ResearchGoddess

Incriminating Google Searches – Widow Imprisoned for Searching ‘How to Murder’….from TrendHunter

Your Google searches can be the death of more than your unlucky spouse, as one unhappy housewife discovered. After her husband was murdered, her computer was sequestered and her recent Google search terms incriminated her, fingering her for the crime.

… prosecutors used the search results of a defendant to help with their case. Allegedly, a woman searched for “how to commit murder,” “instant poisons,” “undetectable poisons,” and “fatal digoxin doses,” days before her husband was murdered.
As the Daily Record reports the State Police digital technology unit testified yesterday about those search results. This is not the first time search results have been used in court cases. The latest is that a woman is accused of searching for a variety of incriminating phrases days before her husband was murdered. Among the searches were “How to Commit Murder,” “instant poisons,” “undetectable poisons,” and “fatal digoxin doses.” (dailyrecord)

When you’re working in an organization where there are more than 5 recruiters who need research done, it’s time to expand your research team! Any good researcher will tell you that they can effectively support 2 – 6 recruiters on their own. Any more than that and you’re getting stretched pretty thin. I couldn’t agree more!

Here are some thoughts that I have come up with as a compilation of consultation with seasoned researchers who have developed successful research teams within their companies.

I will use my own company, SearchPath International, as the example.

SearchPath’s structure looks kind of like this:
You can replace the ‘Franchise Office’ with your individual recruiters, or with your desk specialty teams. Our franchise offices are supported by our Corporate team. I am on the Corporate team, therefore I support the offices in their research needs. This is typically what support from Central Research looks like:

As one might imagine, this would be a tough thing for one researcher to manage. Not only do you have multiple offices, but multiple industries which only complicates the situation. Putting together a strong research team in this case is essential to thoroughly support all the industries and the offices.

There are several ways to combat this scenario. The first way would be to bring on more researchers and train them as general researchers. This is what it might look like:

This could get confusing if the researchers do not specialize in a specific industry, or if there is not one point of contact for the Central Research team. The researchers are simply given searches based upon their current workload or perhaps good relationships built with specific recruiters.

A second way of organizing the research team would be to assign a researcher to an arbitrary grouping of recruiters. Let’s say one researcher for every three recruiters, for example’s sake. Some issues arise in this situation:

1. How do you group your research/recruiter teams? By related industry? By number of clients held by the recruiter?
2. Do you train the researcher as a generalist, or have them specialize in one or two specific industries?
3. If your assigned researcher is not available, what happens then? Do you turn to the researcher for another group? What if that person is already swamped?

A better organization of the research team could be represented by allowing each researcher to specialize in an industry or a job function. For example: a technology researcher would be able to support the IT hardware recruiter as well as the medical devices recruiter. A healthcare researcher would also be able to support the medical devices recruiter, and would also be able to help out a physician or nurse recruiter. Here is how this organization might look:

While this is a more specialized method of organization, it still can get confusing. In my personal belief, the best method of organizing a research team is to have one point of contact for all search requests. Think of this person as your proxy server. This individual, probably the team manager, receives all the search requests and distributes them. Distribution of the search requests can depend on a couple of variables:

1. Area(s) of specialization of the researcher
2. Existing workload and availability of the researcher

The nice thing about this model is that several of the specializations for the researchers overlap. This way, if one researcher is unavailable to take on a new search project, it can simply be distributed to another researcher who specializes in a related industry. Having researchers who specialize, in my opinion, is as important as having a recruiter who specializes. You become familiar with the players in your niche when you specialize and can therefore pinpoint companies, resources, and networks much faster when presented with a new assignment. When you are a generalist, while you can support everyone, you generally become a ‘jack of all trades and a master of none’.

I believe that most good research teams are laid out in a similar fashion as this last model. Design your team to have one, or a small handful, of contact points for the recruiters to send their requests to, who then distribute these requests amongst their team in order to complete search assignments in a more timely fashion. This will lead to more productivity, happier recruiters and clients, and more money in your pockets!

I was shocked the other day when I jokingly called our new technical support manager “Nick Burns” and he did not understand what I meant!!! What!?!?! MOVE!! EVERY tech support person, or IT professional for that matter, should know who Nick Burns is! Then I remembered that he is younger than me and probably never saw those SNL episodes of Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy. For the sole purpose of educating all the young up and coming technology crew, here are some videos of the skit. In my honest opinion, you cannot classify yourself working in IT if you do not know who Nick Burns is!

