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Top 10 Free Job-Hunting Resources for Talent Acquisition Professionals
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We’ve been in recruiting a long time, and have had our share of layoff stints. Fortunately, they’ve been relatively short, which we attribute (beyond our actual work histories) in large part to smartly tapping resources, how well we network, and how we’ve cultivated our professional brands.
While branding and network are each deserving topics in themselves, we want to focus this article on go-to resources that we and other TA peers have tapped successfully — all of which should save you time and optimize results. Here are our top 10 recommendations for TA professionals to tap for their own job search (numbered for convenience, not priority).
Comprehensive job-seeker guides like JobHunt are great, but they often don’t speak from the perspective of a TA person looking for work. But this COVID-19 Recruiter Page does. This is a living webpage with comprehensive resources that we along with other peer continue to compile and maintain. You’ll probably be most interested in the “Hiring Lists” and “Company & Interview Resources” sections.
One of our personal favorites from the above that’s underutilized by most TA folks is Crunchbase Companies Search. It’s free and it lets you target by industry, location, size, etc., and we particularly recommend that you expand the “Financials” section of the left-hand column “Filters” and select “Series C” and higher firms. These companies are beyond startup stage — big enough to have the scale to bring recruiting in-house but not necessarily posting about it. Hit up the TA heads you know/can find via LinkedIn (or get a mutual intermediary to approach the second-degree folks).
On a related note, AngelList is a great place to scope out companies that are hiring and need some help. Get a free login, then go to AngeliList jobs, where you can leverage filters like job title, location, salary range, skills, industry, keywords, funding level, company size, businesses that can sponsor visas, and more. In the results, colored tags indicate if a company is fast-growing, highly-rated, verified as hiring during Covid, has strong leadership, encourages strong work/life balance, if it’s funded by an investor of a mega-unicorn, etc.
Insider sourcer and recruiter jobs are posted most often in these groups, particularly the SourceCon Facebook Group. To surface slightly older job posts below the fold, just search by keyword, like “available.” In SourceCon’s group, you may also search for “Jung” to find the posts by Jung Kim, who shares the majority of job posts.
On a related note, in a recent post, Jung shared some excellent search strings that he uses to find such roles. (He added a search for Twitter in the comments, but it has more false positives to filter through, so we don’t recommend that one as much.)
Other big Facebook groups with TA postings (which we find far more useful than LinkedIn equivalents) are Secret Sourcing Group and Jobs for Recruiters. [Editor’s note: You may also head to ERE’s Facebook Group for occasional job posts and peer support.]
Indeed Jobs and LinkedIn Jobs are the two best general boards for TA folks, as long as you’re tight with your search criteria. If you don’t know all the Indeed syntax to limit to companies, job titles, etc., start with https://www.indeed.com/advanced_search, where all the form fields make it easy.
Additionally, there is now a free Chrome extension created by Hiretual that automatically expands your search on both those job sites to include related search terms you might not have thought of. If you indicate that you are actively job-hunting, you should be granted immediate alpha-version access (it’s already useful), or else you’ll be put on the beta release list.
Also, don’t ignore the up-and-coming Google Jobs. Relevant openings should naturally bubble up in your Google search results, but make sure you are entering the “Jobs” interface so you can set distance radius, etc., as well as save jobs and set alerts (this is different than the regular Google Alerts, which do not have a “Jobs” filter). Details at https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7498276.
Unless you’re in a Covid-proof recruiting niche (or a Covid-enhanced one, like vaccines), another way to stand out to add value nowadays is via diversity recruiting. If you have a track record of success in any underrepresented category (particularly women, people of color, military veterans, LGBT+, or disability if in the United States) — or if you have creatively or successfully built such pipelines — definitely call that out in your CV and initial approach. It’s also worth pointing out that you should expand your hiring-manager targets beyond TA heads to include chief diversity officers (again, easy to find via LinkedIn, etc.).
And if you’d like to get more up to speed on diversity in recruiting, there are two Facebook groups — Diversity: HR & Recruiting Best Practices and Diversity Sourcing and Recruiting — that focus on it, as well as a free biweekly DEI Cohort Zoom call (not recorded to ensure candor/safe space) at 4 p.m. ET every other Friday. (Contact Glenn Gutmacher to get on the DEI zoom distribution list.)
Most recruiters are great at evaluating others’ CVs but not crafting their own, typically leaving out quantitative data: How many people did you place in what kinds of roles over what period of time? Resumes that include such details stand out from others that are more qualitative in nature.
You can get constructive feedback on your resume in the Free Resume Review Facebook Group, monitored by professional career counselors and recruiters.
The individuals cited in these emails are the people who ultimately approve TA-related hires, so when a chief HR officer moves to a new company, you should follow, add, and congratulate the person. It’s a great way to uncover hidden opportunities (or make an influential friend). There are two good free sources for this, and they don’t overlap much: CHRM Moves (just scroll down the page to view) and Hominum (you need to request to get added to their list).
Two lists of people to keep on your radar and vice-versa:
Top 100 Human Resources Influencers of 2019 and Top 100 HR Influencers to Follow on Twitter. The second one contains Twitter handles, so if you have a free PhantomBuster.com account, it takes 30 seconds to add these 100 new influencers to your Twitter following list.
Built In is a great resource to find growing companies, but we’re putting it last because it’s more useful if your metro area is among the eight (and growing) active metro sites in the network. Of course, if a company offers virtual roles or you’re open to relocation, then you’re not restricted that way.
[Editor’s note: RecruitingJobs.com is a further resource to find work opportunities.]