Anything worth doing is worth measuring, and sourcing isn’t exempt from this.

If you want to know which method of sourcing has the highest ROI in terms of enabling a person to find more of the right people more quickly, then you’re in luck – because that’s what this post is about.

Human capital data comes in many forms – resumes, social network profiles, blogs, bios, press resleases, etc. – and I have found that a key and critical aspect of sources of human capital data that many people fail to formally recognize is the depth and completeness of the data that can yield information through review and analysis.

When it comes to leveraging information systems such as the Internet, applicant tracking systems, social networking sites, job board databases, etc. for sourcing and recruiting – the operative word is “information.”

Data is the lowest level of abstraction from which information can be derived. For data to become information, it must be interpreted and take on a meaning.

Generally, the quality and amount of information that can be gleaned from any particular source is directly linked and limited to the quality and amount of data present to be reviewed and analyzed. How useful is an information system supported by only a small amount of limited data?

In this post, I will:

• Review the major sources of human capital data
• Examine sourcing return on time invested
• Explore the potential candidate’s point of view
• Ask you to take a quick sourcing test

Ready?

ATS, Job Board Resume Databases

Resumes typically represent the deepest source of human capital data.

While the accuracy of them can be argued (albeit no differently than social media profiles) – most resumes contain significant and specifically professional information about the people who wrote them.

Even when poorly written, most resumes contain:

• A summary of experience
• Objectives that can give you insight into the types of opportunities they are interested in
• A work history that can give you an idea of their capabilities based on their past responsibilities and experience at specific companies, as well as an educated guess as to their desired compensation
• A full address, which can be critical in making an educated guess at whether or not they might be open to a particular commute

LinkedIn Profiles (CV’s?)

LinkedIn is the one stand-out social networking application that has a decent number of profiles with deep human capital data.

Although not a resume database, you can typically find (and thus search for and target) more employment qualification-related information than anywhere else outside of an actual resume database.

While LinkedIn calls them “profiles,” and some contain very little information other than 1 title and 1 employer, some LinkedIn users fill their profiles out just as they would their resume.

In fact, with the employment market in relatively bad shape, there are a number of articles advising job seekers to do exactly that – fill out their profile as they would a resume.

And now, LinkedIn even offers the ability to convert your LinkedIn profile into a resume(fantastic move, by the way!).

It also doesn’t hurt that LinkedIn has a robust search interface, supporting full Boolean logic as well as a number of LinkedIn-specific advanced search operators. Great search interface + deep human capital data = highly leveragable information system for talent identification.

Of course, it can’t be overlooked that there are more incomplete and shallow LinkedIn profiles than there are complete and fully fleshed out profiles, so all is not perfect in LinkedIn land.

Additionally, while LinkedIn has started to add some more specific location options for people to select (for example, my zip code gives me the option to select Alpharetta or Atlanta), many people still use their major metro area as the location on their profile (I do).

This can make it difficult to find people who are likely to be close to the location of the job you are sourcing for and thus “recruitable.”

What About Facebook, Twitter, and Google+?

While many people in the recruiting and staffing industry get REALLY excited about Facebook, Google+ and Twitter - I don’t.

Before you recoil in absolute horror that I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon with everyone else, let me say that I’m a big fan of leveraging  any/all social networking sites (provided your target talent uses them to a good degree, of course).

Yes, I they’re cool, and yes, I use them.

However, I refuse to get so blinded by their perceived potential and the hype in the sourcing/recruiting community that I fail to see their limitations.

You can certainly use Twitter, Google+ and Facebook to identify and contact potential candidates – there’s no arguing that. While Twitter is highly searchable, supporting Boolean queries and their own set of advanced search operators, Facebook isn’t (although it does offer you access to the largest single repository of people on the planet), and Google+ isn’t nearly as searchable as it should be given that it’s a Google creation.

However, regardless of “searchability,” none of those sites offers much professional data about the people who use them, or at least not the right types of information that can help a sourcer or recruiter gain any significant insight into specific skills, experience (including precise responsibilities and capability as well as overall years and career progression), and specific location.

You might get lucky to see a title on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, and you might find people talking about their line of work, but the people who do mention titles and in some cases even employers is the vast minority.

Lastly – when it comes to social networking sites like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, even when people do mention something work related online that can enable you to try to guess what it is they do, in many cases they do so using non-standard terminology, which poses an additional challenge to talent identification.

Shallow Human Capital Data

Facebook, Twitter and Google+ can be effectively leveraged for employer and recruiter branding, marketing, online community development, and socializing job opportunies (that’s social media speak for “job posting”) – which are largely passive methods of talent attraction.

However, as shallow sources of human capital data, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are not particularly effective for active candidate identification.

When I say “active candidate identification,” I’m not referral to job seeking status (people actively seeking employment) – I’m referring to the process of actively searching for and identifying candidates with specific experience and qualifications that are highly likely to match specific hiring needs.

Posting jobs is a passive method of identifying potential candidates, because you post the job and then sit and wait for people to do the work of identifying themselves.

There is no doubt you can find and contact LOADS of people using Facebook, Twitter and Google+. However, in most cases, you have no real idea how much and exactly what kind of experience these people have prior to contacting them, and in many cases, you don’t know precisely where they live.

Just because they list that they have their CPA, or that they belong to a nursing association, or they are a “fan” of a PHP developer page - it certainly does not guarantee you of anything beyond that.

Non-Resume Internet Research

Using Internet search engines such as Google, Bing, Blekko, et al, to search for and sift through human capital data can definitely produce results.

I won’t argue that. However, once you go beyond resumes (the deepest sources of human capital data), you quickly enter the shallow end of the human capital data pool - press releases, blog posts and comments, articles, etc.

I would never suggest that these shallow data sources can’t be leveraged for sourcing and recruiting – but my point is that the intrinsic probability that any particular non-resume search result is qualified for your hiring needs is LOW.

This is because less data means less information available to be gleaned about the potential candidate – leaving us with little to no idea as to their professional experience and qualifications, and even specific location in many cases.

