About Search: Across the Universe

If you're stuck in Googleland or Bing's your only thing, it’s definitely time to venture out beyond your cyber borders. Different search engines return different information and you might just be amazed at what you’ll find.

One of the most interesting new search engines, Social Mention, belongs to the class of tools that utilize a real-time search platform. Basically, real-time search allows you to find what’s happening now or, at the very least, uncover fresh information.

In the case of Social Mention, the search is focused on social media.

Here's how it works.

When you enter a person's name (presumably the name of a candidate), results known as mentions get returned. These are in typical search engine format, and you have the ability to click through each link, but there's a slight difference. Social Mention provides timeframes for these mentions (as in yesterday or 2 months ago, for example), as well as the venue where the person was mentioned. This additional info helps recruiters find current candidate activities.

The details provided in the left sidebar area can also prove useful from the standpoint of recruiting. In this section, Social Mention provides a quick snapshot that can help recruiters hone in on appropriate candidates.

Here, the Top Keywords category shows the most frequently used keywords associated with a person. These generally relate to industry or topic areas. Meanwhile, the Top Users category provides posting information, such as blogs, websites or individual users.

The sidebar also provides details about how often a person is mentioned, and when s/he was last mentioned.

It's all great data. Nevertheless, there's one section in the sidebar that seems unreliable: the sentiment meter. Supposedly it weighs positive, negative, and neutral comments to arrive at a ratio. Yet, even though a recent search supposedly included 7 negative comments, upon clicking through, none of these comments actually were negative. With this as an example, recruiters would be wise to delve deeper into the negative category and/or ignore the sentiment meter.

This small glitch aside, Social Mention is a terrific search tool for recruiting. After entering a name, a message is returned: “searching content from across the universe.” In an age where social media has become the way people converse, the universe Social Mention searches will continue to expand—and so will Social Mention's value as a recruitment tool.