Five Super Useful Free Online Resources for Recruiters and HR Professionals
You may know about some of these already; others may be brand new to you. Whatever the case, the hope is that you’ll discover at least a few useful, informative resources to help you refine your practices — because there’s always room for improvement. And if you don’t think so, you probably shouldn’t be in this industry.
1.Flazingo’s Free Interview Guide and Job Description Wizard
Flazingo was, up until very recently, a free hiring system, and an impressive one at that. The company has since turned into a pay-as-you-go service, which means it’s still pretty affordable for operations with tighter budgets, but we’re not here to talk about affordable resources — we’re looking for the free stuff. And Flazingo offers two really excellent free tools: an interview guide and a job description wizard.
The interview guide lets you select up to 10 competencies you’re looking for in a new hire. After you’ve tailored the guide to your needs, Flazingo returns an aligned interview template, complete with possible questions and spaces to make notes and score candidate responses.
Similarly, the job description wizard offers a customizable template. You can watch it change in real time as you walk step-by-step through Flazingo’s questions, which guide you through the whole process of writing a solid, informative, eye-catching job description.
For a brief period of time, Sell Hack was awesome: the free browser extension, once installed, allowed users to find email addresses on LinkedIn — even when those addresses were hidden because their owners were outside of your connections. LinkedIn was pretty mad when they found out about this, so they sent Sell Hack a cease and desist letter. Understandable, but to be clear, we should note that Sell Hack only analyzed publicly available data to uncover email addresses. The guys behind the extension weren’t savage digital marauders.
Still, Sell Hack has decided to comply with the cease and desist order (again, understandable). So the extension may not currently work, but we’re keeping it on this list because the makers have taken to their blog to promise good things in the future: “We are building a better product that does not conflict with LinkedIn’s [terms of service].”
Sell Hack is benched for now, but Microsoft Outlook add-on Social Connector is still in the game. Social Connector is similar to Sell Hack, in that it’s a nice way to uncover hidden email addresses. However, Social Connector requires significantly more legwork than Sell Hack, and it only works through MS Outlook.
Still, it’s a valuable tool to have. Be sure to check out recruiting pro Irina Shamaeva’s detailed description of how to use Social Connector to find email addresses. Bonus: in that same blog post, Shamaeva outlines two other methods for (somewhat sneakily) ferreting out email addresses.
Chances are, you already know all about Jobvite: the company generates some important workforce surveys and offers a fairly popular ATS. But are you making use of Jobvite’s veritable library of HR and recruiting e-books? Because you really should be. That page is packed with information and insights from a leading authority on sourcing, hiring, and managing talent.
Sample titles include “Phoenix from the Ashes: How Innovation Will Help the ATS Rise Again” and “The Seven Deadly Sins of Recruiting,” which are better than 99 percent of other recruiting-related e-book titles.
5.TradePub
Asthe site’s name suggests, TradePub is basically a repository of trade publications. Navigate over to the human resources section of the site, and you’ll find what you might call an “utterly excessive amount of free stuff.” TradePub features magazine subscriptions, white papers, and downloadable content on all manner of HR topics. The best part? All of it is free for qualified professionals.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available on TradePub, so don’t hesitate to sort publications according to sub categories. You can break down the HR umbrella into more specific channels, like “staff training,” “talent management,” and “recruitment,” for a more focused resource hunt.
This is Only the Beginning
There’s so much free stuff on the Internet that trying to catalog it all would be ridiculous — but that isn’t going to stop us from trying. These are only five of the awesome resources we’ve found so far. We promise we’ll keep coming back with more in the future.