When cold-calling passive candidates or searching for names, lists, and resumes on line, I make a point to maximize my time by only talking with high performers. This way, even if these people are not perfect for the assignment at hand, they know other top performers who are. Of course, to be a successful full-cycle recruiter you have to be very good at getting these top people to call you back, then recruiting them and then getting the referrals (we show you how to do this in Recruiter Boot Camp Online). To save time at the front end you must limit your calling to only top people. You can do this by adding recognition terms, honors, and awards into your online searches.

Top people all include recognition terms in their resumes. These are the honors and awards they've earned, leadership positions they've held, and societies they've been invited to join as a result of some special achievement. For sales people use the term "club" and for engineers use the term "whitepaper" and "patent." This will bring up sales people who made it into the President's Club and tech folks who have written something important or have patents. Of course, each field has its own special recognition terms, but here's a list of some of these scholastic honor societies you might want to check out to get started.

For example, here's a simple Google search string I used to find resumes who were members of Epsilon Delta Pi, the national collegiate society for those in the computer sciences: "resume 'Epsilon Delta Pi.' -jobs." About 200 hits came up, half of them resumes and all members of Epsilon Delta Pi. The first person was on the Dean's list (another good performance term to use) at the University of Rochester. While she appeared out of the workforce, her resume indicated a number of other connections you could tap into to get some great referrals. I found another person who was an Eagle Scout (another good performance term), who was a Unix System Administrator for a Fortune 100 company and very well connected. When I searched on LinkedIn I found over 100 people in my network who were members of Epsilon Delta Pi. Most of these people appear well-connected with good positions. (You can connect to me on LinkedIn through my This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it email.)

A bigger honor society for technical people is Tau Beta Pi. This is the equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa for the non-Liberal Arts majors. Searching this term on LinkedIn came up with well over 500 very hot people in my network, many of them working at Google! If you're looking for nurses try searching Sigma Theta Tau, for top MBAs use Beta Gamma Sigma, and try Alpha Beta Gamma if you want to hire top AAs for entry-level positions.

With this Google string "Dean resume -jobs logistics TX" I found hundreds of hot people for a senior-level distribution position in Dallas. Now all I have to do is call 10 or so of the best, recruit them and get 2-3 referrals from each one, and I'll have 3-4 candidates for my search before the sun sets. Getting great names is easy when you insert performance terms into your search strings. It's what you do next, though, that will determine whether you're a good recruiter or not.