10 Commandments of Internet Candidate Research

Last month Moises Lopez wrote an article in which he describes the "ten commandments of internet candidate research." They were all pretty straight forward. Make sure to plan. Make sure to refine. However, a couple commandments caught my attention. The second commandment, "define what you are targeting," seems pretty straight forward. What I found interesting was his comment, "focus on the skill more so than the key word." It strikes me that possibly this should be the title of this commandment. I feel that with today's search engines like Avature it is so easy for recruiters to simply type in a few key words and use the number of responses to rank the resumes. While this seems like it'll narrow the search easily enough it seems to me as though it's a very easy way to ensure that you know nothing about the candidate pool. Very conceivably the recruiter might not even consider the top talent within the pool.

What I find confusing about the post is what exactly Moises does mean by "focusing on the skill." I'm not necessarily sure I know how one would do this without using key words. The idea is all fine and dandy, but I guess I just don't have enough recruiting experience to truly understand what he means by this concept.

A few other points are made that are worthy of mention. For one, Moises instructs us to define the search as much as possible. He says that a recruiter needs to use as many advanced Boolean searches as possible. Here, he probably could have made the point that if you're lazy, you may not come to the best possible outcome (as I suppose is one main rule of life).