Here is the expanded slide deck from my SourceCon 2010 Keynote: Resume Sourcing and Matching – Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Cognition. It contains all of the talking points as text so you are not left guessing as to what I spoke to during the live presentation.

You’ll learn about the intrinsic and often overlooked challenges associated with sourcing resumes (it’s deceptively complex), what artificially intelligent semantic search and match applications claim to do and how they actually work, the limits of artificial intelligence, what people can do that semantic search applications cannot, the 5 levels of semantic search,  the 5 levels of talent mining, and what I think is the ideal candidate sourcing solution.

The other day I came across an insightful post on Fistful of Talent by Josh Letourneau in which he addresses the arms race that rages on in the talent acquisition universe – the never-ending attempt of people and companies to achieve some sort of technological advantage over the competition.

Josh would rather have a recruiter “with the “will to fight,” in other words – someone with a never-say-die-because-I-will-make-it-happen Recruiter/Sourcer. If I have that, then I can introduce technology and truly accelerate their success. But if it’s a lazy Recruiter who would rather let their Careers Site do the work, then all the technology in the world would prove wasteful in their hands.”

I could not agree more!

A driven, no-excuses sourcer/recruiter will always out-perform a lazy sourcer/recruiter – no matter how bleeding-edge their technology.

High Tech or Low Tech – Information is the Key

Although Dan Hilbert, a recruiting leader who’s unequivocally proven what technology can do for a Fortune 25 company’s recruiting efforts (read this excellent 5 part series by Dr. John Sullivan: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5) has said that “When the war for talent is waged over the Internet, major corporations will be won and lost over staffing technology,” it certainly doesn’t take sophisticated sourcing applications, the best contact management system, a better branded careers site, or a “bleeding edge” social media strategy to be hugely successful in the war for talent (or the latest term du jour).

However, regardless of high-tech or low-tech (or no-tech!) sourcing and recruiting approach, I will say that today’s level of access to large volumes of information/data at the candidate and corporate level is a game changer.

The ability to filter through the noise and abstract, evaluate and understand relevant information (intel, to stay in Josh’s analogy) and extract value out of it in a timely manner confers an advantage over those who are unable to. The quality, quantity, and timeliness of intel (good, bad, late, none, etc.) can drastically affect the outcome of any staffing and recruiting effort, provided that the person, team, or organization has the capability of effectively leveraging it. 

There’s an unprecedented amount of candidate data out there, both public and private – and interestingly,  it doesn’t take advanced technology (or a great careers site or a social media strategy) to take full advantage of it.  Talent mining via basic Boolean logic and a sound search strategy can yield great results!

Passive vs. Active Sourcers/Recruiters 

Unfortunately, there are a good number of sourcers and recruiters who either knowingly or unknowingly take a primarily passive role in their company’s talent identification efforts. These people are content to let their employer’s brand ( job postings, etc.), employee referral program, social media presence, and/or cutting-edge sourcing applications do the vast majority of the work in identifying/attracting talent.

In many cases, these sourcers and recruiters simply wait until the right person stumbles into their grasp through one of the aforementioned means.  Whenever that fails, they either wait longer, assume that the candidates simply don’t exist, or perhaps turn over the position to a third party recruiter who will produce the right candidates for a fee, although most of the time the third party recruiter won’t actually do anything the corporate recruiter could not do themselves. In fact, most third party recruiters get excellent results leveraging sources of candidate information that most corporate recruiters have access to. 

How wrong is that?   

The best active sourcers and recruiters can and will find a way to get excellent results, regardless of their employer’s brand draw, referral program, social media strategy, job board access, or artificial intelligence/semantic matching engines.

The best sourcers and recruiters are results-oriented and never complain about or make excuses for how challenging a particular position is. Failure is simply not an option for these sourcers and recruiters, and they actually thrill in rising to meet a challenge that others avoid, and to succeed where others fail. These people are (I believe) ultimately competitive control freaks who would never be content to wait for the right candidate to come to them, nor would they willingly give up any position to a third party recruiter.

Active sourcers and recruiters are true hunters – they will go out and find the right candidates, whether the candidates woke up that morning looking for a job (only about 14% of all people) or woke up that morning thinking they have the best job on the planet.

These sourcers and recruiters hunt in the deep end of the candidate pool – specifically targeting and taking advantage of the fact that 66% of all people are either not looking or are passive candidates – this vast majority does not search for job openings on career sites, job boards, or vertical search engines, nor do they “see” targeted ads positioned in the places they frequent online. 

To active sourcers and recruiters, everyone is a candidate – they just don’t know it yet.

Some Questions For You

Are you a problem identifier or a solution identifier?

Do you complain about difficult positions and make excuses as to why you can’t find the right person, or do you put your head down, grit your teeth, and revel in the challenge of solving the difficult hiring challenge? 

Do you sit in the back seat and wait for your employer’s brand, referral program or social media presence bring candidates to you, or do you sit in the driver’s seat and take an active role in finding the best candidates, whether they are looking or not?

A military force using outdated gear and weapons but with abundant and highly accurate intel and the ability to to leverage it has a significant advantage over an opposing force with the latest weapons and gear with low quality or no intel at all.

Similarly, a team of recruiters with the “will to fight” but lacking a big-name employer brand, industry-leading referral program, award-winning social media strategy, and high-tech ATS/CRM has an advantage over lazy recruiters who may do little more than hide behind a strong employer brand, industry-recognized social media efforts, and matching applications, and those who don’t or simply can’t take advantage of the vast amount of human capital data available to them.

Human capital data is the sword of the 21st century sourcer/recruiter.

Is your sword displayed on the wall, or do you spend countless hours practicing with and using it daily in combat in the war for talent?

