of using the API. While I don't know of any job boards in Ireland that have tried this yet it is happening in other parts of the world. Take for example:
 Tribehq, LawEnforcementJobs, HealthJobsNationWide.

So if you manage a career site or a job board should you integrate this into your site?

Possibly. I'd give it serious thought - especially if you have a niche job board and still want to build up its brand. Most people will probably baulk at not having people register on their own site -  but how many people if they see any for of registration form simply decide to leave the site straight away. I know I've done it many a time but with this App you simply hit the Facebook logo and you have one click authentication and your in. So by allowing easier access you may catch some extra users that you otherwise may have lost. Once in you can see how many of your friends are already in the site. You can allow people post comments to others walls which will drive traffic to your site, you can pull basic profile, change avator images, etc. If you have a Facebook account click on one of the example companies above to see what it's all about and check out the video.

www.Twitterjobsearch.com

This was bound to happen sooner rather than later but as of yesterday www.twitterjobsearch.com was launched by Bill Fischaer and the crew at WorkHound. Lots of recruiters are begining to enter into the world of Twitter and if you've ever gone there you'll see a huge amount of informaiton being spread around at ligtening speed. It looks like another aggregation tool for me like Indeed.com but with a new shiny medium. Whether it takes off or not let's see. That said excellent idea and well deserved hat tip to Bill.

Interestingly enough speaking of Twitter I noticed that LinkedIn now allow people to comment on any edit you make to your profile header. I wouldn't be suprised if we see some Twitter like functionality built into LinkedIn very soon.

LinkedIn and the new "Follow" command in groups

If you are a member of some LinkedIn groups and a reader of discussions you'll be happy to know that LinkedIn have added a neat feature called "follow". It's similar to the RSS functionality that exists in blogspot around tracking comments. With this new functionality not only the originator of questions will get an email update when someone posts a comment to a discussion so will the readers once they hit the "follow" button.

New Facebook App and Automated LinkedIn searches

Facebook's own profile search has been bettered by a recent free plugin that has been created in the open source community, check it out here.

Also worth looking at is LinkedIn's new email search agent where you can receive emails when new people enter your 3 degrees who meet your search criteria. There are 3 free searches and you can get more when you have a paid LinkedIn account... check it out at www.linkedin.com/search and edit or cancel them anytime at www.linkedin.com/search?savedSearchListing

Yahoo and the "Region" command

All too often Yahoo is neglected by recruiters when sourcing directly and it really shouldn't be as it is one of the biggest indexes that exists on the planet and spider and indexs differently to that of Google and Live.

Recently, Yahoo introduced it's "region" command. The syntax when searching for candidates would look a little like this

region:"continent" intitle:resume "keyword"

For example, if you are looking for resumes of a Auditor in Europe, your search string will be

region:europe intitle:resume auditor -sample -apply -jobs

Happy Hunting

List of European Search Engines

When sourcing passive candidates on the Internet most recruiters only use Google, which in my opinion is a big mistake. You should always have a healthy variety of search engines at your disposal to source with... at a very least you should also use Live and AltaVista as well. Engines index differently and in my years of searching I have found on numerous occassions CVs in one search engine that did not feature in another.

Here is a list of European search engines to be aware of.

Using JobCompass to find a job on your iPhone

Interestingly CareerBuilder a few months ago came out with an iTunes job searching agent that works with your iPhone but it looks like JobCompass has outdone them with a far more slicker and more location specifc spider that runs off popular job boards like Monster, Dic, HotJobs and Cybercoders to pull their jobs from...

Check out the demo...

Tip: Use the new LinkedIn app to place your jobs on Facebook

LinkedIn as well as changing its UI recently, also very interestingly did a Facebook on Google move :) by creating a Facebook application of its own that allows LinkedIn users place there jobs on Facebook. Clever.

In my opinion this is a clear first mover play to protect the potential threat of Facebook launching similar functionality to it's own site that take people away from LinkedIn.

Simply called "My Company's Hiring", the app is very basic and though it is branded with the LinkedIn logo, it has absolutely no connection with LinkedIn or your profile on LinkedIn. Quite simply it is a way to post what jobs are open at your company, into your Facebook profile.

To put it into use you simply turn on the application, fill out your company's name, location and position details and where people can get more info.
Simply activate the application, and fill out the company's name, location, the positions you are hiring people for, a description, and if needed, a link for where people can get more information from.

Google updates its search functionality on Advanced Search Page

The advanced search page has been upgraded and now you can search pages in the last 24 hours and 2 months... in additional to the usual 1,3,6 and 12 month options. Pretty cool functionailty if you want to search for CVs that are only 24 hours old!

And here is for the hack for the URL which I learned about from the excellent Tara Calishan. The syntax for the date seach is:&as_qdr=. The variables are d (day), w (week), m (month) and y (year). So the way this works is if you try a search and added &as_qdr=d to the end, you'd get only results from those pages added to the Google index in the last 24 hours.

So the examples would be:2 days is &as_qdr=d2. Searching 3 weeks is &as_qdr=w3, and so on. Now when you start goofing around with the result URLs, odd things can happen.

intitle: tag in Hebrew

So i'm down in Israel at the moment doing some internet sourcing training and I learnt some very interesting things. This is for advanced cybersleuth aficonads...for those of you who want to know more let me know and we can set up a training session on the net or at your premisese :)

Hebrew is written right to left. You can use the intitle tag translated into Hebrew to do a traditional intitle:~cv search in Google however you confuse the engine when you try to write a string that has intitle in English and the word for CV in Hebrew which is a double word going right to left. You have to keep it one language or the other... this is not the case if you use the intitle with other languages which go left to right! So you can use a comnination of English and Russian or German but you can't do it with English and Hebrew. I wonder what it the situation in Arabic?