Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

When you hear the URL ‘Peopletoucher.com,’ the last thing you might think of is a recruitment application for LinkedIn. But that’s exactly what it is.

The Peopletoucher web application is described by founder Chris Pomeroy as an advanced-advanced-search for sales and recruiting professionals.

“I became frustrated with the built-in LinkedIn search functionality,” Pomeroy said. “For starters, there’s simply not enough text input space available to type a complex search and too many cumbersome drop-down menus. . . so I made a web application. The search tools lets recruiters save terms they use frequently, save search settings, filter contacts by rank, and automates some of the Boolean operators that have to be tediously entered.”

The application is totally free, and Pomeroy said there he has no intentions of changing that. Here’s how it works: the user begins with a fresh search interface. You can choose to either hunt for job candidates or decision makers, depending on your current function. Then you type in the location (city, country, or anywhere).

Next you can pick the candidate’s job title ranking with RankFilter. You may select from 5 tiers of career levels, from Staff to Director to C-Level. Or you can choose all five or a combination of two or three.

Now you select from a list of applicable search terms like ‘audit’ or ‘financial’ or ‘HR.’ Each term you select turns from black to red so you know what you’ve picked.

You can also refine your search by freshness, which is not how new contacts are to LinkedIn; rather, it’s how new they are to your “network” (within 3 degrees of separation to you). These people could have been on the site for years and only recently became visible to you.

Recruiters can use the keywords function to drill down on a particular certification like CISSP or software experience like J2EE, for example, as these terms may or may not be in a person’s title. Often they are in the job description field.

Pomeroy recommends only using the keywords function when you want to find matches of terms outside of a person’s title and Title Search Terms for all others.

Lastly, you can also search for people by entering in the company name in the corresponding field.

Before beginning your search, Pomeroy says it’s a good idea to add as much contacts as possible since your searching ability is limited to your LinkedIn network, or the group of people connected to you via 3 degrees of separation.

“We are not really technically a ’search engine’ because we don’t crawl pages – we just help users put together better searches and organize them for reuse,” Pomeroy said. “I know some people use Enterprise Recruiter accounts which provide them with access to out of network candidates. These members should get the same visibility level through our search, although we’ve only tested Free and Business-Premium accounts. We’re merely linking users to LinkedIn search results pages.”

Here are three great suggestions Pomeroy devised to add contacts.

As for that controversial moniker, Pomeroy said he’s fully aware that it’s generating some giggles.

“People have been making fun of the name. We know it has some connotations to it, but it just helps spread the word.”

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