Have you ever used Microsoft Word to build and save Boolean search strings to be able to copy and paste entire searches into LinkedIn, Monster, Dice, or your ATS ?

I did for quite some time, until I ran into a problem.

Many years ago, I noticed that several sites, including Monster, Dice, and LinkedIn were not “obeying” my request for exact phrases in my searches.

If I searched for “project manager,” I would get results in which “project” and “manager” were highlighted as keyword hits even though they were mentioned separately and not together as a phrase.

One day I contacted Dice to ask what was going on with my inability to retrieve exact phrases using quotation marks and the support rep asked me what I was using to build my search strings. I told her I was using Microsoft Word to build and save my strings and that I would copy and paste them into Dice, to which she responded with, “There’s your problem.”

She summarily explained to me that Dice doesn’t recognize Microsoft Word’s default quotation mark format (aka “smart quotes”). Turns out that Monster, LinkedIn, and many others don’t recognize “smart quotes” for exact phrase searching either.

Here’s an example of Word’s “smart quotes:”

She then suggested that I either enter my queries directly into Dice or use Notepad to build and save my Boolean searches because they produce “straight quotes.”

Well, I didn’t want to build my searches in Dice’s search field because I could not see my entire search string as I was building it.

This is an issue with just about any job board resume database, ATS, Internet search engine, and social network – the search fields are all ridiculously short (e.g., LinkedIn’s is 37 characters).

Oh, and if you need evidence that LinkedIn does not actually recognize Word’s smart quotes for exact phrase searching, try this search on LinkedIn:

After my call with the Dice support rep, I started using Notepad to build and save my searches so I could simply copy and paste them directly into any job board resume database, Internet search engine, social network, and my ATS and they would recognize and obey the quotation marks as a request for an exact phrase.

However, it turns out there is a way to force Microsoft Word to not use “smart quotes” and instead use “straight quotes” – which most sites, social networks, databases, and search engines will obey as a request for an exact phrase.

How to Create Straight Quotation Marks in Microsoft Word

First, go to File –> Options.

Then go to Proofing and click on AutoCorrect Options.

Once in the AutoCorrect options, choose the “AutoFormat As You Type” tab, and then ensure that the “Replace as you type – ‘Straight quotes’ with ‘smart quotes’” is NOT checked/selected.

From then on, whenever you type quotation marks, they will be “straight quotes,” which will work for searching for exact phrases on any site or system that allows for exact phrase searching via quotation marks.

This also works for MS PowerPoint, for those of you who may copy and paste Boolean search examples from a presentation from time to time.

How to Fix an Entire Library of Boolean Searches in MS Word

If you happen to have a decent amount of Boolean search strings saved in Word and you didn’t notice the difference between smart quotes and straight quotes, you can use Word’s Find and Replace functionality to quickly convert all smart quotes into straight quotes.

Simply invoke Word’s Find and Replace and enter each smart quote in the “Find what” field and a straight quote in the “Replace with” field, and then click “Replace All.” You’ll have to do this with the leading smart quote and the ending smart quote, as they are different.

Saving Your Boolean Search Strings – Beyond Word

If you don’t want to use Word for building, saving, and copying/pasting Boolean search strings, you can use Notepad.

You can also use Excel if you like, as Excel doesn’t use smart quotes. Excel has the added benefit of allowing you to automatically build large Boolean OR statements as well.

Another option is Google Docs, which allows for the ability to share and collaborate with a library of Boolean searches online with others. However, by default, Google Docs also uses smart quotes.

To switch from smart quotes to straight quotes in Google Docs, navigate to Tools –> Preferences:

In the Preferences menu, be sure to deselect “Use smart quotes.”

Happy hunting!

It is all too easy for sourcers, recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers/teams to develop a skewed, distorted, and decidedly one-way view of the world. Perhaps spending 99% of the time on only one side of the recruiting process is to blame.

Regardless of the cause, it is absolutely critical to regularly take the time and think about, understand, and appreciate the recruiting life cycle from the candidate’s side – the job seeker, the passive candidate, the non-job seeker, and the elusive “A+ player.”

In this article I’m going to walk you through over 10 different scenarios in which I think recruiters and hiring teams can benefit greatly by taking the candidate’s perspective into careful consideration.

If you don’t take well to being challenged to think differently from time to time, or if you don’t like long blog posts, you may not want to read any further. This one clocks in at 3700+ words.

Consider yourself warned.

The “Fantastic” Opportunity

How often do recruiters contact potential candidates about a “great opportunity?”

How can a recruiter know if it is a great opportunity without first finding out what the candidate would define as a great opportunity?

Assuming you have a “great opportunity” for someone you’ve never spoken to is presumptuous at best.

At worst – insulting.

I strongly suggest you check out this blog post – “Why are technical recruiters so clueless?“, including the 140+ comments (some not for the faint of heart).

If you perform just a little Internet research, you can find forums in which professionals express their disdain (to put it kindly) for this kind of approach from recruiters, precisely because a recruiter can’t know if their opportunity is a “fantastic match” for the them without first finding out what their current situation is and what they believe is the next step in their career.

Sourcers and recruiters – do your research before approaching candidates and be sure to only approach potential candidates with opportunities that would actually be relevant to them, in their opinion, and not just yours.

Social Recruiting

With all of the buzz surrounding social recruiting, I find it important to take a moment to recognize where all of the buzz is coming from.

It’s coming mostly from people who are in some way, shape or form selling social media/recruiting services and advice, and also from people in HR/recruiting roles.

What about the people being “socially recruited? Shouldn’t we care about what they think?

What does “social recruiting” look like from their perspective? How does it differ for active, passive, and non-job seekers?

Do they think that Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook are more effective at getting them matched to the right opportunity at the right time than any other method?

Do they even want to be approached via sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google+?

If you want to find out the real answers and not just the ones you like – don’t send out social recruiting-related polls solely using social media. It will yield a non-representative sample with skewed results favoring social media (hello!) – use a real random sample and multiple delivery mediums to get a more accurate representation.

