Vol. 1 Issue 11 - May 1, 2002 - More Executive Leads

In this Issue...

  • Finding Execs Using Paid Sources (cont'd)
  • Search Engines That Do More: Teoma
  • Where Recruiters Hang out to Collaborate

 

HOW TO CONDUCT YOUR OWN EXECUTIVE SEARCH USING PAID SOURCES

On April 15th, we mentioned a few more paid sources for executive leads. These
powerful tools are not all designed exclusively for lead generation, but they are very
effectively used for that role.

 

Nexis

Our first, and possibly the single most powerful information source in the world today
is Nexis. The Nexis information portal claims to contain upwards of 2.8 billion searchable documents. The key is that this is not a Web search engine, but rather a collection of resources gathered and archived from all corners of the globe.

A majority of the information housed in Nexis is not in the public domain. Almost every important news source is archived through Nexis, along with hundreds of other
resources like government databases, publications, periodicals, magazines, newsletters, organizations' annual reports, international reports, newswires and market research. There are too many to list. It's important to remember that while these may have once been published or made public in some way, they could easily be out of publication today, and therefore, not easily accessible.

Besides these news collections they also compile company information sources like
Standard & Poor's Register of Corporations, U.S. Public Company Profiles Disclosure, Hoover's Company Capsules and Profiles, US & International Company Intelligence sources, Full Text Annual Reports and Directory of Corporate Affiliations.

For the sleuths among us, Nexis is one of the best places to conduct skip-tracing, and find people who have moved around. The advanced person locator is simply unbeatable! It provides access to mortgage and tax information, motor vehicle registration databases, legal and court records, and much more. Best of all you need not have a membership to any of the sources listed in Nexis. A paid membership with this service allows access to all of them through accords they have with each source. From temporary or pay-per-query to monthly and yearly memberships, there are many ways to purchase access to Nexis. Different options are available on the website, but they negotiate each individual membership.

 

Marquis Who's Who

A more biographical approach is available through another company.
Marquis Who’s Who is an amazing source of information on public figures. The publishers of Who's Who in America® have provided accurate, concise biographies of notable Americans since 1899. Marquis Who's Who directories include biographies of over 900,000 leaders and achievers from around the world, and from every significant professional field. Some of the collections you may find interesting are Who's Who of American Women®, Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare®, Who's Who in Science and Engineering®, and Who's Who in Finance and Industry®. These biographies are very complete and sometimes include detailed personal contact information. Marquis does not limit their database to executives only. Individual contributors who have significant impact in their fields are also frequently profiled. Often they are nominated by peers or submit their bio directly.

Dunn & Bradstreet

Yet another resource is found in the credit reporting industry. Well known for keeping detailed and impartial information about businesses' credit history, Dunn & Bradstreet collects more than just financial data on the companies they track. Their Million Dollar Database provides information on approximately 1,600,000 U.S. and Canadian leading public and private businesses. This includes industry information with up to 24 individual 8-digit SICs, size criteria (employees and annual sales), type of ownership, and principal executives and biographies. Executives frequently volunteer their information in order to have access to the D&B credit reporting system.

Leadership Directories

Among the many directory-style databases, one rises to the top.
Leadership Directories publishes 14 personnel directories they call Yellow Books. In our experience, the information on contacts listed is very complete and up-to-date. It almost always includes a current phone number and e-mail. The entire collection called Leadership Directory Library is available online and is updated daily from hundreds of sources. In its entirety there are 400,000 leaders listed. The Corporate, Foreign Representative and Financial Books are of particular interest. The types of leads you will find in the Corporate Books are limited to the senior executives and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Companies smaller than that will not appear in these books. The Foreign Representatives Book contains the same type of information as the Corporate Book, except corporations founded in other countries that have major operations in the United States. The Financial Book provides access to leaders of the major financial organizations. Other books may also be of interest depending on your industry: Congressional, Federal, State, Municipal, Federal Regional, Judicial, News Media, Associations, Law Firms, Government Affairs, and Nonprofit Sector. These are all excellent sources of leads. Each online directory costs $255-$340 per year or for $3,035 five users can access the online version and receive the cd-rom.

Lead411

More than just leads, a business intelligence source like Lead411 can reveal quite a bit about a competitor. Information can be found about their funding or financing, what products and services they plan to spend money on, their new hires and resignations, which companies in your industry are hiring, mergers and acquisitions, product launches, new businesses, new offices, new contracts and which companies are growing. Of particular interest to recruitment intelligence and executive exfiltration, is the direct contact information like phone and fax numbers, e-mail and address. Company details like location, subsidiaries, addresses, and a company overview, are also very useful.

Lead411 offers several products. The two we recommend for executive exfiltration use are: The Daily411 which is a "Hot Lead Sheet" available online or e-mailed to you daily and their Search Tools to search for Executives by title, department, and location. The "Hot Lead Sheet" contains all the current info. in your chosen areas.

