When I recently spoke at SourceCon in New York, I showed an example Boolean search string that could be used as a challenge or an evaluation of a person’s knowledge and ability.

The search string looked something like this:

(Director or “Project Manage*” or “Program Manage*” or PM*) w/250 xfirstword and (truck* or ship* or rail* or transport* or logistic* or “supply chain*”) w/10 (manag* or project)* and (Deloitte or Ernst or “E&Y” or KPMG or PwC or PricewaterhouseCoopers or “Price Waterhouse*”)

During the presentation, an audience member asked me why there wasn’t any use of site:, inurl:, intitle:, etc. I responded by acknowledging that for many, sourcing and Boolean search seems to be synonymous with Internet search – however, this is definitely not the case.

Boolean Logic is Simply the Simplest Way to Search

Some (but I hope not too many!) sourcing and recruiting professionals may be surprised to learn that Boolean logic significantly predates the Internet as well as computers – by over a century!

I still run into sourcers and recruiters that are not aware that the word “Boolean” comes from the man who invented Boolean Logic in the 19th century – George Boole. Boolean Logic is the basis of modern computer logic, and George Boole is regarded in hindsight as one of the founders of the field of computer science.

With Boolean logic being created in the 1800′s – it’s pretty obvious that Boolean logic is not just for searching for people and information on the Internet.

Practically any information system from which you need to search and retrieve information from “speaks” Boolean.

This is understandable, because using Boolean logic is the simplest way to construct a search. When you want a combination of terms/phrases you use AND, when you want at least one of a group of terms/phrases you use OR, and when you don’t want something you use NOT. It really doesn’t get any easier than that.

When anyone types more than a single word or phrase into Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Amazon, eBay, etc., they’re performing Boolean search, because spaces are automatically converted to ANDs. Billions of people across the globe are running basic Boolean strings whether they are aware of this or not, which is a testament to how easy Boolean search is.

Sourcing isn’t about Boolean Search Strings

Sourcing candidates is much more than Boolean search strings – they are but one aspect of sourcing.

Sourcing talent is more accurately and completely defined and described as human capital information retrieval.

Information retrieval (IR) is “the science of searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching relational databases and the World Wide Web.”

Leveraging information systems for talent discovery and identification is about searching documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching relational databases and the Internet for human capital information, including titles, companies, responsibilities, skills, technologies, social network updates, blog posts, resume information, event and association lists, etc.

With IR, an information retrieval process begins when a user enters a query into an interface.

Queries are simply formal statements of information needs. For a sourcer or recruiter, their information need is typically to find information that will lead them to discover and identify people with specific skills, experience, capabilities, education, etc.

While using Boolean operators is arguably the easiest way to construct a query, IR queries do not have to be limited solely to Boolean logic, as can be seen in the various non-Boolean query modifiers of Internet search engines (here are some of Google’s and Bing’s), LinkedIn’s advanced search operators, faceted search (e.g., LinkedIn’s filters), etc.

The “hard” part of creating queries for human capital information retrieval isn’t deciding which Boolean operators to use. AND/OR/NOT is the easy part. In fact, my daughter learned about Boolean logic last year, including constructing Venn diagrams – in her 1st grade public school class!

The hard part of creating queries is intelligently selecting a combination of words and phrases, and in some cases strategically excluding some words and phrases, that will return highly relevant results – people who are not only likely to be qualified for the position being sourced for, but also highly likely to be interested in the opportunity (i.e., “recruitable”).

Yes – you actually have to think in order to create effective queries that return highly relevant results.

Human-Computer Information Retrieval

Human–computer information retrieval (HCIR) is “the study of information retrieval techniques that bring human intelligence into the search process.”

According to Wikipedia, which IBM’s Watson used heavily to compete in Jeopardy, “The fields of human–computer interaction (HCI) and information retrieval (IR) have both developed innovative techniques to address the challenge of navigating complex information spaces…[and] Human–computer information retrieval has emerged in academic research and industry practice to bring together research in the fields of IR and HCI, in order to create new kinds of search systems that depend on continuous human control of the search process.” (emphasis mine)

The term human–computer information retrieval was coined by Gary Marchionini whose main thesis is that “HCIR aims to empower people to explore large-scale information bases but demands that people also take responsibility for this control by expending cognitive and physical energy.” (emphasis mine again)

For those who simply want information systems to magically provide them with the most relevant results at the click of a button, you should take special note of the fact that experts in the field of HCIR do not believe that people should step out of the information retrieval process and let semantic search/NLP algorithms/AI be solely responsible for the search process.

If you’re interested in learning more about HCIR, I suggest you read this blog – you may be surprised and interested to see who the author is, where he’s been, what he’s done, where he is now, and what’s on his mind.

Talent Mining

In my opinion and experience, Boolean search neither adequately describes nor gives proper credit to what sourcers and recruiters are really doing when they leverage the Internet, resume databases, ATS/CRM applications and social networking sites such as LinkedIn to find candidates, and to what some very talented and highly skilled professionals are able to accomplish with human capital information.

At SourceCon 2010, I spoke about a specialized form of HCIR which I call talent mining, which is essentially human capital information retrieval – a specialized form of IR involving querying and analyzing human capital data (resumes, social network profiles and updates, blogs, etc.) for talent discovery, identification, and ultimately acquisition.

I believe there are at least five distinct levels of Talent Mining:

1. Skill/Title Search
2. Concept Search
3. Implicit Search
4. Semantic/Natural Language Search
5. Indirect Search

Talent Mining is not defined by nor limited to Boolean search – any and all information retrieval methods that can be leveraged to discover and return human capital data are applicable and should be used.

At the strategic level, talent mining is the process of transforming human capital data into an informational and competitive advantage, which is much more than simply writing Boolean search strings.

Only the simplest and most basic level 1 talent mining can be performed without much thought – slapping titles and keywords taken directly from a job description into a Boolean search string and hitting “search.”

Beyond that, more advanced level 1 and most certainly levels 2 through 5 talent mining require significant “cognitive energy,” as well as involve continual improvement.

In fact, effective sourcing can and should be an iterative process.

Beyond Boolean & Internet Search

I believe that those who equate sourcing with basic Boolean Internet search don’t fully understand or appreciate the power of human capital data, its many forms and sources, and the many ways that it can be leveraged.

While the Internet has a lot of information, it is also full of garbage (others would call it “noise”) and it does not hold as many “findable” resumes as you may have been led to believe.

There is no denying that non-resume human capital data is valuable, but searching the Internet for non-resume information can easily spiral into an exercise in low ROI, time consuming garbage-sifting. Many don’t realize (or want to recognize) that non-resume data offers shallow information at best and thus has less qualitative and predictive value.

Additionally, the Internet isn’t a database – it’s a network of networks and the information stored on those networks is largely unstructured.

Structured data is an order of magnitude (it could easily be argued many orders of magnitude) more valuable and searchable than unstructured data, if for no other reason than it’s intrinsically high predictive value.

LinkedIn offers a good example of the power of structured human capital data, although a large percentage of LinkedIn profiles are information-anemic. Even so, all profiles are required to have employer and title information, and both are structured, fully searchable fields.

Additionally, corporate ATS’s and major job board resume databases have hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of candidate records – with deep and sometimes well-structured data. I’m perpetually confused as to why there is so much written on Internet sourcing and why I don’t see more people writing and speaking about mining all of the rich human capital data hiding in resume databases and applicant tracking systems.

