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All You Need to Know About Using ZoomInfo to Source Great Candidates

By Lou Adler, March 5, 2008

ZoomInfo and LinkedIn should be the starting points for any search assignment from experienced staff to CEO. Here's the link to an article on how to use LinkedIn for passive and active candidate sourcing. This week's article will focus on using ZoomInfo to find more great candidates within hours.

ZoomInfo is different than LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an opt-in networking site whereas ZoomInfo constantly crawls the Internet seeking out information about companies and people connected to those companies. The company information includes an overview, basic financial performance, and an easy means to find industry information, competitors, and current and past employees. The biographical information is presented in a manner that appears to be resume-like, but in reality is a web page consolidating information from a variety of web sources about the person. This includes information like someone being mentioned in a company press release or having spoken at an industry event.

Read more articles by this author.

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The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent, Newsletter, Recruiting

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Recruitment and Technology

Great Active Candidate Sourcing Ideas

Since LinkedIn is an opt-in site it's comprised of people who want to be found and want to network with others. This approach has plusses and minuses. The plus is that it's relatively easy to find people you want to connect with on any search. The minus is that the best and most visible people are getting contacted too often and are getting tired of fielding recruiter calls. LinkedIn also makes it very difficult to contact these people. Except for your direct contacts, you need to connect with everyone else individually. This alone makes LinkedIn quite tedious to use. ZoomInfo has a real advantage on this side offering a number of email merge tools (see below) that allow you to instantly contact hundreds of people. Since the names in ZoomInfo are fresher, the people haven't been contacted as frequently, so they're more likely to respond to your email or voicemail. Despite the differences, both LinkedIn and ZoomInfo are extremely valuable for searches at the experienced staff level and above.

Following are some specific ideas on how to get great results using ZoomInfo. If you contact us, we'll get you a short free trial version of ZoomInfo's Power Search tool. Those who attend any of our live or online Recruiting Boot Camp or Extreme Sourcing courses receive a 30-day free trial to ZoomInfo.

