I have met many experienced and accomplished recruiters who have been thrown into the rapidly expanding online world without anyone providing adequate basic training or ways to keep up with the most important news.

In this brief post I don’t aim to bring everyone up to speed. Bit I’d like to cover a list of the very basics that you may want to check for yourself. If you are way beyond this, and are open to learning more, please check out the Tools page and please consider attending the Productivity Tools webinar that I will be repeating/scheduling soon.

If you see anything basic missing, by all means, please comment below:

1. It’s time to update your hardware, the operating system, and get a fast Internet connection if you haven’t.

2. The more Internet browsers you have, the merrier. At the very least get Chrome and Firefox and do your best to stop using the Internet Explorer.

3. Update your LinkedIn profile with a photo and fill out the details. Get at least several hundred connections. Invite only those who is likely to accept your invitations; this means either people who know you or people who claim to be “open networkers”/LION’s/Toplinked.com, etc. Join a good number of LinkedIn groups; 50 is ideal.

LinkedIn is still the place number one for recruiters to be. But take marketing messages from LinkedIn with a grain of salt.

4. Learn to use at least a few advanced capabilities in Google and Bing search. Keep in mind that the Yahoo.com search is identical to Bing’s.

• Quotation marks around several words mean search for a phrase (or search for a specific word exactly) in both.
• The operator site: (lower case, no space between the operator and the URL) means search within a specified site. Recruiters call it X-raying.
• Play with the advanced search dialog on Google to train yourself to use its operators; it will guide you.
• New! Turn off the “personal” search on Google: ~ Log out of Facebook when you search on Bing.

5. You don’t necessarily have to be on Twitter. You definitely don’t need to catch up on SEO (search engine optimization); it is changing dramatically anyway as we speak. You will need to get a profile on Google+, the sooner the better.

One last thing, don’t rely on tools that search for you automatically based on your requirements!