When I run recruiter training classes, I often ask for the trainees to bring me example positions they are having trouble working on to use for live sourcing training.

During one such class (a little over 2 years ago), I had a recruiter bring me an opening for a challenging position at Google that had been open for a while. He had been working this position for a couple of weeks and had failed to produce a single candidate that Google was interested in interviewing. 

Many Had Already Tried and Failed…

As I asked him for a little background on the position, I found out it had been open for 4 months. 

That’s almost always a bad sign to a recruiter, as it had no doubt been thoroughly beaten up by countless other recruiters/vendors to Google. However, he assured me this was not a “black hole” requirement and that Google would indeed interview and hire candidates.

Now, the position this recruiter was working on was a network performance test engineer, which poses some unique searching challenges because most of the Boolean search strings that recruiters will employ will result in many false positives – resumes of candidates that contain all of the search terms, but who are not primarily responsible for the performance testing of networks. A simple game of “buzzword bingo” would not work for this position.

This was also independently verified by Google, as they commented that most of the candidates they were receiving were not appropriately qualified – most were QA/test engineers who had performance tested software and network applications, but not networks and network hardware specifically.

Give Me Four Hours to Chop Down a Tree…

When I first accepted the challenge of helping this recruiter, my initial searches did pull many false positives. However, after about 20 minutes of manipulating search strings and observing the corresponding changes in the results, I came up with a handful of Boolean queries that resulted in fewer false positives and a larger percentage of resumes of people who were primarily responsible for the performance testing of networks.

Once I gave these searches to the recruiter and he put them to use, in 2 weeks he called to let me know Google had already hired one of his candidates he had found using the Boolean search strings, and he had an interview request for another.

Where Did He Find the Candidates No One Else Could Find?

So where do you think he found these candidates that no one else had been able to find and submit to Google for the network performance testing positions?

Cold calling? Referral recruiting? Blogs? User groups? LinkedIn? Twitter? Facebook?

Nope – he found them on (drumroll please)…………..Monster.

Yes – this recruiter was able to use a resume database that presumably quite a few (if not all) other vendors to Google (and likely Google’s contract recruiters as well) had access to and most likely used to try and find candidates for these positions for several months.

Interestingly enough, the candidates this recruiter was able to find were not new candidates who just posted their resume – their resumes were over 3 months old, which tells me that they had been in Monster’s resume database ever since Google released their network performance testing positions.

I specifically point this out because I love to continuously disprove the commonly held belief that if many recruiters have access to the same resume database that they will be able to find the same candidates, the best candidates, and all of the appropriately qualified candidates.

Holding onto that belief is as foolish as thinking that if 10 people go fishing in the same lake, that they will all catch the same fish, as well as the biggest fish in the lake.

Job Board Resume Databases Do Have High Quality Talent

This is also a good example of how, contrary to popular belief, you actually CAN find extremely good candidates (Google is notoriously elitist, which I respect) on the job boards. I continue to see well-respected recruiting and staffing thought leaders comment on how the job boards have mostly “mediocre” and declining levels of talent.

This may be subjectively true, but certainly not objectively true. Besides, when’s the last time they ran a search and hired someone from a job board? Nothing bothers me more than people talking about something they have little-to-no direct experience with. 

All Boolean Search Strings “Work”

I am 100% positive MANY recuriters searched Monster in an attempt to find candidates for the network performance testing positions at Google. But there’s a funny thing about Talent Mining – you’re only aware of the candidates you actually find, and conversely, you are not aware of the candidates you didn’t find.

However, that does not mean the candidates you want and need aren’t in the database you’re searching. It just means you weren’t capable of finding them. When most recruiters search any particular database, including their own ATS or LinkedIn, and don’t find the people they’re looking for, they assume the candidates don’t exist.

But they’re there. Trust me.

The Power of Talent Mining with Boolean Search Strings

Here’s the search string that produced one of the candidates who was hired at Google:

Test* and (qa or quality) and (perl or tcl*) and (cisco or rout*) and (lab* or case* or plan* or script*) and (ixia or smartbit* or “smart bit”) and (L2* or LACP or STP or RSTP or VRRP or UDLD) and protocol* and (bgp* or eigrp or rip or ospf or mpls)

Interestingly, most of the search terms in the string above were not in the job description or required skills.

So it took me about 20 minutes of experimenting and refining search strings to come up with that search, from which a recruiter was able to make a hire from less than 10 phone calls on a position that had been worked for 4 months by countless other recruiters who had access to the exact same database.

How’s that for ROI?

That’s the power of effective e-talent discovery.

Now that we are on our way into exploring the new year, I’ve seen some articles on what’s coming next for the recruiting industry this year, and even as far out as 10 years from now.

When I read one such article written by Kevin Wheeler, I was struck by his comment that although sourcing remains a topic he is interested in, he feels that “the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.” 

I was prepared to write an article just in response to that thought, but as I sat down to review his post again on Sunday in preparation for my post, I noticed that Kelly Dingee had commented in defense of electronic talent identification.

In response, Kevin wrote “I think that intensive Internet searching, for most internal recruiters, is a sign of their failure to develop a community of potential candidates. If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter. For volume and routine hiring there should be no need to use anything beyond a network of potential candidates whether proprietary or not. Building that community is what a recruiter’s job is all about – not running searches or becoming a computer nerd.”

Wow. Where do I begin?

Boolean Search is NOT Dead – Nor Will it Ever Die

We are well into the Information Age of recruiting - ”characterized by…the ability to have instant access to… (candidate) information that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. The idea is linked to the concept of a Digital Age or Digital Revolution, and carries the ramifications of a shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based around the manipulation of information.”

