Chrome Extensions for a Sourcing Enthusiast - Chapter 2

In one of my earlier posts, I wrote about five chrome extensions that I found useful in my pursuit of candidates.  Since then, my love for these extensions has grown immensely.  I have found that not only do they prove to be useful in recruiting, but utilizing them properly has actually improved a number of things about my web browsing experience.  Now, I can’t claim to be Dean Da Costa but I’m still a huge fan.  For those of you who don’t know, Dean is widely regarded as a sourcing expert and has long talked about the power of chrome extensions.  He has published lists of useful chrome extensions that stretch from here until forever.  I’m not that deep into it, but I have identified five more chrome extensions that I have found to be incredibly useful.  So at this point, I’m going to put my “tech geek” hat on and share some of the free tools at everyone’s disposal that I find quite useful. 

Facebook Search

According to the website Wordstream, Facebook accounts for 21% of all the social media traffic in the world and in any given month, 1.28 BILLION people are active on the site.  For many recruiting and sourcing professionals, those statistics are enough to invoke downright giddiness.  That’s a huge resource that many folks have struggled to figure out how to tap into.  Well, this extension makes the job quite a bit easier.  This extension literally walks you through the steps that you need to take to find the people that you’re looking for on Facebook.  You can focus on a number of different search criteria, but just the fact that you can target a job title within a certain geographic area makes this a valuable addition to your chrome arsenal.  The interface is configured to be very easy to use and it makes a great compliment to your everyday tools.    

E-Mail Hunter

E-mail Hunter does exactly what it says it’s going to do.  It locates personal email addresses for people.  This extension can be used with a variety of different social media sites.  Of course, LinkedIn is one of my favorites.  When I can find an e-mail address or any other contact information outside of your typical InMail, it’s like gold.  This tool will also identify e-mail patterns that are associated with various organizations and make educated “guesses” if it isn’t able to verify an address.  To give you an idea of what you’re working with, the extension will tell you how certain it is that it has the e-mail address correct.  Utilize this tool with a tool such as MailTester and you no longer have to rely on InMails for all of your communications. 

LinkedIn Storage

For many talent acquisition professionals, it is common practice to put profiles, candidates, and resumes into working folders.  They do this for a variety of reasons.  Obviously keeping your efforts organized increases your efficiency but the real value lies in the ability to re-visit pipelined candidates and share information about these candidates with other team members.  LinkedIn Storage allows you to save LinkedIn profiles to your own personal web page.  In addition, you can add “tags” putting these candidates into various categories that will make them easy to identify later.  In the absence of a LinkedIn Recruiter account, this tool is a must have. 

Gorgias

If you visit the Gorgias website, it will simply state that the extension gives you the ability to “Create text templates and insert them with shortcuts in Chrome”.  This handy chrome extension gives you the ability to create customized messages, store them as a template, and access them instantaneously, which greatly improves your efficiency.  The best part is that Gorgias integrates with a variety of commonly used tools.  This little extension can save you time on the keyboard and get you back to hunting down those hard to find candidates. 

ext templates and in

\sert them with shortcuts in Chro

Extensity

Once you delve into the world of chrome extensions, things can get a little messy.  Your toolbar can get cluttered, you struggle to keep everything organized, and find yourself having to disable/enable chrome extensions on a consistent basis.  Well, for that we have Extensity.  Extensity takes all of your chrome extensions and puts them in one, easy to use package.  Most importantly, you can eliminate the vast majority of chrome extensions on your toolbar and access them easily through extensity.  Previously I was hiding chrome extensions in the Chrome menu to keep my toolbar clean which proved to be clunky and a bit confusing.  With extensity, that’s no longer an issue.

I hope that some of the information on my most recent post has proved to be useful.  Once again, I can’t talk enough about how these extensions can impact your day-to-day efforts.  For questions or comments, please feel free to contact me at will@therecruitingnerd.com

Will Maurer is currently living his dream as the Global Sourcing Manager for General Motors.  With that said, his opinions are solely his own and do not reflect the opinion of his employer.  He firmly believes that Talent Acquisition is a team sport and feels very fortunate to be surrounded by some of the best professionals in the world.  You can find his random thoughts at www.therecruitingnerd.com