Tools-2014
Here is a List of People Sourcing, Internet Research, and Social Recruiting Tools and Resources.
For comprehensive coverage and one month support check out The Sourcing Tools Prerecorded Webinar.
Last Updated: January 2014
**Productivity Browser Add-Ons **
- Fastest Chrome – offers “endless pages”, searching for the selection on a number of sites on a mouse click, linkifying URL’s, and more
- Fastest Fox – the same but for Firefox
- iMacros Chrome – an advanced tool, to run prerecorded sequences of actions (macros)
- iMacros Firefox – the same for Firefox
- Search by Image (Chrome) – offers searching by image under the right mouse click
- TinEye Image Search – searching in the Tineye database of images
- Selection Search (Chrome) – expands Chrome’s capacity to search for the current selection in its default search engine: allows to right-mouse-select from several engines
(Using Chrome? Don’t miss the Manage Search Engines function.
Scraping, Parsing, Filtering, and Sorting
- Outwit Docs – “download manager”; offers to store documents referenced on a web page (such as the Google search results for Excel or PDF files); sort the documents by size and by date; save and process offline. Similar to DownThemAll!
- Outwit Hub – an excellent web scraping tool. It “makes sense of” (parses and collects) the data shown on web pages, in cases where there are lists of similar entries, in particular, lists of search results. There’s a free version; the paid version costs very little and is worth it (I think). A lot can be done with no extra effort on the users’ part: collecting contacts; creating tables with data; going over all the search results in many sites offering search; “digging” into certain sub-sites; and more. Quite often it’s easy to clean-up the resulting data in Excel. Advanced users can write “scrapers”. Comparable Recruiter-oriented tools like (Broadlook Diver) cost a lot.
- Outwit Email Sourcer – collects contact info from a selection on a page. It has more targeted functionality; overlaps with the Hub.
- Free tools from eGrabber – check them out
- Broadlook Contact Capture – a free downloadable piece that offers contact collection from the current selection in the front window on control-key combination. It seems to have improved its international contact data parsing.
- Email Extractor – one of many similar email extraction tools; paste some text and it will extract email addresses
- Scraper (a simple Chrome Add-On) – get data out of pages into spreadsheets
- Firebug (a Firefox Add-On) – a web development tool that includes HTML inspection and cookie management
People Aggregators (a.k.a. “Dream Software”)
This is a new generation of People Sourcing Tools. People aggregators are the systems that collect social data about the same professional across the web into one profile and allow the users to search within the aggregated database of these profiles.
While the idea of aggregating profiles is the same across these tools, they vary widely in: specific networks, industries, and locations they cover; numbers of aggregated profiles; quality of gluing together pieces of the same person’s profile; accuracy and freshness of the data; ease of use; search facets; advanced search syntax; correct handling of locations; supplementing the contact info for profiles; availability of export; integrating with Applicant Tracking Systems; and more.
Some tools have extra functionality (on top of people aggregation and search), as an example: sending and tracking emails; predicting when a person may be open to a job change; or giving access to a browser add-on to display the aggregated data while browsing networks. I feel that as long as the main function of aggregation and search is done right (which is a challenging task!), extra functions are not that important. Dice is the only job board where aggregation is integrated with a resume database. Due to LinkedIn being protective of its data, it presents a challenge to all of the people aggregator developers. All of the existing tools cover software engineering in the US; many of them cover other industries and territories as well. All of these tools are paid.
Want to learn more about people aggregators? Ask the vendors for a demo.
- Dice Open Web (former theSocialCV, which was acquired by Dice Holdings)
- Talentbin (acquired by Monster.com in 2014)
- Hiringsolved
- Swoop Talent
- Entelo
- Gild
- 3sourcing
Facebook-Based Tools (paid)
- Identified (acquired in 2014)
- Work4
Social Cross-Referencing
- Rapportive – Chrome Add-On; finds online profiles based on an entered email address: looks up in its database. Company was acquired by LinkedIn.
- 360social.me – Chrome Add-On; dynamically finds social profiles and possibly contact info of the person while on a profile page in one of the ~40 supported networks. May evolve into the People Aggregator category.
- Connectifier – Chrome Add-On; finds profiles and contact info of the person while on a profile page. Keeps and grows database, plans to become a People Aggregator. Large coverage, including contact info. Be aware of its’ tracking the user (you).
- Account Researcher by eGrabber (paid) – finds contact info for an online profile
Email Verification
These tools work on the same principle, “asking” the server whether a specific email exists, without sending a specific email. This type of verification works only with the servers that support that.
Social Job Distribution
Real Time Search / Social Media Monitoring
Real-time social search:
- Topsy – has had access to Twitter’s “fire hose” of info for a long time and keeps this data
- socialmention* (it used to have alerts; not sure they are offered right now)
- Newsle – offers searching for people from your social networks or everyone; has alerts
- SalesLoft – (paid) collection and maintenance of looked up social profiles
Alerts:
Past Search
People and Company Search
- Zoominfo – a long-timer among professional search sites. Collects basic professional information across the web, including job titles, employers, and contact info. Combines the database of professionals with company data. (Predecessor for People Aggregators.) Solid User Interface. Free with the Community edition”, where you offer your data from MS Outlook in exchange for access.
- (former) Jigsaw, now Connect.data.com – “business card exchange” – heavily used by sales people, offers Business card” data on professionals in exchange in users’ data or for pay. Has some mechanisms for cleaning up data by the user community. The % of hits may be low, so combine with some sort of verification before you start calling or emailing.
- Implu – not being actively developed but works just fine. It collects data on public companies and executives from the public sources and offers search. The results can be downloaded as a CSV. Phones only, no emails.
- Yatedo can be here or in the section for people aggregators. It has been criticized for making public access to LinkedIn public profile data, including old data. (I am not on top of the story here.) It’s free. Offers people to step in and verify or remove their personal data.
- Link Silicon Valley – a lesser known aggregator of news and executives in the Silicon valley. Has been out there for a while. Free use can be quite enough.
- Whois – not really a people search but rather checking who has registered a specific site. In some cases, such as newer, smaller start-ups, it’s the only place to pick some contact info.
- InsideView Free Addition has limited professional people search functionality. The product is for CRM/Sales
“People Finders”:
People search, combines data from searching the open web, social sites, and public data. Makes money from referring visitors to paid sites to get more info. (Don’t go to those other paid sites, unless you are certain.) There’s no need to use them all, just pick a favorite. Some data on can be obsolete or wrong.
- Zabasearch – one of the older People Finders; seems to show more phone numbers than some other sites
- Pipl –works internationally; checks user names
- More sites; the quality and the coverage varies:
- PeekYou
- Wink
- Yasni
- Radaris
- Namechk – checks usernames across many networks
Company Research
International Social Networks
Free Resume Search
- Indeed.com – excellent volume of resumes. Has a solid advanced search dialog – which should be used (no benefit to X-Raying). The challenge is that there’s no contact info and messages are rarely read. This can be compensated by cross-referencing elsewhere. International coverage.
- TheLadders – a site that has changed over the years, was originally oriented toward executes, went from free to paid to free again and now has a variety of profiles, not just executies. Definitely worth checking whether your target population is there, if you haven’t.
Custom Search Engines
Look up a set of advanced custom search engines for Sourcing and include in your practice.
Global Search Engines
“General” Tools
URL Shortening
File Storage and Sharing
“Social” Tools
Automation/Scheduling for Social Media Management
Twitter-Based
Please let me know what else should be added to the list. Thanks!