As sexy as many people and organizations apparently believe social recruiting to be, there are at least some indicators that it isn’t so sexy from the perspective of the people you’re trying to recruit.

For example, when Steve Boese has asked the Gen Y/Z students in his Human Resources Technology classes about learning about organizations and engaging with company recruiters on social networks like Facebook or Twitter, almost all of them recoil – they say no way, “Facebook is for me and my friends only.”

Shouldn’t we be spending more time worrying about what our target talent pools think of using social media for employment and less time talking (and tweeting) with other recruiters about how social recruiting is “the future of all recruiting?”

Referrals

Yes, yes – we all know that employee referrals are the “holy grail” of talent acquisition.

However, have you ever been solicited for referrals? How did it feel? Do you think everyone feels the same way when being approached by a recruiter or manager for referrals? Have you always provided referrals to people asking you for them? Why or why not?

Have you ever been offered a referral bonus to refer people?

Some organizations pay for referrals – even for referrals from non core employees. Incentivizing people to provide you with referrals isn’t intrinsically a bad idea – but does anyone care about how people feel about being paid for referring their friends and peers to your organization?

I’ve heard of some people being quite offended by referral bonuses – they did not like the idea of “selling” their friends or people in their professional network.

Ultimately, I think that most people provide referrals primarily to help the person they are referring – not just (or at all, in some cases) to help the recruiter, manager, or company.

What do you think?

More importantly, what do the people you solicit referrals from think?

Messaging/Talent Engagement

How many recruiters do you think have ever wondered about what it’s like to get a 5 calls, voicemails, emails, and/or messages via social media from recruiters?

How about 10 a day? 20?

It’s a good exercise to take a moment and think about what it must be like to constantly under assault by sourcers and recruiters.

Sure, most active job seekers will return your call, respond to your email, and even pick up when their phone rings from a number they don’t recognize.

What about passive job seekers? How about non-job seekers? Why would someone who isn’t looking for a job even call you back?

Can we really blame non-job seekers for not picking up the phone or not responding to a voice mails and emails?

Do you know what most recruiters sound like in their voice mail messages and what the emails most recruiters send look like?

Do you realize how awkward it is for someone to receive an unsolicited call from a recruiter while they’re at work? In a cube? Sitting next to their lead/manager?

Do you think the highlight of anyone’s day is talking to another recruiter?

Making phone calls and sending emails and messages to potential candidates are among the highest volume activities that recruiters and some sourcers perform on a daily basis. As such, it seems to become one of the things that the least amount of thought is put into.

It is important to realize that people who don’t know you don’t call you back just because you left them a message. As I am fond of saying, “If they don’t know you, they don’t owe you.”

All Recruiters are Not Created Equal

While you might be a great sourcer or recruiter – many are not.

In fact, some very talented and good natured people view recruiters on the same level as used car salesmen (again, a little Internet research will yield a lot of information you may not want to see).

This is because some recruiters do not do the recruiting profession justice.

It’s important to realize that on any given day, you might be the 10th recruiter to try and contact the person you’re calling. Realize that the last 10 recruiters they spoke to may not have been very good at what they do.

On any given call, you may have to overcome an opinion of recruiters that’s been deservedly earned through multiple bad experiences with horrible recruiters.

You may have to fight an uphill battle to prove that you actually are better than all of the other recruiters who over-promise and under-deliver, don’t take the time to appreciate and understand the candidate’s experience and motivators, only push jobs, and never follow up.

In fact, you should assume it – you might just alter your approach a bit and get a higher response/success rate.

A little empathy goes a long way.

A Players

What defines an “A” player anyway?

The reality is that one person’s or organization’s “A” player is another’s “B” player, and vice versa – it’s all a subjective matter of perspective, and who is to judge?

It should also be recognized that specific corporate and team environments can play a huge role in whether or not someone even has the opportunity to be an “A” player.

And let’s not too hastily forget that companies are quite literally built on and by “B” players. “Research by Harvard professor Tom DeLong has shown that while A players can make enormous contributions to performance, companies’ long-term performance, even survival, depends far more on the unsung commitment and contributions of their B players.”

On the retention side – focusing heavily on retaining “A” players can give solid “B” players the feeling that they are not valued, making them more likely to leave, and certainly more easily “recruitable.”

Resumes and LinkedIn Profiles

Sourcers, recruiters, HR pros, hiring managers are quite often guilty of committing the age-old error of judging a book by its cover.

When your job consists of reviewing tons of resumes, it’s easy to get picky and judgmental, and equally easy to forget that the resumes represent real people who simply cannot be effectively represented in a resume.

That Java software engineer you’re recruiting/hiring for? Remember that you’re hiring for a Java software engineer and not a professional resume writer.

Ditto for every other role/skill that could ever be hired for.

It’s important to keep in mind that the resumes of the people you’re reviewing may be the 2nd or 3rd resume they’ve ever had to write.

How good are you at anything when you’ve only had to do it 2-3 times?

Don’t see a particular skill or experience in a resume or social media profile?

Don’t assume the person lacks the skill or experience. While the idea that everyone should have a 1 page resume (2 pages max) is still perpetuated amongst job seekers and employers alike, have you ever stopped to think about what someone is actually doing when they have more than 1-2 pages’ worth of experience?

That’s right – consciously deciding to remove information in order to reduce the length of the resume – information you can no longer search for or use to determine whether or not the person might have the skills and experience you’re looking for.

The next time you or someone you work with is getting a tad overzealous with the resumes they’re reviewing, remember that there is a real human being attached to those resumes, and that it’s better to rule people IN rather than OUT.

You’re not judging a resume writing contest – you’re trying to identify top talent. You don’t know anything about a person until you talk to them.

Talent Pipelines

We all know it’s important for recruiters to build up talent pipelines, but how many recruiters have ever wondered what it must feel like to actually be a “pipeline candidate?”

