Vol. 1 Issue 14 - June 15, 2002 - Executive Leads from Corporate Publications


In this Issue...

  • Raiders of the Last Arc
  • Finding Execs through Corporate Publications
  • Searching with Fuzzy Logic: The ADJ Command

RAIDERS OF THE LAST ARC

Secrets of a Corporate Headhunter
By: David Perry
Anyone who has tried to hire a key executive or technical person lately has to wonder if the newspapers ever get anything right! The skills shortage is still in full swing right across America.

Worse, high-tech talent shortages are contagious. A drain in one city tugs fiercely on the supply of talent in all cities. So an unemployment rate of 2% in San Francisco puts tension on jobs in every city across the continent. This is a borderless problem.

With this level of competition for talent, the Web has become an indispensable tool for recruiters. In January 1998, 17% of the Fortune 500 companies were recruiting online; just a year later the number increased to 45%. Last year it was 80%.

Unfortunately, e-cruiting can create almost as many headaches as it cures. The open frontier of Web-based job boards, with the promise of a nationwide market for talent, has become an expensive, tangled wilderness with 40,000 job boards and more solutions than any sane person could ever consider.

Here's how to stay ahead of the curve:

Get JobMachine's free ToolBag CD and order Barbara Ling's "The Internet Recruiting Edge." Between these two amazing resources you will find every tip, trick and special technique for tracking down even the coyest candidate.

Educate yourself with best-in-class training from the industry's top five gurus at the Breckenridge Group .

Integrate Web-based skills testing and certification tools like BrainBench to streamline your recruiting process with active lookers. Why return 1,000 phone calls to unqualified candidates when you only need to return three to hire the person you need?

Drop forever the notion that recruiting and hiring must be done face-to-face. Develop remote recruiting and hiring practices that are superior to face-to-face ones. The plain old telephone is still the best tool, and the technology is already available for video interviews. More to the point, candidates are more relaxed and likely to be more candid when they're "just talking" on the phone.

Banner ads don't work. I don't click them and neither do you. In fact, there are entire companies who will pay people to just click banner ads so they can get their "stats" up. This is a ludicrous waste of money. Web-based affinity programs do work though. Develop programs that build ties and friendships with people inside your company. Leaving friends is the major reason most people will accept counter offers to stay put, not the money. Affinity groups build bonds beyond the job.

Team recruiters up with articulate engineers so they can provide answers to tough questions. Technicians should also approve all newsgroup postings that need to be more technical than job board ads. Use a meta tool like workinsight.com, owned by Perry-Martel International Inc., to reach out to passive candidates through newsgroups quickly. I wrote it for myself but let it out to other recruiters because it works. The monthly cost is less than 1 dinner at Denny's.

Write recruitment ads that are specific. Sell the sizzle, not the steak! Talk about the contribution you expect. Be as detailed as you can about the scope of the job, not the requirements. No one wants to be "C++ Programmer #10893."

Develop an e-letter, a periodic e-mail newsletter, to keep potential candidates interested in your company. Let people log into it from anywhere on your website. Chances are your competitor's engineers looking at your product's technical specifications will also look at your job openings. Capture them from all points. We did this for a client a year ago and hired 68 people in 3 weeks. One key person had eluded hiring for three years.

Internet recruiting is the ultimate test of one-to-one marketing. Effective promotion requires you to make both a logical and emotional connection with each candidate. Present an image of dynamism, youth and forward movement rather than boring, staid or traditional. Unless, of course, the company is boring, staid and traditional, in which case the type of people you are looking for need a conservative pitch from you.

Packaging is everything else. Outsiders cannot see what you see. It's your responsibility to sell the image of your company. People move for greater challenges and the opportunity to play on a winning team and rarely strictly for monetary reasons. Very few hiring managers do an adequate job selling prospective candidates on their company. They just naturally assume everyone's as enthralled with the place as they are. Check all your interviewers to make sure they understand what they need to be emphasizing now. Candidates are getting very good at drilling down and examining firms before they commit thanks to the DOT.COM bubble bursting.

Sell your CEO on personal courting and just-in-time hiring systems that attract and land superstars. The HR department should consult and teach ALL staff how to recruit and interview - yes, engineering, you too - but managers should do the real hiring.

Do you know why your top performers are still with you? Ask them and integrate their answers into your Internet recruiting practices.
The world is enjoying a huge rise in prosperity, powered by the "new economy" or the "knowledge economy". This economy is fueled by brainpower -- the consenting, enthusiastic contributions of high-tech workers. And the more their efforts succeed, the greater the demand for their services.

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About the Author
David Perry is managing partner of Perry-Martel International Author of
Workinsight: A Headhunter's Guide to Finding the Perfect Job.
He may be reached at dperry@perrymartel.com


HOW TO CONDUCT YOUR OWN EXECUTIVE SEARCH
Corporate Publications: Annual Reports

One of the easiest sources of information about an organization's leaders is their annual report, a mandatory publication for public corporations. Many organizations make the report available on their websites under an "Investor Relations" or related section. Non public companies are not required to release annual reports, but that does not prevent some from publishing them anyway.

