Quintessential Careers Press:
The Quintessential Guide to Job-Hunting on the Internet
Chapter 5: Increasing Your Visibility and Online Presence

Page 16

In the previous chapter, we learned of the importance of recruiting the passive candidate -- the employed candidate who is ostensibly not looking for a job. Recruiters, employers, and job-seekers alike are discovering new online venues -- blogs, social/business networks, and Google searches -- for matching candidates with opportunities. In an age when employers and recruiters are using all sorts of these Internet-based tools to find both active and passive candidates, boosting your online visibility and presence can help employers to find you.

One of the most basic and growing ways that recruiters look For candidates is though simple Internet searches, especially using the ubiquitous Google search engine. While recruiting for a large software company, Seattle-based Alice Hanson described how she found candidates: "The first thing I do is go to Google and look for resumes that are posted to the Internet. These are the first people I call because they are free," she explained. "The next is members in professional organizations and people listed in ZoomInfo (a site that provides a compilation of any mention of a person anywhere on the Web in any search engine) and on Linkedin.com."

Hanson continued, "We go through our own database of resumes and see if there are any 'live ones.' Then, we target competitive firms that we want to raid and cold call for referrals of people that they know who are looking and get their resumes. If all that fails, the last option is paying good money to search through Monster.com and specialty databases. Monster is the dead-last place we look."

The average job-seeker probably does not think about the importance of Google and the other online sites the recruiter mentioned. Sullivan calls Google "the best-funded recruiting machine on the planet." He also cites ZoomInfo as "the best source for finding employed top performers who are not actively seeking a new job … (i.e., the difference-makers)."

Bottom line: Your online presence is more important than ever, and even if you are not actively seeking a new job, an online presence, in which you pop up in Google and other searches, can open up some unexpected opportunities.

  • Google Searching

    A poll conducted by Harris Interactive shows that 23 percent of people search the Web for the name of potential business contacts before meeting them. In a survey by executive job-search and recruiting network ExecuNet of 100 executive recruiters, 77 said they use search engines to learn more about candidates.

    Google searches are so crucial to recruiters that they hold training classes and share secrets on discussion boards about exotic Google search strategies to find candidates.


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