Perhaps one of the reasons why the sourcing function and role isn’t highly regarded or respected by some is because those people equate sourcing with basic Boolean search. If all they think sourcers and recruiters are doing is directly searching for keywords and titles from job descriptions, then I can actually understand why some people would think of sourcing as an entry level role or function.

However, sourcing isn’t just about Boolean search, it’s about human capital information retrieval.

While Boolean logic is the simplest way to construct an IR query and practically all information systems accept basic Boolean operators, the real “magic” and work of sourcing talent 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 matched candidates are identified.

I would personally like to see more sourcing, recruiting and HR conferences and blogs to address human capital information retrieval, specifically with regard to focusing on the sourcing process, as well as deep and structured human capital data. If this happens, I don’t think it will be long before companies start to realize that sourcing can offer a serious strategic competitive advantage, and perhaps invest more in technologies and talented people to achieve a competitive advantage based on human capital data for talent discovery, identification, acquisition, and retention.

When most people talk about “passive recruiting,” they’re referring to the practice of targeting and recruiting so-called “passive candidates” – people who are not actively looking to make a move from their current employer.

If you accept that notion – what would be the opposite?

Active recruiting?

Think about it for a moment. Neither phrase even makes sense grammatically. The “passive” in “passive recruiting” isn’t being used to describe the type of recruiting being performed – it’s being used to describe the type of candidates being recruited. 

In this article, I challenge the notion of “passive recruiting,” implore you to retire the phrase, and introduce the concepts of active and passive sourcing.  

Passive Recruiting?

What could “passive recruiting” possibly mean if you’re not using “passive” to describe the types of candidates being targeted?

Recruiting is intrinsically an active process - it requires action and active participation. So “passive recruiting” doesn’t actually exist!

However, if you don’t want to let go of the oft-overused phrase, my take on “passive recruiting” zeroes in on the talent identification phase of the recruiting life cycle. It actually is possible to take a passive role in candidate sourcing.

How?

If you’re sorting through, contacting and recruiting candidates who have responded to your job postings – you’re not having to actually find the candidates…they’re coming to you.

If you’re tracking down, contacting and recruiting candidates that have been referred to you by employees of your company or other candidates - you’re not having to actually identify the candidates…someone else has already done that for you.

Make no mistake – recruiting people who have responded to job postings and people who have been referred to you is an active process, whether the people are looking to make a change in employment or not. However, the candidate sourcing step is passive and reactive – the people have already been identified for you. 

So if you simply must use continue to use the phrase “passive recruiting,” please make sure that you use it to describe the process of recruiting people who have already been identified for you. 

Active Recruiting?

As I’ve already mentioned – recruiting is intrinsically an active process. Anyone who performs the recruiting function is performing “active recruiting,” regardless of the candidate’s job search status (active, passive, not looking…).

However, you can probably guess how I would distinguish the opposite of my more accurate definition of “passive recruiting.” Yes – it has to do with the candidate sourcing step of the recruiting life cycle.

If the candidates aren’t coming to you by way of ad responses and employee referrals, you’re taking an active role in the talent identification phase because you have to go out and hunt them down with no help from anyone else.

Let’s Move Forward!

Just because a whole bunch of people use the same phrase over and over to describe something, it doesn’t make it right. “Passive recruiting” is one of those concepts that has been perpetuated for years without much thought as to what it really means, which has resulted in widespread misuse.

Not only does it not make any grammatical sense – it doesn’t even really exist. It’s impossible for a recruiter to take a passive role in the recruiting process – you’re either recruiting someone or you’re not.

If you happen to be recruiting people who are passive and non-job seekers - you’re not passively recruiting…you’re actively recruiting passive candidates!

Don’t be a lemming and continue to follow the crowd – just let it “passive recruiting” go.

Now when you overhear someone use the phrase “passive recruiting” to describe the process of recruiting passive candidates, you can be “that” recruiter who says ”Actually, you know the phrase ‘passive recruiting’ doesn’t make any sense…”

Passive and Active Sourcing

In all seriousness, I would like to advance and update the recruiting vocabulary by introducing the concepts of passive and active sourcing.

Passive sourcing: Not taking an active role in finding candidates to recruit because the candidates are identified for you – identifying potential candidates primarily through job postings and employee referrals.

Active sourcing: Finding potential candidates to recruit that don’t come to you – identifying potential candidates primarily through e-sourcing and cold calling. 

Notice how the adjectives of “active” and “passive” are not describing the job search status of the candidates being found (which is actually irrelevant, IMO), but rather (and correctly, I might add) describe to the type of sourcing being performed. 

Recruiting is intrinsically an active process, regardless of candidate job search status. However, the means of identifying the candidates you recruit isn’t.  

What do you think?

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 consecutive 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, 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 Part 1 and Part 2 in this series, I explored many of the intrinsic limitations and hidden costs of traditional candidate pipelining – sourcing, screening, and “keeping warm” candidates for which you do not have a current need.

• Is a “push” based strategy that is not based on an actual customer (client or candidate) need
• Often results in recruiters pushing their candidate inventory (what they have on hand) to clients rather than going out finding the best candidates
• Creates a work-in-process inventory that is highly perishable and requires significant time and effort to maintain
• Poses an opportunity cost when recruiters spend time re-qualifying and re-verifying the availability of their candidate pipeline when an actual hiring need arises
• All of the time and effort spent maintaining relationships with candidates that will never be submitted to a hiring manager, interviewed, or hired is waste – it provides no value to candidate or client alike
• Creates 5 of the 7 classic wastes of Lean production: over-production (recruiting more candidates than necessary), over-processing of candidates that will never be advanced in the hiring process, excessive WIP inventory, defects (candidates who do not match actual hiring requirements), and waiting (the vast majority of WIP candidates never move forward in the hiring process and spend most of their time waiting for something to happen that never happens)

Now that I’ve bloodied my knuckles putting a serious beating on candidate pipelining, let’s explore what I think is a better way to get the job done and provide value to candidates and clients: Just-In-Time (JIT) recruiting.

What is Just-In-Time Recruiting?

Just-In-Time (JIT) is a Lean concept that has been highly refined by Toyota. Lean is centered around creating more value with less work, and Lean production considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer (in recruiting – candidates and clients/hiring managers) to be wasteful.

JIT is a pull-based production strategy that strives to improve a business’s return on investment by reducing in-process inventory and associated carrying costs, making it easy for companies to react to specific demands with agility and speed with the goal of producing the exact product (or performing the exact service) that a customer wants, when they want it, in the amount they want.

Applying this concept to talent identification and acquisition, Just-In-Time recruiting is a pull-based strategy of providing hiring managers/clients with candidates that exactly match their needs, when they want them, in the amount they want.

Instead of proactively building and maintaining work-in-process (WIP) candidate pipelines, JIT recruiting has a primary focus of tapping into “raw material” candidate inventory (resumes, candidate profiles, etc.) and contacting delivering candidates only in direct response to a hiring need.

When properly executed, a recruiter can source, contact, screen/interview candidates and submit the best to a hiring authority for consideration within 24-48 hours of being given the “green light” for a specific position – all without having a traditional pipeline of candidates that have been “kept warm.”

Yes, even for “purple squirrel” requirements.

