Why and how can effective recruitment research help your business – notes from the #rechangout

This week we had the very smart Martin Lee joining us for the #rechangout. As usual Alan Whitford asked the questions and Mark Stephens and Louis Welcomme joined in with their own thoughts and questions. Martin is the Sourcing Strategist within www.socialmediasearch.co.uk (which is a Norman Broadbent business). He is also an expert knowledge sharer and trainer on the subjects of data mining techniques, Boolean strings, search engines and using social media for recruitment.

I thought it might be useful to collate together some supporting materials for anyone wondering why and how can effective recruitment research help your business.

Firstly check out the experts in this field. There are lots of really great recruitment researchers and probably the best known is Katharine Robinson (aka The Sourceress). This year Katharine ran a conference called Discover Sourcing and you’ll find a lot of other experts on her speakers page including Shane McClusker and Oscar Mager. You’ll also want to check out Johnny Campbell and over in the US Irina Shamaeva and Laura Stoker.

I’ve pulled together some articles which touch on some of the areas discussed in the hangout.

LinkedIn is constantly changing, adding and removing features – which is a major pain for the recruitment researcher. Here are the 17 Most Important LinkedIn Updates of 2013.
Shane has also just done a brief webinar on 3 Cool Linkedin Tools for Recruiters.
In the hangout you’ll see Martin mentioned a couple of tools for recruiters. If you want the full list check out his slideshare presentation from the Discover Sourcing conference. One tool he did suggest recruiters take note of is the Facebook Graph Search – here is an article from Infinity Social Media on 3 Ways Facebook Graph Search Could Transform Recruiting.
Martin also commented on how a good understanding of Boolean Strings is key to extracting the right results from search engines. Irina has an entire blog dedicated to the subject.
If you are a recruitment researcher and don’t already know about the Executive Research Association I’d suggest you check them out. The Chair is Heather Travis who can you find on Twitter.