Getting More Out of Google for Accounting & Finance Candidates

2007

AIRS Getting More Out of Google for Accounting & Finance Candidates 2007 Copyright © 2007. AIRS, All Rights Reserved.

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Today’s AgendaGoogle Guided Tour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Google Essentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Google Power Strings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18

Creating a Google Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25

Google News & Google Alerts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29

Google Specialized Searches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

Google Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46

Google Co-op (Create Your Own Google Search Engine!!) .56

Filetype Searches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69

Google Extras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78

AIRS Getting More Out of Google for Accounting & Finance Candidates 2007 5

http://www.google.com/

A simple interface isn’t it? In comparison to the bells and whistles found on the various Internet portals over the years, Google’s front page is blissfully simple.

But Google also has a feature set that allows almost all of the techniques that AIRS has developed for finding passive candidates over the years. The site supports Boolean Logic and Field Searches, has advanced usability features like Cached Pages and HTML versions of PDF files and, above all, has created a basket of tools that can’t be found anywhere else.

So settle in as we look behind the clean interface and learn how to get the most out of Google to find those very specialized and hard to find finance and accounting candidates.

Let’s start by taking a quick tour of some of the features that we will use during our session today.

Google Guided Tour

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From the front page at Google, if you click on the option “more” and then choose “even more” Google will take you to an ever expanding list of options to choose from.

NOTES

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Google News & Google Alerts

Let’s shift gears for a while and take a look at some of Google’s tools and features that can help us quickly and easily find candidates without having to create long complex Boolean strings.

First we’ll take a look at the functionality of Google News to find some specific finance candidates. We will also use one of the tools that require an account here, Google Alerts.

http://www.google.com/

From Google’s homepage, click on the link directly above the search box titled “News”.

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http://news.google.com/

Here’s the front page at Google News. This amazingly simple search interface allows users to search through 4,500 different news resources, both globally and locally. From this interface, the results that you find will be no more than 30 days old. (If you want to search documents dating back decades, you can use Google’s new “News Archive Search” feature.)

The good news (pun intended) is that searching here works exactly the same way as it has in the other Google interfaces we’ve seen. Use keywords normally.

Many of us use Google everyday and it is easy to take what the engine does for granted. It’s super fast and, like the inner workings of our computer, we don’t really think about what’s going on inside – we just switch it on. But as impressive as the engine itself is, what Google News does may be even more unbelievable. A newspaper story rolls off the digital presses in Tampa and minutes later, a Google News user in Seattle can not only read the story, they can do keyword searches on it too.

As cool as all that is, the best part of Google News from a recruiter’s perspective is the ability to get to hundreds of trade publications and small market newspapers that we might never have seen otherwise. This is simply a completely new opportunity in our business to find candidates from a cornucopia of informational resources.

Let’s take a look at an example of how the local element of Google News could be useful. In this demonstration we’re after “Loan Consultants” in California.

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SEARCH STRING: “loan consultant” (ca OR california)

Google News only returns a few results for this search but most appear to contain the title Loan Consultant and a person’s name close by. Several of the results are in smaller local newspapers that might have easily been under our radar.

NOTES