When you need to find information, unless you’re using a single word or phrase (I literally shudder at the thought), there is no escaping Boolean logic. You either want something (AND), you want at least one thing in a list (OR), or you don’t want it (NOT).

The reason why Boolean logic will never die is that it doesn’t get any simpler when it comes to information retrieval. Yes, I said “simple.” We’re not talking SQL here -  we’re talking about 3 very basic operators. There is a reason why Boolean logic is the foundation of ALL modern digital electronics – it’s the simplest fundamental logic!

Of course, if you’re using Google, Bing, or LinkedIn, you don’t have to type AND, as every space is an implied AND, so perhaps many people are unaware that they are conducting simple Boolean searches. However, if you use more than one search word/term you’re still using Boolean logic – it is inescapable.

The Boolean operators of a search are the easy part – the more challenging aspect of electronic talent discovery is the entire process of understanding the hiring need, thoughtfully translating it into an effective search strategy, and adpatively modifying consectuve searches to return results that have a high probability of being excellent potential hires. 

Yes, searching information systems to find candidates requires thinking. Sorry.

Recruiters Do Need to Know How to Perform Electronic Talent Discovery

While every step of the recruiting life cycle is equally important, the fact of the matter is that you can’t build a relationship with (or hire for that matter) a potential candidate that you haven’t identified in the first place. Talent acquisition is dependent upon talent identification.

Recruiters should know how to search information systems to find and identify talent. It’s not about being a “computer nerd” – it’s about the fact that with each passing day, there is more information available about more people electronically, whether it be in a corporate ATS/CRM, a social network, a blog, a press release, a resume, etc. This is a trend that will continue to accelerate – we will never experience a decrease in access to human capital data. 

If a recruiter cannot fully capitalize on all of the human capital data that is readily available and accessible today, they are doing themselves and their organization a considerable disservice, and their organization is at a competitive disadvantage.

When Kevin states that for a corporate recruiter, “If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter” – my question is why? If I was a corporate recruiter, I would never need to use a third party recruiter, primarily due to my ability to leverage information systems and human capital data. I am not bound solely to candidates with whom I have a pre-existing relationship.

More on that in a few paragraphs.

Bottom line: You’re not a full life cycle recruiter if you can’t find your own candidates. Whether or not candidate sourcing should be a separate role or integrated function will be the topic of a future post.

Access to Information is Not Enough

The value of information lies not in the information itself, but in the ability to retrieve the information needed at the appropriate time. Information is of no use or value if it cannot be discovered in the first place.

Having direct access to an unprecedented number of potential candidates via a combination of an ATS/CRM, the Internet, LinkedIn, job board resume databases, Facebook, and Twitter is of no value without the ability to capitalize on that data – the ability to sort through the information and retrieve the right candidates at the right time. 

In part 1 of Dr. John Sullivan’s excellent 3 part series on talent acquisition trends for 2010, he comments that “The challenge moving forward isn’t finding people – that’s too easy…” I agree, in that with ready access to millions of potential candidates, finding people is easy. However, finding the right people at the right time is not, nor will it ever be.

It is all too easy to assume that access to information automatically confers the ability to fully capitalize on that information. It does not.  That’s like saying I’m a great tennis player because I own a tennis racket.

Even if you’ve already built a community of candidates, you still have to be able to find and retrieve the right person at the right time. If you think that a potential candidate has been “found” just because they are already in your ATS or CRM, think again. Having a candidate record in an ATS/CRM only means that the human capital data has been captured.

Many ATS/CRM applications are well-nigh unsearchable – candidates go in, but they don’t come out. Consider the Fortune 500 corporate recruiter who recently admitted to me that it’s easier for her to run a search on Monster, find a candidate based on skill and experience, then cross reference the name in their Taleo Talent Management solution to find the candidate record.

Ouch.

Breaking the Bonds of Pre-Existing Relationships

The Information Age of recruiting, unbeknownst to many people, has enabled recruiters to break the bonds of the pre-existing relationship.

A core responsibility of any recruiter is to build a community of potential candidates. For over two decades, recruiters have been trained that proactively pipelining candidates is the best way to ensure that they will have ready access to the right candidates at the right time. 

However, there are many intrinsic limitations and weaknesses of this practice. What is the likehood that the best candidate available for a given position is already in a recruiter’s pipeline? Also – what happens when a recruiter’s community of potential candidates fails to produce any viable (appropriately qualified, available, and closeable) candidates?

For the first time in the history of recruiting, a recruiter who has the ability to fully capitalize on the huge and ever-increasing volume of the readily accessible human capital data available to them via their ATS/CRM, LinkedIn, online resume databases, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  can almost instantly identify and engage well-qualified candidates with whom they have no pre-existing relationship.

The Information Era of recruiting enables recruiters with solid e-sourcing skills to no longer be limited solely to candidates with whom they have a pre-existing relationship. These recruiters can find and attract the best candidates, regardless of whether or not they have previously identified them.

I’ll let that sink in a bit. It’s deep. 

Social Networking

Nearly everyone in the recruiting industry is buzzing about the opportunity provided by and the importance of social networking. While I enthusiastically engage in online social networking (yes, I’ve even made a hire from Twitter), social networking is simply an evolution of in-person and phone networking - taking what recruiters have been doing for decades in person and over the phone (building and maintaining relationships) online.

While social networks increase access and reach for many recruiters, they do not significantly improve a recruiters ability to quickly find the right people, nor the right people at the right time, unless they are adept at e-sourcing. 

Moreover, as I’ve written before, networking of any kind (in-person, online, referral recruiting) has intrinsically low levels of control over critical candidate variables, and thus a low inherent probability of producing the right candidate at the right time. 