Is it some kind of an honor or a privilege?

What do they get out of it?

Would you like to be continually contacted and screened by recruiters who never actually produced any well-matched opportunities for you, but liked to stay in touch with you regularly anyway, if for no other reason than to solicit you for referrals and leads?

If so, how many recruiters would you or could you entertain in this fashion?

Recruiting Relationships

What is the ultimate value that a recruiter can provide a potential candidate?

Wait – before you answer, it really doesn’t matter what you think.

Only the candidate can truly answer that question, because value can only be evaluated from the perspective of the customer of a service or product.

It’s one thing for people in the recruiting profession to talk about the value of relationships – but it’s ultimately the candidate who defines the value.

So why don’t you ask them?

A while back I wrote an article that challenged the value of the traditional “relationship” between recruiters and potential candidates- I urge you to read it and let me know your thoughts.

Do we really believe that all active, passive, and non-job seekers really need another recruiter to have a relationship with? How many “relationships” can any given job seeker have and maintain anyway?

The reality is that the vast majority of people ultimately want a job that is a great fit with what they are looking for – one that is the critical next step in their career, not another “relationship.”

Talent Communities

If one of your company’s talent acquisition strategies involves building and maintaining talent communities, the theoretical value that a talent community could provide a company is obvious.

However, have you ever wondered what real value a talent community provides the people in the community? Do they even perceive it to be a community?

Perhaps you saw it coming this time, but I have to remind you that it really doesn’t matter what you think. What really matters is what the people in your talent community and the ones you are trying to attract think.

Have you asked them? Probably not.

The idea of building talent communities is a deceptively logical approach to the need of proactively identifying talent. I say “deceptively logical” because what is good in theory may actually not be in practice.

The talent community concept has issues. For example – have you ever wondered about how many talent communities the people you are looking to identify, attract and perhaps hire at some point can possibly belong to?

It may feel as if the talent universe revolves around your company, but chances are you aren’t the only company of your kind. That means your competitors and other companies are vying for the same talent you are. Your talent community is one of many that the talent you so covet can chose from.

How many talent communities can a person realistically belong to? Actually participate in? Actually want to belong to and participate in?

Bear in mind that having an interest in your corporate brand does not necessarily equate to someone’s interest in becoming a part of your “talent community.”

Gareth Jones wrote a spot-on piece about the myth of the talent community – I urge you to read it if you haven’t already. Gareth astutely points out that “Job seeking is an event, not an interest,” and that fact alone will render many corporate branded talent communities into pit stops along the career highway, frequented mostly by transients and passers-by.

My guess is that isn’t how most companies would like to view their talent communities.

While “talent community” seems to be quite the sexy term in HR and recruiting circles these days, it is important to realize that “community” is defined as “an interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location.”

That means that if your “talent community” doesn’t have an interacting population, by definition, it isn’t a talent community.

If you have anything to do with a company’s development of a “talent community,” please make sure it provides some real value to the people who join and that it fosters interaction, and that it doesn’t function more like a talent collection point, farm or holding pen.

A good start in that direction would be to ask the talent you are trying to attract and serve what they would like to be able to get out of the talent community.

Either that, or just stop calling it a “community” if it really isn’t one.

Effective Job Posting and Response

You may think your job postings look good, but you’re not a neutral party. What really matters is what they look like to the average job seeker.

Do they accurately reflect the opportunity? Do they have enough real content (as opposed to boilerplate mumbo-jumbo) and are they interesting and compelling enough to get a response from the right people? From a passive job seeker that doesn’t have to or need to make a change? Can a potential candidate really get a sense of what they would be doing in the role?

Even if you have the most fantastic and compelling job postings, as I recently wrote, passive and non-job seekers typically don’t even “see” job postings or employer branding content even if it’s on the same web page they’re reviewing (think Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).

Take the time to look at your job posting/socialization strategy from the perspective of a discriminating active and/or passive job seeker who has many choices to choose from and who will only respond and take action on a select few. How can you ensure that you and your organization are among the select few? If you take the time to understand your target talent pool, you headed in the right direction. It’s not what you think is interesting and effective – it’s what they think is interesting and effective.

Last in this category, but certainly not least, is the response provided to applicants who take the often considerable time and effort to jump through the numerous flaming hoops of your applicant tracking system to respond to one of your postings.

How would you like to apply for a position that you feel you are well qualified for and never get a response? Would you be impressed with an auto-response sent via email confirming your resume/application has been received? How about the same snail-mail postcard that you know everyone else who applied also received?

The bar for what is “acceptable” has been set incredibly and embarrassingly low.

Interview Process and Feedback

Imagine you’re a job seeker for a moment.

You successfully landed an interview with a prestigious and well-respected company and arrive on time and fully prepared. How would you feel if no one who interviewed you was on time or prepared? Yes, this actually happens.

What if all the interviewers seemed interested in was how well you fit into their predefined job description, rather than looking for ways to fully leverage your talent, skills, and experience? How would you feel if the only questions you were asked were the “standard” interview questions?

How would you feel about not being selected for a role you interviewed for, and all you were given in response was that “you were not a fit for the role,” with no further explanation?

My guess is that you wouldn’t like it. So please make an effort to treat others as you would like to treated.

Active/Passive Candidates

Active candidates are okay, but passive candidates are better, right?

We all know that as soon as someone posts their resume on a job board or responds to a job posting, they can magically transform from a highly sought after “A” player passive candidate to just another “B” player active job seeker.

After all, “A” players don’t need to post their resume anywhere, right?

Ridiculous. The reality is that the subjective perception of any particular job-seeking status has nothing to do with the objective quality of candidate.

Nothing.

Active candidates are not plague-stricken, desperate “unemployables.”

Active, passive, not looking – who cares?!?! Let’s stop labeling/classifying people – anyone can be a candidate for the right opportunity.