WIP Candidate Inventory is the Main Source of Waste

The activities associated with proactively building and maintaining work-in-process candidate pipelines involve 5 of the 7 wastes identified by Lean/TPS: overproduction, inventory, defects, over-processing, and waiting. These 5 wastes occur mostly due to the fact that traditional candidate pipelining involves contacting and maintaining relationships with the candidates who are contacted.

The relationship maintenance aspect of proactive candidate pipelining automatically qualifies the candidate inventory as work-in-process (WIP) – because most of the candidates are often perpetually “in-process” (the waste of waiting).

WIP candidate pipelines are a perishable inventory that requires time and effort to maintain, and WIP inventory is one of the major wastes that Lean/JIT production is specifically designed to reduce. Moreover, proactively recruiting candidates ahead of actual need leads to overproduction – engaging more candidates than needed to deliver to your customer.

One could easily argue that screening and maintaining relationships with candidates that will never be moved forward in the hiring process (even submitted to a hiring manager for consideration) qualifies as over-processing.

And any candidate that is recruited proactively ahead of need that does not in fact meet the job specifications when it becomes available can qualify as a defect of the recruiting process. The same goes for candidates that were recruited ahead of need that are no longer available or interested when the need actually comes open.

Raw Material Candidate Inventory Reduces Waste

In Part 2, I introduced the concept of “raw material” candidate inventory, and it serves a critical role in Just-In-Time recruiting.

A raw material is something that can be converted by processing into a new and useful product: broadly – something with a potential for improvement or development. I believe that resumes and/or candidate profiles (ATS, social networking sites, etc.) that sourcers and recruiters have access to and are able to retrieve on-demand are essentially candidates in their “raw material” form.

These are people who have been (or can be) identified as potential matches for current and/or future hiring needs based on their candidate data, but no time or energy is spent in an effort to build and maintain a relationship with these potential candidates prior to actual need – they are not “in-process”.

In a Just-In-Time recruiting scenario, sourcers and recruiters do not focus on proactively building and maintaining WIP candidate pipelines ahead of need, and instead focus on producing candidates only in direct response to a hiring need.

They do this by searching for and identifying candidates from their resumes, candidate records (ATS/CRM), and/or social network profiles – candidates in their raw material form – and contacting them only when they have an opening to hire for.

• Resumes are not “in-process” inventory – candidates are not contacted until there is an actual need, which also means there is little-to-no over-processing
• Overproduction does not (or at least should not) occur when the object is to recruit candidates for a specific position once the need has been identified
• Defects are less likely to occur when a recruiter is sourcing and contacting candidates for an actual need rather than a projected/forecasted need
• Only candidates that are contacted and submitted in consideration for a specific position are waiting (as opposed to traditional candidate pipelining in which all candidates that are being “kept warm” are waiting)

Push vs. Pull

Push

If you recall from Part 1 in this series, I identified traditional candidate pipelining as a “push” strategy – one in which batches of a candidates are sourced, contacted and screened, not in direct response to an actual/current customer need. These candidates are processed and “pushed” downstream (kept warm) whether there is a need for each candidate or not.

Push systems often result in the production of large inventories of product that require time and effort to maintain, and that perish or are never fully finished or sold. In recruiting, candidates “perish” when they are no longer available or interested, and they are not “fully finished” unless they are submitted to a hiring manager and interviewed, nor are they “sold” unless they are hired.

Essentially, traditional candidate pipelining that involves the building of an inventory of work-in-process candidates results in a large number of candidates that end up “sitting on the shelf” – most of whom “expire” without ever being fully processed or “bought” (hired). The vast majority of these candidates represent excess inventory that was not directly required for any current openings.

Pull

Just-In-Time is an ideal supply chain system which reduces WIP inventory costs and makes it easy for companies to react to specific customer demands with agility and speed – which is an excellent example of a “pull-based” system.

A pull-based strategy aims to respond to specific needs, not to anticipate them (e.g. a forecast). A fundamental principle of Lean is demand-based flow production. In this type of production setting, inventory is only pulled through each production center when it is needed to meet a customer’s order.

In Just-In-Time recruiting, recruiters only contact, screen and submit candidates in response to a client’s (internal or external) “order” – these processed candidates are pulled through the recruiting lifecycle based on actual demand.

Deli Analogy

A good example of a push-based system would be a deli that pre-makes their sandwiches every day. A deli with this business model would have to anticipate (forecast) the demand each day – by both total quantity and type of sandwiches. Customers are only able to choose from the sandwiches that have already been made – if you don’t like what they have available, you have to go somewhere else. For the deli, the pre-made sandwiches are WIP inventory, and any sandwiches that have been made and are not bought will eventually expire (due excessive waiting), can be considered as defects of the production system, and will be waste as a result of over-processing and overproduction.

A deli with a pull-based system would be something similar to Subway. They don’t pre-make sandwiches – everything is relatively custom made in a Just-In-Time manner based on each customer’s specific order. The only inventory they carry is raw material – the components that make up every possible combination available. There is essentially no work-in-process inventory, no over-processing, no overproduction, and very few defects (because each sandwich is made-to-order). As such, this is a very low-waste system because Subway is never left with any sandwiches that have been made but not sold. And customers are generally happy because they can get their sandwich they way they like it, with some degree of customization.

See where I’m going with this analogy?

Yes – it is that simple.

Don’t resist applying sound and proven Lean/JIT supply chain principles to recruiting because people are not sandwiches (or any commodity or traditional “product”). Lean principles can be applied to ANY service or production process. Move your cheese.

All Pipelining is Not Created Equal

Many people have commented (here and here) on my first 2 posts in this series expressing that the ideal recruiting strategy would involve both JIT recruiting and candidate pipelining.

I am inclined to agree. However, there’s a catch.

Traditional candidate pipelining, in which sourcers and/or recruiters spend a lot of time finding, contacting, screening, and maintaining relationships with candidates for whom there is no current need, is highly wasteful.

I believe that to reduce waste (overproduction, over-processing, defects, waiting, and WIP inventory) and to provide more value to candidates and clients (internal or external), WIP candidate pipelines should be created as a byproduct of JIT recruiting.

In other words, any work-in-process candidate inventory should only be built as a result of contacting candidates for specific positions. Essentially, any candidate that is not available, interested, or the right match for the position being recruited for now becomes WIP inventory.

The critical distinction is the primary focus.

In a Lean/Just-In-Time recruiting model, recruiters have a primary focus of producing the exact candidates that a customer wants, when they want them, in the amount they want, in direct response to actual hiring needs. Recruiters should spend very little, if any, time focused solely on sourcing, contacting, and maintaining relationships with candidates for which there is no current need.

However, any candidate that is contacted for a specific opening that is not interested, currently available, or qualified can be entered into “relationship maintenance” mode – aka WIP inventory/your pipeline.

But should they be?

Provide Real Value to Your Customers

I believe traditional proactive candidate pipelining delivers very little value to the customers involved – candidates and clients alike.

I think this is mainly due to the fact that traditional candidate pipelining practices were developed primarily to aid recruiters in delivering candidates to hiring managers/clients in a timely fashion, as well as to provide greater insight into each candidate’s motivators which can facilitate closing and control. I don’t know about you, but none of that sounds like it puts the candidates’ interests first.

I have heard all of the “benefits” recruiters claim that candidates supposedly gain as a result of being in regular contact with recruiters while they’re being “kept warm” – industry/market information, resume and interview advice, etc. It certainly sounds good coming from a recruiter.