Expect a Return on your Time Invested

Maybe some sourcers and recruiters like to find and contact lots of people because they get paid to just be social and make lots of friends online.

Maybe some companies think it’s productive and cost effective to sift through and contact large quantities of people who aren’t qualified for, would not be interested in, and/or would not commute (or relo!) to the opportunity they are being sourced/identified for.

I certainly don’t! Who does anyway?

Wait – please don’t raise your hand (not you – that other person).

As shallow sources of information, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and practically all sources of non-resume human capital data on the Internet simply don’t have much professional-experience/qualification-relevant information.

Less and incomplete data doesn’t really make for a heavily leverageable information system.

At least not when it comes to talent identification where it’s more than helpful to know a little bit about someone’s experience before you contact them.

Value to the Candidate?

Candidates generally appreciate being contacted for opportunities that are in their “ballpark” when it comes to location and responsibilities.

Most candidates don’t appreciate being contacted for opportunities that aren’t.

Think about this for a second – what VALUE are you providing to people that you find and contact using shallow sources of human capital data when they are in fact not even remotely qualified or interested in your opportunity?

Most people don’t appreciate being contacted by recruiters only to end up being used as a tool in your networking/referral recruiting efforts because you didn’t have enough information about them to possibly provide anything of value to them.

Yes, I remember the days of just picking up the phone and calling people with little to no information – but take a second to answer this question: Is this kind of practice and process the best and highest ROI method of sourcing and recruiting?I think not.

Critical Candidate Matching Variables

Deeper and more detailed human capital data enables more precise and controlled searches, allowing sourcers and recruiters to be able to make an educated decision to contact people based on capability and experience rather than blind faith or a guess based on perhaps a title alone.

With resumes or fully fleshed out LinkedIn profiles, a talented sourcer or recruiter can effectively control critical candidate variables such as location, potential opportunity match, and experience/capability – including years of experience, which can tie into compensation.

Sourcing Test: Which Person is More Likely to be Interested and Qualified?

Here is a dramatic and certainly more practical example of deep vs. shallow human capital data: If you were responsible for filling a position for a Business Analyst with energy industry experience and specific experience working on SAP projects and using UML, which of the following people has the higher probability of being both qualified and interested in your opportunity?

Person #1: LinkedIn Profile

Person #2: Twitter Bio

The contrast is dramatic.

The LinkedIn profile is essentially filled out as completely as a resume would be, and as such, we can feel confident when contacting this person because their experience appears to closely align with our opportunity, and even if they aren’t recruitable, they’ll have to admit the opportunity was relevant.

The Twitter profile mentions the title of “Business Analyst,” but little else – we have no idea as to this person’s industry or project experience. While we can cross reference the Twitter Bio with LinkedIn, when doing so, we can see by looking at her profile that she does not appear to have any energy industry experience, and we cannot tell if she has any SAP project or UML experience.

If you had a choice between using either an information system that had shallow data on the people contained within, or an information system that had deep data on the people contained within - and you could only choose one – which would you choose and why?

I know which one I would choose – all things being equal, I would choose the information system with the deep and more complete human capital data.

That way, I can run creative and effective queries to search for, find, and contact people based on specific experience and qualifications. Why would anyone choose any different?

Final Thoughts

You can find and hire people by searching any source of human capital data – resume or otherwise.

However, searching Facebook, Twitter, Google+, blogs, the Internet and other similarly shallow sources of human capital data requires a higher amount of effort for a smaller return – what I call low yield sourcing and recruiting.

While there is undoubtedly more shallow human capital data than deep human capital data, does it sound like a good idea to go out of your way to focus on low yield sourcing and recruiting?

When it comes to proactive candidate sourcing (e.g., searching for people and not posting jobs and waiting for responses), I’d argue that the deep sources of human capital data such as resume databases, applicant tracking systems, LinkedIn, and Internet resumes are responsible for producing 80% of the search based sourcing and recruiting results (hires).

Conversely, the shallow sources of human capital data such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and and non-resume Internet research produce 20% of the active-search based sourcing and recruiting results. You essentially have two paths:

1. Find and contact more uninterested and unqualified people
2. Find and contact more interested and qualified people

Which one will you take?

Does your employer give you a choice?

While there is much written on the subject of how to search the various talent sources available to recruiters and sourcers today, such as the Internet, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, ATS/CRM systems, etc., there does not seem to be much written about their ROI as sources of talent/human capital information.

I believe that the value of any source of information is 50% based upon the actual information contained within (data depth), and 50% in the ability to extract out precisely and completely what the user needs (searchability). Information has no value if you are unable to easily access, effectively search for and find what you need and take action on it.

When it comes to leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition, it is critical to assess the depth of the talent/human capital data offered by the source as well as how “searchable” the source is.

Why is Data Depth and Searchability Important?

Quite simply, the deeper the data offered by and the more searchable the the source is, the higher the ROI for your sourcing efforts.

All electronic sources of talent are NOT created equal, and some offer sourcers and recruiters instrinsic advantages with regard to the ability to more quickly and precisely find more of the right people, yielding higher productivity.

I’ve created a graphic representation of a comparison of the data depth and searchability of the most common information systems used by sourcers and recruiters to find candidates.

Shallow Data Depth

The whole point of using information systems to search for candidates is to find people who have specific skills and experience, and typically people who live in a specific location.

It’s not terribly difficult to find PEOPLE, but it can be very challenging to find the RIGHT people.

As you can see from the chart above, I’ve classified Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and the Internet (non-resume results, such as press releases, company directories, etc.) as shallow sources of talent data.

This is because these sources either don’t offer much in the way of professional/occupational information (often a title and little else), and/or they have very little information as to the exact location of the potential candidates. In most cases, they contain very little information regarding critical candidate variables such as skills and responsibilities, quantity and quality of experience, career history and accomplishments, education (Facebook being the exception), precise location, etc.

Many shallow sources of candidate information simply do not provide ANY information regarding some of these details. This is because the majority of people who use sites like Twitter and Facebook often don’t include professional/employment information on their profile.

