Job market: Looking for person or organization?
You might be a recruiter seeking a candidate, a salesperson seeking an unnamed prospect or a business owner seeking an unknown resource. If you’re job hunting, the methods these professionals use may lead you to companies and contacts.
Obviously, getting a referral is the easiest method — when it works. You might also read articles about your industry to identify a contact or organization and/or you might utilize technology.
Traditional and not
Ladan Davia, CEO of Beeya Inc. beeya.com in Irvine, California, uses artificial intelligence to help people identify their optimal career path. Davia sources daily “to hire the right people the first time so we don’t waste time or money.” She looks for new people and organizations through newspaper articles about people and activities reflecting values similar to those of her business, especially as they relate to removing bias in job searching and hiring. She also looks for articles about her current partnerships.
She contacts the article’s writer for more information. If her email to a writer elicits no response, she calls once to make sure it arrived. When she doesn’t have an email address, she uses social media.
“About 98 percent of the time I can find a Twitter or Instagram handle,” she said.
To find an organization, Davia scours Google for writers of articles related to technology, women founders and women in technology.
“If they don’t respond, I don’t contact them again.” she said. “I look for another person in an organization or another outlet.” She’s practiced at calling switchboards.
“When we find the person we think could help us, we don’t waste time,” she said.
Technology
Technology may also be a primary door-opener. Ruben Moreno, who conducts 10-12 searches per week, is founding partner and HR practice leader at Knoxville’s Blue Rock Search LLC (bluerocksearch.com), an HR executive search firm.
“Through technology,” he said, we can get to the right talent pools very quickly.”
He first explores his internal database of 20,000 potential candidates, then enlists his talent sourcer, who is trained in sourcing through technology. However, technology is limited by not “landing talent or giving direct contact,” he said. “You need to engage in a conversation, not just find a resume.” Combined, the team uses both “free and subscription-fee based tools for direct contact information.”
Free ones include anywho.com, superpages.com and LinkedIn.
“Based on our experience, the top resource to identify a person or resource with which you’re not familiar is LinkedIn,” he said. “A few key words, such as the title, location and functional area, will send you to your target population quickly.”
At least twice weekly, Shelley Dunagan, president of SellXSell Corp. (sellxsell.com), a Newburyport, Massachusetts, leadership consulting firm focused on revenue acceleration, searches for people or resources. She paid for lists a few times before she discovered that Google would produce names she needed.
Google is Dunagan’s primary tool, but she said, “I don’t know what I did before LinkedIn. You can put in what you’re looking for, couple it with Google and use many groups you join for contacts. On Google, I insert, ‘who are the competitors of X.’ You may not be familiar with the exact resource you’re looking for but by googling competitors, you may be able to access what you are trying to find.”
She also posts questions on Quora and checks in several times daily.
“It’s a bit of a scavenger hunt,” Dunagan said. “The more you do it, the easier it becomes.”