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Jun 22, 2018
This article is part of a series called Editor's Pick.

WebClipDrop is a pretty cool tool by my free trial expired.

SeekOut is an excellent tool, but my free trial expired.

SocialList has brilliant search agents (and data parsing), but my trial expired too.

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Do free sourcing tools still exist? Everybody needs a subscription fee it seems. Seven days or two weeks, that’s not much time to form a full opinion, unfortunately.

That’s one of the reasons I take notice of new technology like Peoplecamp, Lumen5, Streamlabs, and some of the cool advancements they are making with Data Miner. Like uber cool stuff, one can utilize at no cost. More importantly, this thing can save you hours of time once you get past the learning curve. The ROI is you get your precious time back and can avoid mindless data entry.

I talk about Data Miner a lot because I keep finding new avenues of innovation. Take a look at the jQuery stuff:

I’ve been using Data Miner for years, but they’ve improved the product exponentially with the Recipe Creator. You can build your own DIY (Do It Yourself) tool, for FREE.

Don’t believe me? Well, I aggregated myself because I wanted to aggregate AngelList and pull ALL the links from a profile:

And then I made a video on how I did this because this kind of thing should become a built-in service for something as expensive as a job board seat.

This is important because if a non-coder like me can build this for one site, we can build on others. And though it may not be elegant like some of the paid tools, it pulls the info for upload into our CRM. So the point is, I got the information without digging or paying for an aggregator that basically scrapes LinkedIn for data. I didn’t pull email in this example, but with that number of social profiles, do I need to? The problem with email is that people don’t live and breathe with email, in fact, I don’t even check my own Gmail every day. I’m on Facebook and Youtube every day though.

A good tool is one you can use for years, learn it and understand it. One can evoke it into something exceptional by exploiting the full or hidden functionality within the said tool. Now it’s not as pristine as what a development team can put together, but this took me a few minutes to build out. Imagine how many sites one could map like this in a day. This isn’t an impossible feat anymore; the tech exists to do what you want with the internet. One just has to find the right alchemic mixture of tools (or Google stuff well enough). As a result of the example above, I DO pay for additional features in Data Miner. If you can pull data like that (for free) just imagine the possibility when you throw money at it. There is so much this thing can do, and people aren’t mentioning.

The genius behind tools like Data Miner and Hiretual is the freemium product model. The free features keep people coming back, exploring the tool, providing feedback and suggestions, telling their friends, and jumping into paid features. Toolmakers and job boards can learn a big lesson from them.

How many video games do we play for free then buy additional content to power up? Those micro-transactions are a fantastic product ploy.

If LinkedIn had Peoplecamp’s messaging functionality, CareerBuilder’s aggregation tools mirrored AngelList or Indeed moved some of their job posting CSV functionality to the recruiters resume search, the sourcing tool market would look insanely different. Recruiting Tech is innovating super fast now, and with all the job board acquisitions of late, I know we are all watching to see how the boards adapt.

This is the perfect forum to ask, so ask us. Honestly, I want to see these boards adapt and succeed. However, the customer is changing, people like me have high expectations for tools with all the new ones emerging.

Finding the Secret Cow Level

There are tools now that help people build tools and workflows. You can use Zapier to automatically post videos to Twitter or to auto pipeline new joiners from Meetup Groups. I’m even creating apps on Bubble in my spare time as I try to understand the backend. And there are several sourcing live streamers coming up now, and we are giving away the whole cow. If we are going to take the leap and start building our own tools, we may need some help. It’s a dream of mine to build sourcing tools to help people. That’s why I built the Toolbox, created those CSEs, opened the YouTube channel, and that’s why I want to hear what you want us to build next. Honestly, if the big companies don’t build it, we can do it ourselves, even if we have to post it on Patreon and beg for funding. As sourcers, if the tools don’t exist, we can build our own portal to the next level.

Master Tool Builders

So for the tool builders out there, here’s my two cents, recruitment is changing, as our market tightens and get more competitive, sourcing becomes more and more critical. As tech gets smarter, we can automate new processes, and gather data in different and more effective ways. With that, the tools have to get smarter and evolve as well. True profile site aggregation is the next stage, the challenge I have is that I can pull multiple pipelines from various sources, but not many tools marry all the profiles into one entity. I know SeekOut and Hiretual are working on this, but AngelList sets this up perfectly (although it’s dictated by the user). This Hufflepuff’s profile (Susanna Frazier) is the future, voluntary links added easily, several points of contact, repositories, articles, projects.

She even has a personal website listed here.

There’s so much more than what is on just one site or a posted resume. It’s the full spectrum. And you don’t even need to X-ray.  Job boards, I know you’ve been acquired (some by staffing firms even).

So why aren’t you tapping into stuff like this? 

Recruiters are a huge audience, maybe ask us what we want (decent data extraction/import into CRM/ATS). Seriously I want to see you guys succeed, so take note and evolve. Heck, bug me, I’ll talk.

If you want to see, more FREE stuff check out my FREE YouTube page for FREE tools. No fees involved there.

https://www.youtube.com/c/GregHawkes-SourcingIRL

The goal is to spread the word and help people over the learning curve. Share and subscribe, and let’s help out as many sourcers and toolmakers as we can.

This article is part of a series called Editor's Pick.
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