With little or no information to go on, it is extremely difficult to search for and identify candidates who have a high probability of at least meeting the minimum requirements for your opening, let alone exceeding them.

Low Searchability

While you can certainly search Facebook to find people – Facebook has significant limitations with regard to its “searchability.” Facebook simply was not designed to be highly searchable, at least not to find people you don’t know, and certainly not based on professional info beyond title and employer.

You may think I am crazy for saying that the Internet isn’t very “searchable,” but most search engines, including Google, don’t even support full Boolean logic.

Also – the Internet itself is unstructured, which makes it intrinsically difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for without drowning in a sea of false positive results. Sniffing out and following candidate leads based on shallow information and using sources that aren’t by design highly searchable comes with the territory of being a sourcer or recruiter, and the thrill of the hunt can be quite satisfying.

However, the angle of this article is ROI, or even more specifically ROTI (Return on Time Invested) – which is a good measure of productivity (Productivity + Work / Time).

Trying to search shallow data sources with limited search capability can be an incredibly slow and time consuming process, as well as result in a significantly low return on time invested. I refer to this as “low yield” sourcing, and its cause is the shallow depth of information available and poor searchability of the sources – which cripples your ability to control or even identify critical candidate variables.

Deep Data But Low Searchability

In this quadrant we have many ATS/CRM solutions, as well as Internet resumes.

In both cases, we’re dealing with resumes. Resumes are definitely deep sources of talent data – and while they are not always complete or 100% accurate – most resumes do contain significant information about the people who wrote them. Even when poorly written, most resumes contain summaries of experience, objectives that can give you insight into the types of opportunities they are interested in, a work history giving you an idea of their capabilities based on their past responsibilities and experience, and of course an addresses – which can be critical in making an educated guess at whether or not they might be open to a particular commute.

While this deep level of talent data is wonderful – it’s of little use if your ability to search for and retrieve the data is limited. Unfortunately, many ATS/CRM solutions aren’t very searchable.

In fact, some are laughably unsearchable, considering a major reason for storing human capital data is (you would think) to be able to retreive it to take action on it.

If you look closely at the chart above, you will notice it says “Most ATS’s.” That’s because there are some highly searchable ATS/CRM solutions on the market, and I am also aware of some “home-grown” systems that are also highly searchable. So while there are some highly searchable ATS/CRM solutions available, too many are unacceptably low on the “searchability” scale.

When it comes to the Internet - while you can search the Internet and find resumes, only Bing supports queries employing full Boolean logic. The irony there is that Bing limits you to 10 search terms or 150 characters (the documentation vs. realized results is sketchy).

It’s nice that Google gives you 32 search terms, but in some cases, this limits your ability to configure queries that are precise enough and/or remove all false positives.

And while finding some local resumes can be done using Internet search engines, it is difficult to be sure if you are actually finding ALL of, or even the best available, resumes.

Because the Internet is unstructured, when you search for area codes, state abbreviations, and zip ranges (as you can with Google), you often get a number of false positive results. And if a person puts their resume online but does not list an address or a phone number – good luck trying to find them as a local candidate.

To be highly “searchable” – it should not be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for, and you should not have to suffer many irrelevant results.

Highly Searchable but Shallow Data

Here we have Twitter and LinkedIn.

I’ve written about this many times before – Twitter is an extremely shallow source of talent data. The operative word in the term microblog is “micro” – 140 characters for Tweets and 160 characters for a bio.  That’s not a whole lot to go on. While some tweeps do tweet about their professional life, many do not. Also, many people don’t give away much information in their micro-bio either.

Unlike Twitter, which by design is a shallow source of talent data, LinkedIn is a deeper source of human capital data. However, while some LinkedIn profiles are as detailed as a traditional resume, there are still plenty of profiles with very little, if any, information on them. I have no doubt that over time more people will flesh out their profiles with more information and LinkedIn will move to the upper right quadrant of the chart.

Here’s where both Twitter and LinkedIn shine brightly – searchability. Twitter employs tag searching (hashtags #), supports full Boolean logic, enables location searching via geocoding ( SQL near:DC within:25mi), and some third party applications (e.g., Twellow) allow you to search specific fields such as bios (@bio developer). Click here to learn more about searching Twitter for sourcing candidates.

LinkedIn supports full Boolean logic and can accept and run insanely long and complex queries, allows for Boolean searching of structured data (current/company, current/past title, school…), has configurable location searching, supports industry and group search, as well as “hand-coding” of searches with LinkedIn’s own advanced operators (ccompany:, ptitle:, etc).

Deep Data and Highly Searchable

Here’s the sweet spot for sourcing and recruiting – sources of talent data that offer significant depth of information AND are highly searchable. In this quadrant we have the job board resume databases and something I like to refer to as Talent Warehouse solutions.

The job major job board resume databases (Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice) all have…that’s right – resumes, which as we have already seen are deep sources of talent data. Resumes offer a work history including career progression, skills and experience (at least to some extent), environment/group/division/project information, education, and precise location. In many cases, resumes will detail specific responsibilities and responsibility level, as well as accomplishments and achievements.

In addition, all of the job board resume databases are also highly searchable, supporting full Boolean logic, useful query modifiers such as the asterisk for root-word searching, structured field searching (recent experience/titles, etc.), and configurable location searching.

Sourcers and recruiters can run Boolean strings and structured queries when searching job board resume databases to precisely target specific experience, years of experience, education, certifications, environmental/project, and industry experience.

Those who are particularly adept can even achieve semantic search by crafting Boolean strings that go well beyond buzzword matching and target specific responsibilities, or in other words, what the candidates have actually done as well as what they have done it with.

The combination of deep data and high searchability affords you the ability to search for and essentially control critical candidate qualification variables enabling “high yield” e-sourcing – a high volume of more accurately and appropriately matched results in less time.

Talent Warehouse

When you saw that large yellow bubble labeled “Talent Warehouse” in the upper right hand corner of the chart, I’m sure most of your were wondering, “What the heck is a Talent Warehouse?”

