I am the world’s most organized person. Well, it doesn’t hurt to think that way at least. Not until I’ve filed and catalogued so much I don’t know where the heck it all is anymore. Like a pre-schooler who does not like one food group to touch another, I diligently bookmark into categories all worldly pertinent info that catches my eye. Pertinent and important in my world of sourcing that is. Of course I bet you I have stuff filed from 5 years ago and the URL no longer even exists. Yep time for some cyber spring cleaning…..ah the sweet scent of springtime!

The sourcing masters from SourceCon have shown us so much. I bow to the great ones. I don’t do half of it I admit (though I’d like to be set up like ‘em all “slick and click” but I haven’t got to the “just do it” part yet) but like they say, “set-up and use what you are comfortable with”, and therein lies the golden key.

So I do my own home grown version with a little tweaking. I have my links grouped in a few main areas as a quick go to and would like to share.

1. Search Engines (includes the custom ones & some spider automation type tools)
2. Professional & Social Networking (boy is this group going crazy!
3. Locator Tools (all those yellow and white page types –Pipl, Whoozy, 123)
4. Job Boards & Resume Databases (paid and free)
5. Subscription sites (what we pay for other than job boards)
6. Sources – Biz Related (like Layoff Trackers and those snazzy Visual Mapping sites)
7. Salary & Compensation
8. Knowledgebase (for all the stuff I subscribe to enhance my self learning)
9. Find – my catchall category for various Glossaries, Patent search sites, campaign donor sites (yeah, can you get some names off there & I don’t care a hoot for political affiliations!) and any off the cuff really interesting stuff I come across.

So what’s the big deal? I go one step further in my fairly simplistic common sense approach home grown methodology. Within a group I re-name the site urls. For example within the Search Engine Group I have several links that specifically search Twitter and yes, for the most part they have those names that start with the proverbial “TW-this” or “TW-that” but I re-name them so the file name becomes something like

“TWITTER – Actual Name of the Site – any other description info”

When I alpha sort my link, all my go to sources for searching on Twitter are all listed together. Power in team work!! Besides I make sure I am covering my bases. Perhaps some of you already do this (indulge me) and if you don’t, I hope this was somewhat helpful!

Some day, post all the spring cleaning, I hope to be super cyber slick clickety-click organized! For now this will do. Sorry what did you need? Oh shoot, now where in the world did I file…hmm…come out, come out, wherever you are!!

Originally posted on April 13, 2010 on RecruitingArsenal