However, I’ve spoken with many active, passive, and non-job seekers who have candidly told me that they feel that it is a waste of their time to be in regular contact with a number of recruiters who have nothing “real” to offer them. It’s not that industry/market intel and interview/career advice isn’t appreciated or that it doesn’t provide any value, but it’s not what most people (candidates, mind you – not recruiters themselves – they are a little biased) see as the ultimate value that recruiters provide.

Also, most people are busy, have a life, and already have plenty of friends - do you really think that all of these great candidates out there need a new best friend or have the time to maintain a “relationship” with multiple recruiters? Do you think they want to?

Yes, developing, building, and maintaining relationships with great candidates will always be the central pillar of effective recruiting. However, from the candidate’s point of view, what do you think is the ultimate value you provide as a recruiter?

Do you think it is being “kept warm” in relationship maintenance mode and getting industry and career advice they could just as easily get from a blog, or that they are already getting from another recruiter?

If you take an objective step back, I find it hard to believe that no one else doesn’t see that traditional candidate pipelining primarily serves to benefit the recruiter – not the candidate, nor the client/hiring manager.

Most recruiters contact and build relationships with candidates ahead of an actual hiring need in the hopes that when a position finally does open up, they can contact the candidates they’ve built a relationship with and submit them to their hiring manager in a timely fashion.

One might be able to argue that traditional candidate pipelining does deliver value to clients because it can aid (but does not guarantee) a recruiter in being able to produce candidates when a client or manager needs them. However, as I’ve detailed in this post, a Just-In-Time recruiting model can effectively render traditional proactive candidate pipelining unnecessary and obsolete as a method of delivering the right candidates at the right time, in the right amount to your clients.

In fact, JIT recruiting can provide more value to your clients in that you can spend less time pushing your pre-packaged candidate inventory and spend more time finding and recruiting the best candidates, rather than spending all of your time trying to maintain and re-qualify your WIP candidate inventory that will inevitably and regularly perish.

Some Tough Questions for You

I realize that last section may have rattled some people. I think I even hear faint cries of “blasphemy!”

Hey, what can I say? I am trying to get people to think, question their assumptions, question what they’ve been taught (the assumptions of others), question the very foundation of what most people believe is THE way to recruit. That’s what it takes to make progress and improve a process – to find a better way.

To that end, here are some questions I’d like you to answer:

• Precisely WHY do you maintain relationships with candidates?
• What is the ultimate value you provide to candidates? Your clients/hiring managers?
• What are you paid to do?
• How much time should a sourcer/recruiter spend maintaining relationships with pipelined candidates for whom they have no current needs?
• What is the ideal level of candidate processing prior to actual need?
• How often should you stay in touch with in-process candidates?
• How many candidates can you realistically maintain a “relationship” with?
• Do you honestly feel that you are providing maximum value to candidates that you “keep warm,” but ultimately never even get submitted to a hiring manager in consideration for an opening?

Part 4, Really?

When I started to write the first post in this series, I wasn’t even intending it to be a series!

Innocently enough, I thought I could bang all of this stuff out in one article. However, when I started outlining all of the content and even in rough draft form it started to approach 8000 words (this post alone is over 2900 words), I realized there was no way to realistically package the paradigm shift involved in the comparison of traditional candidate pipelining vs. JIT recruiting into one post.

With each week that I set out to write the final post in this series, I both want to and find it necessary to go into more detail to thoroughly explore and explain the issues involved. If you do some Internet research on the topic of Lean or JIT recruiting – you can find a number of results, but they’re most are fairly shallow and don’t go into much detail. So I’m doing my part and adding some deeper content for others to find.

I thought this would be the final post – however, I’ve realized that you deserve one more, one specifically dedicated to HOW to achieve a JIT recruiting model.

I’ll also address many of the excellent comments and questions I’ve received in response to Parts 1 and 2.

While I work on finishing Part 4 (no easy task!), take a stab at answering those tough questions I asked above, and be sure to “step outside of the box” in an effort to leave your comfort zone.

Read Part 4 in the series here

In Part 1 of this series, I explored and challenged the practice of traditional candidate pipelining.

Some people may have interpreted my last post on the subject to mean that I don’t believe in any form of proactively building candidate pipelines. That would be incorrect. Anyone that really knows me knows that I am not a black/white, either/or kind of guy.

What I am is the kind of guy that will tell you that anyone who says there is only 1 way to do something is ALWAYS wrong, because there is always more than 1 way to do anything. I’m also the kind of person who wants to find the BEST way of doing a thing – I am not satisfied to do things “the way they’ve always been done,” nor will I blindly accept what other experts tout as best practices.

There is always a better way.

The comments I received from Part 1 in the series were fantastic! They gave me significant insight into what many of the industry heavyweights think – and it’s obvious that traditional candidate pipelining is alive, highly valued, and practiced often.  

At the end of Part 1, I mentioned that the ugly truth is that proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need has many intrinsic limitations and hidden costs that no one seems to want to think or talk about.

So let’s talk about them.

The Hidden Costs of Pipelining Candidates

No one seems to attach a value to all of the time and effort it takes to develop and maintain Work-in-process (WIP) candidate inventory – a pipeline of candidates that have been sourced, screened, evaluated, and “kept warm” through ongoing relationship management.

But don’t kid yourselves – there is a heavy cost associated with all of this work!

Building and maintaining a traditional pipeline of candidates requires quite a bit of time and effort. First you have to source well qualified candidates who closely match the forecasted/projected requirements – this often means a mix of phone sourcing, internet sourcing, social recruiting, and network/referral recruiting.

Then you need to screen and evaluate the potential candidates to verify that they are in fact good at what they do. After that, you’ll have to stay in regular contact with them to maintain a relationship and stay abreast of any changes in their situation and motivators.

Multiply this effort X 20, 50, 100+ candidates and simply the relationship management aspect of recruiting becomes the single largest time consuming aspect of pipelining candidates.

There must be some value being provided by all of this work being performed to proactively find, screen, and build and manage relationships with candidates for whom you don’t currently have a need, right?

From the comments I received on Part 1 in this series, I can tell many seasoned recruiting veterans certainly know the value that candidate pipelines generate for them.

However, the real question is what value is a recruiter providing to their customers – both candidate and client (hiring manager) – by all of this pipelining activity?

That question is trickier to answer than most people think. It’s actually a pretty deep question, and it can’t be answered by you. Value can only be determined by your customers – both candidates and clients. I’ll be dedicating a whole post to this concept in the near future.

Waste

I think that a large percentage of the time and effort associated with proactively building WIP candidate pipelines (candidates that have been found, screened/evaluated, and kept “warm”) is pure muda.

Muda is a Japanese term for an activity that is wasteful and doesn’t add value or is unproductive. One of the key steps in Lean production and the Toyota Production System is the “identification of which steps in a process add value and which do not. By classifying all the process activities into these two categories it is then possible to start actions for improving the former and eliminating the latter.”

It’s been a LONG time since I’ve written about my theories of Lean Recruiting – I honestly worry that it’s not a topic most people are interested in reading about because it is definitely “outside of the box” of traditional recruiting. However, I feel that Lean production concepts (including JIT sourcing/recruiting) will be a big part of the future of recruiting and staffing.

“Lean production is a practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Basically, lean is centered around creating more value with less work.” Now can you see why I’m such a Lean nut?

And remember – we’re not talking about the value to YOU, we’re talking about the value to your customers – candidates and clients.

