Glenn Gutmacher's blog

Get Your Sourcing Questions Ready for Shally & the Cybersleuths this Sunday and Monday

If you get good sourcing and competitive intelligence data from patent search, why go to various individual countries' patent search sites or pay for a consolidated one?

All the major search engines have recently incorporated real-time search results. For example, blogposts that used to take 5-15 minutes to get indexed are now under 10 seconds (see video at http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=513).

We got so many great questions during the Twitter webinar that I presented last week (not surprising since we actually got within a few dozen of the maximum 1,000 simultaneous attendees allowed by Citrix GoToWebinar!) that I've decided to address selected ones via the blog.

Someone tweeted this question to one of my colleagues, and after discussing it, I decided it was too long to answer in a tweet, and worth posting to my blog to benefit others, so now there's a URL to forward!

I've seen a lot of job search products and it's pretty rare that a two-hour free DVD is as comprehensive as this: http://www.putamericabacktowork.com/dvd/

If you know the related: command on Google, then you'll be excited to learn that Google has just expanded the maximum number of results from 30 to almost 200.  And if you don't know why that should be so important to sourcing, read on:

Mobile devices and social networking are starting to make very interesting bedfellows that can help recruiters and sourcers, if you take a look at the latest apps.

Shally and I jumped on the mobile device bandwagon a while back:  the numbers make it inevitable (4 billion wireless devices, twice the number of PCs in operation -- as pointed out so nicely by Michael Marlatt in his webinar for Arbita ACES).

Shally and I have long advocated that you want to check multiple search engines for any given query, because the results can vary dramatically, even for the exact same search string. Therefore, you'd be missing out on great results if you only depended on one. In 2005, I attended a web conference where I discovered Thumbshots Rankings, which allow you to graphically see the low overlap between search engines which proves this -- and we've been using it in webinars ever since!

A misleading headline has appeared atop a new article on Workforce:  Sourcing Disappears as Applications Pile Up for Overwhelmed Recruiters.  The article is based largely on the opinions of John Younger, CEO of Accolo, a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) vendor.