Non-Competitive Offers

If you and your organization are looking to hire top talent, make sure that your offers and total compensation packages accurately and directly reflect that desire to the people to whom it matters most – the candidates.

When you’re dealing with people who don’t need to leave their current employer, you’re not going to get ”A” players and not even solid “B” players with significant talent, skills, and experience who can make a large positive impact on your team and in your company to leave without some incentive.

Don’t get too comfortable with your prestigious employer/company brand and assume anyone would be honored to work for your company for a lateral compensation move.

It is critical for hiring managers and HR to always keep in mind what it’s like to be on the other side of the hiring process, but it seems that not enough do. I’ve seen hiring managers that get so confident with their corporate/employment brand that they will extend offers under a very good candidate’s current pay.

I have a few questions for managers who extent these kinds of offers – how would you feel receiving such an offer, what kind of message does that send to you, and what would you do/how would you react? Would you seek to interview elsewhere?

Take the time to think (and care!) about how your offers will be received and perceived by the top talent you are trying to acquire. The best candidates invariably have choices in the market, and no one likes to feel undervalued and unappreciated.

And they talk.

Do you care if the word on the street about your company is that you’re a good employer to work for, but you don’t pay competitively? How about developing a reputation as a “cheap” employer?

Gen Y/Millennials

I daresay that the amount of time spent writing and talking about recruiting and managing Gen Y candidates comes close to the amount of time spent writing and talking about Social Recruiting.

I know and understand (and loathe) the human need for labels and categorization, but the fact of the matter is that you simply cannot generalize and stereotype everyone that’s been born in the 80′s or 90′s.

There are Gen Y people who actually think and behave more like Gen X, and vice versa. There are even Gen Y’ers who are more like Baby Boomers than the traditional “Trophy Kid.”

I know I don’t like being lumped in with anyone or any group simply because of when I was born – it’s absurd and insulting. I’m pretty sure most “Millennials” feel the same way.

Each person is a unique individual.

Take the care to recruit and manage people for who they are as individuals, not as a member of any particular generation.

Final Thoughts

Sitting on one side of the recruiting and hiring process can lead to the development of a distorted and disconnected view of the talent identification and acquisition process.

I strongly urge you to take the time and think about, understand, and appreciate the recruiting life cycle from the candidate’s side – the job seeker, the passive candidate, the non-job seeker, and the elusive “A+ player.”

I don’t think you can be a top recruiter or employer without the desire and ability to understand and appreciate the perspective of the people you are trying to recruit.

That’s the human element to the recruiting process.

Posting a job online is perhaps the first action most companies take to attract talent when they have an opening.

However, posting jobs in an attempt to attract qualified talent has many intrinsic flaws, and here are the top 4 in my opinion:

1. Posting jobs a passive strategy
2. Posting jobs offers no control over candidate qualifications
3. Job advertisements only attract candidates who are actively looking
4. Posting jobs isn’t social!

In comparison, sourcing from Internet, LinkedIn, online resume databases, ATS/CRM systems and similar resources to discover and identify qualified candidates is an active strategy which offers significant control over candidate qualifications, can be used to specifically target passive and even non-job seekers, and is 100 times more social!

Read on for a more in-depth analysis of posting jobs vs. sourcing candidates, as well as to have your eyes opened to a new way of looking at the value/ROI of posting jobs.

Job Posting is a Passive (lazy?) Strategy

Posting jobs online is a passive, sit-back-and-wait talent attraction strategy wherein there is no action taken other than that of publishing the job to various sites.

If identifying, attracting and hiring top talent is critical to any company’s ability to create and maintain a competitive advantage, does it make sense to rely heavily on a method of talent attraction that involves little-to-no effort?

Posting jobs online anywhere – whether it be on a corporate site, LinkedIn, Facebook, or a niche job board – is essentially the lowest level of effort anyone can take towards the goal of hiring your next game-changing employee.

Job Posting Offers No Control Over Candidate Qualifications

To me, posting a job is just like setting a trap. In setting a trap, the strategy is to set it in a place where you think your quarry might come across it and be ensnared.

Wherever you place the trap, you are essentially hoping that the specific type of animal you’re looking to capture will wander into it.  This is very much a passive, hope-based strategy, and hope is actually not a strategy.

For example, if you are trying to snare a rabbit, you could just as easily end up snaring a raccoon, a skunk, an opossum – or basically any small animal that wanders by, simply because you have no control over what, if anything, gets snared.

This is the same with job posting.

If you post a job for a windows system engineer with a minimum of 5 years of experience, an MCSE certification and web hosting industry experience - literally ANYONE can respond, whether they have the appropriate experience, certification, or industry experience or not.

As a passive, zero-percent control  strategy, you simply cannot control who responds – unqualified, under qualified, over qualified, out of area, etc.

This isn’t just my experience and opinion.

A recent Atlanta Business Chronicle article cited a study of 501 hiring managers by Robert Half and CareerBuilder which found that 44 percent of resumes presented to hiring managers are submitted by unqualified applicants. Additionally, the 2009 EDGE Report also found that 47 percent of hiring managers cited under-qualified applicants as their most common hiring challenge.

No one should be surprised by such a high percentage of un- and under qualified applicants, because you can’t control what wanders into the traps!

As critical as attracting and hiring the right people is for any company to perform well, does it make sense to rely heavily on a strategy that puts 100% of the selection control in the hands of the job seeker and 0% in yours?

Job Posting Attracts the Smallest Percentage of Job Seekers

Not only can you not control who responds to your job posting, but the only people who are going to get “snared” by the trap you’ve set are people who are actively looking for a job, and active job seekers represent the smallest percentage of the available talent pool.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, here is the breakdown of job seeker status:

• 32% passively looking
• 34% not looking
• 20% casually looking
• 14% actively looking

Now, unlike many people, I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with active job seekers – they are not all desperate, unemployable people (can you believe people in the recruiting industry actually believe that?).

However, the real issue at hand is that with job posting, you are essentially missing the other 86% of the workforce.