Nick Burns with Jennifer Anniston

Nick Burns with Jamie Foxx

Nick Burns with Jackie Chan

Nick Burns with Calista Flockhart

Nick Burns with BillyBob Thornton

This is a pretty neat tool that I stumbled across today! Stealth Message is a secure messaging system designed for communicating sensitive and confidential information. It protects your privacy, allowing you to communicate in complete confidence with friends and colleagues.

Here’s what Stealth Message can do:

• Encrypts your private messages
• Stores encrypted messsages anonymously
• Allows you to set security options, including self-destruct
• Automatically sends a message notification to recipients
• Prevents forwarding of messages
• Helps to prevent unwanted copying of messages
• Sends message notifications to your existing e-mail accounts
• Requires only that you and the receiver have access to e-mail and a browser

You can choose whatever user name you want, and you don’t even have to enter your email address in order to sign up. All you need to do is make sure that you and your recipient have agreed on a shared code to access messages sent through this system. Contact your friend or colleague prior to sending the message and agree on a secret code that only the two of you will share. You may always change it later (it is recommended you do this by telephone, in person, or through an alias e-mail address).

Here’s how it works:

You set yourself up with an account. Note: you don’t have to sign up with an email address if you don’t want to!
To send a message, you simply click Send A Message, type in your text (unfortunately it only supports simple text and not any HTML), and determine your security code. You can then choose Security Options: if you’d like it to self-destruct (so awesome!) or use anti-copying security.

Then, your recipient is notified by e-mail that there is a confidential message for them stored on the Stealth Message servers. They can click a link back to the Stealth Message site, enter their private code, and access the message. The first view of the message will be encrypted.

The recipient will be able to click on ‘Decode’ in order to see the confidential message. If the sender has established the message to self-destruct, the count-down will begin once the message is decoded. Self-destruction can be as quick as ten seconds or as long as 30 minutes.

Once the countdown to self-destruction is complete, the message will ‘fizzle’ and become red, and the recipient will not be able to retrieve it. Even clicking back on the original link from the email will not restore the message.

From a sender’s perspective, you can actually track when your recipient receives the message, and if it has self-destructed or not. Or, if you prefer, you can destroy the message before the recipient reads it.

The messages are untraceable and there are multiple back-up security systems in place to ensure that the content of your messages can not be accessed except by legitimate recipients. Special options help prevent recipients from accidentally making copies, forwarding your messages, or allowing them to be seen by prying eyes. The only issue is that the technology is optimized for IE and Netscape browsers and some Opera browsers experience a Javascript handling error that corrupts the encryption code. Some Mac operating systems may also experience problems.

How is this a recruiting tool? Consider confidentiality and its importance with some high-level executives. This might be a good way to get information to these individuals without raising red flags to any of their associates. Confidentiality is an important thing and unfortunately there are some bad apples out there who don’t protect this for their clients or their candidates. With that said, you can also use this tool to send confidential correspondence to your hiring authorities. Say you are working with a client on replacing an executive, but that person is unaware that they are going to be replaced. You can use Stealth Message to ensure absolute privacy in correspondence.

Plus, I just think this is a really awesome tool – self-destructing messages, high level encryption, I mean this just plays on the fantasy of being a oo7 spy! Now, I can truly feel like Magnum P.I. on the internet….

I don’t even know when or how I came across this amazing site, but I am so glad that I did! Over the past month or so I’ve read so many insightful articles from Toby Lucich, Amy Winkelman, and Rick Turoczy. According to Toby, they started this blog because they “spent more than enough time frustrated with the shortcomings of corporate life. Work can’t just be about taking home a paycheck. Educated professionals need to find satisfaction in their work to remain engaged.” AMEN to that! As a fellow GenX’er (I think?….I actually think I am on the cusp of X/Y) I can relate to much of what these three talk about. For instance, here are some examples of recent posts to their blog:

• In This American Dream Job, Amy showcases stories of people with dream jobs that aren’t always so dreamy (something most young professionals realize a couple of years after leaving the educational world and joining the work world)
• In Hiring decisions, when mistakes keep on giving and giving and giving, Rick discusses the importance of hiring for your company not just to band-aid an immediate need, but to consider the future image that person will reflect of your company. He says that “person has your company on his/her resume forever. That person is forever a message to the market about your company.”
• In Gen-X Management, Toby talks about how GenX individuals need to be managed differently from their parental generation, and how in the future their managerial styles will reflect the way they were raised by this generation and their personal preferences as a result.

I urge each and every one of you to check out More Than A Living: it is a refreshing glimpse into the minds of young professionals who tell it like it is. Thanks guys! I look forward to more great stuff from you – keep up the good work!