We had a great RecruitingLive session last week, and I wish we could have answered all the questions on the air. I felt that people who spent the time to look at my mug for 30 minutes deserved to get their questions answered, even if we couldn’t do so on the show. So, here’s my take on a few of the questions that came in last week.

Thanks again to everyone who took time out of their day to join.

What is Spokeo, and is it free?

Spokeo is a great tool for finding contact information on people. Think of it as the 21st century version of the White Pages, where old folk used to have to go to find contact information, and what was probably the world’s first legitimate recruiting tool.

Spokeo is not free, but it comes at an exceptionally reasonable cost. For example, I use three of their search products: Name, Email and Phone. The three of these cost me about $40 for six months, which is easily justifiable, when you’re talking about being able to circumvent InMauls and other blind touch methods. I get about 20 searches in each category a month, and because I use it as a verifier or last step of my search, it’s about all I need. Sourcers – your mileage may vary.

As with all tools, it is not the end-all-be-all, but it is a critical tool in being able to put the pieces together to get to the person you want to find. I will caution that sometimes the phone numbers are a little out of date, but I’ve seen this in far fewer instances than when the phone number is right on target.

Is Spokeo available outside the US? 

To my knowledge it is US-based right now.  If anyone has different information, I’d love to hear it.

What is Riffle? Is it part of Twitter? 

Riffle will change the way you use Twitter. I think that many people wave off Twitter because the communications are so fast and fleeting, that they feel you can’t possibly build rapport on there. But what if there was a way to use a tool that allowed you to see how your candidate targets use Twitter? Enter Riffle.

Riffle is a FREE Chrome extension (and not a part of the Twitter native platform) that allows you to see critical information about the profiles you view on Twitter. It provides you with data on several key metrics:

• How many Retweets and Favorites per tweet that account gets
• The top @ mentions used by that account
• The top hashtags used by that account
• Average tweets per day AND the platform from which they are tweeting from.

Do these tools mess you up with LinkedIn? Will they discover you are using these and penalize you? 

Good question. Some of the tools we talked about – primarily the Chrome extensions – do leverage scraping data from LinkedIn. And, as we are all too familiar with, LinkedIn does not like anyone playing around for free in their sacred garden. I have not encountered anyone who personally came across any issues with LinkedIn for using Chrome extensions – yet. I’m not a lawyer (but I did in fact stay at a Holiday Inn last weekend), but I’d assume the risk and liability lies with the creator of the extensions. With Microsoft taking over in a few months, it’s a little more murky on how they will approach 3rd party tools grabbing information from the platform. The Redmond Machine has always been particularly aggressive about the protection of their software and platforms, so time will tell.

Can you break down your usual day? 

I always laugh at the phrase “usual day”. We’re recruiters, and each day is like smashing open a pinata and not knowing what you’ll get – which is half the fun. But you asked, so here you go.

I’m an early riser. I hate being at work late or after it gets dark, that’s just me.  I like getting in early by 7 or 7:30, so that I can have 90 minutes or so to clean up from the day before and get myself ready for the day. I also try not to bring work home if possible. I have two young kids, and don’t need them handing me the lyrics to “Cat’s in the Cradle” 20 years from now. You can always do more work, you can’t always play with your 4 year old again.

Here’s what an average day looks like for me.

7-8:30 – Check emails, respond to any critical overnight issues, handle any paperwork (offer letters accepted, etc), check for new resumes from overnight and reach out to anyone who looks good. I’ll also do a sweep of Twitter, and schedule a few tweets out for the day if I have something to share or something we had scheduled to put out there.

8:30-12 – My mornings are usually filled with calls in 20-30 minute increments. In between those calls, I’ll grab five minutes on email to check for any fires I need to put out. Anything that is run of the mill can wait until the afternoon.

12-1 – I’ll usually try to grab lunch here. If I’m busy, then I’ll eat at the desk. If I’m less busy, I like to take a book and go hit the lunchroom at work for 20-30 minutes. It’s just a nice break from talking Java and QA for the last 4 hours. Either way, I’ll use this time to check for new resumes that might have come in, and do another sweep of email.

1-4 – More calls, depending on the req load I’m carrying at the time and candidate availability. When calls are lighter, I spend some time talking with managers, and giving them updates on their roles or doing intake meetings. Here I’ll also do another sweep of Twitter and some Facebook groups, to see if anything interesting is being talked about.

* I may also sneak 10-15 minutes here during fantasy football season to see if I can steal someone off the waiver wire. #Priorities. 

4-5 – I’ll spend the last part of my day cleaning up the emails I didn’t get to, and planning out my day for tomorrow. This allows me to prep for meetings, calls or other things. Evernote is my go-to for all my organizational needs. I keep all my to-do’s in there and update it in live time, so I can stay on top of what needs to happen – both at work and outside of work. I’d be lost without it.

I may switch this up based on need and volume. I try to carve out at least half a day a week for sourcing if possible. We run a full desk on a small team, so I can’t source every day – that’s just my reality.

How do you stay focused with all the tools out there? Doesn’t your head spin?

It’s not so much my head spinning, as much as it is me feeling progressively older with all these tools at our disposal. I’m a fan of finding the 5-7 tools that really work well for you and leveraging them. Try to use all of these, and you’ll just run in circles.  Now, if the 5-7 tools aren’t working for you, then expand out from there. Too often I’ve made the mistake of having 10-15 tools open and the next thing I know, 4 hours have gone by and I’m no closer to my goal. Keep it simple and sane.