Many tools come and go, but some have become very reliable in our efforts to better source talent. Sourcers are keen on the advantages of sourcing tools, but many are still learning the power behind combining sourcing tools to achieve optimal success.
Like in the card game Yu-Gi-Oh, you can combine tools or cards to create magic. Yu Gi Oh is a card game that is based on a well-known children’s show called Yu Gi Oh. In the show, the good guys battle using cards that when combined with particular hologram technology brings the cards to life. In some cases, you can combine these cards to do something extraordinary.
One such example is “the Magical Exemplar” a decent card with great power for a four-star monster. However, if you combine it with the magic card “Book of Moon” you can power up an even more powerful monster “Explosive Magician” and in doing so gain counters which power “Explosive Magician.” While it can be hard to do at times, it is possible to win with the strategy, because you can power up the monster at the right time and take down other monsters. Sourcing can be the same way as well if certain tools are working together to create a winning sourcing strategy that creates sourcing magic.
For example, let’s say you do a search and find a list of people who are java developers and spoke at a conference. You get their names and company names. You can use Recipe Creator to create the right recipe (a recipe is a set of commands telling Data Miner what info to scrape and where to put it) then use Data Miner to scrape that info. Then Use Toofr to get the work emails. Then use BlockSpring and the full contact template to use the work email to get enriched info on the people.
So let’s look at these tools; Data Miner is a tool that allows you to scrape data from sites for use elsewhere easily. Its sister tool Recipe Creator lets you quickly and easily create the recipes needed to scrape the info you want into the best format, for use in the next step of the process.
Next up is Toofr. Toofr is a tool and website that allows you to input first names, last names and company names or domains, and get work emails. What’s good about Toofr is you can do it in batch, meaning a lot at a time and they don’t all have to be from the same company. So at this stage, you would get work emails for all the people you scraped. Now you could stop there and contact them via work emails or go on to the next stage
The last tool is Blockspring. Blockspring is a tool that operates in conjunction with Google Sheets and allows you to use APIs that most tools have easily. API stands for Application Programming Interface and is a set of subroutines, protocols, and tools for building software. Like building blocks and different block do different things. You need to know who to program to use he, but Blockspring allows you to do it without knowing how to program. In this case, we would use a template created by Blocksping that would enable us to use the full contact API to enhance the information about the work emails we now have. What we could get back from this is; social sites, personal emails, location, title, companies and much more.
So let’s see we started with nothing more than a list of names and companies where they work. Then we utilized four tools to turn that simple list to an extensive, usable information rich list of possible candidates to target. The four tools again are; Recipe Creator, Dataminer, Toofr, and Blockspring. These tools allowed us to take an information lacking list and turn it into a legitimate list of viable candidates; It does not get any better than that, a four tool combo that takes your candidate sourcing to a whole new level and save you time.