Did you know that recruiting, sourcing, and HR professionals account for 5% of all U.S. LinkedIn Profiles?

While 5% may seem like a small number, it is a disproportionately large representation of the profession - it literally means that 1 out of every 20 LinkedIn profiles in the US is a recruiting, sourcing, or HR professional.

What’s the significance of this? Why should you care? I’ll get to that shortly, but first I’d like to show you how I came up with the 1 in 20 figure. Read more…

Have you ever wanted or needed to search for people who have achieved high grade point averages in high school or college?

While GPA is relatively unimportant to many employers - to others, a high GPA is indicative of a person’s ability to achieve results in an unstructured environment (no one is there making you go to class or study for your exams), which can provide clues to self-management capability and the drive to excel. Some employers simply won’t hire candidates for certain roles without a specific GPA or higher, with few exceptions (e.g. Google). Read more…

It’s been a long time coming, but I have finally gotten around to creating a resources page that essentially contains a “best of” compilation of Boolean Black Belt articles. It contains 10 “How-To” posts ranging from how to search Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and Google for candidates, as well as articles on semantic search, Boolean, extended Boolean, and the top 15 common e-sourcing mistakes.

Here’s where to find it:

Enjoy!

In recent posts I’ve explained the Boolean Black Belt concept and exposed what I feel is the real “secret” behind learning how to master the art and science of leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition.

Now I would like to show you precisely WHY Boolean search is such a big deal in recruiting. There are 2 main factors: #1 candidate variable control and #2 speed of qualified candidate identification.

The goal of this article is to shed significant light on the science behind talent mining, how it can lead to higher productivity levels (more and better results with less effort), why I am so passionate about e-sourcing/e-recruiting, and why everyone in the HR, recruiting, and staffing industry should be as well.

Control is Power

Talent identification is arguably the most critical step in recruiting life cycle - you can’t acquire and hire someone you haven’t found and identified in the first place.

My experience has shown me that properly leveraging deep sources of talent/candidate data (ATS/CRM’s, resume databases, LinkedIn, etc.) can enable recruiters to more quickly identify a high volume of well matched and qualified candidates than ANY OTHER METHOD of candidate identification and acquisition (e.g., cold calling, referral recruiting, job posting).

The true power of Boolean search lies in the intrinsically high degree of control over critical candidate variables that using Boolean strings to search deep data sources such as resume databases, the Internet, and social media affords sourcers and recruiters. Applying that that high degree of control to large populations of candidates - tens of thousands (small internal ATS, niche resume database) to tens of millions (large ATS/CRM, Monster resume database, LinkedIn, etc.) enables adept e-sourcers/e-recruiters to perform feats of talent identification and acquisition most would think impossible.

Candidate Variables Defined

The match between a candidate and a specific job opening can be expressed as a combination of these 5 basic variables: Location, Skills (Experience/Education), Opportunity, Compensation, and Availability. There are certainly other factors at play when it comes to determining the right match between a candidate and a particular opportunity (e.g., cultural fit). However, these are the “big bucket” variables which render the rest pointless if they are not satisfied.

Control What You Can

Ultimately, the best match between an employer’s hiring need and a candidate is one where there is very close alignment between a candidate’s variables and those of the particular job opportunity.

Most job openings have a fixed set of variables - sourcers and recruiters don’t often have the opportunity to control or change the location of the position, the skills/experience/education required, the specific opportunity (the type of work involved in the position, the company/team culture, opportunities for growth/advancement, etc.), the compensation associated with the position, and when the position becomes available (open and ready to hire).

However, when it comes to searching deep sources of human capital data that support Boolean queries (such as your ATS/CRM, online resume databases, LinkedIn, etc.) to identify potential candidates for any particular job opening, sourcers and recruiters CAN exercise a significant degree of control over critical candidate matching variables.

Here’s a preview:

Controlling Candidate Variables Through Boolean Search

Read more…

I recently wrote an article that definitively defined the “Boolean Black Belt” concept. In this post, I explain how to become one. The good news is that you don’t have to be born with the “Boolean gene” (no one is). The bad news (for some) is that it requires a great deal of what is known as “deliberate practice.”  