Why is Lead411 different than other business intelligence sources? They don't use automated bots or spiders. Humans are the ones who generate the leads through sources like business releases, public filings, phone interviews, and industry news. The key difference is quality over quantity. While other sources boast hundreds of thousands of contacts, Lead411 provides high quality business intelligence and complete, verified contact information for successful targeted one-to-one communications. The cost is $4.95 for 7 days or $19.95 per month.

Join us next issue for a discussion and demonstration of frugal executive lead
generation tools you can access with no registration required.


SEARCH ENGINES THAT DO MORE: TEOMA

Size is important when judging a search engine database, but without good relevance
ranking, a large index is practically useless to recruiters. Teoma joins the game with a new way to analyze and rank pages.

Searching Teoma’s index brings back pages that contain the search terms, like any other search engine, but also pages that may be very relevant based on link context. After finding matching documents they are organized into what are called communities, then ranked based on link popularity within the community.

Fine, but what relevance does that have to recruiting?

Resources

Looking at the "Resources" section we find that search results include a list of collections from "Experts and Enthusiasts" on the bottom right side of the page. These "Resources" are pages listing relevant collections of links to other sites and resources for your search topics. Or, in other words, Weblogs with subjects related to the search keywords.
Weblogs are created and maintained by people who consider themselves experts, or
at least connoisseurs, on a particular subject. They spend vast amounts of time organizing what links they consider relevant to their chosen field. These pages not only make great resources for our recruitment efforts, but their authors are excellent contributors to our network and their collections are incredibly useful lists of links in their chosen field. Effectively, what this means is we are searching "other people’s searches" or searching what others have searched before.

For example, a search for "optical network" brings up http://www.gmpls.org/ as one of the top resources. On the site we see a plethora of white papers, MPLS (Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching) tutorials, presentations, standards organizations, and many technical documents from hundreds of optical organizations. It's like a set of perfectly customized search results! You can also contact Mr. Vinay Ravuri via his e-mail address listed on the site. It's quite likely he would welcome questions and be helpful.

Other link collections include a page linking to all SONET vendors, a list of all telecom companies from the United States Telecom Association, and an article about Supercom 2000 describing and linking to all the upstart and major competitors in the optical industry.

Authority

Besides the traditional search engine results you would expect, one more reason to check in with Teoma along with other popular search engiens is its ability to provide highly relevant, or authoritative, results. Teoma’s results ranking is based on what they call Subject-Specific Popularity. According to Teoma Subject-Specific Popularity analyzes the relationship of sites within the list of results, ranking sites based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it. In other words, Teoma claims they provide the best answer to search queries because by analyzing site peers they can establish authority for the search result.

Keep in mind, that while results are highly accurate and relevant, like with Teoma’s owner Ask Jeeves, they lack volume. Our optical network search yields an estimated 300,000 results in Teoma, but over one million in Google.

Interestingly, Teoma’s search results were some of the most authoritative Optical
Networking sites around like the National Transparent Optical Network Consortium
NTONC, Sycamore, Ciena and the All-Optical Networking Consortium. In contrast, Google displayed a great selection of unique sites, but on the first page of results it was hard to pick out the authoritative sites like those in Teoma’s first page. There was, however, a small amount of overlap - both engines picked up "NTONC" and "Salira" in their first page of results.

Refining

Refining a search is easy because Teoma provides a section on the top right specifically designed to suggest additional relevant keywords, which can be added to your search. Clicking on one of the links under the "Refine" section automatically adds those words to the search and returns a new set of refined results. Our search example on "optical network" offered five refining choices. The last one in the refine list was Fiber, Manufacture. Clicking on it brought back results on a new search for "Fiber, Manufacture, optical network."

Teoma does not support special syntaxes, advanced Booleans, wildcards, stemming, or field commands like inurl: and such. A search for "optical network intitle:resume", for example, is not possible. One final treat, just like Google, it's clear who the advertisers are on Teoma because their ads are placed under a section dedicated to paid results - the "Sponsored Links" - making them easier to avoid.

The Teoma advantage is the ability to find which sites are the most relevant to a search. It is by no means a conclusive search, or a way to locate rare jewels and hard to find pages, but it is an invaluable tool in the CyberSleuth’s ToolBag.


COLLABORATING AT RECRUITER'S CAFE

Sharing candidate and client information with our recruitment peers can be a
treacherous affair, or a mine-covered field. At Recruiter’s Café the field becomes more even and fair. The RecruitersCafé split placement network features a superior resume & splits database containing over 1.5 Million contacts and currently exceeds 25,000 new entries monthly. Recruiter’s Café is a networking & split placement community for third party American and Canadian executive search professionals.

Web-based industry contact, collaboration and applicant tracking features integrate
seamlessly to maximize productivity and assist in market expansion. Lead by recruitment networking guru Nelson Abreu, the main focus of the Café is to help its members grow their network along with their billings. A free 30-day trial is available at www.recruiterscafe.com/recruiters_network.htm .