Final Thoughts

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

The human element of recruiting – contacting, building and maintaining relationships with, and consultatively selling to (recruiting) potential candidates – has not changed in the past 20 years, nor is it likely to in the next 20.

What has changed significantly, and will continue to do so, is the level of access recruiters have to people beyond their pre-existing relationships, which is 100% due to evolving and emerging information technology. 

Large corporate ATS’s contain millions of candidates, each of the major job board resume databases has over 20,000,000 resumes, and LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter alone provide access to over 100,000,000 people in the U.S.!

With ready access to unprecedented volumes of potential candidates, the competitive advantage lies in the ability to  search for and find the right people to engage and attract at the right time.

I disagree with Kevin’s assessment that the need to ”apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.” However, I wholeheartedly agree with his idea that data mining is an advanced skill that can facilitate recruiting success(on the same level as relationship building, no less). 

The ability to quickly and effectively extract value out of information systems containing human capital data enables a recruiter to be more productive – to do more of what most people consider to be “real recruiting.” Quite simply, the more qualified candidates you can identify, the more qualified candidates you can contact, engage, attract and recruit - with or without pre-existing relationships.

Relationships and recruiting go hand and hand. This has been long-known and well established, and there’s nothing new to discover here. However, the next frontier in recruiting lies in the effective information management – ATS/CRM solutions, the Internet, resume databases, social networks and whatever comes next.   

With more information available about more people on a daily basis, the complimentary need arises to leverage that information to find the people you want and need. The ability to query social network sites, systems, and databases to find these people to engage and recruit is a highly valuable skill and ability, and will only increase in value to organizations who wish to have a competitive advantage in the “war for talent.”

In Ben Franklin’s the Way to Wealth, he talks about the issues associated with carrying unnecessary inventory, “You call them goods; but, if you do not take care, they will prove evils to some of you…You expect they will be sold…but, if you have no occasion for them, they must be dear to you.”

If Ben were alive today and in the recruiting industry, he’d tell you that building, maintaining, and managing the turnover associated with in-process candidate inventory (traditional candidate pipelines) consumes a great amount of time and effort which ultimately may provide little-to-no value to candidate or client alike, at great cost to you.

So how can recruiters go about creating more value for their candidates and hiring managers with less work?

Just-In-Time Recruiting

Just-In-Time recruiting is based on the Lean, pull-based strategy of providing hiring managers/clients with candidates that exactly match their needs, when they want them, in the amount they want, without the safety net of a traditional candidate pipeline/WIP inventory.

Instead of proactively building and maintaining work-in-process (WIP) candidate pipelines without an actual hiring need, JIT recruiting has a primary focus of tapping into “raw material” candidate inventory (resumes, candidate profiles, etc.) and contacting, qualifying, and delivering candidates only in direct response to a hiring need.

JIT recruiting is replicable – anyone and any organization can achieve it.

How? I’m glad you asked.

How to Achieve Just-In-Time Recruiting

Anyone can find and develop candidate pipelines, but not everyone can achieve JIT recruiting and delivery.

This is because there are a few system and recruiter capability requirements that must be met before Just-In-Time recruiting and delivery can be reliably accomplished.

JIT Recruiting Requires Access to Human Capital Data

In Part 2 of this series, I introduced the concept of resumes and/or candidate profiles (ATS, social networking sites, etc.) as potential candidate “raw material” in the sense that they can be converted by processing (contacting and screening) into a new and useful product: a live and viable candidate.

In order to achieve JIT recruiting, a recruiter must have ready access to a volume of human capital data in the form of resumes, candidate records, or social network profiles that they are able to retrieve on-demand.

Any recruiter or organization hoping to achieve JIT recruiting should have their own well-stocked candidate database in the form of an ATS/CRM solution into which every candidate that responds to a job posting, that is found through a search, referred into or otherwise identified by a recruiter is permanently captured.

In an ideal scenario, a recruiter would have access to a Talent Warehouse. A Talent Warehouse is a specialized form of ATS/CRM application that is both manually and automatically populated on a daily basis with potential candidates that have been identified, parsed, and permanently captured from the Internet, social networks, and major/niche job board resume databases.

In addition to having access to a well stocked private Talent Warehouse (or at the very least, an ATS/CRM app), having access to 1 or more major and niche job board resume databases would further enhance Just-In-Time recruiting capability.

It should go without saying, but I am also factoring in access to LinkedIn and the Internet itself as significant sources of human capital data (raw material candidate inventory).

The Power of Numbers

When it comes to raw material candidate inventory – the more the better!

For some individuals and small local companies, 5,000 to 10,000 resumes/profiles may suffice. For larger, national, and global corporations, hundreds of thousands to several million records would be more ideal.

Having fast and easy on-demand access to more human capital data increases the probability that you can easily find the right candidates at the right time, either directly (search and retrieval) or indirectly (referral/network recruiting).

It’s simple statistics.

X Degrees of Separation

Speaking of numbers and statistics – one thing to keep in mind is that if you have access to a source of 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000+ people, the value of having that access is not limited to solely those individuals. Every single one of those individuals knows other people, who also know people, and so on.

In that sense, every source of human capital data, whether it is an ATS, a job board resume database, etc., is not unlike LinkedIn, except you can’t “see” the people who they know. But they do know them.

So for people who say that using technology for talent identification (resume databases, applicant tracking systems, etc.) has its limitations because not every person can be found electronically/online somewhere – they don’t have to be.

