The Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing

Posted at July 13, 2009

When I was working on the LinkedIn Search: What it COULD and SHOULD be post, I noticed a couple of things in the video of Esteban Kozak searching for Lucene Open Source Engineers and I realized it would make for a perfect example of the importance of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing. I know Esteban was just giving a demonstration of LinkedIn’s search functionality, but I could not resist offering some search advice. Hey – it’s what I do. 

I originally wrote about the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing in this SlideShare presentation a few months back – it states that for every term you are thinking of  including in your search, #1 Consider whether or not everyone would say it, and #2 Consider how many ways it can be expressed.

Applying the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing to LinkedIn’s search for engineers with solid Lucene experience, I would not necessarily recommend searching for the term “open source,” nor the title of “engineer.” While there is nothing inherently “wrong” about including “open source” in a search for people with significant Lucene experience, or searching by the title of “engineer,” master e-sourcers would stop to think before using those terms in their searches. Why?

Pay close attention – this is the “good stuff:”  

Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing: Part1

Part 1 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing would require you to think about whether or not every person with extensive Lucene experience would necessarily mention that Lucene happens to be open source in their LinkedIn profile (or resume, etc.). The answer is no, every person with Lucene experience will not mention “open source.” Because Lucene is intrinsically open source, Lucene pros may find it unecessary or redundant to mention “open source” when writing about their experience and expertise, perhaps even assuming anyone else would simply know that Lucene IS open source. They could also just as easily simply forget to mention “open source” when writing about their work and experience.  

Let’s test this theory. Using Esteban’s search parameters for Lucene, open source, and a title of engineer (and limiting results to the U.S.):

 

We get 167 results:

Now let’s search for people who mention Lucene but do not mention “open source” – we can do this by using the NOT operator:

We get 408 results:

So we can see there are many more people who mention Lucene but do not explicitly mention “open source.” The 408 results from this search and the 167 results from the original search are mutually exclusive – there is no overlap between them (there can’t be).

Going one step further, let’s try putting the term “search” into the list of keywords. This may help us narrow the results down to people who don’t just mention Lucene somewhere in their LinkedIn profile, but who have experience specifically implementing, configuring, and developing search functionality with Lucene. Adding “search” to the query will find people who text search, enterprise search, search engines, etc.

We get 249 results:

Even adding the additional term “search” to the query yields more results than the original search (167) that included “open source.”

Here is a particularly interesting result from my search:

Grant is on the Lucene Project Management Committee, he’s an Apache Software Foundation Member, and he doesn’t mention “open source” on his LinkedIn profile. You can’t and thus won’t find Grant if you’re using “open source” in your search. Ouch!

Missing great potential candidates like this happens literally every day to sourcers and recruiters all over the world as a simple result of not stopping to wonder whether or not all potentially qualified candidates would explicitly mention the search terms used in their queries. Perhaps the worst part is that without strictly  and consistently applying Part 1 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing, sourcers and recruiters don’t even know they are actually eliminating great candidates from their results – candidates that exist in their ATS, in LinkedIn, on Monster, etc., but they’ll never know they were even there.

Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing: Part2

In this specific search example for engineers with Lucene experience, Part 2 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing would require you to think about all of the potential titles that someone who has significant Lucene experience might have. Starting with “engineer” is a good idea, but you have to be aware that there are other potential titles that people who have significant Lucene experience might have, especially because most people don’t get to choose their title – it’s determined by their employer in most cases, and not all companies conveniently use the same titles for the same roles and responsibilities.

Titles other than “engineer” that people with Lucene experience might have could include architect, developer, programmer, consultant, specialist, and many more. However, we don’t even have to bother with trying to think of all of the alternate titles qualified candidates could have – we can easily find them by using the NOT operator to make sure that we only return results of people who mention Lucene, search, and have not had a title of engineer in their career. 

Here’s the search:

And we get 108 results:

So let’s examine the results and see what kinds of titles these people have had:

I see architect, consultant, specialist, and lead (the Director of QA that came up as result #2 isn’t a directly relevant hit, however, she might know people!).

It is critical to realize that NONE of these 108 results could have been found using the original search looking for the title of “engineer” and searching for “open source” – this is quite literally a hidden talent pool of candidates that the original search simply could not find. Using the NOT operator, I’ve isolated a set of people who have never had a title of “engineer,” who do not make explicit mention of “open source,” yet do mention Lucene as well as “search.” These are the kinds of candidates most people don’t find, because their searches actually CAN’T find them based on search term selection.

Every single last one of the 108 results does not mention the title “engineer” anywhere on their profile. Did you catch result #3 above – Vedant the project lead at Google? LinkedIn might be interested in him, but he was not even on the radar of the original search, because the original search could not find him. It’s very important to understand that.

So does Vedant have any search experience with Lucene?

Yes he does. How about some of the others in the results – do they have any experience with Lucene? Here’s a peek at snippets from 3 profiles of the page 1 results:

Perhaps the Associate Director is too high level for opportunities at LinkedIn? Well, that’s a lesson for another post, but I will say that you can’t know if he’s hands-on or off from his profile alone, and we also just uncovered a bit of Lucene intelligence in that now we know AT&T Interactive (in LA, btw) is using Lucene, which means there are developers and engineers with Lucene experience there. Hmm…interesting, yes?  Quite so if you’re looking for Lucene talent!

But Wait – There’s More!

I got curious and I decided to continue to take my own advice (sounds a little weird, I know) with regard to part 1 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing  – maybe there are people with Lucene experience who do not mention “search” on their profile who also have never had the title of “engineer.”  It’s easy to test this using the NOT operator:

This search yields 83 results (all completely NEW, by the way), and the first result is eye-opening.

Result #1 for me is Mark Miller. Mark’s kind of a big deal because he is a Solr and Lucene Committer at The Apache Software Foundation. Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on Lucene.

Mark looks like he might be someone we’d be interested in if we were looking for people with deep Lucene experience, right? Duh! The lesson here is that you can continue to dig up fantastic candidates by applying part 1 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing – always questioning your search terms. Mark doesn’t mention “open source,” he’s never had the title of “engineer,” and he doesn’t even say they word “search” on his profile!

Some of the best candidates don’t mention what you *assume* they will mention – as such, you often don’t/can’t find them. The dangerous part is that it is all too easy to unknowingly craft a search that, by design, actually eliminates some of the best candidates available. And you’ll never even know they were there to be found in the first place. Ignorance is bliss, unfortunately.

Conclusion

As simple as the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing seems to be, it is all too easy to overlook it. However, it is inescapably at the very foundation of effectively and exhaustively leveraging information system for talent identification. Hidden Talent Pools are very real – I’ve shown you in the many examples above that you can literally find hundreds of candidates that were previously hidden and literally “unfindable” by the original search.

So before you begin to search LinkedIn, your ATS/CRM, a job board resume database, or the Internet for potential candidates, always remeber to obey the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing: For every term you are thinking of including in your search:

#1 Consider whether or not everyone would say it

#2 Consider how many ways it can be expressed

If you don’t, I can guarantee you that you are not finding everyone available, and in many cases – you’re missing some of the best candidates.

Mistakes, Search Process, Sourcing Mistakes, Sourcing and Recruiting

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