How to source resumes from Google Base

Posted by Jim Stroud

March 31, 2008

Its been awhile since I’ve played (or even looked at) Google Base. Its been in beta a loong time. From my best recollection, Google Base lets you post classifieds (Housing, Products, Recipes, et cetera) en masse. Users can then search through the various ads and buy your stuff. For example, below is the homepage for Google Base.

Check out what happens when I click the “Hotels” link.

See? Lots of Hotel Room ads from various Travel destination sites.

Now, let’s go back to the Google Base homepage and click on the “People Profiles” section. (See arrow)

As Google Base is searching the profiles of various Personals websites, there is a lot of well… personal things to search on such as Gender and Marital Status. Unless you are looking for a date, that is unimportant to you. What may prove of interest is the “Keywords” section. (see arrow below) Try adding a job title like… “Programmer,” which is what I did.

And these are the results. Not a lot, but something to work with. Let’s click on Peter Wang here.

This is his profile and a link (see arrow?) to contact him.

You will not find a lot of passive prospects with this technique, but no doubt you will find a few here that you won’t see elsewhere. (Worth a few minutes of your time. ) Now let me show you one more way to search Google Base (that perhaps, I should have just shown from the beginning).

Head back to the Google Base homepage and type in this query:

resume email C++ -inurl:job

What you will see in the results are links to 140+ resumes featuring people with a background in C++. Here is an example of such a profile - Mr. Wen Liu.