Although I would argue that with each passing day, more and more people ARE able to be found electronically somewhere – a trend that will never decrease – the simple fact of the matter is that any source of human capital data can be used to access a MUCH larger network of people who may or may not be online anywhere today.

With strong referral recruiting/phone networking skills, a recruiter can use a database of 10,000 candidates to essentially reach 300,000 or more people, or an ATS with 1,000,000 people to reach over 30,000,000 people – whether they can be found anywhere online or not.

How’s that for power?

JIT Recruiting Benefits from High “Searchability”

The more “searchable” a source of human capital data, the easier it is to reliably achieve Just-In-Time recruiting and delivery.

The minimum level of searchability to facilitate JIT recruiting would entail support of full Boolean logic queries of at least 400 characters.

An ideal level of searchability would go beyond basic Boolean and include manual proximity search, variable term weighting, and root word/stemming coupled with an AI/matching/recommendation engine. ATS/CRM solutions should also feature automated resume/profile parsing and field-specific (most recent title/experience, etc.) and derived data (years of experience, etc.) searching.

Thankfully, LinkedIn is highly searchable, although annoyingly, it does not support stemming/root word search. Most major job board resume databases are also highly searchable, including field-specific search, fixed proximity (Monster’s NEAR), and matching/recommendation capability (Careerbuilder’s R2 and Monster’s Power Resume Search).

High searchability facilitates a sourcer/recruiter’s ability to quickly (as in <1 – 5 minutes in most cases) and easily find people who have the highest probability of either being a great match for a specific position, or are highly likely to know someone who is, and contact and engage them. In other words – convert resumes/candidate profiles in their raw material form to screened, qualified, and engaged candidates.

JIT Recruiting Requires Effective Engagement and Referral Tactics and Strategies

A critical link in the process of Just-In-Time recruiting is the conversion of candidates from their raw material form into in-process candidates. This involves successfully contacting and engaging potential candidates in 2-way communication. Having quick and easy access to a large talent pool is great, but if you’re not very good at establishing 2 way communication with candidates you haven’t already established a relationship with, you’re going to have a very hard time achieving Just-In-Time recruiting.

By very good, I mean >75% response rate to initial email and phone contact attempts to candidates, regardless of their job search status (active, casual, passive, not looking).

Remember that when tapping into large pools of human capital data, we’re not targeting people based on their job search status – the goal is to find, contact, and engage anyone who is potentially well-qualified. Practically anyone can get an active or even casual job seeker to call them back or return their email. However, very few people are able to reliably get >75% of people who are not looking at all to respond to an email or phone call.

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that 32% of all people are “passively looking” and that 34% are “not looking.” That’s fully 66% of the potential candidate pool – and the portion of talent that most recruiters and employers covet the most! If you can’t successfully connect with and quickly gain the interest of these people, you’re at a significant disadvantage in achieving Just-In-Time recruiting (or any form of passive candidate recruiting, for that matter).

I honestly believe this may be one of the core reasons why traditional proactive candidate pipelining is used as a solution to meet hiring needs. If you can’t get the majority of passive and non-job seekers who you’ve never contacted before to respond to you – your only option is to make the most of the people who you HAVE already contacted (your WIP inventory). However, being able to get practically anyone to respond to emails/call you back changes the game entirely, as you are no longer limited to the candidate inventory you happen to have on hand (your pipeline).

I know I’m onto something here – more on it later.

Just-In-Time Recruiting Requires Search Ability

Having access to a decent volume of high quality human capital “raw material” via systems that are highly searchable is quite literally worthless without the ability to actually leverage the data and the search capability. The value of information is directly related to the ability to retrieve precisely the right information, exactly when you need it.

To achieve Just-In-Time recruiting, sourcers and recruiters don’t have to be Boolean Black Belts, but they must be proficient in candidate search best practices, techniques, and strategies. In order to retrieve information from information systems, it’s critical to speak the “local language” – and there’s no getting around Boolean logic for querying data. Artificial Intelligence/Semantic Search applications and recommendation engines are great to have and can certainly help, but they are not a solution in and of themselves – they are not “the answer.”

Pipelining – Proactive vs. Reactive

Contrary to what some people may believe, Just-In-Time recruiting does leverage candidate pipelines – just not in the traditional way.

First, Just-In-Time recruiting involves the pipelining of raw material candidate inventory, in the form of resumes/candidate profiles. Recruiters and recruiting organizations should be both proactively and reactively, manually and automatically building a database of potential talent on a continual basis, 24 X 7.

Unlike traditional candidate pipelining, when these resumes are identified, acquired and permanently captured, the people that the resumes and social media profiles represent do not have to be contacted without an actual hiring need.

Second, Just-In-Time recruiting creates candidate pipelines as a result of sourcing and contacting potential candidates for a specific need. Any candidate that is not available, interested, or immediately qualified for the specific position being recruited for essentially becomes part of a work-in-process (WIP) candidate pipeline.

This can be referred to as “reactive pipelining,” and opposed to the “proactive pipelining” which involves contacting and engaging candidates without an actual hiring need.

Yes, I said the dreaded “reactive” word. I am well aware that many in the recruiting industry think “reactive” is a four-letter word. However, I am here to tell you that it most certainly is NOT. It’s an 8 letter word.

Seriously though, it is a common misconception that proactive = good, reactive = bad. In reality, Lean/TPS best practices dictate that an ideal state of production is one in which a product is produced or a service performed directly in response to a customer need (pull).

Ultimately, building candidate pipelines as a result of JIT recruiting efforts is actually a mix of both reactive and proactive strategy. It’s reactive in that people are contacted for a specific hiring need, and proactive in that anyone not interested, available, or the right fit for the position being recruited for enters the candidate pipeline for future opportunities.

