ResearchGoddess

Over the past eight years, I’ve gone from working with search and placement firms to working with corporate recruitment organizations, conducting research for high tech industries, financial services, construction, PR & marketing, and telecommunications among others. I’ve blogged, tweeted, Facebooked, LinkedIn, and shot video in hopes of sharing knowledge with all of the wonderfully interesting people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting throughout my career. My Research Goddess blog grew wings and took off, and helped me establish a well-known and well-respected online presence. Each chapter of my professional career has ended with a paragraph leading seamlessly into the next chapter. And the end of this chapter is certainly no exception…

Next week, I will be joining ERE Media, Inc. as the Editor for The Fordyce Letter as well as The Source Newsletter. I will also be helping out with organizing the Fordyce Forum and SourceCon conferences. I’ve had a long-standing relationship with the founders of SourceCon, serving as the editor for the newsletter since 2007 after the first conference was put on. When ERE Media purchased SourceCon last year, I continued in this role on a voluntary basis, and when the opportunity came recently to join ERE as an employee and also take on The Fordyce Letter, I couldn’t say no! I’m super excited about this opportunity – not only will I get to continue working with SourceCon, but I will also get to return to my roots by working closely once again with recruitment search firms and helping bring relevant news and information to both worlds.

As the daughter of an English teacher and a card-carrying member of the Grammar Police, being an editor is a natural fit for me. This new chapter is an ideal next step for my career – I have the opportunity to be a change agent in sourcing and a part of the grand tradition of The Fordyce Letter. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, The Fordyce Letter has been the gold standard for search and placement firms for the last four decades. It was purchased by Paul Hawkinson in 1980, and a few years ago ERE acquired it from Hawkinson. The newsletter has always delivered high quality articles from some of the most successful search professionals in the industry, and I intend to see this continue.

I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed my time with AT&T – I have learned and grown so much professionally over the last year and I am grateful for all of the wonderful relationships I have been privileged to build while there. My experience with AT&T I really believe will help me be successful in my new role. I will miss my AT&T colleagues, but as I’ve said before, changing companies doesn’t mean friendships end! I plan to keep in touch with everyone there and hope to see many of you around the conference circuit.

My first duty with ERE will be attending the Fordyce Forum next week in Las Vegas. I am looking forward to reconnecting with those of you who will be there.

Yesterday, I spent about 30 minutes in the Arbita Sourcing Lab at SourceCon showing the participants how to search Twitter profiles. We were supposed to get into how to manage and clean up our Twitter friends as well, but we ran out of time. As I mentioned in the session, here are some of the resources I had lined up to share with the lab participants. Enjoy!

MyCleenr – sorts your friends by their last tweets, and allows you to get rid off all the inactive and useless accounts that you are following. However, it only works if you’re following less than 700 people.

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Friend Or Follow – searches to find accounts you follow but that don’t follow you back. Sortable by Username, Name, Location, # of followers or # following, last tweet, and account age. Great tool for looking at reciprocity.

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Twitoria – allows you to quickly view the accounts you follow sorted by their last tweet. You can sort from 1 day up to 1 year. One of my favorite tools, but unfortunately the website doesn’t always work.

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UnTweeps – unfollows accounts that don’t have much activity. Enter the number of days in the past you want to check and then check off the accounts you want to unfollow. You can use this resouce up to three times per month for free; after that, they start charging.

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Tweepler – lists out new followers and classify them in one of two “buckets”: Follow (meaning you wish to follow them back) and Ignore (meaning you don’t wish to follow them and want to archive them out of the way, reducing clutter). Gives you a quick snapshot of each person’s profile & recent tweets. Quick and easy way to manage your followers, especially if you get lots of new followers each day.

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TwitIn (BuzzOm) – log in with your Twitter account, and you can follow new people, flush those who aren’t following you, or reciprocate follow to those who are following you. You also have the option to flush and block users from following you back. Good tool for a quick clean sweep. Some interesting features:

• Lock: “locks” certain results so they do not come up in future searches
• Grow: provides you the list of people who are likely to follow you back (cool)
• Cross Follow: shows data for either all of a user’s followers or all of the users they are following to allow you to add to yours (sort of like Twiangulate)

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Tweepi – Good if you have multiple criteria on which to remove a user. More robust and customizable results. You can use it to Flush, Reciprocate, and Cleanup. You can also check out an interesting profile and bulk-follow all of their followers using Geeky Follow. Very thorough tool that lets you sort your followers by so many categories, not limited to:

• Location
• # of followers or following
• # of updates
• times retweeted by others
• last tweeted

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Do you know of any other Twitter cleanup tools? Please leave a comment with a link!

Earlier today, I spent about 30 minutes in the Arbita Sourcing Lab at SourceCon showing the participants how to search Twitter profiles and clean/manage their followers. We had fun and learned how to make good use of the information that people provide in their bios to aid in our candidate searches. Below are some of the resources I shared with the lab participants. Enjoy!