The 5 Deadly Wastes of Candidate Pipelines

The activities associated with proactively building and maintaining work-in-process candidate pipelines involve 5 of the 7 wastes identified by Lean/TPS: overproduction, inventory, defects, over-processing, and waiting.

Overproduction

This happens each time you engage more candidates than needed to deliver to your customer. Proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need almost always leads to overproduction. Chances are you’ve never looked at it this way.

Inventory

A proactively built pipeline of WIP candidates is inventory and requires time and effort to maintain. Sitting in the “relationship maintenance” phase does not provide  a real value for the candidates or clients, and what happens when the positions you pipelined candidates for never get approved or never become available?

Defects

According to Lean, a “defect” is something that does not conform to specifications or expectations.
I’m not suggesting that the people themselves are defects. However, candidates that are proactively sourced, contacted, screened, and with whom a relationship is maintained that do not ultimately match the actual hiring need are defects of the pipelining process. Defects arise whenever job specifications/requirements change from forecast, rendering pipelined candidates no longer qualified, or when candidates are no longer interested, available, or when their motivators change change away from your opportunity.

Forecasts are never perfect – they can’t be.  Positions and requirements change, and people don’t stay interested or available forever.

Over-processing

Over-processing occurs any time more work is done than what is required by the customer. Screening and building and maintaining relationships with candidates that will never be submitted to a client/manager can be seen as performing more work than necessary. Are your customers (candidates and clients) requiring you to maintain relationships with a large number of people who will likely no longer be available or interested or even qualified when you actually have a need? 

Waiting

Whenever candidates are not being advanced through the recruiting and hiring process, they are waiting. In most traditional recruiting processes, a large part of a candidate’s life is spent waiting to be moved forward in the process. Maintaining relationships with candidates is not moving forward – it’s a holding pattern, which for many candidates, is permanent.

This is What I’ve Got vs. This is the Best Candidate

One of the biggest issues with building candidate pipelines/work-in-process candidate inventory is quite insidious.

What does a recruiter do when they’ve built a deep candidate pipeline and a specific hiring need finally becomes available? They will go to their candidate pipeline of course. 

At first glance, this seems like the logical thing to do – they’ve spent all of this time and effort building their work-in-process candidate pipeline – so why wouldn’t they start there? However, when recruiters do this, what they’re essentially doing is going through their inventory – what they happen to have on hand – which they produced not in response to this specific and “real” need, but a more general forecasted need.

Does this sound like a process designed to produce the best candidate at the right time?

I’ve watched many recruiters push their inventory. In many cases, after sorting through their candidate pipeline and determining who is still available, interested, and who actually fits the opening(s) – they may have had some candidates to submit to a client/hiring manager. However, the probability that the “best” candidates in their pipelines were still available and interested was low.

The issue here is pushing candidates just because you have them, without asking the critical question of whether or not they are actually the best candidates you can find.

Opportunity Cost

One of the opportunity costs of developing traditional candidate pipelines comes in the form of spending time and effort following up with candidates and checking to see if they are still available, interested and qualified rather than simply going out and finding the best candidates available.

When that position finally opens up for which you’ve been pipelining for – your first order of business is to make contact with everyone in your pipeline to see who is still available, who’s still interested, and who actually fits the job specifications. This can take a lot of time and effort – time and effort that could arguably be better spent simply going out and finding the best candidates you can, rather than checking your inventory.

And what happens when none of the best candidates in your pipeline are available, interested, or even fit your current hiring need?

Perhaps the reason why many recruiters seem to have too little time to find more and better candidates is because they’re spending so much time maintaining relationships with their candidate pipelines rather than trying to find the right people.

The Alternative to Work-In-Process Inventory

Now that we’ve taken a critical look at traditional pipelining – proactively building work-in-process (WIP) candidate inventory – let’s take a look at another way of viewing candidate inventory.

If you recall, work-in-process inventory is comprised of candidates that a recruiter stays in routine contact with, without a specific and current need. This is what many refer to as the relationship maintenance phase. It’s called “work-in-process” because they’ve been “processed” (sourced, contacted, and screened to some extent) and they also remain “in-process” as long as the recruiter maintains routine contact with them.

So could there be a form of candidate inventory that is not “in-process?”

Yes – I’m glad you asked!

Raw Material Inventory

I believe that resumes and/or candidate profiles (ATS, social networking sites, etc.) that sourcers and recruiters have access to and have the ability to retrieve on-demand are essentially candidates in their “raw material” form.

A raw material is something that is acted upon or used by human labor to create some product. To paraphrase Merriam Webster’s definition, raw material is material that can be converted by processing into a new and useful product: broadly – something with a potential for improvement or development.

“Raw material” candidate inventories consist of readily accessible resumes and/or relatively detailed candidate data (ATS solutions, resume databases, LinkedIn, etc.). These are people who have been identified as potential matches for current and/or future hiring needs based on their candidate data, but no time or energy is spent in an effort to build and maintain a relationship with these potential candidates prior to actual need.

Now, before you go thinking that I am commoditizing people – I’m not.

Remember, the resumes/candidate/social media profiles are the raw material – NOT the people they represent.

So What’s the Alternative to Traditional Candidate Pipelining?

I know it’s not easy getting people to question “the way it’s always been done.” That’s why I’ve spent so much time thoroughly exposing some of the intrinsic issues associated with traditional candidate pipelining.

Now that I’ve shown you a different way to look at candidate inventory (WIP vs. raw material), in my next post I will explain Just-in-Time sourcing and recruiting, under what conditions it can be achieved, and why it’s superior to traditional candidate pipelining.

I’ll also reveal what I believe is the ideal method of pipelining candidates.

Yes, I know that it might come as a bit of a shock to hear that I do believe in building candidate pipelines, especially after the thrashing I’ve given to proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need. However, the method of pipelining I’ve used to be highly productive and to provide maximum value to both candidates and clients isn’t traditional pipelining.

Speaking of value – In my next post I’m thinking of exploring what the true value is that recruiters provide candidates. Here’s a hint - it’s not pipelining. Because when you really get down to it, pipelining primarily helps YOU, not the candidate.

But more on that next week.

Click here to read Part 3

Last week I wrote about how I learned to use Boolean search to leverage information systems to quickly source candidates, and I challenged the concept and practice of building candidate pipelines.

Amybeth Hale commented on my post (thank you – you inspired me to finally write this one!) and mentioned that she was puzzled by the mention of the fact that I never pipelined candidates. I’ve literally never had to. Not for the rarest skillset, the most challenging under-market compensation, the highest security clearance, 3rd shift, 100% travel - I’ve successfully recruited for these and more from scratch. Honestly, I’ve never known any other way.

Amybeth feels that my experience may be somewhat unique and this might not be replicable by other sourcers, recruiters, or recruiting organizations. I’ll agree on the first part – that my experience may be uncommon – I’m undeniably a product of the specific environment and circumstances under which I entered the recruiting industry. However, I have to respectfully disagree on the second part. I won’t apologize for it (nor would Amybeth want me to), because professional debate is a good thing, and we should all welcome it! There’s no critical thought or learning involved if we all agree on everything. 

On the surface, pipelining candidates and building candidate inventories seems to be just plain and simple common sense. However, sometimes what just “feels right” may in fact not actually be the most effective and efficient method of doing a thing.