There, that should make everyone happy.

Just-In-Time Recruiting is Not Anti-Relationship

I received a few comments throughout this series from people who seemed concerned that Just-In-Time recruiting was anti-relationship – that it might somehow endorse “forgetting” about great candidates you’ve spoken or met with.

Nothing could be further from the truth. No aspect of the Just-In-Time recruiting concept and strategy has anything to do with not building and maintaining relationships with great people. I just wanted to take a moment to clear that up.

Just-In-Time Recruiting Requires Less Candidate “Processing”

While JIT recruiting supports building and maintaining relationships with candidates, it does not endorse doing so for no other purpose.

Remember that Just-In-Time is a Lean concept, and Lean is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful. I asked readers in Part 3 what they felt was the ultimate value they provide to candidates. Jeremy Langhans responded with what I believe is the most accurate answer, which is “a job.”

Many recruiters who proactively build and maintain relationships with candidates for which they do not have a current need never provide any real value to the candidates. These recruiters proactively pipeline the candidates for their own personal benefit – to be able to have people they can quickly “activate,” requalify, and submit when a position finally does open up. However, what real value is being provided to candidates who never move past the “relationship maintenance” phase in the recruiting lifecycle?

You only need to look at a few of the insightful comments left on previous posts in this series by people who have recently been on the candidate side of the experience to know that being kept warm doesn’t really do much for them.

In a JIT recruiting scenario, candidates are not contacted prior to actual need – their time is not potentially wasted in a perpetual state of being “kept warm.” If a candidate is contacted for a specific opportunity and it is determined that it is not a proper fit, or that they are not interested or available, they do enter the candidate pipeline for future opportunities and become work-in-process candidate inventory.

However, in Just-In-Time recruiting, the level of “processing” (relationship maintenance) involved in being a pipelined candidate is typically lower than that of candidates who are proactively pipelined ahead of need. In Lean terminology, this means that JIT recruiting reduces waste (overprocessing) and increases value for the candidates involved.

Here’s a quick story to illustrate this point: I was recruiting for a project manager with telecommunications industry and EAI experience and I found someone with a very strong resume – which was posted 6 months prior to the time I found it. I called him, left him a good message, and he called me back. He explained that he was not looking or available because he was working on a contract that was scheduled to end in 6 months. In about 10 minutes, I found out more about him and informed him of the kinds of positions I recruited for and typically had available. Then I asked if I could reach out to him in about 5 months. He said sure, so I set a reminder to call him in 5 months. I literally forgot about him until my reminder popped up 5 months later. I contacted him, qualified him some more, and submitted him to one of my clients. 2 phone calls, 1 submittal, 1 interview, 1 hire.

My point here is that I did not keep this person “warm” by chatting with him every 2-4 weeks during the 5 month period, and in no way to it prevent me from having a client hire a fantastic candidate who was extremely pleased with the opportunity. Minimal processing, maximum value for all involved – Lean/JIT recruiting at its purest form. I could have called this candidate every 30 days, but it would not have added any additional value to him or to my client.

Final Thoughts

In an effort to continually improve processes is critical to identify the assumptions and beliefs behind the current work process (i.e. “the way it’s always been done”) and to challenging them – significant breakthroughs can be achieved when you are able to identify untapped opportunities through challenging and assumptions and traditional beliefs.

Do you really think the way that the majority of people and organizations currently execute sourcing and recruiting is absolutely perfect, offering no room for improvement?

I’m trying to move the ball forward. I am not content to with the way things have always been done. I do not blindly accept what others tell me, and neither should you. There’s always a better way – what are you doing to find it?

I think that most people are trained on or learn about the concept of traditional candidate pipelining early in their careers, and I may be one of the few who was not. This seems to have given me somewhat of a unique perspective on the subject. In other words, no one ever told me the world was flat – that the most effective way to recruit has to involve traditional candidate pipelining.

It’s important to understand that I did not just sit around and think these ideas up, trying to adapt Lean and Just-In-Time production to recruiting. On the contrary, practically everything I write about comes directly from experiences I had during my first years in the recruiting industry, in the trenches, working a recruiting desk in a highly competitive staffing agency, 10 years before I even heard of the concept of Just-In-Time, let alone the Lean concepts of Value, Waste, Pull, and Perfect First-Time Quality.

What I learned largely through my own trial and error in the process of trying to not only keep my new job but also become the top performer for the company ended up being uncannily aligned with core Lean philosophy – creating more value for my candidates and clients with less work, and giving them exactly what they want, when they want it.

The expression “learning to see” comes from an ever developing ability to see waste where it was not perceived before. I’d like you to try and work in a Lean approach to everything that you do – to view the expenditure of time and effort for any goal other than the creation of value for your candidates and clients/hiring managers as wasteful.

I am not asking you to become a Lean/JIT recruiting convert – I’m just asking you to think, and to examine your recruiting processes and practices with a critical eye for waste, such as unnecessary WIP candidate inventory, over-processing, excessive waiting, overproduction, and defects.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes. Thanks for reading!

Depth Matters!

Human capital data comes in many forms – resumes, social network profiles, blogs, bios, 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 quality and depth of the information.

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.” Generally, more information is better than less information. How useful is an information system if it has little and/or poor quality information (data)? 

ATS and Job Board Resume Databases

Resumes are typically deeper sources of human capital data – and while the accuracy of them can be argued (no different than social media profiles) – most resumes 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. 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the one stand-out social networking application that has a decent number of profiles with deep human capital data.  Although it is NOT a resume database, you can typically find (and thus search for and target) more employment qualification-related information. While LinkedIn calls them “profiles,” and some contain very little information, some LinkedIn users fill their profiles out just as they would their resume.  In fact, with the employment market being the worst is has been in decades, there are a number of articles advising job seekers to do exactly that – fill out their profile as they would a resume.   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 active talent identification.