Just as Business intelligence applications are typically supported by a data warehouse - which is the main repository of an organization’s historical data, also known as corporate memory (the total body of data, information and knowledge required to deliver the strategic aims and objectives of an organization) - a ”Talent Warehouse” serves as the main repository of an organization’s Human Capital data, and it would serve as the raw material for a Talent Support System (TSS) – a computerized system for helping to make Talent-related decisions, such as talent identification and acquisition.

The core of a Talent Warehouse is a relational resume database. We’ve already established that resumes are deep sources of human capital data – but you may have noticed that on the chart above, “Talent Warehouse” is actually higher on the scale of data depth than other sources of resumes. “What’s a deeper source of human capital data than a resume you ask?” A Talent Warehouse adds more depth to resumes through the use of comments/notes and tags – sourcers and recruiters can add additional information to candidate records and resumes based on phone screens, in-person interviews, references, tests and evaluations, etc.

Imagine being able to search for candidates based on information contained in their resumes AS WELL AS information gleaned from the candidates through interviews. Imagine that!

Although many Applicant Tracking Systems, HRMS/HRIS solutions and Recruiting CRM applications make lofty claims as to their capabilities and functionality, I don’t consider (m)any vendor solutions currently on the market to be a true Talent Intelligence/Talent Warehouse solution. Most are simply systems that track and organize applicants (ATS), and/or enable the management of “relationships” (CRM), and they often they lack a critical piece of the puzzle – searchability.

A true Talent Warehouse has a search interface that supports the searching of resumes as well as tags and notes using both standard and extended Boolean queries (including configurable proximity and variable term weighting) to enable effective semantic search as well include an Artificial Intelligence resume/job matching engine to cover all angles.

This kind of search interface and engine can enable sourcers and recruiters to quickly and precisely find quantities of well qualified candidates. In the hands of an adept Talent Miner, a Talent Warehouse can yield a high volume of results with a high percentage of candidates who have specific skills and experience, specific responsibilities, specific years of experience, specific environmental/project experience, and who live in a specific area.

What this essentially affords a recruiter is the ability to leverage technology to find, contact, and establish and build relationships with more of the right people more quickly – increasing effectiveness and productivity!

Final Thoughts

You can find and hire people by searching any electronic source of talent data – resume or otherwise.

However, searching shallow and less searchable sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs, the Internet and other similarly shallow sources of candidate data takes a higher amount of effort for a smaller return – a low ROI. This results in low yield sourcing and recruiting and ultimately lower productivity.

If you have deeper and more searchable sources of talent data, why would you go out of your way to (or allow your sourcing/recruiting team to) focus on low yield sourcing and recruiting?

Highly searchable and deeper sources of human capital data enable you find more appropriately qualified candidates more quickly, through your ability to search for, control, and quickly analyze and assess critical candidate variables such as specific roles/responsibilities, years of experience, skills/technologies, environment, education, and location.

This results in a higher return on time invested and higher productivity. While it may sound perfectly logical to start with the deepest and most searchable sources of talent data available to you, I assure you – not everyone actually does this. I continue to see and hear about sourcers and recruiters who are blinded by buzz of sources like Twitter and Facebook and who spend more time using them than their own ATS/CRM, or other deeper and/or more searchable sources available to them.

And if your private candidate database/ATS/CRM isn’t as searchable as it could be - consider doing something about it- because it should be. Make the conscious decision to focus the majority of your e-sourcing efforts on the highest ROI sources – those with deep data and those that are highly searchable.

While no company has a flawless recruiting system, process or solution, there is a glaring problem shared by many corporate recruiting functions from which the Fortune 500 and the Big 4 are not immune.

As some of the most respected companies in the world invest quite a bit of time, energy and money into social recruiting efforts, interactive recruiting solutions, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and career site optimization, one critical piece of the recruiting puzzle seems to be all but completely overlooked.

Before you read any further – do you believe you have an idea of what I might be talking about?

From the conversations I’ve had over the years with many corporate recruiters and recruiting leaders from small companies all the way to the Fortune 500 and the Big 4, as well as the contract recruiters who are hired to help these companies source and recruit talent, I believe that the #1 mistake in corporate recruiting is the failure to fully realize and take appropriate action on the value of the human capital data they already possess.

The #1 Mistake in Corporate Recruiting

In my opinion, the single biggest corporate recruiting flunk is the failure to accurately value and appropriately leverage the human capital data they have in their applicant tracking and/or CRM systems.

Let me show you the depth and complexity of some of the contributing factors of this issue.

The Shiny New Candidate Syndrome

A bachelor’s degree in psychology certainly doesn’t make me a psychologist – but it doesn’t take an advanced degree to recognize that it seems to be human nature to want what they don’t already have.

Certainly I cannot be the only person to be confused by companies investing a large amount of time, focus, energy and money into social recruiting, fancy and high-tech job posting systems and optimized career sites in order to identify and attract new candidates when they might already have the best candidate sitting in their ATS.

Getting a shiny new candidate via your Facebook advertising campaign or your LinkedIn Recruiter account is perceived by some to be “cutting edge,” sexy and seems to afford bragging rights at recruiting conferences. Heck, anything recruiting related that can be tagged as “social” is certainly cooler than ATS mining (for those few companies that can and actually do mine their ATS!).

However, who is to say you don’t actually have faster and lower cost access to better qualified candidates already in your database?

To be sure, the most recently identified candidate is not necessarily the best candidate, and I can speak from experience when I say that some of the best candidates I have ever placed came from “old” resumes – some as old as 4 years since the last update. Someone I recently trained was happy to report he had made a placement by calling a candidate whose resume had not been updated in over 6 years!

Instead of focusing so heavily on trying to find “new” candidates from external sources, companies should spend more time leveraging the candidates they already have at their fingertips.

Resumes acquired in the past that were never reviewed by someone are essentially new candidates – they might be “old” in your ATS, but they’re new to you when you finally dig them up and review them for the first time! There are plenty of “new,” unidentified candidates in corporate ATS/CRM resume databases – you just have to look for them!

The Big Fat Ugly Assumption

Why are so many companies and recruiters focused on looking outside their own database in places like LinkedIn, Monster, Twitter, Facebook, etc. for talent?

