8 free tools that will make you a smarter, more effective recruiter with Johnny Campbell – #RecHangout

This week we had a #rechangout with Johnny Campbell of Social Talent. Louis Welcomme and Mark Stephens joined in with their own thoughts and questions. During the show Johnny shared his favourite tools to make recruiters more productive (we originally marketed this as 10 tools but we only had 40 minutes f Johnny’s time so we only got through eight tools!).  Here they are:

1. Boolean Generator
This is one that Social Talent crated themselves giving you the power of using Boolean without the confusion of creating your own long strings. You register (for free) and the work through the steps of choosing the job titles and the skills you want, then adding some synonyms those keywords, then removing any “junk” and then in mere minutes (depending on how complex you are going) you have the code. You can then cut and paste it into google, your ATS, LinkedIn, etc.

2. 360 social
This is a browser plug in (which can only be used with Chrome) that allows you to do a “deep dive” into your contacts & prospects in seconds . You find the person you want via one of many social sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) and it searches the social web to give you access to all their linked social profiles. It allows you to know more about your potential candidates or clients.

3. Google Chrome Browsers; Johnny says “only use this browser for searching”

4. Finding out an unknown email address
This is a simple but effective search string to find the email address of anyone. Pop “email * * companyname.com” into google to determine the pattern that organisation uses.

5 Mailtester.com
Once you’ve worked out what the email address of the person you want to contact is (see point 4) you are going want to double check. Mailtester.com does just that. Type in the email address and hit check to see colour coded results.

6. Rapportive
Rapportive works within Gmail and Outlook 2013 and basically shows you a load of information about your contacts right inside your inbox. Again using the searching of social tools you can see what your contacts look and on which social platforms they hang out. Another great way of establishing an engagement with prospects.

7. Signals
This is another Chrome add on. There’s nothing more annoying than sending an email to a candidate or client and not knowing if they’ve even looked at it yet. This tool tracks email opens and notifies you as soon as the message has opened or clicked. According to Johnny 80% of agencies recruiter emails don’t get a response Knowing the email has been read just two minutes earlier means that you can phone that candidate or client when you KNOW you front of mind.

8. Using the LinkedIn interests and education search facility.
This tool allows for the interrogation of data across Linkedin to formulate target lists of applicants that have commonality through experiences such as their Educational. Johnny explains some interesting ways to use this function to formulate target lists of potentially suitable candidates.

You should watch the hangout recording to see all of these in action.

There are a load of other brilliant tools and here are a few sources I  think worth linking to:

– Recruitment Geek’s Tools
– Colleague’s Recruitment Goodies
– Shane’ McClusker’s blog is full of useful tools
– LinkedIn Alert tool (which I’ve just added to my own site)

Finally, some very sensible advice from Johnny; Don’t start downloading and using all these tools at once. Stick to trying a couple at a time those that resolve your biggest problem?

Our next show is on 9th April with Mike Clark (LinkedIn Trainer, MD of Really Connect) and Bert Verdonck (LinkedIn Trainer at Networking Coach) on the subject of Advanced techniques for using LinkedIn to source candidates and leads. (you can sign up here). We even have a snazzy new trailer for the show which Mark Stephens created.  I’m “on keyboard” which is by far the most appropriate for me!