Social Media – Beyond LinkedIn

While many people in the recruiting and staffing industry get REALLY excited about Facebook, Myspace, 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 social media sites. Yes, I think they are cool. Yes, I use them. But I refuse to get so blinded by the newest “shiny objects” available to sourcers and recruiters that I fail to see their limitations.

Sure - Facebook, MySpace and Twitter can all be used to identify and contact potential candidates. There’s no arguing that point. Twitter is highly searchable – supporting Boolean queries and their own set of advanced search operators (Facebook – you could take a lesson from the folks at Twitter!). However, none of those sites offers much depth of information 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), years of experience, education, certifications, industry, etc.

Shallow Human Capital Data

Facebook and Twitter 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 and Twitter are not particularly effective for active candidate identification – or in other words – searching for and identifying candidates with specific experience and qualifications that are highly likely to match specific hiring needs.

There is no doubt you can find and contact LOADS of people using Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and other similar applications. 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, Yahoo, Live, Ask, and Exalead to search for and sift through human capital data can definitely produce results. However, once you go beyond resumes (the deep sources of human capital data), you quickly enter the shallow end of the human capital data pool - press releases, blog posts, 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 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 people think it’s productive to contact large quantities of people who aren’t qualified for any of their openings, now – or in the future, or to contact people who won’t commute to the location they’re hiring for (let alone live in the target state in some cases!).

Well 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, Myspace, Twitter, and non-resume human capital data on the Internet don’t often have much professional-qualification-relevant information. Less and shallow information doesn’t really make for a heavily leverageable information system, does it? At least not when it comes to talent identification where it’s more than helpful to know a little bit about someone’s experience and qualifications 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 candidates that you find and contact using shallow sources of human capital data when the candidates 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 think about this: Is this kind of practice and process the BEST and HIGHEST ROI method of sourcing and recruiting?  I think not. 

Critical Candidate Matching Variables

More information/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.

Searching for Mr. or Mrs. Right

Let’s look at this from a different angle. If you’re looking for Mr. or Mrs. Right, you have several choices avialable to you. You can read through 4-line personal ads in a newspaper in an attempt to find someone that you think you might be compatible with. This would be an example of leveraging shallow human capital data in an attempt to find the right match.

Or you could leverage technology and try an online service such as eHarmony or Match.com and review fully detailed profiles (deep human capital data) – giving you access to more information about potential Mr./Mrs. Rights, and more insight into and more control over your preferences and potential compatibility. You could argue that profiles on online dating sites aren’t all accurate – but neither are resumes OR social media profiles or bios.

If You Had a Choice

Let me make a point by asking this question: 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 candidates has the higher likelihood of being the right candidate?

LinkedIn

Twitter

The contrast is dramatic. The LinkedIn profile is essentially filled out as completely as a resume would be, and as such, we can feel very good in attempting to contact this person because their experience appears to closely align with our opportunity. 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.

In this case, however, we’re lucky – because Andrea is on LinkedIn.  Looking at her profile, 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 human capital information. That way, I can run creative and effective Boolean strings to search for, find, and contact people based on specific experience and qualifications.

Why would anyone choose any different?

Conclusion

You can find and hire people by searching any source of human capital data – resume or otherwise. However, searching Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, blogs, the Internet and other similarly shallow sources of candidate data takes a higher amount of effort for a smaller return – what I call low yield sourcing and recruiting. Does it sound like a good idea to go out of your way to focus on low yield sourcing and recruiting?

I’d argue that the deep sources of human capital data such as resume databases, applicant tracking systems, LinkedIn, and Internet resumes produce 80% of the active-search based sourcing and recruiting results (hires). Conversely, the shallow sources of human capital data such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, 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 unqualified people
#2 Find and contact more qualified people

Which one will you take?

What’s The Sexiest Job in Recruiting?

I recently read this excellent post on the Google blog written by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management at Google, and I was especially excited to read this:

“Hal Varian likes to say that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. After all, who would have guessed that computer engineers would be the cool job of the 90s? When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.”

Hal Varian gets it. 

Google gets it.

So Why Don’t People in the HR and Recruiting Industry?

What am I talking about? That the ability to understand and extract value from data (human capital data in recruiting) is the scarce factor and it leads to intelligence and success in business.

Every day, more information about more people is made available electronically – in the form of data. This comes from people: responding to job postings with resumes and entering them into corporate databases, creating social media profiles online, posting resumes on the Internet and online job boards, being mentioned in press releases, blogging, Tweeting, etc. As such, it is increasingly becoming more important for organizations to be able to leverage these sources of human capital data for talent identification and acquisition.

Whenever I see something written about/hear something said about the e-sourcing function (using human capital data for talent identification), someone is sure to shout, “Yeah – but real recruiting is about relationships!” Another good one is “The BEST people can’t be found in a database or online!”

The last time I checked a calendar, it was 2009. You CAN find anyone either in a database somewhere, online, or simply with a phone – either directly or indirectly through networking or referrals.

Yes, the core of recruiting is about relationships – that will never change. Now that we’ve got that out of the way - I’d like to firmly kick the “relationships” crutch out from under the arm of everyone who needs to wake up and realize that leveraging human capital data for talent identification and acquisition is THE next wave in recruiting. And it’s quickly approaching a shore near you, whether you’re prepared for it or not.  Closing your eyes to it won’t stop it from crushing you.