How to find Annual Reports

Anyone with an ounce of determination and hours of free time can find an organization's annual report. However, in order for these resources to be useful in the day-to-day search for executive leads, it must be done quickly and efficiently. Simply hitting the corporate website and digging around will waste valuable time. Following the CyberSleuthing tradition let's examine how to find annual reports in ten minutes or less.

Vast majorities of annual reports are published in PDF format. Starting from our beloved Google, all we need to do is look for PDF documents within our target company's website which contain the words "Annual Report" along with the most current completed year. During 2002 the search string would look like this:

inurl:sony filetype:pdf "annual report" 2001

In this search there are several likely candidates for the full version of the annual report. This is only because Sony has chosen to break up their report into sections. Notice that files ending in .PDF all begin with ar2001e and then are followed with an underscore and a two-digit number like ar2001e_07.pdf. These are separately numbered parts of a full report. From here it's easy to deduce that the master file would not have a two digit number at the end and we can also make an educated guess that ar2001e.pdf is the master annual report.

Indeed, it is. By clicking on the following URL:

http://www.sony.co.jp/en/SonyInfo/IR/financial/ar/2001/pdf/ar2001e.pdf

it opens up the full 2001 Sony Corporate Annual Report which contains much information about their executives.

Replacing Sony with Panasonic in our original search string:

inurl:panasonic filetype:pdf "annual report" 2001

we easily find the annual report for Panasonic here.

By replacing Panasonic with Philips we quickly find Philips' annual report.

Now all that is left to do is plug in the name of all our target companies into this search string and we can find all their annual reports in ten minutes or less.

A word to the wise, it is of utmost importance to ascertain the correct name of the target company's website. For example, entering Pioneer instead of Sony will lead to Pioneer Middle School, Pioneer Foods and Pioneer Valley reports. The correct way to search for Pioneer would be using inurl:pioneer.co.jp because they are based in Japan.

In the next issue we will discover how to find very fresh executive leads in press releases, news, magazines and white papers.


SEARCHING WITH FUZZY LOGIC: THE ADJ COMMAND

Fuzzy search fun doesn't end with just the NEAR command we reviewed in the last issue. To broaden the horizon a little we use two other extremely powerful search engines, one old and one new, like AOL and Vivisimo.


SEARCH AOL:

AOL has the little known ability to search with the boolean NEAR, which we have used for many years, but also the ability to use the search commands ADJ and W/n.

What is that, you ask?

ADJ means directly adjacent. With it we find documents that contain specific keywords directly in front of or behind a primary keyword. ADJ is different than "double quotes" for three reasons. First, ADJ in AOL Search automatically allows for root word variants or truncation as in "program," "programming," "programmer" and so on. Second, ADJ can connect complex expressions. For example:

(engineer or developer or architect) ADJ software

finds items containing either software engineer, software developer or software architect. Finally, unlike "quoted phrases" your words can be on either side of each other, not necessarily in the exact order found within the quotations.

To illustrate, if we were to use quotations to find both versions of database next to design we would have to use

("design database" OR "database design")

however, by using the ADJ command all we need to do is search for:

design ADJ database

That's not just easier, it's also a bit more accurate!


WITHIN

On Search AOL WITHIN is a command expressed as W/n where n is any number. W/n is a proximity operator that gives us the power to manually set how close we want things to be. It will find documents where specific keywords occur within a specified number of words - "n" words - to the right of the primary keyword. Any whole number can be used for "n". For example:

optical W/5 engineer

finds documents in which optical occurs within five words after (to the right of) engineer - as in optical systems engineer, optical board level design engineer, optical long-haul systems engineer, etc. It will look only for words in order of "optical" first, then any other words numbering up to five, and finally "engineer" but not the inverse.

Vivisimo:

An automated, hierarchical, conceptual, just-in-time clustering engine, Vivisimo is much more than a meta-search. There are many reasons, but the most relevant for this article is its ability to offer total control. Vivisimo offers the use of advanced commands like: image:, title:, url:, link:, linktext:, host:, site:, domain:, related:, and text:, in addition to every form of boolean both traditional and fuzzy like AND, +, OR, |, AND NOT, -, NEAR and ~.

Since this is not a search engine of its own, but rather gets results from Yahoo, MSN, Fast, Netscape, Open Directory, Direct Hit, Looksmart, AskJeeves, Lycos, AOL and HotBot, the advanced commands are used as they would with the search engines directly. The absence of Google and AltaVista is not a coincidence. Also, be aware that NEAR is only used by AOL and Lycos, and that on Lycos NEAR means within 25 words. Vivisimo should handle command translation so that the use of "host:" should translate to "url.host:" for Fast (AlltheWeb) and "domain:" for HotBot.

Clarification on who uses what commands and how can be found on Danny Sullivan's easy reference chart.