COMPETITORS

Competitive Recruitment Intelligence

What is Competitive Recruitment Intelligence? Competitive Intelligence is knowing what your competitors will do next. The difference between competitive intelligence and corporate espionage is significant. By definition, industrial espionage refers to illegal activities - which range everywhere from outright theft to bribery and everywhere in between. Conversely, competitive recruitment intelligence collection is governed for the most part by adherence to corporate and professional ethics precluding the use of illegal means to obtain information.Put another way, it's the process of improving recruitment marketplace competitiveness through a greater and ethical understanding of competitors and the employment environment. CRI is a systematic process that, through analysis, converts bits and pieces of information about people and an organization's unique employment ecosystem into strategic knowledge used to make decisions. The collection and analysis of information regarding capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions of competitors is conducted by using information databases, Internet research, other open sources and through ethical inquiry. CRI creates knowledge about the current and future talent acquisition environment, employment strengths and weaknesses and specific future opportunities and threats. CRI is used to form a complete high-level outline of these main areas:

1. The organization's employment ecosystem SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats)
   
2. How to identify and attract top talent
   
3. Competitor's human capital weaknesses and recruitment strategy
   
4. What motivates people to leave a competitor
   
5. Who influences decisions within competitor organizations, what kind of decisions are made and what decisions will likely be made in the futureCRI is useful in both large and small companies, providing decision makers with early warning of vital changes in the employment ecosystem.

This enables senior managers in to make informed decisions about everything from compensation, competitive hiring trends, areas of investment, recruitment marketing and long-term business strategies. Effective CRI is not afraid to face unpleasant conclusions, or disseminate "bad news" to decision makers, in order to anticipate employment marketplace developments rather than merely react to them.It doesn't take a spy, illegal activities, or invasion of privacy to get results from Competitive Recruitment Intelligence. All that is required is a process to gather and analyze vast amounts of information, one to block leaks in order to keep others from seeing the organization's secrets, and a leadership commitment to insure that this information will actually effect change in the company's plans, decisions, and operations.

• Bidigital: A catalog of CI resources like Associations, Books, Companies, Documentation, Educaiton, Jobs, News, Publications and Software
• SCIP: Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, the fastest growing organization today!
• CI Report: provides focused, organized information resources for competitive intelligence professionals.
• IntelBrief: knowbots, infobots and robots.
• IBIS: CI Terms Defined
• Moreover: Register for free access to their news portal providing headlines from their database of 3000 news sources.
• Vivisimo: "Clustering" meta-search engine of business intelligence, news, patents. Save or email results.
• Blogs: The definitive source of information about weblogs
• APQC: Benchmarking: New best practices report developed by SCIP and APQC provides insight into how science and technology intelligence contributes to competitive awareness. Article and executive summary are free; full report is fee.
• Customer intelligence: Customer knowledge management converts customer data into shareholder value. It requires a specific culture, organization, accountability and leadership.
• Economic espionage: The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 and the doctrine of US conspiaracy law require companies to have compliance programs in place. Characteristics of a good program.
• Ethics: Two centers for the study of business ethics provide an overview of the ethics literature and promote ethical business conduct.
• IIT: The IIT site also includes a collection of company ethics policies.
• Information: Key elements in creating structured rewards and recognition systems encourage employees and managers to change information sharing behavior. Article includes examples of company reward systems.
• International: A guide to WTO / GAAT research covers the essential sources for finding information about the current WTO system and its predecessor.
• Internet: Weblogs (or blogs) create rolling pages of frequently updated, chronologically linsted links and commentary. Article contains list of annotated resources and pointer sites.
• OCLC: How big is the web anyway? OCLC has released a new set of numbers on the size and composition of the web.
• Wayback Machine: A digital library - veritably a time machine - of the web from its infancy until today. Enter a URL and see what is looked like any given year. Excellent way to find out who is who and track them back in time.
• Internet Geography Project: shows current statistics on Internet use, domain name geography
• NAICS: Search for NAICS and SIC numbers.
• NUA: The leading resource for Internet trends and statistics.
• Web Credibility: Stanford University Web Credibility project to understand what makes people believe what they find on the web.
• Euroseek.com is a search engine and portal designed for the European countries and available in 39 languages.

SOFTWARE

• InfoGIST Business Browser:
• Brimstone Intelligence - Business Intelligence software for structuring and analyzing information, facilitate future collecting and surveilling. Allows for tracking individuals! Free 30 day evaluation version.
• Inxight MetaText: server automatically analyzes, summarizes, extracts and indexes information from unstructured information sources such as email, web pages, wp documents and presentations.
• Taxonomy: software helps manage information overload by using a categorization process to focus search results. A review of the software that provides this feature for internal text searching.
• 1Jump: Advanced Company Intelligence software 1,000,000+ selected global companies, public and private. 33 possible types of business info for each. 29 proprietary search methods.
  Full access to 16 vertical directories. Over 1 million corporate e-mail addresses. No Ads: $19.95 a month
• Prospectcity: - ?

• AMNESI Find out about your target company's IP addresses, what routers connect you to them and other useful Internet data. .
• CMP and IT news site. Search the archives.
• Competitive Research Intelligence Competitive intelligence resources that provide exceptional business analysis, market research and other key competitor intelligence information.
• Computer Directory Search for a product and it lists companies who compete in that space.
• Hoovers Sales investigation database. . Free profiles of companies. Premium service lists key executives and other analyst information..
• Verisign Find what other domains your target company or competitor owns.
• Newslink One of the best newspaper indexes
• Rileyguide By far the single best jobhunting information portal. Contains valuable information about company's and places to look for - and post - jobs. Excellent place to start 'researching' a company.
• SalesLeads Some business information for sale.
• Vault Insider career network full of valuable information about employers.
• VaultReports Inside information on companies.
• Wetfeet Competitive employer and employment information
• Yahoo Finance: Find out about company's performance, read the "insider" discussion lists, Enter a company name to look up its ticker, then follow the linked on the ticker symbol. Once on the company's page follow the Insider link to read about Insider and restricted shareholder transactions for the year (who at Yahoo bought or sold how many shares). The Messages link takes you to a Message Board where people discuss the company. This is a great source of juicy insider tidbits. The SEC Filings link reveals all the major documents they have filed.
• Business.com: Developed by a team of industry experts and library scientists, contains more than 400,000 listings within 25,000 industry, product and service subcategories. General industry background and specifics about particular product lines.
• SuperPages: Search for US Businesses by distance from you, ZIP, Street, Category, Name or Number. Also features People Pages, Reverse Lookup