The Hidden Talent Pools in every source of candidates
There is a Hidden Talent Pool (HTP) in every source of candidates – the Internet, job board resume databases, Social Networks, your ATS, etc., and it contains candidates that you assume aren’t there because you never see them. However - just because you never see them doesn’t mean they aren’t actually there. Because they are. Years ago, I became aware of these Hidden Talent Pools and I have figured out how to tap into them using creative search strategies and common Boolean operators. I estimate that HTP’s account for about 30-40% of the candidates in each talent respository (Internet, ATS, job board, etc.).
Each Hiddent Talent Pool is comprised of two distinct groups of candidates:
#1 Those that you do not find
#2 Those that you can not find
Sounds like a play on words, right? I assure you it’s not. Here’s the difference:
Candidates you do not find
If you run a Boolean search and it returns several hundred (or more) results – you are not likely to examine each result due to the quantity, typically due to 2 reasons: #1 time constraints, and #2 you find “enough” candidates from the first 50 to 150 results, you don’t “need” to look through the rest. Any candidate that was retreived by your Boolean search that you did not actually examine or review is a candidate you did not find. It would be the same if you were searching for buried treasure and you excavated 10 cubic feet of sand on a beach. If you only sifted through 6 cubic feet of sand and you were either too tired to sift through the rest or had “found enough” treasure in the first 6 cubic feet, you did not find any treasure in the remaining 4 cubic feet of sand.
Candidates you can not find
When you run Boolean searches, any candidate that mentions a skill, technology, or responsibility in a way that you did not include in your Boolean query, you can not find the candidate. Unless you think of and account for every possible way a candidate can mention a thing that you are searching for (which is nearly impossible), you simply can not find every qualified candidate. Further exacerbating this issue is that for various reasons, there are many candidates that simply do not explicitly mention all of their skills and experience in their resume (or profile, or web page, etc.). And if they don’t mention it, you can not create a Boolean search string to retreive them, and thus you can not find them.
Simple and basic Boolean search strings will net you some candidates, and typically the same candidates that your competitors can find. As a recruiter or sourcer, it should be your goal to not only be able to find the candidates that your competitors can find, but more importantly, to be able to find the candidates that your competitors can not find.
The first step on the path of sourcing enlightenment is becoming aware of the Hiddent Talent Pools. Stay tuned for some tips and tricks that you can employ to begin to tap into these Hidden Talent Pools.
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