Thomas Edison (I’m a fan) once said, “There is always a better way.” My goal has always been to find it. Whether it comes to quickly finding great candidates, creating voicemail and email techniques to get the non-job seeker to respond, developing candidate closing and control techniques, implementing effective time and activity management, etc. - I want to be using the BEST possible way to do a thing.  Don’t you?

Keep an Open Mind

I know I am in the minority in my view of candidate pipelining – I’m going to ask you (most likely in the majority) to have an open mind and not just simply “stick to your guns” and what you know/what you’ve been taught. If you are a passionate candidate pipeliner and you’ve built a successful career around that practice – congratulations!

However, be aware that there are other ways to be successful in recruiting, and they might actually be more efficient and/or effective. You’re reading the words of someone who’s been highly productive and successful without ever having to pipeline a single candidate, I’ve never had the benefit of a hiring forecast, and I’ve outperformed all candidate pipeliners I’ve worked with head-to-head on the same positions consistently – even when they’ve had a head start! 

How was I able to do this? That’s the good part - there’s a science of sorts behind the success, and it IS trainable and replicable.

Get ready for a paradigm shift – I’m going to move your cheese.

So What is Candidate “Pipelining” Anyway?

I think it’s critical that we first come to a common definition of pipelining candidates. While on the surface we may all appear to be talking about the same thing, we may not be – so to remove any confusion, let’s settle upon David Szary’s definition of developing candidate pipelines: “A pipeline/network of talented professionals (active and/or passive job seekers, pre-screened or not) that you regularly communicate with regarding opportunities with your organization. A pipeline of candidates, that when an opening comes up, you can immediately contact and engage in discussions about the opportunity and/or to network.”

That seems to be as good of an explanation of candidate pipelines as I’ve come across – let me know if you have any refinements or suggestions. I also agree with David’s assessment that most hiring managers have unrealistic expectations (having a candidate pipeline is the magical answer to all challenging hiring needs) and that pipelined candidates are always available (when in fact they are highly ”perishable” – regardless of their job search status).

Work-In-Process Inventory 

Developing a pipeline of candidates is essentially the development of a candidate “inventory” in the sense of supply chain management – candidates are “held available in stock” for ready access. Furthermore, the cache of candidates built through proactive pipeline recruiting can be classified as a specific type of candidate inventory: work-in-process.   

Work-in-process is a production/supply chain concept, used to describe “unfinished” inventory in a production process - this inventory is ”either just being fabricated or waiting in a queue for further processing or in a buffer storage.”

A group of candidates that a recruiter stays in routine contact with, without a specific and current need (essentially what Amybeth refers to as relationship maintenance), is essentially a work-in-process (WIP) candidate pipeline. 

When most recruiters talk about proactively pipelining candidates – they’re really referring to building work-in-process (WIP) candidate inventories. Candidates in a work-in-process pipeline are typically people identified by a sourcer or a recruiter as people whose work history/experience somewhat closely matches the kinds of positions that an organization typically recruits for. Once identified, these candidates are contacted and screened (to some extent).

These are candidates that are waiting on further “processing” (screening, interviewing, networking, etc.), or essentially remain permanently “in process” – a relationship is maintained with them indefinitely, as the vast majority of these candidates never become a “finished product” (are never hired).  

Candidates in a WIP pipeline may be active, passive, or not even looking, and may or may not precisely fit any current hiring needs. However, time and effort is expended to build and maintain a relationship with these candidates to be ready when an opening does arise, or when the candidate’s situation changes and they become available, or to simply network with to gain intel and referrals.

Building Candidate Pipelines is a “Push” Strategy

By definition, candidate pipelines consist of people that are contacted and communicated with without a current need – the whole point of a pipeline of candidates is to have a cache of candidates ready before a specific need arises.

This is what is referred to as a push-based strategy - one in which batches of a product (candidates) are created, not in response to an actual/current customer need, and are processed and “pushed” downstream (in-process) whether there is a need for the specific product produced or not. Push systems often result in the production of large inventories of product that perish (expire, are no longer available, etc.), or are never “sold” (fully finished/utilized/hired, etc.).

The “Logic” Behind Candidate Pipelining

On the surface, pipelining candidates seems like an excellent solution to the challenge of having well qualified candidates available when you need them.

The idea is that if you build a cache of strong candidates before you need them, you will surely fill positions quicker in the future when the need arises.  The belief behind building candidate pipelines is that time and energy invested on the “front end” (aka, “proactive recruiting”) can lead to significant time savings later, and perhaps even better candidates due to having more intimate knowledge of the individuals (from the ongoing recruiter/candidate relationship) you are pipelining than you would have with candidates you just identified and contacted for the first time once a hiring need arose (“reactive recruiting”). 

The Need For Candidate Pipelines

For many recruiting and staffing organizations, proactively building talent pipelines is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that appropriately qualified talent is available when the actual need arises. It appears to be the ultimate answer to the question of, “What will we do if we get an opening for which we do not have any candidates?”

I think it is very important to examine exactly why most organizations and recruiting professionals believe that building candidate pipelines is the only answer to filling open positions. 

This may seem too obvious, but no one ever seems to directly address it, so I will say it. I feel that most recruiters must proactively recruit and build candidate pipelines simply because they are unable to deliver high quality and well matched candidates within 24-48 hours of receiving a hiring need from scratch without a pre-built candidate pipeline. In other words – most people simply can’t do it any other way.

Is there an Alternative to Pipelining Candidates?

Although most recruiters are unable to deliver high quality and well matched candidates within 24-48 hours of receiving a hiring need from scratch without a network of pipelined candidates – it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Just because developing candidate pipelines is “the way it’s always been done” doesn’t mean it’s the most effective or efficient way to identify and recruit candidates and fill positions in a timely fashion. 

The ugly truth is that proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need has many intrinsic limitations and hidden costs that no one seems to want to think or talk about.

There’s always a better way. You’ll just have to wait until next week to read about it.

Click here to read Part 2

When it comes to my theories and best practices for leveraging information systems for quickly finding highly qualified candidates, I am often asked, ”So, how did you figure all of this stuff out?”

It’s a fantastic question, and I am happy to be asked it, but my answer doesn’t seem to satisfy anyone. 

The short answer is literally that “I just figured it out.”

The long answer provides some insight into how I figured some of this candidate search stuff out, but I think the real value and message of my personal story is that anyone can become quite proficient at electronic talent discovery – and it’s less dependent on any training you receive and more on how you approach your job.

When people ask me how I’ve managed to “figure out” all of this candidate search stuff, it seems they want to hear that I went through some specific training program, that I read a certain book, that I worked under some sourcing guru or something similar.

The reality is I’ve never worked under any sourcing guru, I’ve never attended any sourcing training classes, and I didn’t read any books on candidate sourcing. FAR from it.

In fact, when I started in the recruiting industry at a small, privately held staffing agency in Northern Virginia in January 1997, I received very little recruiting training, let alone any specialized training on how to find candidates.  I was shown a Lotus Notes-based C-PAS resume database and told “this is where you find candidates.”

It is important to know that I did not enter the staffing industry with any prior experience or advantages that would help me in leveraging information systems to identify talent. When I started in recruiting, I did not own a computer. I graduated college with a B.A. in Psychology, not “even” a B.S., let alone a technical degree like Computer Science or Information Systems. Although I was told that the company’s C-PAS database supported Boolean search, I did not know what Boolean search was. 

Not only did I not know what Boolean search was – I did not know you could find resumes on the Internet. I did not know about AltaVista, and Google did not exist yet.

