A sourcer is only as good as their tools. After all, without a functional email account, strong WiFi connection or a decent computer, the amount of work even the most committed and talented sourcer is able to accomplish is limited. But, assuming you have all of the above, what else out there can help you take your work to the next level? Well, you’re in luck, because in honor of the 2017 World's Greatest Sourcer competition, we spoke with sourcing guru and WGS judge, Shally Steckerl, to get an updated look at his favorite sourcing and productivity tools.
Evernote
Evernote started out as a simple digital notepad where you could jot things down whenever you needed to. Now it’s far more than that. It’s a true organizational hub for all kinds of documents, including PDFs, photos and more. You can forward emails to it for safe keeping and even scan pieces of paper or objects for safe keeping (receipts, bills, business cards, etc). It also syncs across devices meaning you can have all of your data and info available to you whether you’re at the office or on the go.
RescueTime
The internet is an amazing thing, but it also presents a million different ways to procrastinate. RescueTime aims to help your productivity by helping you cut out the time-wasting. It also tracks your time to let you know what your biggest timewasters are, which can even help you figure out what parts of your job are draining the most energy and resources during your day to day.
Google Voice
Sourcers have to bounce between phone calls, emails and numerous other types of communication, which can make it hard to keep track of everything. Google Voice simplifies this with features like SMS to email, voicemail transcription, voicemail sharing, one number for all of your phones (office, cell, home) and other features that make it easy to stay synced across multiple numbers and locations. It also makes it easy to share information with others that otherwise would be locked in your voicemail account. Google Voice is a great way to centralize everything.
Google Custom Search Engines
Google customer search engines are an amazing way to focus and limit your searches to just the relevant databases. Just want to search Github, Stackoverflow, and Hacker News? Create a custom search engine for that! Trying to narrow down your focus on designers to just Behance and Dribbble. Just eliminate all the other websites and you're in business. In the right hands, Google custom search engines are an amazing way to cut out the noise, something every sourcer can benefit from.
Google Personal Blocklist
In a nutshell, the personal blocklist chrome extension allows you to create a list of websites that you don’t want to see in your search results. The rise of content farms and other websites creating low-quality content or impersonating higher quality sites has made eliminating the bad stuff essential. Personal blocklist helps you keep your searched focused on the information and candidates that really matters. Combined with Custom Search Engines, it puts all the focused power of Google at your fingertips.
TruePeopleSearch.com
If you don’t have Entelo, finding email addresses and phone numbers for candidates is no small task. TruePeopleSearch is one way to get that information. All you need is a person’s name and the city they live in to get more detailed contact information. Plus, most of the info is completely free. It won’t have everything you need, but it’s a solid place to begin your search when you're digging up hard to find intel.
Hunter.io
The web version allows you to look up domains and find the email addresses associated with those domains. Whether you’re trying to find out how to contact the author of a blog or the person behind a particularly impressive portfolio, hunter is a great place to get that information. It’s also cool, because it also shows the information sources, giving you even more resources to dig around in.
Todoist
The value of listmaking and checklistsis well-proven and Todoist offers one of the best list apps around. Like Evernote, it allows you to sync across devices, but Todoist also lets you set deadlines, check projects off when you finish them, create subtasks, and in general keep track of everything you need to do and when you need to do it. If there is one app you download, let this be the one.
Glockapps
A recruiter and sourcer’s worst enemy are outreach emails that don’t get read Glockapps is an email optimization tool that allows you to improves your email performance and deliverability by testing and tracking your email messages before you send them. Outreach is a huge part of recruiting, and Glockapps lets you optimize that.
IFTTT
As you know, we’re big fans of automation at Entelo, and IFTTT is an incredibly powerful automation platform. It allows you to knit together the different tools and solutions you use to create a more seamless experience. With IFTTT you can create workflows such as automatically saving resumes to Dropbox or streamlining your social media to allow you to manage everything more easily. With IFTTT, the possibilities are endless for enterprising and creative sourcers to create better ways to do your work.
If you would like to hear more from Shally on his favorite ways to save time, optimize his work, and source even better, be sure to check out our webinar with him on Essential Hiring and Productivity Tools kicking off Thursday, December 12th at 10am. Do you have any favorite tools and apps of your own? Let us know in the comments!
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