I had noisy roadwork outside of my office this morning and somehow this made me think of this list. :) I am interested in what fellow recruiters would think about it.

1. The Yahoo! Search engine
2. Search tools that look through all the sources of data at the same time in a productive way
3. Search strings to find the information that was not posted on the web
4. Search strings that show only relevant results on Google
5. Search strings that can be reused for different requirements by changing keywords
6. Search process that is guaranteed to bring up every matching result
7. Pure Phone Sourcing with no use of the Internet
8. Pure Internet Sourcing with no use of the phone
9. Pre-constructed search strings that make everyone’s job easier
10. Online employee directories, for most companies
11. Employee directories, available by searching on Google, for most companies
12. Automatic pre-qualifying candidates without reading their resumes or at least LinkedIn profiles
13. Automatic matching resumes against job requirements
14. Automatic matching LinkedIn profiles against job requirements
15. Automatic creation of searches based on job requirements
16. A working, adequate semantic search engine for social profiles
17. A working, adequate semantic search engine for all of the Internet
18. A useful search capability that doesn’t allow AND, OR, and NOT logic (the Boolean logic)
19. A straightforward way to find contact info for any LinkedIn member
20. A package that will show all the available info on a LinkedIn member’s profile in one browser window 

What does exist and what can help in people sourcing? Lots, actually. I promise to make a positive list of things that work beautifully, very soon.