I’ll tell you why.

Although largely unspoken and unrecognized, the big fat ugly assumption in recruiting is that every candidate captured in an ATS/CRM has been reviewed, and that if a candidate fits for any position, someone would know.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

I’d estimate that a good portion of every ATS consists of candidates whose resumes have been acquired, but not reviewed, and thus not identified. If that sounds a bit backward, that’s because it is.

When relying on job posting for the majority of the acquisition of candidate resumes, you can actually acquire a resume that is not reviewed. And if you haven’t reviewed a candidate’s resume, you can’t identify them as a potential match for any position, let alone the one they responded to.

If your organization isn’t putting enough emphasis on searching your resume database, you can be assured you have plenty of candidates that have technically been “acquired” because you’ve captured their resume, but have not been identified because no one reviewed them, and thus they cannot be matched to any position.

Even if a company does review 100% of all applicants for the positions they apply to, many great candidates are still overlooked, are not properly identified and are never matched to positions they are qualified for. See “Right Candidate, Wrong Job,” and “The Time Value of Resumes” below.

Do not make the mistake of assuming that someone has searched for and reviewed every possible candidate match in your corporate ATS/CRM. As I said above, there are plenty of “new,” unidentified candidates in corporate ATS/CRM resume databases – you just have to search for them.

A Heavy Reliance On Posting Jobs

Many companies rely heavily on posting jobs for talent attraction and acquisition. I’m aware that some companies get such a high volume of responses from their online job postings and career sites that their recruiters are so buried with reactively processing applicants that they practically have no time to proactively source candidates from their own ATS.

While it may sound like a good thing to have a steady stream of people interested in joining your company and applying to your job postings, no matter what technology or solution you use, there are some serious limitations and universal truths to using job postings to identify talent:

• Posting jobs is a passive candidate identification and acquisition strategy – you are 100% reliant on the right people finding or stumbling across your opening.
• Posting jobs offers no control over the qualifications of the candidates who apply – the phrase “post and pray” is quite accurate, because it comes from the fact that you are essentially hoping that the people you want and need actually find and apply to your opening.
• While 100% of the people who apply to online job postings are interested in the positions they are applying to, a good portion aren’t actually qualified for them (which is both a bad and a good thing – more on this later).
• Posting jobs – via web 1.0, 2.0, or x.0 – primarily attracts the attention of active job seekers only, which is the minority of all people. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that approximately 14% of all people are “actively” seeking a new job. Even if you add in the estimated 20% of people who are “casually” looking for a new job, you are still missing nearly 66% of the workforce if you rely heavily on posting jobs to find your next great hire.
• Passive and non-job seekers simply do not “see” job postings, even if you place them on their Facebook or LinkedIn pages. Sorry.

It is a HUGE mistake to place a large amount of the control over your talent acquisition strategy in the hands of others – the talent you’re hunting.

Without a strong focus on proactive ATS/resume database mining, you’re primarily in reactive mode, waiting for the people you want and need to come to you, and you can simply cannot target and tap into the elusive and highly valued “passive candidates.”

Right Candidate, Wrong Job

Assuming that every resume submitted into an ATS is reviewed (remember what I said earlier about this assumption), what happens to all of the people who apply online to job postings who are great people, but just aren’t qualified for the specific position they apply to?

If a person doesn’t meet the basic qualifications of the position they directly applied to, does that mean they don’t meet the basic qualifications of other open positions?

Of course not.

The unfortunate reality is that every company in existence is sitting on a pile of people who are a great match for a position other than what they directly applied to. Unless a recruiting organization focuses specifically on mining their resume database, a great many of these people will never be matched to the positions they actually are qualified for.

The Time Value of Resumes

What happens to all of the people who apply to positions that they are not yet fully qualified for, but will be in 1-3 years?

Unfortunately, in most cases the answer to the above question is absolutely nothing, which is both unacceptable and a significant opportunity for all companies.

If I had $1 for every time I have heard a recruiter say that it’s a waste of time to search “old” resumes because they’re old and “out of date,” I’d be a millionaire. Resumes don’t spoil, and they don’t have a “best used by” date – I cannot stress enough how shortsighted it is, as well as just plain wrong, to believe that a resume over 1 year old is worthless.

Just as a point of reference – not too long ago I spoke with someone in a recruiting leadership function from a Big 4 firm that mentioned their organization “purged” millions of resumes during a migration to a new ATS. Ouch!

Failing to search your resume database for people who applied to positions 1-3 or even more years ago is an epic #fail.

While I could write a small book on the many reasons as to why, for the sake of this post, let me just say that it’s quite easy to calculate a person’s career trajectory, and calling people with “old” resumes is a very effective way of recruiting passive candidates – including non-job seekers that you simply cannot identify and acquire through any other means.

Resumes do not lose their value as they age – they actually do gain value over time.

If your organization is burdened by a large collection of worthless old resumes – I will gladly give them a good home.

Black Hole ATS

Practically every company has an internal database filled with actionable information on thousands to literally tens of millions of applicants, candidates, and professionals.

You would think that a private internal database of people that an organization has actively and passively, tactically and strategically collected over the years would be a prized possession and be viewed and leveraged as a significant resource and competitive advantage.

However, this post on Weddles gives us a glimpse of just how wrong we would be to think such a thing. An Online Sourcing Survey conducted by TalentDrive found that almost two-thirds (64%) of the employers represented by the survey’s participants did not know how many qualified candidates were in their own ATS databases.

Yes – you read that correctly. Most companies don’t even know how many people are in their Applicant Tracking Systems.

Surprised?

While that is an especially disturbing statistic and a sad reality, I’m actually not that surprised.

Many Applicant Tracking Systems have horrible search interfaces and extremely limited search capability. Prospective candidates go in, but they don’t come back out. If you can’t easily search your internal database, how can you find the top talent hidden within, let alone determine the total candidate population?

This problem is not isolated to small companies with home-grown Applicant Tracking Systems. I recently spoke with a corporate recruiter from a well-known and highly visible Fortune 500 brand who told me that it’s easier for her to find candidates on Monster and then cross reference the names in her ATS than it is to actually source candidates from her ATS.

