Human Capital Data Analysts – Sourcing Samurai
What’s The Sexiest Job in Recruiting?
I recently read this excellent post on the Google blog written by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management at Google, and I was especially excited to read this:
“Hal Varian likes to say that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. After all, who would have guessed that computer engineers would be the cool job of the 90s? When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.”
Hal Varian gets it.
Google gets it.
So Why Don’t People in the HR and Recruiting Industry?
What am I talking about? That the ability to understand and extract value from data (human capital data in recruiting) is the scarce factor and it leads to intelligence and success in business.
Every day, more information about more people is made available electronically – in the form of data. This comes from people: responding to job postings with resumes and entering them into corporate databases, creating social media profiles online, posting resumes on the Internet and online job boards, being mentioned in press releases, blogging, Tweeting, etc. As such, it is increasingly becoming more important for organizations to be able to leverage these sources of human capital data for talent identification and acquisition.
Whenever I see something written about/hear something said about the e-sourcing function (using human capital data for talent identification), someone is sure to shout, “Yeah – but real recruiting is about relationships!” Another good one is “The BEST people can’t be found in a database or online!”
The last time I checked a calendar, it was 2009. You CAN find anyone either in a database somewhere, online, or simply with a phone – either directly or indirectly through networking or referrals.
Yes, the core of recruiting is about relationships – that will never change. Now that we’ve got that out of the way - I’d like to firmly kick the “relationships” crutch out from under the arm of everyone who needs to wake up and realize that leveraging human capital data for talent identification and acquisition is THE next wave in recruiting. And it’s quickly approaching a shore near you, whether you’re prepared for it or not. Closing your eyes to it won’t stop it from crushing you.
If you can take advantage of and tap into the power of the unprecedented amount of human capital data available to sourcers and recruiters today (which increases and accelerates every day!), you can quickly find and develop relationships with and recruit MORE of the RIGHT people at the RIGHT time. If your definition of success (or acceptable paycheck) is achieving more than 1 to 2 hires per month, you are at a significant competitive advantage if you cannot leverage technology.
If you CAN effectively leverage human capital data for talent identification and acquisition, it is a productivity MULTIPLIER.
Human Capital Data Analysis
I think the term “sourcing” does not do the role/function of leveraging human capital data for talent identification proper justice. I think that what most people refer to as a sourcing function is really more accurately labeled as a human capital data analysis.
Data analysis is defined as a process of gathering, analyzing, and transforming data with the goal of highlighting useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making. If you take a look at a typical data analyst job description, you’ll see responsibilities such as:
- Collaborate with business process owners to identify opportunities; define business requirements, and design and implement solutions designed to maximize efficiency and productivity.
- Perform complex data mining and aggregation; critically examine the results
- Accumulate, analyze, and interpret data in understandable terms for the customer from multiple systems
- Analyze complex data including: structured, unstructured, and plain text.
- Develop analytic approach in collaboration with project staff
- Respond to ad-hoc and standing customer requirements
- Utilize in-house database applications
- Perform data migration
- Research new data sources and analytical tools
- Support analysis results at customer meetings
- Utilize query languages (SQL)
- Conduct competitor and benchmarking analyses
Translating “Data Analyst” to “Human Capital Data Analyst:”
- Collaborate with managers and business unit owners to identify opportunities, define position requirements, and design and implement talent identification solutions and processes designed to maximize efficiency, productivity, and results
- Perform complex talent mining and aggregation; critically examine the results for relevance, qualifications, and proability of match to hiring requirements
- Accumulate, analyze, and interpret human capital data in understandable terms for the customer from multiple systems, including, but not limited to the Internet, resume databases, and social media
- Analyze complex human capital data including: Resumes, social media profiles, blog posts, press releases, and unstructured plain text
- Develop analytic approach in collaboration with project staff
- Respond to ad-hoc and standing customer requirements
- Utilize in-house Applicant Tracking Systems and database applications
- Perform data migration, permanently capturing human capital data from multiple sources and entering them into corporate ATS/Talent Warehouse
- Research new human capital data sources and analytical/search tools
- Support analysis of search results at customer meetings
- Utilize query languages (Boolean)
- Conduct competitor and benchmarking analyses
The human capital data analyst function is a critical role in supporting a company’s Talent Intelligence initiatives – applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze Talent-related (Human Capital) data and information and help organizations develop consistent and “data-based” Talent-related decisions.
Most Appropriately Qualified
A Human Capital Data Analyst is essentially a data analyst that specializes in talent identification and acquisition. This process involves analyzing and interpreting hiring needs and requirements, often with poor or incomplete information, leaving them to piece the puzzle together. Once the needs have been understood, they intelligently assess and strategically select available information resources to leverage, translating hiring qualifications into precise Boolean queries to search targeted sources of talent-related data and quickly retrieve relevant results – human capital data representing people who are likely to meet and ideally exceed the basic qualifications of the hiring needs.
A talented human capital data analyst is capable of leveraging information sources and systems with such speed and precision to enable organziations to achieve Just-in-Time sourcing and recruiting - identifying and acquiring the right talent, in the right amount, at the right time, without the need for having to recruit people ahead of need and building talent pipelines that may not be available when the actual need arises.
