How to find passive candidates by searching books online
Check out this new site for searching books - Booksearch X3 (Hat tip to Tara Calishain!) What Booksearch X3 does is it allows you to “Search Inside books from A9.com, Google.com and MSN Live Search - at the same time.” I like it because it helps me with passive searching! Let me show you what I mean.
1. This is the homepage of the seachengine which is (as you can see) a big page of white. I type in the phrase “is a software engineer” in the search box. As to why, all will be clear in a moment or so.
2. These are the search results. In the first column are the results from A9 (Amazon’s searchengine), in the second is Google’s and the third is MSN (which is nothing at this writing).
3. Just at random, I click the first result under Google’s Book Search results.
4. Google takes me “inside” of a book where I see the biography of a particular author (which mentions her background as a Software Engineer), the website of the author and her email address. Nice!
5. On a whim, I hit the back button and return to the search results. I notice in the upper left hand corner of the page is a series of links that lets me refine my results by technical categories. I think to myself, “why not?” and click the link “Programming / Object Oriented”
6. From there I am taken to refined list of results where I see excerpts from technical books that mention the names of the Software Engineers that wrote them.
Among the names mentioned are:
- Ping Bai Ping Bai is a software engineer at Hughes Aircraft of Canada.
- Russ Miles is a software engineer for General Dynamics UK.
- James Snell is a software engineer on IBM’s Emerging Technology team.
- Donn Cave is a Software Engineer at the University of Washington’s central computer site.
- Ethan Cerami is a software engineer at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine
at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. - BRIAN MYERS is a software engineer and database administrator
for a large manufacturing company. - Jorge Barrios is a software engineer, currently working in Silicon Valley.
- David L. Caster is a software engineer with ReThink Systems.
Click here to see for yourself.
If you like this technique, download my e-book “The Art of Shakespeare Recruiting” where I have many more examples and resources to leverage.
Happy Hunting!
-Jim
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