Tweepsearch – allows people on Twitter to search their followers bio and location information. Twitter doesn’t currently have a bio search and as your Twitter network grows, it’s nice to be able to look through your tweeps. Limited advanced Boolean search (i.e. no near: location search). This is a good service be cause it is:

• Sortable by username, # of followers, or # followed
• Able to download search results to .csv file

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Tweepz – does the same thing as Tweepsearch, but allows you to create an RSS feed from your search results. You can:

• Use advanced Boolean operators (location, specific name, etc.)
• Create an RSS feed of search results

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Followerwonk – lets you search bios as well as do Twitter account comparisons. Can be either a very simple keyword search or a more complex, detailed SQL full-text search (using the documentation available on the site). For account comparisons, you can run up to three accounts side-by-side and get Venn diagram information on:

• Shared connections – followers & following
• Days on Twitter
• # of new followers per day
• # of tweets

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LocaFollow – a Google-powered Twitter profile search engine. It allows you to search bio, location, name, AND tweets. By logging in to your Twitter account from LocaFollow you will be able to:

• Bulk follow the resulting Twitter accounts, or follow them individually
• Create a Twitter list directly from the search results
• Create a TweepML list as the service is integrated with LocaFollow (see my post about why I love TweepML)
• Tweet a particular Twitter user’s search results rank

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Twiangulate – lets you search for who your friends, enemies and peers are following (see my Cool Tool Alert post about Twiangulate). Allows for three comparison searches of up to three Twitter accounts, as well as a keyword search. Only simple Boolean can be used in the keyword search (AND, OR [using | ], NOT [using !], and phrase [using “ ”]). This is an awesome service because:

• You can keywords search for profiles of individuals whom a specific Twitter user is following – for example, let’s say I wanted to find out what Account Directors a recruiting colleague is following… I would type “account director” into the keywords search, and the Twitter username I wanted to parse into the next field. I would get the results listed below
• You can instantly tweet out your search results directly from Twiangulate
• You can search for biggest or most common followers, or most common or most obscure friends

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Do you know of any other Twitter profile search tools? Please leave a comment with the link!

I am so pleased to have another article published on Mashable!

12 iPhone Apps for Surviving Conference Season

Next week, I’ll be in San Diego to attend both SourceCon and ERE Spring Expo, and I wanted to share some of the apps that I’ll be using while attending both. Please take a look at the article, and if you have any suggestions for other good conference apps, leave them in a comment either on the Mashable article or right below!

Apologies for the lateness of my post! Those of you who know me know that I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in DC this summer, and that’s where I went after SourceCon for the weekend. HOWEVER – I have to say that SourceCon was awesome! And if you didn’t go – figure out a way to get to SC ’09 because you seriously missed out this year.

There are most likely several posts of overviews of the conference, and please also stay tuned for the September issue of The Source for some additional thoughts on it, so I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight my favorite session from the event – Michael Marlatt‘s presentation of Web 2.0 technology in recruiting, Sourcing Beyond Recruiting 2.0. I enjoyed so many sessions, but this particular topic is near and dear to my heart because I use so many of the types of tools Michael laid out in my every day function. Michael didn’t do a “web 2.0 recruiting” session on ‘this is Facebook, this is how you create an account on Facebook’ or something similar with using LinkedIn. I understand the need for such training sessions, but for me personally they don’t do a bit of good. I already know how to create a profile, and search using the resource’s search function, and add friends, and join groups. I want MORE!

What Michael did was paint a picture of the future of our function based on the use, and mashup, of various tools that are available out there. He used the term “cloud recruiting” as derived from “cloud computing“. He discussed the virtualization of recruiting, and how far we’ve come just in the last couple of years with technology to make our jobs simpler. Michael even drew an example of future technology where you could have a job alert set up on your phone, and a notification if someone fitting the requirements happens to be in the vicinity. This is not so futuristic, he told us, as ideas like this are already being worked on (Dave Copps I’m sure will agree with that – he too had a fantastic keynote presentation on semantic search).

Something I took to heart (and I’m sure many in the audience did as well) was what Michael said about RSS: “If you are a sourcer and you don’t use RSS, you should put a question mark after your job title.” OUCH Thankfully, I’m an avid RSS user for many different reasons – keeping up with the recruiting trends, keeping up with the PR industry, using articles to do name gathering and research, keeping track of who is reading and quoting me, etc.

In my opinion, Michael’s presentation topped the charts because he gave a nod to the past, as well as the present, but his focus was on the future of these tools and that’s where we all need to be looking. Kudos to you, Michael. I can’t wait to see more!

Please keep your eye out later this week for the new The Source newsletter, and also watch for other posts that are sure to be popping up this week!