I wanted to share a quick hack I’m using this weekend.
My sister is in the process of moving from New York to Baltimore to start business school. I suggested that we get some movers to help us on each side of the trip, figuring we’d pay $40 an hour and provide some food and plenty of water. I used Craigslist to post a basic advertisement about 48 hours beforehand.
In the past I have used Craigslist to find handymen for a number of jobs such as moving furniture and brush. The response rate has always been high, but filtering to find the best/most trustworthy of the bunch is always a challenge.
However, this morning it occurred to me to run Rapportive and see if I could find Facebook or Linkedin profiles of some of the applicants (Rapportive is an awesome app for Gmail that surfaces that shows the social profiles for various email addresses). Sure enough, we had a total of about 40 responses and about 10 showed up in Rapportive. After scanning their profiles to eliminate anyone who looked like a serial killer I picked a jazz musician in New York (listened to his stuff on MySpace) and a student in Baltimore.
Filtering against public social network profiles is definitely not the be all end all, but it’s definitely better than nothing and provides me with a little bit more comfort when hiring strangers.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Sam, it's Martin from Rapportive here. Just wanted to say that we're thrilled that you're finding Rapportive useful. Indeed, right at the beginning when we had just started working on Rapportive, one of the first uses we found was when renting out a room and looking at prospective tenants' profiles. Thanks for sharing your story!
Hey Martin,
Thanks for reaching out. Rapportive is a great product! What else do you guys have on the road map?
Thanks :) We did a big new release yesterday, with two changes:
1. We never used to show information for emails from organisations. Now, we will show a summary of the senders' websites.
2. We now import Google Profiles and Gravatar Profiles, so you will begin to see better lookup results.
We'll share more about our roadmap when the time is right :)
What a great idea! I love my Rapportive plug-in already, but your post just made it a little cooler. Thanks for sharing!
No problem Ros. Glad it helped!
Great idea, definitely a great tool for double checking those who you are considering using for whatever reason.
yes and no. Rapportive requires an email address so it won't ingrate
with your Facebook account. However, it will recognize the Facebook
account of the sender of an email (assuming that email is what they
used when they signed up for Facebook).
Hmm, can it be used with Facebook?
yes and no. Rapportive requires an email address so it won't ingrate
with your Facebook account. However, it will recognize the Facebook
account of the sender of an email (assuming that email is what they
used when they signed up for Facebook).
No, it's not like a background check per se.
It will simply allow you to find any public information available on
social networking profiles about the individual (…assuming the email
they are using is the one they used to sign up for
Facebook/Linkedin/etc)
Sam
I have never used Rapportive but I have been having a hard time hiring for simple jobs. Is it like a background check for a small business?
No, it's not like a background check per se.
It will simply allow you to find any public information available on
social networking profiles about the individual (…assuming the email
they are using is the one they used to sign up for
Facebook/Linkedin/etc)
Sam
Another cool Rapportive hack is that you can guess someone’s email address by typing different variations (first.last@company.com etc.), and see which one shows up in Rapportive as your target. Useful when cold-emailing press, potential partners etc.
Yep, that’s a great one for biz dev