Your next great hire may have a resume already posted on the Internet. It could be in a resume database, on their personal home page, or in a profile. Your task: find it. That may be easier than you think.
Sites such as Monster.com (my former employer) will charge you for resume search, and lots of great candidates who are open to new opportunities can be found there. There are free services, too. Of course, the biggest goldmine of all for resume search is the Web itself, and I'll describe some simple tricks for that. Depending on what type of job you want to fill, online resume search can be very fruitful. A few things to keep in mind:
1. Decide what skills you need and how far you’ll cast the net (just local, or nationwide?).
2. Resume search can be very effective on the big sites, but be certain to look for niche ones too. And don’t forget to use Google.
3. Be patient. It’s better to look at a few more resumes and find the great ones than to craft such a surgically precise resume search that you’ll find no matches.
First, try free resume search
Millions of resumes are openly posted on the Web, and you can use Google to find them. Since resumes most often are the only item on the pages they appear, more often than not they'll include the word 'resume' or 'cv' in their title or URL. That makes them a cinch to isolate using Google.
I recommend: Google allows you to create fancy searches that look for a word like resume or cv only in the page's title or url. That's resume search nirvana. All you do is add inurl:resume or intitle:cv to a Google search that already includes the skills you want, and you get a result like
this. You can find a list of these tricks at Jim Stroud's
blog.
Join
LinkedIn, a networking site for professionals, and use their
Advanced Search capability for resume search by industry, location, title and other criteria. LinkedIn is free.
PageBites is an interesting new site for resume search and executive bios, by keyword and location. It's worth a look.
Second, try resume search that's mostly free
Several sites allow you to compile lists of professionals and their companies. Although it's not resume search per se, you can build a list of prospects based on their job title and industry.
I recommend: You can search in
Hoover's by job function, location, industry and company size. However, only the first 10 matches are shown and you need a paid Hoover's subscription to get more.
OK, start spending some money
Resume databases have flourished with the growth of the Web. So resume search is much easier than it used to be. Plus, it's easy for professionals to post resumes, whether or not they're actively looking for a new opportunity. The result: the major job boards as well as some specialty sites have millions of resumes and collectively add thousands and thousands daily.
I recommend: The big three -- Monster, Careerbuilder and Yahoo! HotJobs -- each have hefty resume databases with easy-to-use tools for resume search. Monster offers a
test drive to give you an idea of how it works before you
buy access for two weeks to a year. Careerbuilder offers a
free trial, and a range of
subscription options. HotJobs does not post rates online, but asks that you
contact them to learn more.
There are several specialty sites for resume search in specific industries, such as
Dice for technical jobs.
You can purchase complete lists of specialty sites at
Weddle's and
The Riley Guide. Those directories include both free and paid resume search sites.
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