1. Some basics. ZoomInfo offers a free and subscription version. The free version is useful for finding people when you already have a name and to obtain quick information about a company. The company profiles are actually quite useful and include key statistics and key competitors. The more advanced and more useful version requires a subscription, but the fee is quite modest given the value. For example, we've presented excellent candidates found on ZoomInfo on every single search we've conducted since we got our subscription. About half the time the person ultimately hired came directly from ZoomInfo or from a ZoomInfo referral. With similar results, you'll pay back your entire annual fee four to five times over with your first placement. If you're serious about search, the fee is something you shouldn't even quibble about. Regardless, you'll be able to determine the value for yourself with the trial version.
2. First build the candidate pool. Every search starts by finding potential candidates and people you can network with to find candidates. A real example helps understand the power of ZoomInfo as a starting point. One of our electronics clients has a number of different facilities located throughout California. They're always in the market for senior hardware, software, and firmware technical staff and key technical managers. There's a great corporate summary in the company listing and two important buttons -- "Find Competitors" and "Find Employees." Clicking the "Find Competitors" revealed 29 direct competitors. Finding appropriate employees to target at these competitors was almost as easy. Tools are available to narrow the search to specific functions and management levels. For this example, I targeted my search to technical staff and technical managers and clicked the "Find Employees" search button. Within a minute a listing of 402 engineers and engineering managers located in California popped up. Better yet, 310 of these names had email addresses. There are probably 20-30 great candidates on this list and even more if you know how to call these people up and network to get referrals. ZoomInfo is a powerful tool that's easy to use. It's hard to imagine how any recruiter wouldn't have a field day with 402 potential leads for difficult searches within 30 minutes of starting the assignment.
3. Advanced search options. Realistically, a target list narrowed down to about 50-100 relevant prospects is ideal for a direct phone call campaign. A direct email marketing campaign can be significantly larger, but 200-300 should be more than enough if you've selected the list properly and are using compelling messaging. ZoomInfo offers a number of useful tools to create a manageable prospect list. Education level is one. In fact, 118 of the 402 prospects from the initial engineering pool had either an MBA or a Masters degree. In addition to degrees you can narrow the pool by date last mentioned to get the most current contact information, company size, management level, geography, credentials (like CPA or RN), diversity, and the specific names of universities attended. For example, thirty-three of the 402 prospects attended UCLA, Stanford, or Berkeley. You'll need to play with the search options to find out what best suits your needs, but the tools provided are very useful to develop a manageable and candidate-rich target list.
4. Find employees you don't know to leverage your Employee Referral Program (ERP). My client is relatively small, but still had 281 current and former employees listed in ZoomInfo. Intel, one of their competitors, on the other hand, had 165 technical staff and managers listed just in Northern California. These are people corporate recruiters can network with to extend their employee referral network. I suggest setting up meetings with these fellow employees -- including those you don't know -- and asking them to tell you about the best people they've ever worked with at their prior companies. When setting up the meeting, clearly say that you want to network with great people who aren't looking. If appropriate, also mention that any referral bonus will be earned by the employee providing the name, not the recruiter. Then before you call and recruit these referred people see if they're listed in ZoomInfo or LinkedIn. You might be able to find some other network connections very easily this way. (More articles on employee referrals and networking.)
5. Expand your search targeting indirect competitors and people who know people. Rarely are direct competitors the only source of talent, and frequently they're not the best. Using the industry search tools within ZoomInfo I found other companies doing comparable, but not identical, work. I also found some competitors of my client's competitors that were not in the original list. Using these new companies I found an additional 211 technical staff and technical managers that were worthy contacts. ZoomInfo offers other options to find people who might be connected with your ideal candidate in some less obvious ways. For example, you can look for purchasing agents and buyers to find sales people or application engineers. You can also call product marketing people to find technical people whom they've worked with on projects, or call people in advertising agencies to find product marketing people. The idea here is to first build a 360 degree network list with your ideal candidate in the center. To pull this off you'll need to call these people and get referrals, but ZoomInfo offers a great way to quickly create this initial list.
6. Diversity sourcing. There is a category in the ZoomInfo search fields for finding diverse candidates. The feature is employed by selecting country of origin or culture as opposed to a specific ethnicity. Since the ZoomInfo technology is based on crawling the Internet looking for indirect connections to categorize a person, I'm not sure the results will be as accurate or as effective as desired. However, in the engineering search example described above there were a number of Hispanic and African-American prospects worth contacting. While this feature is reasonably effective, I suspect it will become more robust in the future.
7. Use direct marketing techniques to find some semi-active candidates. Once you have your initial target list you can contact these people using some type of direct marketing approach. Regardless of the contact technique you use -- email, direct mail, or direct calling -- there's an important caveat to consider: don't be boring! Compelling messages are an essential component of any direct marketing campaign. Don't even consider sending a traditional job description. (Here's more information on how to prepare compelling messages.) ZoomInfo provides their internal JobCast system to contact these people or you can export the list to Excel. About 60% of the contacts listed in ZoomInfo have email addresses, so this is a powerful tool for conducting a direct email campaign. For a recent financial assignment we found a number of high-quality controller and senior accounting manager candidates using this approach. In fact, the finalist was a referral from the initial compelling email campaign. The email subject -- Go Green and Become Part of the Alternative Energy Industry -- was attention-getting and key to the high response rate. If you're doing higher level searches you might want to consider a direct mail campaign (using a real letter and real stamps). This was common in the 80s and 90s to attract senior-level candidates and it would probably work well today. As long as your messaging is compelling a few candidates from your list are likely to respond, and if it's really compelling you'll get some referrals.
8. Leaving voicemails and making first contact. While ZoomInfo offers some good internal management tools I prefer to export the list and use it within Excel or my own candidate tracking system. Regardless, you still need to contact the people who don't respond to your initial email campaign and those without email addresses. If you're working a hot and current search you'll need to be more aggressive in your direct calling than if you're just building a candidate pool for future assignments. While different recruiting approaches apply for both, the initial voicemail is vitally important. Here are some articles on how to increase your voicemail return rate. The key is to leave an irresistible message. Leaving the name of the person who referred you will help increase the voicemail response rate. Mentioning that you're handling a number of searches ranging from senior staff to VP can also help increase the response rate. It's best to be vague in your voicemail about the positions you're handling and the location. Revealing too much information just provides the candidate reasons not to call you back.
9. Recruiting and networking once personal contact has been established. Once you get the person on the phone and after a quick intro, you'll need to ask a question like this: "Would you be open to explore a situation if it were clearly superior to what you're doing today?" Most candidates will say "Yes" to this, but you must then get the person to give you a quick snapshot of their background before you give them any information about your job. Don't go into a tell-all sales mode; instead be vague and ask questions. If the person finds the job title or location uninteresting before you find out about the candidate, she won't reveal any personal information or give you referrals. It's at this point where most recruiters lose the war for talent despite having some great leads. Here are some more articles on how to recruit and network with passive candidates.

ZoomInfo is a remarkable tool, especially in the hands of a strong recruiter. In our search firm, we use it extensively. More than half the time we have found finalists using ZoomInfo, many of whom who have eventually received offers. It's also been a tremendous lead generator. For every recruiter it should be the starting point for any position from professional staff and higher. The key is to first develop a targeted list of high potential prospects. From a direct marketing perspective send compelling messages to those people with email addresses. Use pre-scripted voicemails in combination with professional recruiting and networking techniques for contacting those on the balance of the list. As long as you know how to source, recruit, and network properly, the ZoomInfo cost is quite modest in comparison to the extraordinary value it provides. ZoomInfo is far superior to LinkedIn by offering excellent tools to contact many candidates at once. Since the names are not as widespread as those in LinkedIn the people contacted either by direct email of voicemail are also more likely to return your calls and be more open to discuss opportunities. This alone makes it a must have for your recruiting and sourcing toolbox.