If you can take advantage of and tap into the power of the unprecedented amount of human capital data available to sourcers and recruiters today (which increases and accelerates every day!), you can quickly find and develop relationships with and recruit MORE of the RIGHT people at the RIGHT time. If your definition of success (or acceptable paycheck) is achieving more than 1 to 2 hires per month, you are at a significant competitive advantage if you cannot leverage technology.

If you CAN effectively leverage human capital data for talent identification and acquisition, it is a productivity MULTIPLIER.

Human Capital Data Analysis

I think the term “sourcing” does not do the role/function of leveraging human capital data for talent identification proper justice. I think that what most people refer to as a sourcing function is really more accurately labeled as a human capital data analysis.

Data analysis is defined as a process of gathering, analyzing, and transforming data with the goal of highlighting useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making. If you take a look at a typical data analyst job description, you’ll see responsibilities such as:

• Collaborate with business process owners to identify opportunities; define business requirements, and design and implement solutions designed to maximize efficiency and productivity.
• Perform complex data mining and aggregation; critically examine the results
• Accumulate, analyze, and interpret data in understandable terms for the customer from multiple systems
• Analyze complex data including: structured, unstructured, and plain text.
• Develop analytic approach in collaboration with project staff
• Respond to ad-hoc and standing customer requirements
• Utilize in-house database applications
• Perform data migration
• Research new data sources and analytical tools
• Support analysis results at customer meetings
• Utilize query languages  (SQL)
• Conduct competitor and benchmarking analyses

Translating “Data Analyst” to “Human Capital Data Analyst:”

• Collaborate with managers and business unit owners to identify opportunities, define position requirements, and design and implement talent identification solutions and processes designed to maximize efficiency, productivity, and results
• Perform complex talent mining and aggregation; critically examine the results for relevance, qualifications, and proability of match to hiring requirements
• Accumulate, analyze, and interpret human capital data in understandable terms for the customer from multiple systems, including, but not limited to the Internet, resume databases, and social media
• Analyze complex human capital data including: Resumes, social media profiles, blog posts, press releases, and unstructured plain text
• Develop analytic approach in collaboration with project staff
• Respond to ad-hoc and standing customer requirements
• Utilize in-house Applicant Tracking Systems and database applications
• Perform data migration, permanently capturing human capital data from multiple sources and entering them into corporate ATS/Talent Warehouse
• Research new human capital data sources and analytical/search tools
• Support analysis of search results at customer meetings
• Utilize query languages (Boolean)
• Conduct competitor and benchmarking analyses

The human capital data analyst function is a critical role in supporting a company’s Talent Intelligence initiatives – applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze Talent-related (Human Capital) data and information and help organizations develop consistent and “data-based” Talent-related decisions.  

Most Appropriately Qualified

A Human Capital Data Analyst is essentially a data analyst that specializes in talent identification and acquisition. This process involves analyzing and interpreting hiring needs and requirements, often with poor or incomplete information, leaving them to piece the puzzle together. Once the needs have been understood, they intelligently assess and strategically select available information resources to leverage, translating hiring qualifications into precise Boolean queries to search targeted sources of talent-related data and quickly retrieve relevant results – human capital data representing people who are likely to meet and ideally exceed the basic qualifications of the hiring needs.

A talented human capital data analyst is capable of leveraging information sources and systems with such speed and precision to enable organziations to achieve Just-in-Time sourcing and recruiting - identifying and acquiring the right talent, in the right amount, at the right time, without the need for having to recruit people ahead of need and building talent pipelines that may not be available when the actual need arises.

Human capital data analysts are capable of searching databases and systems containing data representing millions of people to quickly and precisely uncover, indentify, and tap into the Hidden Talent Pools that exist in every source of human capital data to target people with specific educational requirements, years of experience, current and prior roles and responsibilies in specific environments and in some cases in specific companies. That’s no small feat!

Whereas data analysts respsonsible for working with financial or other types of data are responsible for producing reports and analyzing information for meaning and identifying relationships to assist with stragetic decision making, human capital data analysts are responsible for identifying and assisting in the acquisition of a company’s most precious assets – its talent, and potentially the next “game changing” employees who can take the company to the next level.

Competitive Advantage

Microsoft and most well run companies know that the true scarce resource is talent – and that identifying, acquiring, and retaining top talent is a company’s only true and sustainable competitive advantage . The more ubiquitous human capital data becomes, the more critical it becomes that companies employ human capital data analysts who are capable of leveraging information systems more quickly, precisely, and accurately than the competition to identify top talent and target them for acquisition.

As Jonathan Rosenberg of Google stated, there is significant intelligence and value in data. I would argue that the most critical asset of any company is its human capital – and the most critical step in the human capital supply chain is the process is identifying human capital. You simply cannot attract, develop relationships with, acquire, or retain people you haven’t identified in the first place.

Some people think that the talent identification function can be automated and/or off-shored. Although you can certainly automate searches, there are MANY intrinsic limitations associated with doing so.  As far as off-shoring talent identification, I’m going to quote something I read recently, “the sourcing function can be conducted by lower paid resources.” If you want to offshore your most critical function - identifying top talent – please, by all means, do so – but know you are doing so at your own peril. Scraping human capital data and migrating it to your internal database/ATS is a good value proposition. However, I would STRONGLY recommend employing true human capital data analysts to perform talent mining on the aggregated data.

Conclusion

There is a reason why companies pay financial analysts and data analysts very good money – because they are knowledgeable specialists and they perform highly critical functions.  I think that the majority of HR/recruiting industry hasn’t yet figured out that analyzing human capital data for talent identification and acquisition is a highly specialized, valuable, and critical function. 

Human capital data is the sword of the 21st century – those who wield it well are the Sourcing Samurai.