YouTube is a video-sharing website that was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. It is headquartered in San Brune California. It boasts an impressive 1.9 billion active users. To put it in comparison, LinkedIn has only 300 million active users. So then why don’t more staffing professionals use it to source?
The answer is straightforward; they either don’t know how or never thought of it. What is surprising about either response is, that sourcing in YouTube is very simple to find candidates.
So, for example, we want to find a Java Developer. I found a video about java programming. Now if it is about java programming, the person who did it is more than likely a developer. So I went into it, checked it out a little to ensure it was legit and then clicked on the author’s name. This took me to his page and then I went to the about tab. Guess what; there is a short bio and links to several sites. I clicked on one, and it took me to his Facebook page. Once there, the tool known as Humanpredictions got me his email and I was good to go.
Now, of course, this could have been just a lucky one where there was enough info to get me to an email. So I decided to try another, but this time, I searched for Truck Driver. Got a lot of results and clicked on one. Just like before I clicked on the author’s name, and then his about me tab, and once again a little bio as well as links to social sites. I followed one to his Facebook page and utilizing my detective skills, eventually found an email. In this case, doing a picture search form one of the Facebook pictures, led me to his website, which, of course, has an email.
I decided to try one more; I mean I could have gotten lucky. So this time, I searched for Pediatric Doctor. Got some results and found one that was of a person rather than a hospital or such. Following the same guidelines as above, I got to her about page, and there was her Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. Using her Twitter page, I then used Swordfish and well there as her email.
Of course, you can also x-ray in and get good results. For instance, if I use the string site:youtube.com/user java “gmail.com” I get over 9,000 results, all of which have a Gmail email address.
The point of all this is, YouTube can be more than just a great place to view videos. It can be a viable sourcing option that can lead to some results you may not have found before, and by using your detective skills, you can almost always find an email.