The other day I received an email from a colleague of mine, detailing
another unique way of exploiting the Google search engine to identify
candidate streams. His Boolean formula used several of the Google
Advanced Operators to target a specific application extension file
that is commonly created to track a large list of people.

And then I thought about what I hear often, as to the
phrase, "thinking out-of-the-box."

As a recruiter, when someone talks about a resume, I normally think
of either an attached file to an email message in Microsoft Word, or
some proprietary format displayed as a dynamic link culled from the
search of a resume database.

Yet, there are many ways that a resume can be created. Here are some
of the more common applications and their extensions.

Microsoft Word (doc), Rich Text Format (rtf), Ascii Text (txt), Adobe
(pdf), WordPerfect (wpd), Microsoft Works (wps)

When people go online looking for work they often either post their
resume on an existing database or get more creative and develop a
personal web space to store a copy of their resume or even showcase
it in HTML format.

So, if you were looking for someone indexed by Google, who had a
resume using one of the above common word processing applications,
you can imagine how simple it would be to construct a Boolean search
string to find these types of documents.

(filetype:doc OR filetype:wpd OR filetype:wps OR filetype:pdf OR
filetype:rtf OR filetype:txt) AND (intitle:resume OR inurl:resume)
AND "software engineer"

The search string above uses all five application extensions with an
OR operator, followed by another targeted operator that says the
word "resume" must lie either in the HTML title or somewhere within
the body of the URL. The last item is simply what skill set or job
position, or anything you want to target your specific search should
be. It can be a single phrase as I have shown, or a series of "must
haves." For example:

…AND "software engineer" AND java AND j2ee

Before you shift back to sourcing mode, remember that there are many
names for a resume as well…

http://spaces.msn.com/members/sourcerersapprentice/