That means that when you post a job for an opening you need to fill in the next 2 weeks, you are realistically only tapping into 14% of the available workforce.  On top of that, many people who respond will not actually be qualified for the position.

That’s an issue!

One could argue that some of the people who are “casually looking” might stumble across your ad, but even if all of them did (which is highly unlikely), you are still missing 66% of the available workforce.

Your Ads and Postings are Invisible to Most People

Truly “passive” job seekers and certainly those who are not looking at all don’t even SEE ads for jobs right in front of their face, no matter how “targeted” and well placed your ads are.  Additionally, the reality is that most people tune out ads of any kind – on the Internet, on TV, billboards, etc.

When’s the last time you clicked on an ad or bought something/took action specifically because of a commercial or billboard you saw?

Even for those people who do “see” or “tune in” your ad/job posting – the reality is that most will not take action.

Changing a job is a big, stressful deal. Most casual, passive, and practically all inactive job seekers will not likely be inspired to take any action and explore leaving their current position just because they saw an online job ad, let alone one on their Facebook page.

SEO Is Not Enough

I agree 100% with Marvin Smith that SEO is not enough.

How could it be anyway?

For SEO to work, you have to have someone searching for jobs and/or information about your company, and as we’ve already seen, that is going to be the active job seekers and perhaps some of the casual job seekers – which is only a small sample of the available talent, the clear minority.

Posting Jobs isn’t Social

Social Recruiting continues to the quite the rage in the talent acquisition community.

However, most people HR and recruiting professionals agree that posting jobs online isn’t social, even if they are on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

That’s simply because in order for something to be social, it has to involve engagement and interaction between people.

Sourcing is an Active Strategy

Whereas posting jobs online is a passive method of attracting talent (I would argue that it’s not even a method of identifying talent), searching for candidates in Applicant Tracking Systems, recruiting CRM’s, job board resume databases, and LinkedIn is an active method of talent identification.

Instead of setting a trap and taking no effort other than to wait for the right person to stumble across it (aka, “post and pray”), when you create and execute searches to source for potential candidates, you are actively “hunting” for talent – targeting people with specific qualifications and experience, who live in specific areas – regardless of their job search status.

Instead of waiting (and hoping) for the right people to respond to a job posting, sourcers take decisive action to go out and identify and proactively engage and attract talent.

Sourcing Affords Significant Control Over Candidate Qualifications

When it comes to searching for candidates, I’m focusing specifically on resume and LinkedIn profile search, because searching for deep human capital data offers significant intrinsic advantages over shallow data. Resumes and some LinkedIn profiles offer more depth of identifying information, which enables sourcers and recruiters with a high degree of control over critical candidate variables.

Sourcers and recruiters who are adept at leveraging deep human capital data (resumes and detailed social network profiles) create queries that control critical candidate qualification variables, allowing them to quickly identify people with highly specific experience, who live in specific locations who are likely to be interested in the role and compensation offered by the position the recruiter is working on.

Remember that windows system engineer with a minimum of 5 years of experience, an MCSE certification and web hosting industry experience I used as an example earlier in this post?

While it is impossible to post a job that can guarantee you that only people who perfectly match the requirements will apply, it is entirely possible (and quite easy!) to write a query to find people who do have the right type and years of experience, the required certification, as well as the right industry experience.  That’s because 100% of the control over who you find and identify is in your hands, not someone else’s.

Sourcing Can Target Passive and Non Job Seekers

Unlike posting jobs online and SEO which require some action on the part of candidates (e.g., actively looking at ads or running keyword searches) and are quite literally invisible to those who are not taking any action to look for a new job (the majority of all people), when you actively search for candidates, you can target people who are not actively looking.

How can you search for resumes of passive and non-job seekers? Quite easily.

Are you ready for a paradigm shift?

If someone responds to a job posting you posted recently and they enter their information into your ATS/recruiting CRM – they are most likely actively seeking a new job, although there is a chance you could also be collecting a casual job seeker.

Statistically, many people who respond to job postings are not actually qualified for the position they applied for. If they are not a match for any current openings, it is likely they will find a position with another company with a position they are actually qualified for.

But you still have their resume in your ATS.

Alternatively, their resume may still be posted in an online resume database somewhere (many people either don’t or forget to take them down after they take a new job). In fact, my own research has shown that approximately 75% of all resumes on the job boards are over 30 days old. So if you think that all of the resumes stored in online resume databases are of active job seekers, you are quite wrong.

Statistically, the majority of resumes in online resume databases are of people who are likely to be not looking or passively looking.

In about 3 months to 2 years’ time, those active job seekers turn into people who are likely to either to be not looking at all for a new position, or who may be satisfied with the new position they took, but open to better opportunities (passively looking).

Unlike job posting, when you are searching for resumes, you can actually specifically target people who are not likely to be actively looking.

Sourcing is Social

Yes, you read that right – I said sourcing is social.

Unless your idea of sourcing involves name generation only with no candidate engagement, sourcing is most definitely social.

A sourcer or a recruiter sourcing their own candidates can and should engage prospective candidates socially via InMails, Facebook messages, tweets and DMs, LinkedIn and/or Facebook group discussions, or just plain old email dialogues for that matter.

However, sourcing can go even more social – actually picking up the phone (gasp!) and calling a potential candidate and having a live conversation with them is a 100 times more social than any online/social media exchange. Imagine that – real, live conversations in today’s social media-crazed world.

An Alternative View of Job Posting

While most people see the primary value of job posting as a method of trying to attract the right person at the right time – I see it quite differently.

If I post a job, I am not expecting results – experience and statistics show that most people who respond are not qualified for the position. Certainly, there have been times when the right person has responded to a job posting at the right time, but as an intrinsically passive strategy with no ”built-in” ability to control the experience and qualification of respondents, to rely on job posting would be folly. After posting a position, I will not wait and hope that the right people find my position. I am going to take control of the process and go out and actually FIND the right people.

