I spend a lot of time online. At least 40 hours per week and that’s probably a low estimate. I spend so much time online I intentionally have an archaic cell phone so I am unable to surf when I’m outside the house. When I go on vacation, the laptops and the crappy cell phones are forbidden, and it’s almost like detox for the first 24 hours.
But, when I am online, I try to maximize my time, whether I’m researching or sourcing. And you should too. I would love to skip around and stop here and there and read and try out new strings and more, but focus is key to getting our jobs done and not falling down the proverbial rabbit hole. So, I am a big advocate of using a Reader. I’m partial to Google And I’ve written about this a bit before here.
Once you get your Reader started, you need to organize it, just don’t slap your blogs, strings and more into it. Take the time to set up some folders. Mine are set up to cover general business blogs, recruiting, hr, sourcing, search strings, tweet feeds and more. When I add blogs or Google Alerts, I file them right away so everything’s tidy and ready to go. Most of my folder titles are self-explanatory, but let me talk about a couple. I do have search strings in my Reader. There are sourcing jobs in my career that have been particularly challenging, and I still have those strings that “worked” and I check ‘em out every once in a while. Some may be wondering what my “tweet feeds” are. I create these feeds with the help of search.twitter.com, for some of my prolific Twitter friends. This way I can check their tweets out whenever and, with a quick scan, see if there’s great articles I missed them tweeting about that I need to follow up on.
With my Reader set up this way, I can make time every day to check on all my topics or, what I usually do is focus in on a particular area, scan the article titles and move on from there. If I were someone with limited funds and time in the recruiting arena, I would definitely set up a Reader and make use of Google Alerts to track my search strings – it would give me back a nice chunk of time in each day to explore other sourcing strategies or better yet, focus on additional projects.
Need suggestions on blogs to read regularly? I think that’s a separate article, or catch me on the Tweet Side and I’ll share some with you.
I’d love to hear what you think of this:
http://adjix.com/p3j7
Thanks,
Guy
Thanks for the comment Guy.
AllTop is interesting – if the information you’re gathering is shareable. Some of the information I gather is, and some might fall under the heading of CI. Google, since it’s got the almighty password system in place, and the ability to choose whom I share with, is still tops for me.
But I’ll dig into AllTop further – I can definitely see how it would help me share information with my company’s clients and the recruiting peer community.
Best,
Kelly