Epic #fail!

If you’re sitting on a stockpile of resumes and applicants, you should be able to quickly, easily, and precisely retrieve exactly what you need. If your ATS/CRM doesn’t have advanced information retrieval capability – it’s time you took action to remedy that so you can begin to fully leverage all of the human capital information you’ve harvested, likely at significant cost.

You Don’t Need LinkedIn to Leverage 3 Degrees of Separation

One of the great features of LinkedIn is that it is easy to see beyond your direct connections and to leverage 3 degrees of separation.

However, you don’t need LinkedIn to leverage degrees of separation. To think the value of an ATS resume database is limited solely to the direct access to the people contained within is a serious mistake.

Every person in an ATS database knows other people, who also know other people.

The resumes you have direct access to essentially represent 1st degree connections, through which you can reach 2nd and 3rd degree connections and beyond.

You’d be surprised what happens when you call people from your ATS simply to network with them and ask for help. Why more companies don’t realize that the value of their ATS goes FAR beyond just the people contained within is a mystery to me.

Lessons to be Learned

While it is a huge mistake for companies and recruiters to fail to fully realize and take appropriate action on the value of the human capital data they already possess, mistakes are simply opportunities to learn.

It won’t take much effort for recruiters and the companies they work for to begin to fully leverage the human capital data buried in their ATS databases.

Lessen the obsession with finding the next “new” candidate via external sources and bright shiny social channels and focus more time extracting the value from candidates that are already in your possession but have yet to be truly identified or acted upon. Not fully leveraging an internal resume/candidate database, which has likely been built through significant time, effort and money is a serious flaw in any talent acquisition plan. In some way, shape or form, every candidate record in an ATS has been paid for, and there is simply no sense in paying for something that you don’t use.

Recognize that while posting jobs online can open the candidate floodgates, posting jobs to attract talent some serious limitations, not the least of which is the fact that it is a completely passive talent acquisition strategy offering no control over candidate qualification variables. Also, don’t forget that job postings can only attract active and casual job seekers, limiting you to only 1/3rd of the talent pool available at best.

Mining your ATS is a proactive sourcing and recruitment strategy which affords you significant control over critical candidate qualification variables, and you can specifically and strategically target and tap into the other 66% of the talent pool by searching for resumes that have not been updated or acquired in over 6 months. If you get “too many” applicants to your job postings, make sure there is at least 1 person (ideally more!) who doesn’t have anything to do with processing applicants – you need to have resources that spend 100% of their time proactively mining your ATS as well as external sources.

Ensure your ATS/CRM is highly searchable – if your ATS/CRM is as easy to search as it is to put candidates in, you will be able to fill more of your company’s openings from talent you’ve already sourced. Any opening you can fill with candidates already in your internal system saves you the time, effort, and cost of advertising and searching for “new” candidates. Filling openings with candidates already in your ATS can afford you significant and measurable cost-per-hire, time-to-identify, and time-to-fill benefits.

Having a highly searchable ATS/CRM can help you reduce your reliance on paid resources if you currently use them (LinkedIn, Monster, etc.). Strive to ensure that your ATS/CRM is more searchable than LinkedIn, Monster and even the Internet itself. It should not be easier to search and identify potential candidates via external sources than it is to mine your own private candidate database!

In addition to high searchability, your ATS/CRM should have robust and easy to use contact management functionality to enable recruiters to stay in touch with the people who enter the ATS. Maintaining regular communications with candidates, regardless of their job search status, allows an organization to be ready to take appropriate action when the candidate’s status changes, or when a new position opens for which the person is an excellent fit. Plus, staying in touch with candidates ensures that resumes never get too out of date (if you’re bothered by that sort of thing)  - it’s easy to request an updated resume each year using solid contact management functionality.

And last but certainly not least – be sure to recognize that the value of your ATS database goes well beyond the people contained within. Every person in your internal database knows people, who in turn know other people. Leverage those degrees of separation for professional networking and ask for help in the form of referrals.

In response to my recent post about the deficiencies in the search capability of many Applicant Tracking Systems, a few people commented to the fact that resumes stored in applicant tracking systems become stale and outdated over time, which may explain why ATS resume databases are often the candidate “source of last resort.”

While candidate records inevitably age over time and can become outdated, this definitely does not have to be the case.

A candidate record can only truly go “stale” if no one ever makes contact and updates the record with more current information from time to time – and it need not even be every 6 months.

Any recruiter worth their salt will attempt to maintain periodic contact with most candidates and update their information as appropriate, regardless of their job search status. This can also be automated to some extent with strong and effective CRM functionality – so even if the recruiter forgets to follow up with someone every 6 months, the CRM won’t.

Resumes Are Like Wine

While human capital data in the form of resumes and candidate profiles may get outdated, it never truly loses its value. Resumes and candidate records are like fine wine – they only get better with age.

Yes, I believe the value of human capital data actually increases over time.

If I find a resume of a 2 year Unix systems administrator today and permanently capture them into my ATS, over time that person will gain experience and expertise, and likely advance their career along the way. In 5 years I will have a 7 year Unix admin, a Unix systems engineer, perhaps a project manager or even a storage area network specialist – who knows? No matter their career path and progression, I will stay in touch with them and routinely update their information - regardless of their job search status.

The same is true of nearly every profession – accountants, attorneys, physicians, customer service reps, mechanical engineers, recent college grads, etc. – they will all gain experience and advance their careers over time. 

Limited Shelf Life

Did you know that some people who post their resume in online resume databases (job boards and such) sometimes pull their resume down shortly after they post it, rendering it unfindable? Sometimes in a matter of hours!

Social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter can also suffer from a similar effect. Because they are based on UGC (User Generated Content), at any time any user can make their profile private and unsearchable (even via X-Ray searching in some cases!), or simply remove content that may aid you in searching for/identifying them based on their professional skills and experience.