So if the main value of posting jobs isn’t finding the right person at the right time, what could it be?

Another way to look at the value of job posting is that it can essentially become a method of cultivating your ATS/CRM into a wine cellar of sorts. All of those active job seekers who respond to your ads but who are not qualified (or simply not selected) for the specific position they applied to today may in fact be well qualified for other positions you have in the future.

Active candidates who enter your ATS/CRM today (or post their resume online) become tomorrow’s casual, passive, and non-job seekers.

ATS Search Capability is Critical

In order to capitalize on your database of casual, passive, and non-job seekers – you need to have an appropriately capable candidate search interface coupled with the ability to run precise queries, enabling you to quickly target and access candidates of ANY job search status.

An ATS with poor/limited candidate search capability is like having a well-stocked wine cellar that you can’t access because you don’t have the key to the door.  Or even if you had the key – you had no way of finding the exact bottle you were looking for.

Final Thoughts

Will there ever be a time when jobs aren’t posted online?

I’m not sure if we will ever get to that point, because it could be argued that posting jobs online is a logical thing to do and is certainly a part of a balanced “diet” of recruiting methods, and it can produce results.

However, if you or your organization relies heavily on posting jobs to find the right candidates at the right time, let alone the best candidates available, I believe you are at a serious competitive disadvantage.

Job posting is essentially like trapping: set the snare and do nothing but wait (and hope!) for the right person to stumble by – an inherently passive, hope-based strategy that affords you absolutely no control over what wanders in. To make matters worse, the only people who will search for or even “see” ads for jobs are those who are actively or casually looking, which is the smallest slice of the talent pie.

That’s right – you simply can’t snag those highly sought after “passive” candidates via posting jobs online.

On the other hand, as a truly active strategy, sourcing candidates affords everything that job posting fails to: control over candidate qualifications and the ability to specifically target and engage passive and even non-job seekers socially. Instead of waiting for the right people to come to you, you simply go out and find them, without a care for whether they woke up that morning thinking about finding a new job or if it was the furthest thing from their mind.

I am aware of many companies that spend quite a bit of time, effort and money on their job posting efforts, including “interactive recruiting solutions.” It makes me wonder if as much time, energy, and money is being spent on enabling their proactive sourcing capability, which would afford them with significantly more control over candidate qualifications and quality, as well as more truly social engagement with the highly coveted “passive” talent pool.

When assessing job posting solutions and efforts, I believe the less obvious but true value of job posting lies primarily in the collection of active candidates and the ability to cultivate them over time through regular engagement (electronic and over the phone) into more experienced/qualified candidates who will inevitably become passive/inactive job seekers.

When I see a strong interest in a “Top 10″ or “Top 25″ list of Boolean search strings, it becomes clear to me that a disconnect can exist between wanting something that solves a problem (a search string to find candidates) and the ability to create something that solves a problem.

While there is undoubtedly value in a list of pre-constructed search strings, specifically Internet queries designed to target event/conference attendee lists, employee directories, resumes, press releases, patents, white papers, etc., the real “magic” of information retrieval does not lie in Boolean operators and query modifiers.

The real “magic” and work of sourcing talent is via human capital data is the iterative, intelligent, and cognitively challenging process of selecting a combination of words and phrases, and in some cases strategically excluding others, analyzing the results returned, making changes to the query based on observed relevance, and repeating the process until an acceptable quantity of highly qualified and well-matched candidates are identified.

The Answer vs. How to Solve the Riddle

When people ask me for a specific search string, they may not realize it, but in effect, they are asking for the answer to a problem.

In some respects, a specific search string can be compared to the answer to a specific math problem or riddle. Unfortunately, once you change the facts, figures and variables of the problem or riddle, the answer will also change.

Similarly – if you change anything about your hiring need, the most effective queries to find qualified candidates will also change, and rarely are two hiring needs are perfectly identical in every way.

When I started my career in recruiting, perhaps I was fortunate to not have anyone to give me any “answers” (search strings), because I had to figure out how to find top talent in our 80,000 resume Lotus Notes database on my own. Throughout my career, sourcing candidates has never been about the searches themselves, but rather the process of finding the best candidates.

Going back to my math analogy, once you’ve mastered calculus, you can solve any calculus problem. Similarly, once you master the process of sourcing, you can solve any hiring problem.  And I do mean any.

If you are interested in leveraging information systems for talent discovery and identification, you should be more concerned with learning the “why” and “how” of good talent sourcing practices and processes, and less so in specific search strings. Rather than (or at least in addition to) asking for a search string, ask the person providing the search string how and why they specifically arrived upon the search they’re providing you.

Take a fish from someone and you are fed for a day. Learn how to fish and you are fed for a lifetime.

Sourcing is an Investigative Process

When I start the process of finding people who are likely to be well-matched to a client need, the first thing I do is research.

I don’t have the luxury of always looking for the same skillset or identical hiring profiles, so even when I am sourcing candidates for a skillset that I am familiar with, there is often something that makes each hiring need at least slightly different than anything I’ve ever searched for.

As such, I always spend some time investigating the skills, terminology, and companies that will likely be useful to me in finding the right people.

It’s quite common for me to get requests from clients for things I am completely unfamiliar with – here are a few examples from over the years: DRSN, 3PL, CTR, Cockburn Use Case Analysis, 10-K’s, LTL, SOP 97-2, SAB 101, MRS/PS.

I’ve learned to not be intimidated by any request, because if the people exist, I can find them. Nothing a little research won’t fix to get me spun up quickly.

On the other side of the investigative coin, human capital data/information isn’t uniform, consistent or complete.  Two companies with the same role can and often do give the role different titles.

Skills, responsibilities, technologies, and even some company names can be written and expressed in a wide variety of ways – ensuring that it’s impossible for a single search string to retrieve every potentially qualified candidate.

