about.me, for the uninitiated, is a fantastic little service which offers users the chance to create a simple splash page which can home multiple online identities and link to social networking sites, websites and blogs. A page can contain as much or little information as one desires (those with far more imagination than me can create some really cool profiles) and users range from software engineers to physiotherapists, art students all the way through to little known technology recruiters. A simple idea, but one which AOL thought highly enough of to acquire the then startup just four days after their official launch back in 2010.
The Sourcer in me grew instantly curious; as always, the question was how could we leverage a new pool of potential candidates to our advantage? While about.me does contain a basic search function, it was rather limited for what we need; you can search by name, which could be useful if you are looking for further contact details for leads you already know, but not so much for sourcing new talent. The ability to search by 'tags' also exists, but is reliant on users tagging their profiles with the same keywords you are searching for.
Thankfully, about.me is indexed very neatly on our old friend Google; check out this simple search string to search for 'software engineers' across the site. Sweet!
A little bit of tweaking, and you can do some pretty cool searches; keeping it as simple as possible seems to be the name of the game (try this very simple search for technology leaders in London, for example), but with a little imagination again a lot is possible.
Note: I have been using about.me to search for some time, and one golden feature which it seems has unfortunately been lost is that it used to actually search not only the about.me splash page, but incredibly all of the social networks contained within. This loophole appears to have closed, but it is still an excellent tool to have in the armoury none the less.
Happy sourcing!
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| site:about.me <your search query> |
Note: I have been using about.me to search for some time, and one golden feature which it seems has unfortunately been lost is that it used to actually search not only the about.me splash page, but incredibly all of the social networks contained within. This loophole appears to have closed, but it is still an excellent tool to have in the armoury none the less.
Happy sourcing!
AOL member search used to be really cool as well.
ReplyDeleteI dunno what it's like nowadays.
Anyone?
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