Depending on where you live, the kids in your life will soon be answering the quintessential back to school question... "what did you do on your summer vacation?" This summer, I can truly look back on where I've been sourcing and different ways I've been trying to stretch. It's been interesting, helping people find everything from Emergency Medicine Professionals to Wind Energy Managers. There's been alot of general advice going out too, particularly on Twitter. But when I look back on the last 3 months, here are just a few of the items that stand out:

Revisiting Exalead
They have an updated search page you can access here. Cleaner but still retaining their amazing advanced search functionality. It's one of the unsung workhorses in the search world. This summer it's NEAR operator has made it fun to dig into Twitter profiles. This is a string I've tried:

site:twitter.com (bio NEAR/3 "ruby on rails")

With a site like Twitter, that refuses to call a profile a profile, the NEAR command on Exalead allows me to capture information that could be hit or miss if I left off that key NEAR/# operator.

Encouraging Recruiters....and candidates... to think beyond LinkedIn
Don't get me wrong. I really like LinkedIn. It's a great go to resource when you need to pull candidates quickly. But I like digging into Google Profiles and FlipSearching Friendfeed too. This summer, particularly when I've had jobseekers approach me, I've suggested they create a LinkedIn profile (100% didn't have one), include their professional information on their Facebook page and consider engaging in some other professional and social networking sites. My final recommendation is to link all of these sites to a Google profile, to increase their "findability".

Burrowing into Blogs
I remember early in the summer chatting with a group of recruiters about sourcing candidates via blogs. What I remember clearly is the eye roll half the group did. I still laugh when I think about it. To me, all the blog publishing sites are pools of potential candidates. I do like to go back and XRay all of these sites. And this summer, for many of my multi-tasking XRays, Bing has been my search site of choice.

Creating Custom Search Engines
Custom Search Engines have become one of my favorite tools. With so many different ways to leverage, I think these should be come a part of every recruiter's strategy. So easy to build and with an amazing potential to save you time and create more depth into your strategy. If I were a corporate recruiter I would create 2 this fall, one focusing on college recruitment and another focusing on diversity.

Making Metasearch a regular part of my sourcing
Leapfish, Zuula and more are great sites to use to make sure you leave no stone unturned in your sourcing. Many times I like to use them to see which search engine will give me the most results. I've been running search strings on the usual Search Engine suspects this summer but also plugging them into LeapFish to see I haven't missed something, or someone.

Use better tools with Twitter
When Digsby came out, I thought it was the applicaton to use to really keep in touch with my social media presence. Then TweetDeck hit. Since then I also have been putting Seesmic through its paces. But the winner for me is PeopleBrowsr. First it doesn't drop those irritating updates onto my desktop when I'm trying to do other tasks. Second, it's lightning fast. People looking over my shoulder typically say "what the ???". It's scalable - functional for the lite user and the competitive intelligence expert. And the coup de grace? It's accessible from my web browser, I don't need to download another application to hog my pc's precious resources. And I can access it from anywhere.

Definitely a productive summer, and eye opening to the opportunities to leverage other resources beyond the standards of search. Let's keep this conversation going - How did you source this summer? Anything different that enhanced your ability to find the candidates you needed?