Furthermore, there are people who either simply forget to include or consciously exclude explicit mention of some skills, responsibilities and technologies. If you need a QA test engineer with experience testing applications developed in PHP, you can’t find people who do have that specific experience, but who didn’t think it was critical to mention that the applications they tested were developed in PHP. It happens all the time – the Dark Matter of human capital data is insidious and significant – most people don’t know what they’re missing…literally!

Investigative research can help uncover all of the various ways that skills, responsibilities, technologies, and company names can be written and expressed, discover what companies have certain types of employees, roles, and technologies, as well as help identify what skills, experience, responsibilities and technologies people may easily forget to include in their resume or social media profile.

Sourcing is an Iterative and Incremental Process

“Iteration” means the act of repeating a process, usually with the aim of approaching a desired goal or target or result. Each repetition of the process is also called an “iteration,” and the results of one iteration are used as the starting point for the next iteration.

“Incremental” is defined as relating to, being, or occurring in especially small increments.

For those of you who source and recruit in the software development space, you are likely familiar with Iterative and Incremental development as the heart of a cyclic software development process that starts with an initial planning effort and ends with deployment with the cyclic interactions in between.

Iterative and incremental development are essential parts of the Rational Unified Process, Extreme Programming and generally the various agile software development frameworks.

You can easily adapt this process to electronic talent discovery and identification.

Once a hiring need is identified, the required skills, experience and qualifications are identified and an initial query is generated and executed.

Once the query has been run, the results are analyzed for relevance and for further information that may be useful to incorporate into successive searches.

Based on the observed results, the initial query is modified appropriately (more terms are added, some may be removed or excluded, term weighting and proximity may be applied if the search engine supports them, etc.), the search is executed, and the cycle repeats until the results are deemed acceptable in terms of relevance (high percentage of results of people who are highly probable to be qualified for and interested in the opportunity).

A sound candidate sourcing process is iterative and incremental – it involves repeating the cycle of (1) search, (2) analyze the relevance and quantity of search results, (3) modify the query slightly (incrementally) based on results analysis (4) search until a search is settled upon that returns a decent quantity of relevant results – people who are highly likely to be qualified and interested in the opportunity being sourced for.

For some hiring profiles, the initial process can take less than 5 minutes. For others, it may take up to 30 minutes or more.

For those who may think 30+ minutes of research and iterative and incremental query development is excessive, contemplate the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Plan-Do-Check-Act

The iterative and incremental sourcing process follows the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle of business process improvement.

PDCA (plan–do–check–act) is an iterative four-step problem-solving process typically used in business process improvement. It is also known as the Deming circle/cycle/wheel, Shewhart cycle, control circle/cycle, or plan–do–study–act (PDSA). PDCA is a successive cycle which starts off small to test potential effects on processes, but then gradually leads to larger and more targeted change.

Here is an example of how the PDCA cycle can be applied to sourcing:

1. PLAN: Based upon hiring requirements gathered, establish an initial query that is likely to identify people with the expected skills, responsibilities, experience and qualifications necessary. By making the expected output the focus, it differs from other techniques in that the completeness and accuracy of the job/hiring specifications are also part of the improvement.
2. DO: Execute the query.
3. CHECK: Analyze the relevance and quantity of the results from the query and compare the results against the hiring profile and requirements to ascertain any differences/variance.
4. ACT: Analyze the differences between observed results and the hiring profile to determine their cause. Variances can be part of either one or more of the P-D-C-A steps. Determine where to apply changes that will include improvement. When a pass through these four steps does not result in the need to improve the search string/query, process and review the search results completely while keeping an eye out for information or patterns in the results that could help you further refine your query to identify more potentially qualified candidates.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to human capital information retrieval, the sourcing process is more important than the search strings themselves.

There is no “final answer” or single search string for any given hiring profile - some of you may be surprised to learn that I am never “done” with any particular search. I can and often do revisit searches I have constructed in the past and continually improve upon them, as I’ve found that you can never stop learning from and observing patterns in search results that you can incrementally incorporate into your successive queries to make them more effective.

Perhaps sourcing, whether as a separate role or as a function of the recruiting role, may get more respect, attention, and investment when proven and well documented cyclical software development and business process improvement methodologies are adapted and applied to the talent sourcing process.

Now that one year has passed since I wrote the original post, I have decided to significantly update and repost it – you can find it here.

Recently, I wrote about the intrinsic issues associated with searching LinkedIn for potential candidates with specific industry experience, and how using the “Industry” field can actually prevent you from finding the people you’re looking for. 

A number of readers responded by suggesting a logical solution to the issue – searching by specific company name(s) instead of using LinkedIn’s ”Industry” field.

It is a logical solution, but a potentially flawed one nonetheless.

I’m going to show you some reasons why, and if you read this post within the next 5 minutes, I’ll even throw in a LinkedIn  company search anomaly as an added bonus.

User Generated Content has Issues

As William Uranga pointed out in his comment, “Behaviorally-speaking, you need to use the fields in your search that most profiles have completed. “Industry” is not one of them. ‘ Company name’, ‘title”, and using geographic modifiers still yield the best results when searching your network. Even ‘keyword’ is not reliable.” 

I agree that when sourcing candidates on LinkedIn you need to use the fields that most profiles have completed – but from my research, it does appear that when you create a LinkedIn profile, you actually do have to choose an industry. I tried not selecting an industry and leaving it at “Choose industry” and LinkedIn would not allow me to save my profile without selecting one from the list – I got an angry red “Please enter a value” for my efforts.

So it appears that every LinkedIn profile will actually have an industry selected – but the issue remains that it may not be the industry you’d assume people would use.

I agree with William that searching by keyword is not reliable – there are many LinkedIn profiles that do not have any text entered into the description field under each work experience. I’m curious to know the exact percentage of these “skeletal” LinkedIn profiles that only have company names and titles entered, but something tells me LinkedIn wouldn’t be motivated to release that number. If I had to hazard a guess based on my experience searching LinkedIn, I’d say at least 40%. 