In 1997, my company did not use any job boards – I did not know Monster existed (or OCC, for that matter – for those who recall where Monster got their search interface from).

My company’s main source of candidates came from people responding to newspaper classified ads who faxed their resumes in, which were subsequently scanned into the C-PAS database, and from resumes collected from job fairs which were also scanned in. I believe that the resume database had about 70,000 records or so when I started with the company.

My Training

My “training” (picture me using air quotes for emphasis) consisted of someone showing me how to navigate C-PAS, telling me about the AND and OR Boolean operators (nothing about NOT), and being told that you could find candidates in C-PAS by entering in keywords from job descriptions. There certainly wasn’t any “formal” training – I think this was all explained to me in about 20 minutes.

Yes, I am serious.

I was never trained on cold calling/phone sourcing – it never even occurred to me to try to call into a company to find people. Our database was how we found candidates, and how any recruiter at any other company found their candidates, for all I knew.

How I Learned Boolean Search

Absent of any real training and lacking a mentor, I essentially learned the art and science of leveraging Boolean search strings to find candidates the hard way – through trial and error.

“Trial and error” is really common language for the scientific method- investigating, acquiring new knowledge, and correcting and integrating previous knowledge. According to Wikipedia, “To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.”

Although I did not know it at the time, and I certainly wouldn’t have told anyone that I was learning my job through the scientific method, this is pretty much what I was actually doing. If something I was trying to do didn’t work – I didn’t have anyone else to go to for answers - so I had to get creative, experiment, and keeping hacking at it until I finally found a way that worked and got me the results I needed. This is a horribly painful and frustrating process, but I have since learned that it’s actually a very effective method of learning. 

For example, if I needed a QA Test Engineer with experience testing applications developed in VB, I’d throw all of the search terms from the job description and required skills in and run with it. Once I exhausted those results, if I didn’t have the candidates I needed, failing to cover the position I was assigned was not an option – I had to find another way. So I’d try something else (i.e., experiment and test a hypothesis) – like wonder if every QA Test Engineer who has experience testing applications written in VB would actually mention VB in their resume…and I would then use AND NOT (VB or “Visual Basic”) to target those people and start calling QA Test Engineers who didn’t mention VB in their resume and simply ask them what languages the applications they have experience testing had been developed in.

After 5 calls to people who did not mention VB in their resume, I found a woman who had in fact tested applications written in VB (and I subsequently placed her). Thus I learned part 1 of what I now call the “Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing,” which states that for every search term you are thinking of using in your Boolean string, first ask yourself if everyone with that skill, experience, or title would mention it in their resume. Because I discovered that many don’t.

I learned part 2 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing(which states that for every search term you are thinking of using in your Boolean string, consider every possible way that it can be mentioned)  through simple observation. As I reviewed my search results, I would notice terms in resumes that I did not specifically search for that seemed to mean the same thing as my search terms. I would make note of these alternate terms and incorporate them back into my search, continuously refining and improving the searches. 

My Performance

Although I am pretty good at what I do now, my career in recruiting didn’t start with any indication that I would be any better than average at finding and placing candidates. In fact, the owner of the company told me later that he was almost sure I would fail.

I started in recruiting on January 13th, 1997, and I did not make my first placement until March – it was a financial analyst at AOL (everyone remembers their first hire, right?).  

However, from April to December 1997, I placed 71 more candidates, which is an average of just about 8 hires per month, leading me to be recognized as the Recruiter of the Year, outperforming more experienced and tenured recruiters by a wide margin (the next closest recruiter had 30 fewer placements for the year). And this was accomplished in an environment without any candidate “ownership,” for those who are familiar with the agency vernacular.

I can tell you precisely how I achieved those numbers. While I had pretty good candidate relationship development skills, good candidate closing and control, good voicemail techniques, and good matching skills (as good as any recruiter with 3-12 months of experience), I had developed the ability to use Boolean searches to quickly find large quantities of precisely matched and highly qualified candidates in direct response to client/manager needs – faster and better than most. And, I planned every single day, without fail.

Interestingly, to this day, I find that most sourcers and recruiters do not come in each day with a call plan. Having a daily call plan to execute first thing in the A.M. that I developed the previous afternoon from my searches was definitely one of the keys to my productivity and my success. I eventually got to the point that if I searched for and built a call list of 20 potential candidates for a given position, I would have 2 A+ candidates submitted on the position within 24-48 hours, and typically have 1-2 backups. 

For those who are interested, in my first year as an agency recruiter, I averaged over 3 external candidate submittals (candidates presented to client hiring managers) per day – my record was 14 in a single day. Most months I would have 65-70 external submittals and over 20 interviews (some call them send outs). As most recruiting managers/directors can attest to – it’s difficult to NOT get 6-10 hires per month from those numbers.

Based on my early performance, I was promoted to recruiting manager and then later to director of recruiting, where I focused most of my time on training and developing my recruiting staff. Interestingly, after the privately held company I worked for was acquired by a large publicly traded staffing firm, I took a position as a “market manager” of recruiting where I was responsible for personal production as a recruiter as well as for managing a team of recruiters. After 7 years of not “working a desk,” I was able to quickly ramp up and achieve “Platinum Performer” status (top 5% firm-wide) in less than 12 months.

When I hit the phones in 2005, I did not have a network of people/candidates – I started quite literally from scratch. I was able to quickly achieve high levels of performance based primarily on two things: #1 My ability to quickly find the right people, and #2 My daily planning. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Lessons Learned

I think it’s been a huge benefit to be self taught. By no means is the way I came to know what I know about candidate sourcing ideal, nor is it practical or scalable. However, by having to figure everything out on my own I had no preconceived notions about sourcing, recruiting, the “right way” to do anything, or what was possible/not possible. There was no proverbial “box.”

For example:

• Candidate Pipelines: I’ve literally never had to focus on pipelining candidates, because I’ve always been able to pretty much find whatever I needed within 24-48 hours. Many years into my career, I would read articles about the importance of developing talent pipelines, and my response was incredulity. I honestly could not figure out why anyone would have to identify candidates prior to having a confirmed need. It seemed like such a waste of time and effort based on my personal experience – what happens if the needs never come? What happens if the positions do finally come, but all of your pipelined candidates don’t match the requirements (they’re rarely exactly as forecasted), or are they are no longer available or entertaining making a change? Later I would learn that my instincts were surprisingly accurate, at least according to the Toyota Way/Lean philosophy. Why bother building inventories of candidates based on forecasts when you can achieve Just-In-Time recruiting?
• Active/Passive Candidates: I was never told that some candidates were “active” and that others were “passive,” nor was I brainwashed into thinking that “passive” candidates were always better than “active” candidates. If anything, I learned that everyone is a candidate. I never thought twice about calling a resume that was 1, 2, 3, or 4+ years old – in fact, some of my easiest, most frictionless placements came from people whose resume had not been updated in 4 years. It’s a funny thing – if you find the right people and present them with the right opportunity – you can turn a non-job seeker into one. Imagine that.
• Phone Sourcing: I’ve never had to make a truly “cold” call because I’ve always been able to quickly find the candidates I need, or find the people who know the candidates I need…and to be honest, after I learned that some people rely heavily on cold-call phone sourcing to identify candidates – it never really made sense to me, because it has many intrinsic limitations when compared to searching information systems, including low control over critical candidate variables, and a low ROI.

