Broadlook Review in the UK Recruiter Newsletter
9/10/2008
Article Two: Broadlook Technologies Product Review by Mike Walmsley
Mike reviews this product for building your client and candidate database from the web.
In the last few years, a number of exciting web-based developments have made the process of finding candidates and hiring managers so much easier. However, the Internet is so vast that despite offering huge access to enormously valuable, real-time information it can still be very time consuming to find, extract, and then get that information in a useable form.
Following my recent recruitment training presentations in North America I believe I have found a major breakthrough.
Like most recruiters, I need to manage my time ruthlessly and the biggest challenge with mining a source like the Internet is time. Whilst presenting in North America recently I was therefore intrigued to hear about some technology from a company called Broadlook Technologies (www.broadlook.com).
Broadlook claims some very impressive capabilities – for example, that with just a couple clicks on the keyboard you can build your contact database – so I checked it out to see if it could do what they claimed, i.e. that you can start to turn the Internet into a virtual, real-time database.
Amazingly, with Contact Capture (part of the Broadlook suite, which you can get for free) you are able to do just that. This simple software allows you to highlight any contact information on a specific Web page you would like to add to your database and just hold down the Control Key, and tap the “C” key twice. The program mines information such as name, address, phone number, email, web site url, and more. Once you are done mining for data, just export it to one of a number of programs such as an Excel spreadsheet.
Their “Eclipse” version is even more impressive in that it can parse, capture, sort and export large online lists of companies and contacts (think of mining Yellow Pages, for example). But here’s the smart bit: if there are no contacts listed on, for example, the data you mine from Yellow Pages then you can utilise Broadlook’s “Diver” software to find them on the web in seconds – and then smile to yourself as it brings back names, job titles, contact details and even bios of the people that work there, provided of course, that they exist in the public domain.
My staff now uses the Broadlook suite on a regular basis and we can’t remember how we got along without it.
To see free clips of Mike’s 28 online recruitment videos, visit http://www.mikewalmsley.com/online.htm