Searching LinkedIn using the ”Company” and “Title” fields as William suggests generally does yield good results. However, with these fields we are dealing with user generated content. Instead of choosing from a fixed list (which has its own set of issues), people can choose to enter whatever they want into these fields – and it may not be what you’d assume.

Allow me to demonstrate…

Searching by Company

For some companies, there may only one way in which a company’s name can be expressed/written. However, there are many companies where people can and do write the company names in a wide variety of ways - not only on LinkedIn, but on their resumes as well.  

Financial Services Example

Let’s say you were looking for people with experience in the Financial Services industry, and after reading my recent article on the industry search issue, you wisely realized that people who work in the Financial Services industry might not actually select that industry when they create or modify their LinkedIn profile. So instead, you start thinking of target companies to search for using the “Company” field.

So you start selecting companies, and let’s say one of the companies you’d like to target is JPMorgan Chase. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’d know that the first thing you’d need to do is obey the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing, which states that for every term you are thinking of including in your search, consider how many ways it can be expressed.

Okay, so to find people who have experience working for JPMorgan Chase, you need to think of all of the other ways that people who’ve worked for the company can express that fact. An easy one is JPMC. Others would include JPMorganChase, “JPMorgan Chase,” and “JP Morgan.”

Here’s positive proof:

There might even be more (such as WAMU, etc.) – but my point here is that if you go beyond searching by industry (which you actually have to), you must be careful to think of all of the various ways people who have worked in your target industry and target companies could possibly express that experience.

If you don’t – you create Hidden Talent Pools of candidates that exist in LinkedIn (or wherever you search), and you cannot find them.

Pharmaceutical Example

If you were looking for people with big pharma experience, you might want to target GlaxoSmithKline. To do so, you’d quickly and correctly assess the fact that not everyone who has worked for GlaxoSmithKline will actually write it that way on their LinkedIn profile (or resume).

Similar to the JPMC example above, we can safely assume some people might abbreviate the company name down to GSK. Of course, some people might also write “Glaxo SmithKline,” “Glaxo Smith Kline,” or “GlaxoSmith Kline.” And they do:

If you didn’t think of those alternate ways of expressing experience working for GlaxoSmithKline, you quite simply would not and could not find those candidates. You would not even be aware that they exist.

Yeah, But this Doesn’t Apply to MY Industry…

If I haven’t got your mind racing on how you can apply this process to your own sourcing efforts, perhaps thinking that I picked a couple of “ringers” with JPMC and GSK – think again. This phenomenon isn’t limited to any particular industry, nor is it limited to the more obvious companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC, “Pricewaterhouse Coopers,” etc.).

In fact, inherently one-word company names aren’t immune either.

How about Microsoft?

How could someone who’s worked for Microsoft mention the company other than “Microsoft?”

I know of at least one way:

Yeah – there’s a couple hundred of those in the U.S. alone on LinkedIn.

Are there other ways people might express working for Microsoft? Maybe

Trust me – your target industry and at least some of your target companies are not immune to this principle. In fact, it’s highly likely that you’ve been missing candidates in your sourcing efforts for a long time now because of the intrinsic issues associated with user generated content.

Going Confidential

Let’s not forget all of the people who don’t actually list the names of the companies they’ve worked for.

If you’re searching by company name, you simply cannot find people who actually work for your target company but do not list the company, who instead use “confidential” as their employer.

There’s over 5,000 U.S. LinkedIn profiles like this.

Have you ever specifically searched for people who list “confidential” as their current employer? If so, I’d say you’re a rare breed of sourcer – perhaps 1 in 100 sourcers have ever even thought to do this. It’s not rocket science by any stretch, but most people simply don’t think enough before they search for candidates. This technique is pretty obvious once I point it out though, right?

Company Research on LinkedIn

Remember that LinkedIn anomaly I alluded to in the intro of this article? 

Well, let’s say you are doing some research on LinkedIn to find the names of other companies in your target industry to include in your search, and your target industry is “Defense and Space.”

If you select “Defense and Space” from the industry list…

… you’d get 50 results.

But do you think there are only 50 companies in the defense and space industry represented on LinkedIn?

Me neither.

I noticed that when I select an industry under LinkedIn’s company search functionality, LinkedIn enters keywords for me:

I didn’t type in “Defense And Space” – LinkedIn did it for me. LinkedIn will do it for any industry you choose – try it for yourself.

Being the curious guy that I am, I wanted to see what happened if I deleted the words automatically entered by LinkedIn and searched again:

I got almost 1700 companies. 

That strikes me as more accurate than 50.

Interesting, yes?

No?

Well, it should be - because anyone who uses LinkedIn’s quite robust company search/research functionality (you do, don’t you?) may be getting seriously short-changed in their search results if they don’t delete the auto-populated keywords and re-run their searches when attempting to get comprehensive lists of companies in target industries.

I have reason to believe that at least a couple of LinkedIn employees read my blog. Let’s see how quickly they fix this anomaly. 

Final Thoughts

Hidden Talent Pools (Google the term) are very real. If you’re not careful to stop to think before you search, you can all to easily and unknowingly create pools of candidates that you cannot and do not find. But they’re there.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – any social network profile consists mainly of free form user generated content (just like resumes), and when people have the ability to enter whatever they think is appropriate to describe their employers and work experience, you’re going to get a wider variety than you might assume. Before you conduct ANY search – take a moment to think about all of the various ways your quarry could possible express what it is that you’re looking for.

Oh – and one last thing: What I’ve detailed in this post also applies to X-Ray searching LinkedIn for people who have worked at specific companies within a target industry as well. 

Special Thanks

Eric Jaquith- thank you for telling my that my site looked like crap on iPhones.

At his suggestion, I installed the WPtouch plugin and now the site is much easier to read and navigate on iPhones, BlackBerries and other smart phones. From this point on, if you ever read my site using your mobile device – you owe your enhanced mobile BBB experience to Eric!