It’s been nearly a year since my last post… I felt it is time to start writing again.
Since a couple of months there are Sourcers who are using the word OSINT more and more, oh and Growth Hacking of course… It sounds cool and it gives a feeling of being part of something bigger than Recruitment.
Talking about Growth Hacking…. I love the buzz word. But still the content of this verb is very versatile and not concrete. Usually I see people talking about it, saying: I found this list of names who attended the conference, added their email from another list and have sent them an email with our coolest vacancy… In Europe, GDPR area, this is not right, this would be a “Ban Hack”… Of course it mostly will be a general email: “since we love you mr or miss __ [need name here]__, you must love us too – come work with us….
So now over to OSINT;
Over the last year we, Kim and I, got screened by several institutions. They wanted to know who we are, what we are doing and why would like to get into this field of work: finding things about people and other things than just for recruitment purposes.
Our motivation came partly from a case we are working on – we needed some licences to be able to do our work – and partly from this crazy urge to find things on the internet.
So this past year we were able and allowed, therefor all the screening stuff, to do a gazillion exams and tests and we passed them all.
It is official now, Kim and Gordon are now Licensed PI and Open Source Intelligence Experts®
But what is OSINT – Open Source Intelligence?
OSINT is a way to gather and analyse things you like to know, from open and semi open sources on the internet. In other words: OSINT is data collected from publicly available sources.
OSINT is part of a series of information collection methods; i.e. Humint, Cyber Humint, Imint, Socmint, Sigint and more.
OSINT comes with a bunch of awesome tools and add-on’s to start with, something a Sourcer nowadays is crazy about, the more tools the cooler… But also with a plan, usually to solve or prevent crimes, fraud or to be sure something really is okay.
Which is of course way out of scope for a Sourcer, who is only looking for people without a criminal record.
And this is where the Licenced PI comes in: To make sure the Sourcer has found someone without the criminal background, we are now officially accredited by the Police and the Justice Department to further investigate this and present our findings to the new employer.
Are we now leaving recruitment? NO! We will just give it a little extra.
We simply like to solve puzzles, and that is what this is all about.