Human capital data analysts are capable of searching databases and systems containing data representing millions of people to quickly and precisely uncover, indentify, and tap into the Hidden Talent Pools that exist in every source of human capital data to target people with specific educational requirements, years of experience, current and prior roles and responsibilies in specific environments and in some cases in specific companies. That’s no small feat!
Whereas data analysts respsonsible for working with financial or other types of data are responsible for producing reports and analyzing information for meaning and identifying relationships to assist with stragetic decision making, human capital data analysts are responsible for identifying and assisting in the acquisition of a company’s most precious assets – its talent, and potentially the next “game changing” employees who can take the company to the next level.
Competitive Advantage
Microsoft and most well run companies know that the true scarce resource is talent – and that identifying, acquiring, and retaining top talent is a company’s only true and sustainable competitive advantage . The more ubiquitous human capital data becomes, the more critical it becomes that companies employ human capital data analysts who are capable of leveraging information systems more quickly, precisely, and accurately than the competition to identify top talent and target them for acquisition.
As Jonathan Rosenberg of Google stated, there is significant intelligence and value in data. I would argue that the most critical asset of any company is its human capital – and the most critical step in the human capital supply chain is the process is identifying human capital. You simply cannot attract, develop relationships with, acquire, or retain people you haven’t identified in the first place.
Some people think that the talent identification function can be automated and/or off-shored. Although you can certainly automate searches, there are MANY intrinsic limitations associated with doing so. As far as off-shoring talent identification, I’m going to quote something I read recently, “the sourcing function can be conducted by lower paid resources.” If you want to offshore your most critical function - identifying top talent – please, by all means, do so – but know you are doing so at your own peril. Scraping human capital data and migrating it to your internal database/ATS is a good value proposition. However, I would STRONGLY recommend employing true human capital data analysts to perform talent mining on the aggregated data.
Conclusion
There is a reason why companies pay financial analysts and data analysts very good money – because they are knowledgeable specialists and they perform highly critical functions. I think that the majority of HR/recruiting industry hasn’t yet figured out that analyzing human capital data for talent identification and acquisition is a highly specialized, valuable, and critical function.
Human capital data is the sword of the 21st century – those who wield it well are the Sourcing Samurai.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
.jpg)
I LOVE this article and thanks for posting. ‘Couldn’t agree more and I know many in the niche would say the same.
Hi Glen! Great aritcle.
Hmmm … do you think companies want to “invest” in having Sourcer types help with DATA ?
Amen to this:
A talented human capital data analyst is capable of leveraging information sources and systems with such speed and precision to enable organziations to achieve Just-in-Time sourcing and recruiting – identifying and acquiring the right talent, in the right amount, at the right time, without the need for having to recruit people ahead of need and building talent pipelines that may not be available when the actual need arises.
Good stuff,
–
JEREMY LANGHANS
Sourcing Guru / Senior Recruiter
Email: ExecSourcer@gmail.com
Resume: http://execsourcer.blogspot.com/
Home Office: 509-921-5451
Mobile: 949-235-0114
Nice post but most good Recruiting Leaders should already be doing this level of analysis and be closely partnering with the business (+ Finance, etc) on forecasting and ROI analytics. Additionally they should also be tied at the hip with the business on demand management and workforce planning and what are the optimal current and future sourcing channels based off workforce demographics (Now and in the future).
If they are not, then what value can they be adding back to the business if they cannot strategically show how Recruiting can identify, attract and acquire a greater caliber of candidate at the right price at the right time?…..Or are they suggesting that maybe the business more hires from looking on Facebook, LinkedIn or posting to some Niche job board
Rob McIntosh
Senior Vice President Global Talent Acquisition
Avanade Inc
Nice post but most good Recruiting Leaders should already be doing this level of analysis and be closely partnering with the business (+ Finance, etc) on forecasting and ROI analytics. Additionally they should also be tied at the hip with the business on demand management and workforce planning and what are the optimal current and future sourcing channels based off workforce demographics (Now and in the future).
If they are not, then what value can they be adding back to the business if they cannot strategically show how Recruiting can identify, attract and acquire a greater caliber of candidate at the right price at the right time?…..Or are they suggesting that maybe the business more hires from
Rob McIntosh
Senior Vice President Global Talent Acquisition
Avanade Inc
Good stuff and an excellent take on where Sourcing is going (or rather should be going). Big props to you too for using the Samurai Champloo graphic. I’m a big fan.
Dorothy, Alexander, Jeremy, Rob, Jim – thank you very much for the comments and feedback – quite a collection of talent and experience! I’m honored you’re reading my blog and that you appreciated the post.
Jim – I was wondering if anyone would recognize the graphic.
Glen,
You are a very intelligent young man and I think worth following. I read everything you write, and practice it. I’d consider myself an “old dog” but I’ve seen the recruiting business change constantly over the last 30 years and have had to scramble to keep up at times. This year was particularly brutal. So you either adapt, or you’re toast.
Now the beauty of social/professional media is accessibility but it’s downside is knowing who is for real and who is a fraud. And, that’s some of what you are talking about. People are so much more or less than what you see on paper. Then there’s character, behavior, and a fit to company culture. Finally, if you don’t understand diplomacy, how to handle people inside the company, and company politics…you could be the best sourcing person in the world and fail.
Oh, and one last thought. I think we should look for people who can adapt to change over the long-haul rather than scrap people into a pile of obsolescence like a commodity.