Creating Phonebooks

Phone directories are terrific - if you have a name.

But, what if (like in most instances) you're looking for someone, but don't know who they are or where they live? What good is a phone directory then?

Well, a typical white pages phone book won't help. But there are other phone directories on the Web that can. Creative searching is what counts.

Employee Directories

Many organizations keep staff or employee directories in a database and many of these databases are available on the Web. Most often, though, such gold mines aren't clearly visible from a company's homepage. It takes a bit of searching and a bit of creative thinking to find them.

Let's say you need a fresh list of engineers. Try a search for engineer AND ("staff directory" OR employee) on HotBot. We did and got more than 33,000 results. Of course, we don't want to look through 33,000 listings. And, we can assume that many of these results won't give us the names, titles and phone numbers of a great many contacts.

But, in the first 100 results, we did find company directories of engineering departments, academic institutions, biomedical organizations, nuclear technology companies and more. A more focused search could refine these results further.

Page Titles

Think for a minute. Some large companies have absolutely gargantuan Web sites. And, as you know, each page on a Web site is a separate file and each file has its own identifying name.

Most of us aren't very good at remembering names that have no contextual meaning. So most of us name our files something that makes sense. For instance, if we create a resume, we often title it "resume." And, if we create a phone directory, chances are we'll call it "phone" or "directory" or "contact" or some other word that clearly describes the file.

So, try some advanced search features. In addition to looking for keywords, limit your search to page titles.

For instance, a search in Alta Vista for asp and any file with the title staff, produced about 300 results - the first 10 were staff directories in large HR departments and advertising agencies - complete with contact information.

A search for "phone list" +.com brought only 1600 results, including CBS Studios (with names and extensions).

Limit Your Sites

Several search engines let you limit your search to a particular domain. If you want quick access to numbers within a particular company, try limiting the search.

As an example, we searched Infoseek, for site:sgi.com and got 9000 results. But, then we searched just within those results for phone, and got only 8 results. One of those pages was MIPS ( http://www.mips.com/whoWeAre/index.html), which had a contact page listing names, titles and phone numbers.

Creative Thinking

Consider the possibilities. When you don't have a name, think of what you want.

Most large organizations keep track of their employees in a database. Will they call it staff, employee, employ, people, engineer, staf? The more people who use the Internet to recruit, the more HR departments are wising up. You may need to purposefully misspell or abbreviate.

There is no easy way. But creativity in how you look at things and imagining how someone would try to hide a phone directory and still remember what it's called can help. Be creative, you'll find.

-- T.J. Ripley is a journalist and Web explorer who contributes to AIRS research and writing.

About AIRS
AIRS teaches recruiters and high-growth companies to find passive candidates hidden inside directories, databases, archives and the public Web servers of over 400,000 companies and organizations on the Net. For more information about our cutting edge training seminars, publications, or web applications please call 1-800-466-4010 or check out our web site at http://www.airsdirectory.com.