In a prior Third Party Thursday I talked about the need for a "sourcing process". I didn't offer one as it differs for different types of recruitng. Assuming you took me up on my advice and now have one, here is another checklist item for your process (although it is more of a strategy item than a checklist item). Free resumes from Resume Distribution Services. Here is one more way to keep your candidate flow going. A resume distribution service is one that actually charges the candidate a fee to distribute his or her resume to recruiters all across the country, so to say these candidates are the "active" type would be an understatement. Having said that, this does not mean they are not quality candidates. Just like any other resource, some are, some aren’t. These services allow recruiters to sign up for free, and then have varying degrees of filters for the resumes you want to receive, depending on the service. You can often limit your inflow to those resumes in a specific geographic region and industry, sometimes more comprehensive filters are available. Here are a few that I belong to for you to look at:

·ResumeDeliver - www.resumedeliver.com
·ResumeBlaster - www.resumeblaster.com
·ResumZapper - www.resumezapper.com
·ResumeAction - www.resumeaction.com
·ResumeAdvance - www.resumeadvance.com
·ResumeSpider - www.resumespider.com

The real benefit to this strategy, as I see it, is your ability to build a database of these candidates. I probably get in between 3 and 10 resumes a week from these services. I notice many that I can’t use have great profiles. I have created a folder in my Outlook for all of these incoming resumes. After several years of receiving these I have over 6000 resumes in this folder. So now I have a database of active candidates, yes, but I imagine that many of them that were active when I originally received their resume have found new jobs and could now be considered passive. I can use my Outlook Advanced Find feature or even a desktop search program like Google Desktop (which is free) to search this folder for keywords. All of these documents have full contact information.

I have just listed a very few of these services. There are many more than listed above. Is this a resource to rely on? Of course not. There is no one resource that we can get 100% of our candidates from, however, it does not take very long to sign up for these and again, there is no cost. My suggestion is that each of you take a few minutes and investigate one or more of these and see what you get.

Mark