The Talent Excuse

As I have worked with and trained many recruiters over the span of my career, I’ve often had people “explain away” my ability to leverage technology (ATS/CRM, Internet, Social Media, Job Board databases, etc.) for talent identification and acquisition with the excuse that I have a “talent” for it. In my first few years in recruiting, I accepted that at face value. I never really wondered where my ability came from - I assumed I actually did have a “talent” for talent mining.

Talent is Overrated

Over the years I’ve come to understand and appreciate that I don’t necessarily have an innate ”talent” for leveraging sources of human capital data - no one is born with an e-recruiting gene. What I actually have is 2 factors that I believe have contributed significantly to my skills and ability. 

#1 I have a combination of personality traits that have likely facilitated my learning of the art and science of talent mining: I’m competitive (I hate to lose), analytical, detail oriented, don’t give up easily (okay, maybe not at all), and I really enjoy figuring things out. Nothing really special there - certainly not a rare combination of traits, and I’m sure many people share them. However, personality traits are not something most people have a choice in.  

#2 Lots of “deliberate practice.” This is something anyone can choose to do, and it’s what really separates world-class performers from everyone else. 

Not All Practice is Created Equal

Back in October 2008, I read an article in Fortune magazine titled “Why Talent is Overrated,” by Geoff Colvin. It completely changed my understanding of my own so-called “talents” and how I came to achieve them. If you haven’t read the article or the book that Geoff wrote (Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else) - I strongly urge you to do so. They are fascinating reads that will give you significant insight as to exactly why some people are so much better than others at what they do.  Read more…

I’ve been blogging for a little over 6 months now, and I realized I’ve never come out and actually defined the term ”Boolean Black Belt.” The concept seems pretty self explanatory, but there has been at least 1 person who’s taken the opportunity to point out (and gain some traffic in the process - it’s all good) that it could be perceived as a bit of an oxymoron to be an “expert” in something as simple as 3 Boolean operators.

So what is a “Boolean Black Belt” anyway? Read more…

I’ve recently received a few requests from my European readers (thank you!) to write about how to use LinkedIn to simultaneously search multiple countries to identify candidates. In this post I will do exactly that - show you how you can search for candidates across multiple countries in one search. Although I will be using European countries in the examples, the same techniques can be successfully applied to any combination of countries.

LinkedIn’s Interface

If it was obvious how to search for people from multiple countries using LinkedIn’s search interface, I likely would not have received requests for help. I’ve personally never run into the need to source from a variety of countries, so I enjoyed taking on the challenge of figuring this out. Read more…

An article posted on the Nielsen Wire blog on April 28, 2009 claimed that more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month. From the number of times I saw people ReTweet and comment about the Nielsen article about Twitter quitters, it seems that many people are intrigued by and concerned about the large number of people who visit and don’t come back to Twitter the next month.

At first, I was a little surprised at the high rate of quitters - a 40% retention rate seems pretty low for something that seems so popular. But then as I started thinking about it, I really don’t care if 60% of the people who visit Twitter in one month don’t come back the next.

Why don’t I care? Read more…

As you might be able to tell from the name of my blog, I’m passionate about leveraging information systems for finding candidates. Unless you’re running 1 word or title-only queries, you can’t search the Internet, LinkedIn, Twitter, your ATS/CRM, or a job board resume database without using at least the most basic Boolean logic.

When I post links to my search-focused articles in various LinkedIn groups, I often get comments and responses expressing the sentiment that using various sites and technologies to search for candidates isn’t “real recruiting.” I’m always a little saddened and frustrated to see responses like this, because it reflects the fact that there are plenty of people in the recruiting and staffing industry that just don’t “get it.” Read more…

LinkedIn is one of the most searchable social networks, and with many users filing out their profiles with as much detail as a resume, LinkedIn offers the deepest occupational and professional data of any of the social media sites. As such, it is extremely important that sourcers and recruiters learn how to master all of the various ways you can search LinkedIn to find potential candidates. 

Through text and video, in this article I will show you how to extract the most value and results from LinkedIn’s search interface, X-Ray searching LinkedIn, unlocking out-of-network results, and leveraging LinkedIn’s unique advanced search operators. Read more…