However, if you’re always on the lookout for certain types of professionals, scouring every source available to you, and you permanently capture the information you find into your ATS/CRM, you may essentially be collecting rare vintages (yes, I’m going to continue with the wine analogy) that may no longer be in circulation in the near future. 

In other words, when you find and capture that resume or profile of the 2 year Unix admin (or accountant, or attorney, or recent grad, etc.) who pulls their resume or alters their social networking profile at some point in the future – you may have in your possession a candidate that may never be found by anyone else again.

This would allow you to specifically search for that particular candidate and reach out to them in a year or two’s time – when they are passively looking or not looking at all – and present them with a position that is well aligned with the next step in their career. At this point, you may literally be one of the few people who have quick and easy access to that candidate as their career progresses, regardless of their job search status.

ATS Databases are 70% Passive/Not Looking by Volume

I believe that a well stocked ATS candidate database is likely to consist of mostly (approximately 70%) candidates who are not looking or who are passively looking. That percentage is probably even higher when you consider only candidate records that have been entered/created over 3 months ago. So, if you’re one of those recruiting professionals who believe the hype that active candidates are bad and passive candidates are good, you should be excited about the prospect of building a private “passive” candidate database that you can mine to your heart’s content.

While I am most decidedly NOT one of those people who buys into the idea that passive candidates are the “best” candidates, I can tell you from experience that candidate closing and control is almost a non-issue when you are dealing primarily with people who are not actively looking, are not being called by every other recruiter in the known universe, and don’t have 5 interviews scheduled this week and 2 offers in hand.

So it IS nice to be able to purposefully target and dip into a large pool of well qualified candidates, who are not actively looking, and many of whom no one else has quick and easy access to. 

It’s not just nice; it’s also a significant competitive advantage.

Let Your Candidate Data Age Naturally

If you have a relatively large candidate database (10,000 to 1,000,000+), you needn’t worry about trying to maintain “relationships” with all of them – it’s actually impossible, unless your definition of “relationship” includes automated emails.

If you’re overly concerned with having ultra-fresh information on all of the candidates in your system at all times - don’t be. It isn’t really necessary.

I’ve called and made easy, frictionless hires with candidates who had records/resumes that had not been updated in 4 years. A seasoned sourcer or recruiter can easily make an educated guess at “career trajectory,” and when you make a call to someone whose resume is not on the Internet, not on LinkedIn, not in an online resume database – you essentially have a candidate no one else has practical, targeted access to – and closing/control is a non-issue when you call with the right opportunity, by design.

Final Thoughts

If you permanently capture data on your target professionals relatively early in their careers, you can cultivate their candidate records as their careers progress, allowing you quick and easy access to them as they evolve into more experienced passive or even non-job seekers – the virtually “ungettable” candidates that your competitors wish they had access to.  

If this approach to valuing and leveraging your candidate data doesn’t appeal to you, and you happen to be growing tired of having to store all of those old, stale resumes in your ATS/CRM – give me a ring – I’d be glad to take them off your hands.

This question has been burning in my mind for quite some time – why is it that so many ATS/recruiting CRM vendors offer poor or limited candidate search functionality? I’m not talking about ATS vendors you’ve never heard of – I’m talking about some of the biggest names in Applicant Tracking/Candidate Relationship Management applications.

I’m well aware that ATS’s serve many critical functions beyond searching for the candidates contained within them, but let’s pull no punches here – you can’t hire someone, or begin to automate candidate relationship management with someone you haven’t FOUND in the first place. And just because a candidate is buried somewhere in your database, it doesn’t mean you’ve actually found them (or can find them when you want or need to).

The bottom line is that data is of little to no value if you can’t retrieve the information you want, when you need it. What is the point of storing human capital data if you can’t precisely retrieve exactly what you want, when you want it? 

Deficiencies Defined

I won’t get into automated/system-side semantic search and match in this post – I’m going to focus on the ability to manually enter search strings to find candidates.

When I say “poor/limited” candidate search capability, I mean at least one or more of the following:

• Unnecessarily short search fields (e.g., 100 characters, including spaces!)
• Lack of full Boolean search (e.g., inability to use AND, OR, and NOT, nesting, etc.)
• Lack of stemming/root word search (e.g., admin* yeilds administrator, administration, etc.)
• Lack of field-based search (e.g., most recent experience, most recent title, education, etc.)
• Lack of searching by zip code radius

Critical Candidate Pool

A company’s internal candidate database is made up of people who have responded to that company’s job postings, people who went to the company’s website and entered their resume and information (not in response to a specific job), and people who were identified elsewhere (employee referral, LinkedIn, Twitter, Monster, niche job board, the Internet, etc.) and entered into the database by an employee. 

One could easily argue that this pool of candidates should be the first place sourcers, recruiters and hiring managers look when they need to find candidates. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

ATS = Candidate Source of Last Resort

A relatively common observation/complaint I hear from recruiting managers in corporate and agency staffing environments is that when it comes to running searches to find potential candidates, their sourcers and recruiters tend to search LinkedIn and the job board resume databases they have access to first, or at least before they search their internal ATS/CRM application. In many cases, recruiters with access to job board resume databases will only use their own ATS as a “source of last resort.”

A recent survey conducted by TalentDrive, which polled over 8,000 companies and staffing firms, confirms this to a shocking degree. They found that “98% of the companies surveyed did not find Talent from within the existing Company ATS.” In other words, candidates can check in, but they don’t check out.

Not quite as shocking, but equally disturbing is that an Online Sourcing Survey conducted by TalentDrive found that almost two-thirds (64%) of the employers represented by the survey’s participants did not know how many qualified candidates were in their own ATS databases.

I think I know one of the major contributing factors to both statistics - most ATS’s aren’t very searchable!

Strong Candidate Search Capability is Out There

I believe the reason why Applicant Tracking Systems are often used as the “source of last resort” is because most ATS’s have candidate search functionality that is far inferior to what sourcers and recruiters have available to them in LinkedIn, any of the major job board resume databases, and even Google. Can we blame recruiters for going first to sources they have access to that actually ENABLE them with the power and control to quickly find the people they need?

