Berger Bites - How to score leads from Association Membership Directories

Posted by Jim Stroud

October 5, 2007

Mark Berger Many of us are in recruiting specialties that have strong associations that support the types of people we recruit. It is easy to search for membership directories for these associations. This is a great way to start off almost any search. I am not saying you will always get one but I have had good luck with the following string.

ieee (~directory | ~contact) (inurl:”membership directory” | intitle:”membership directory”)

In the example above I chose to search for membership directories in a very large electrical engineering society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, also known as IEEE. In order to use this technique successfully you do have to know the name, and/or the acronym, of the association you are targeting. I ran my search and got back 68 hits. My first hit was a main members search page where I could search by subject, title, or author. You would use keywords here to get members with the type of background you are seeking. Another hit was a link to the membership directory of the Distribution System Analysis Subcommittee, that had all of the subcommittee officers, complete with full contact information, along with clickable links to the entire subcommittee membership, allowing you to send an email to those members automatically. Most of the other links were to membership directories for other IEEE subcommittees and groups.

Good luck!

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About The Author

Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR has been recruiting since before most of you were born. He has been involved in Internet recruiting and sourcing since its infancy in the early nineties starting with classified ads on AOL and Compuserve. Many resources on recruitment technology, including those for Internet passive candidate sourcing and recruiter databases can be found by visiting his website at www.swatrecruiting.com.