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A Test Question for the People Sourcing Certification Program

Participants of the People Sourcing Certification Program go through 60 questions for the Level 1 and 80 questions for the Level 2 at the end of the Program. We use the tests as an additional opportunity to practice and apply the sourcing skills.

As several participants have pointed out, and as one of them wrote, the Program actually makes you "think" instead of just plugging in some answers and forgetting about them a month later like some recruiters/sourcers do.

Here is a sample test question. It is in fact easy but, unless you think before and while you search, it looks like a pretty complex challenge!

I've decided to run a little contest around the question and support two sourcing enthusiasts to attend the Program.

Please email your answers to test@peoplesourcers.com from now till EOB Thursday May 31st to be included in a drawing to attend the Program as a guest (a $599 per person value).

We will randomly select one person for live attendance in San Francisco June 6-7 and one person to attend online (the online program starts June 12th). Please indicate live or online preference in your email.

Ready?

1. Find a file containing several lists of employees from many companies, including: Amgen, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, and Astrazeneca. The lists are dated from 2000 to 2010. What is the URL?

2. One of the people taking the test couldn't initially find the answer, but did right away, after he and I discussed one sourcing idea. I didn't give him any additional info but he found the file. What was the idea?

Irina

 

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The idea I believe would be theuse of filetype:xls
example

(Amgen and Pfizer and Roche and Sanofi and Astrazeneca) and attend* filetype:xls

I got one list of over 5K + participants and another with email and other information that could be easily correlated.

Took < 1min to acquire.

Peter Boyle

Hi Peter and All,

It is very important: Please follow the rules and email the answers. Participants who post the answer/link publicly will not be entered into the contest. If you post prompts publicly you are helping the people with whom you are competing! Irina

Sorry.

Sure, I understand; you may want to remove your prompt as well :)

Peter Boyle said:

The competition was fierce! Many correct results and even more incorrect results were submitted. Here are the winners:

Joe Self of TrustaffOnline; congratulations!
Kim Rosenberg of Global Recruiters of San MateoLive in San Francisco; congratulations!

Irina

Several people have asked how to solve this. 

So, there are some initial thoughts: why would people from different companies be in one list? Suggested answer: they have attended an event.
Also, the list would probably have the fields like company and title, plus some contact info.
The most common list format is Excel, so let's try it first.

(Would the word "employees" be in the list? Probably not.)

The "idea" is to IGNORE some of the requirements. Let's ignore the years 2000-2010.

You can find the correct file among these results:
Amgen Pfizer Roche Sanofi Astrazeneca attend filetype:xls

It's the result #1 in this search:
Amgen Pfizer Roche Sanofi Astrazeneca attend filetype:xls company t...
 - if you check the file you will see that it has several lists from several years between 2000 and 2010.

(Or even this:
Amgen Pfizer Roche Sanofi Astrazeneca attend filetype:xls phone email)

Why wouldn't it show up if we include "2000"? This is because Google only indexed the first page in the Excel file.

Enjoy!

Irina

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