If you take a look at large repositories of deep human capital data, such as those offered by LinkedIn and the “big 4″ job board resume databases (Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, and Dice), you’ll find robust search capability. All accept full Boolean logic, accept relatively long/complex/precise search strings, feature zip code radius search, and offer field-specific searching. Monster takes Boolean search one step further by offering proximity search with the NEAR operator, and Careerbuilder offers advanced AI matching with their R2 functionality(which I think it powered by Sovren – can anyone confirm this?). 

Regardless of how many excellent candidates may be buried in a company’s ATS/CRM, if recruiters can’t run appropriately precise searches to quickly and easily retrieve highly relevant results, they are actually incentivized to use other sources to identify candidates. Sourcers and recruiters will naturally gravitate to what works for them, and unfortunately, in many cases, it isn’t their ATS.

The Customer is Always Right?

When I recently challenged a major ATS vendor regarding their extremely short candidate search field (100 characters, including spaces), their response included this interesting and unanticipated angle - they claimed that 99% of their clients are statisfied with their short search field. In other words, very few prospective or current customers of their ATS asked about, commented on, or asked for improvement of the short search field.

A representative of another well-known ATS chimed in on Twitter and said they also don’t come across many clients asking for more than 100 characters in the candidate search field.

I can only assume that their customers either aren’t very proficient at talent mining, don’t understand the value of human capital data, or worse – both. Regardless, we’ve already seen the statistics from TalentDrive’s surveys - most companies don’t even use their ATS to identify candidates. If they’re not using their ATS to find talent, why would they care about the length of the search field, or even if it supports basic Boolean logic? 

So what we have here is ATS vendors who are not developing and offering robust candidate search capability because their customers aren’t asking for it. Okay, I understand “the customer is always right,” but it’s a sad state of affairs when companies who create talent/human capital solutions are not incorporating strong/advanced candidate search capability into their products because their customers don’t understand the value and full potential of human capital data.

Whatever happened to educating and informing your customers, providing training, and offering a product that exceeds your customers’ expectations and provides them with a true competitive advantage?

100 Characters is Not Enough

I conducted a very informal poll on Twitter and Facebook, asking sourcers and recruiters what they thought of a 100 character candidate search field limit, and 100% of those who responded all felt that it would handicap their ability to find the right candidates. By comparison, Monster’s resume database has a keyword search field that accepts up to 500 characters, LinkedIn’s search field is bottomless (I just crammed 6003 characters in the keword field and LinkedIn laughed and asked, “Is that all you got?”), and even Google accepts up to 32 search terms (at an average term length of a little as 5 letters, that’s still 160 characters, NOT including spaces or operators). 

The TalentDrive survey discovered that the number one sourcing challenge facing companies currently is filtering through the mass of resumes and increased number of applicants. In other words, the candidate “haystack” is getting HUGE, and it’s becoming more challenging to sort through it to find the needles.

Ultimately, short and basic candidate searches are imprecise and yield a high volume of imprecise results, riddled w/false positives. Without more room to create search strings that are appropriately precise, relevance will suffer, and with more resumes to search through – the issue is exacerbated.

The Future of Staffing and Recruiting

I firmly believe that the one aspect of recruiting that has the most potential to improve the speed of talent identification (the time to find metric) and increase the quality and quantity of candidates identified is electronic talent discovery and identification. With each passing day, there is more data available on more people somewhere – on a social network, in a resume database, or in your ATS – and it will only increase and accelerate. The ability to slice and dice human capital data will afford companies a HUGE competitive advantage.

I will never get tired of quoting this passage from Google’s blog: “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.”

The ability to extract value out of human capital data is already, and will continue to be, THE complimentary scarce in recruiting and staffing – but most people just don’t know it yet. ATS/Recruiting CRM vendors need to step up, recognize this, and offer their clients solutions that enable them to truly capitalize on their human capital data and offer them a competitive advantage.

If anything, I feel that employers and staffing firms should provide their recruiters access to MORE powerful and capable candidate search functionality than publicly and widely available resume databases or social networks. If they don’t, their ATS will continue to be the candidate source of last resort.

I believe that ATS/CRM apps should essentially serve as talent intelligence solutions, not unlike business intelligence solutions and decision support systems. The power lies primarily in the the human capital data/information stored within, and the ability to retrieve and analyze that information for talent identification and to make hiring decisions. 

One Thing has Changed

I don’t believe that the majority of the recruiting life cycle has changed over the past 20 years, or will change all that much in the future. Building relationships with current and potential candidates will always be at the heart of the recruiting process.

However, the one step in the recruiting process that has changed dramatically is sourcing, or talent discovery/identification. Information systems and applications have evolved rapidly over the past 20 years, and will likely continue to do so. With more information available about more people growing with each passing day, information retrieval becomes absolutely critical.

The ability to instantly retrieve information about the right people at the right time can accelerate a company’s ability to build relationships with more of the right people more quickly, leading to faster and higher quality hires with less effort.

If you find that concept interesting, I suggest you read these two posts about Lean/Just-in-Time recruiting.

A Call to All ATS/Recruiting CRM Vendors

If you work for or use an ATS that has strong candidate search functionality – Congratulations, you are among the fortunate few! Vendors – make sure your customers fully understand and leverage that power. Users – take full advantage of the candidate search capability, and be sure to not use your ATS as a source of last resort. Those candidates in your ATS are there for a reason – either they expressed interest in joining your company, or someone in your company expressed interest in them! 

If you work for an ATS vendor with poor/limited candidate search functionality - Why do you offer sub-par candidate search capability? Recognize that the future of human capital information systems lies primarily in talent discovery and identification. Either build in your own robust candidate search capability, or simply integrate any one of a number of excellent 3rd party text search and/or resume parse/search/match applications that are available. Educate your current and potential customers and explain to them the value and potential of human capital data. CRM functionality is great, but is of little value without the ability to find the right people to begin to manage relationships with in the first place!

If you currently use an ATS with poor/limited candidate search capability - Send this article to your vendor. Let me know how they respond, and if/how they can answer the question of why they offer such poor/limited candidate search functionality. They’re essentially putting you at a competitive disadvantage!