We had a phenomenal response to yesterday's webinar so here's the lowdown on what we call The Recruiter's Toolkit…

As we move from Application-Screening to headhunting to recruit, our time gets eaten up by distraction and time-consuming online sourcing, leaving next to no time for the actual recruiting bit of our job. Conversation is king when it comes to recruitment, it's all about talking to people and selling your brief or your company. To try and make sure you are not wasting time that you could be using doing just that, here are a few (free!) tools we've picked up that allow you to save the time online so you can better spend it doing real recruiting.

What Internet Browser Should You Be Using?

Internet Explorer (still the most popular browser in the world but rapidly losing market share) is not your friend for savvy sourcing. Not only is it slow, but it also actively censors your Boolean Searches to find candidates attempting to prevent Cross-Site-Scripting. Furthermore, you can't add on any of the cool tools we'll highlight below. Google Chrome(now the 2nd most popular browser) and Mozilla Firefox (now in third) are what we recommend you use and install the extensions and add-on's below to speed up your sourcing.

Extension and add-on's - little third-party tools that you add to your web browser that give you more functionality - are free and often little gems that save you minutes per search. We use them everyday and they make our lives much easier, which is surely what it's all about!

Tools for: Finding Words on Any Web Page

EfTwo - available for Chrome (download here bit.ly/eff2). Once downloaded, it allows you to turn on highlighting for all of the terms you've searched for in the Google Toolbar, so it's no longer the dreaded black text on a white background. By highlighting your search terms with EfTwo, you can quickly assess profiles for core skills as they just jump off the page, different colours for all the different terms you've searched for. To access, just type the F key twice, a little search bar will appear at the top of your browser. Your search terms from Google will already be in there, but you can add new ones if you wish. This works on ALL web-pages, not just Google or Bing.

HighlightAll - available for Firefox (download here bit.ly/highlightall), similar to EfTwo. Using your CRTL+F function, enter your desired terms and click "highlight-all", and your search terms are highlighted.

Tools for: Scanning Through Search Results Quickly

AutoPager - available for both Chrome (bit.ly/AutoPChrome) and Firefox (bit.ly/AutoPFox). With AutoPager you don't have to worry about "next paging", as the next page of your search loads on the bottom, so you can just keep scrolling. As a convenience tool we like it a lot, plus it works for all sorts of pages with a search result (like LinkedIn for example). If you're going to use it when searching for LinkedIn profiles a top piece of advice is to right-click each profile you want to investigate, open it in a new tab and then go back to your search.

Tools for: Quickly Posting Content To Twitter and Facebook

Buffer - We wrote a blog post on Buffer on Monday, download it here for Chrome (bit.ly/BufferChrome) and Firefox (bit.ly/BufferFox). We've been using Buffer for four weeks and in that time it has given us a 200% increase in our Twitter traffic to our website. It's super easy to keep fresh content alive on your Twitter account using Buffer. The tool enables you to quickly post any webpage of content (like your job spec or blog) out in to your chosen social network with one click.

So how does it work? Let's say you're on LinkedIn and you see a recommended post, you read it and decide you'd like to share it, you can do so using the Buffer extension which is in the top-right hand corner of your screen. Click the button, your Buffer account opens up and it gives you a suggested tweet that you can use or alternatively you can edit it yourself. You then add it to your Buffer and Buffer does the rest - it determines what is the most productive time to tweet it out, it is learning all the time, making sure the most amount of people see it.

Tools for: Finding Out Who Works Where

WhoWorks.at - Chrome only extension, download here: bit.ly/WhoWorks. This is a great tool for both in-house recruiters and agency recruiters. Let's say you're on a company website, take Oracle for example. Click the WhoWorks.at icon in your browser and a menu of your first-degree LinkedIn contacts affiliated with that company, followed by second and third degree contacts will appear. You now have information at your fingertips to go and reach out by phone (don't sidestep and go straight to email, get talking!) to the most relevant person in the organisation.

Tools for: Monitoring Change in Webpages

PageMonitor - Chrome extension (download here: bit.ly/PageMonitor) - Want a quick way to pick up leads before everyone else? PageMonitor will notify you when a particular webpage that you want to keep an eye on (say a careers page for one of your PSL companies) changes. When a new vacancy is posted you'll be the first to know.

Check4Change - Firefox add-on (download here: bit.ly/Check4Change) - this is the Firefox version of PageMonitor.

Tools for: Turning emails and web addresses in to Hyperlinks

ClickableLinks - Chrome extension (download here: bit.ly/clickablelinks) does what it says on the tin - it makes every single un-clickable web address or email that appears on a webpage clickable (ie, Hyperlinked).

Ways to use all these tools together...

AutoPager + ClickableLinks + Boolean Search + EmailExtract: You have AutoPager on, ClickableLinks on, let's do a Google search for LinkedIn profiles of, say, Accountants in the UK who have their email address somewhere on their profile.

Search Google for: site:uk.linkedin.com (accountant OR accountants OR acca OR aca OR cima) ("* gmail.com" OR "* hotmail.com" OR "* yahoo.com" OR "* .com")

Now, this should bring you up LinkedIn profiles with email addresses of Accountants, and since you've got AutoPager on, when you select ALL text (CTRL+A) and copy all that text (CTRL+C), now paste it in to an Email Extractor service. Use http://eel.surf7.net.my/, and simply paste all the text you've copied in to it and hit Extract. Now, all those email addresses contained within your search results are in one clean list, which you can download as an Excel spreadsheet file, and then import back in to your LinkedIn contacts to connect with all those accountants. (Watch the webinar on our Livestream channel to see exactly how we did this).

PageMonitor + WhoWorks.At + related: : So you see from your notification that the careers page of one of your PSL companies has just been updated with a new role, you contact them to see if you can source a selection of candidates to fill that role from competitor companies. Do a quick Google Search using the related: field command and Google will bring up companies that are similar to your client. Eg, related:oracle.com. Go on to the competitor sites, click on your WhoWorks.At icon, and see who you are connected to in LinkedIn that you can headhunt out to your client.

What combinations of these tools have you tried? Or have you any extensions or add-on alternatives that you like to use to help boost your sourcing activities? Let us know in the comments.