There is No Sourcing Gene

It always bothers me when people say I have a “talent” for candidate sourcing – that all too easily “explains away” everything I have worked so very hard to figure out. 

There is no gene for sourcing and recruiting. Besides, Talent is Overrated – deliberate practice is where it’s at. I literally come into work every day to get better at what I do. Most people don’t – they just come into work and do what they’ve always done. It seems like such a subtle difference, but I can assure you, it’s not.

I honestly don’t think there is anything unique about me – I am simply a product of my environment. If I had not started in the recruiting industry in a sink-or-swim environment, or if I had more in depth training (and learned the ”right” way to source/recruit) or if I had been taught that the only way to find high quality candidates was through phone sourcing and cold calling, I know for a fact that I would not have the skills or ability I have today, and you would not be reading this blog! Looking back, I am thankful for my lack of training and for the unique opportunity that I was given – it played a big part in making me who I am today.

While there is definitely no sourcing/recruiting gene – I do have to give some credit to my personality traits (there’s that B.A. in Psychology rearing its head again). I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I am very competitive (I hate to lose at anything), I don’t enjoy doing things unless I do them well, I really enjoy figuring things out/solving problems, and I don’t give up – I will find a way. 

If I were to self-diagnose, I’d say I have an obsessive personality. The more “PC” way to describe an obsessive personality includes “focused,” “driven,” “goal oriented,” “never gives up,” “has to be the best,” etc. I have a theory that most top performers in business or sports (or anything, for that matter) have obsessive personalities. But that’s another post entirely.

The moral of this story is that you don’t need any special training or any particular background to become exceptional at sourcing candidates or any step in the recruiting life cycle  - in fact, I’d argue that all you really need is the desire to become very good at it, and the focus and drive to put in the deliberate practice necessary to achieve your goal. If you’re truly committed and dedicated to mastering a thing, you will, or you’ll come close trying.

What is the ultimate value you provide to candidates as a recruiter?

I want you to really think about that question before proceeding. In this post, there will be more questions raised than answers provided. Please take a moment to ensure that you have your thinking cap on and that your mind is open. 

Who Defines Value?

From the candidate’s perspective, what do you think the real value provided by a recruiter is? There are countless recruiting articles and blog posts (such as this one referencing Guanxi) that will tell you that the relationship is more important than the transaction itself. But for the majority of candidates, is it? Really?

I’m a little bit of a Lean freak. One of the core principles of Lean philosophy is Value - every activity in a business should be scrutinized for how it adds value to the final product or service provided to the customer. A lot of activities previously thought to be essential in a business turn out to be non-value adding when evaluated from the perspective of the customer.

There’s the key – “when evaluated from the perspective of the customer.” It’s one thing for people in the recruiting profession to talk about the value of relationships - but it’s ultimately the customer who defines value.

Imagine this scenario: Recruiter A (“John”) has been developing a professional relationship with a “passive” candidate (“Brett”) for the past year, but John has never been able to find precisely the right opportunity for Brett to make a move. Recruiter B (“Jenny”) finds an old version of Brett’s resume and calls him with an opportunity that happens to very closely align with exactly what Brett has been looking for. Within 1 week, Brett interviews for Jenny’s opening, receives and accepts an offer. 

From Brett’s perspective – which recruiter provided more value?  

How Do You Define a “Relationship” With a Candidate?

I think that “relationship” is one of the most overrused words in recruiting – it’s slung around with reckless abandon, yet it is rarely defined or explained.

And I can see why. The definition of “relationship” in Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary isn’t very helpful: “the state of being related or interrelated, the realtion connecting or binding participants in a relationship, a state of affairs existing between those having relations or dealings.” Umm…okay.

However, the the definition of “relation” (the root of “relationship”) is more helpful: ”an aspect or quality (as resemblance) that connects two or more things or parts as being or belonging or working together or as being of the same kind; the state of being mutually or reciprocally interested (as in social or commercial matters)”

And there it is. To paraphrase – a connection built by working together in mutual interest.

In this sense, a relationship between a recruiter and a candidate can be defined as a connection built as a result of them working together towards the common goal of the candidate making the next step in their career.

How do you define a “relationship” with a candidate?

Relationships – How Many and How Deep?

For a recruiter to ever hope of assisting candidates with making the next step in their career, certainly they will have to get to know each candidate to at the very least assess their current situation, understand the candidate’s motivators, and learn specifically about what the candidate would ideally like to be doing.

But in order to qualify as a “relationship,” exactly how deep does the interaction between a recruiter and a candidate have to go? 

In his “The Death of Sourcing” post on RecruitingBlogs, John Sumser explained his belief that “Next generation recruiting is about relating intimately, not about mutual discovery. It’s about fidelity and long term value exchange, not one night stands.”

In response Paul Davenport commented, “By the numbers: 1 hire requires approx. 10 interviews (phone and full face-to-face). 10 interviews require 40 profiles (resume, candidate profile completed by Recruiter). 40 profiles require 100 solid “hits” (candidate generation through passive and active search). A typical Recruiter carries 20-25 Reqs at any given time and they are rarely all for the same exact description. However, let’s assume for our purposes these req’s are identical. 20 req’s times 40 profiles = 800 profiles…people YOU claim are interested in long-term “fidelity”. Let’s make this easier by cutting everything in half. You still claim that success can only come with intimate, professional relationships with over 400 people. In the ever-changing real world, skills, priorities and hiring targets are constantly moving. How many people do you honestly think a professional can have a true intimate and long-term professional relationship?”

While the numbers and ratios are debatable, Paul raises an excellent point – any recruiter who is responsible for 20 or more positions per month (let alone at one time) will be required to contact a large number of candidates every month in an effort to find and hire the right people.

Some points to ponder:

• Is a recruiter expected to develop intimate and long term relationships with every great candidate they come into contact with? Is that realistic or even possible?
• How many “deep and lasting” candidate relationships do you think can any given recruiter hope to effectively maintain? 
• Do relationships between recruiters and candidates necessarily have to be “intimate and long term?” 
• Do you think that candidates are actually looking for “deep and lasting” relationships with recruiters? 
• Exactly how “deep” does a relationship between a recruiter and a candidate have to be in order to provide value to the candidate? 
• Ultimately, what do candidates want from recruiters? 

“Transactional” Recruiting

I’ve read many recruiting articles that take the position that “relationship recruiting” is superior to the lowly ”transactional recruiting.” That certainly sounds good (it probably feels good to say as well), but I have yet to see those concepts clearly defined. 

Hitting up the dictionary again, “transaction” can be defined as “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other; something transacted, an act, process, or instance of transacting.”

“Transact” is defined as “to carry to completion, to carry on the operation or management of.” 

Hmm…action or activity whereby two parties reciprocally affect and influence each other – nothing intrinsically evil there, in my opinion. What do you think? Is there anything wrong with carrying the relationship to “completion” (a hire, perhaps?) and carrying on the management of the recruiter-candidate relationship?

How effective or productive would a recruiter be if they only focused on building relationships and never sought to achieve hires (transactions) – helping candidates take the next step in their careers? Isn’t that what recruiters do? 

Final Thoughts

If a recruiter happens to find and call a candidate with the right opportunity at the right time, yet hasn’t developed a deep and long term relationship or value exchange with them, are they a bad recruiter? Is the recruiter providing any less value to the candidate? Would the candidate care?

Do all candidates need a new best friend, or another recruiter to have a relationship with?

It’s nice to have a relationship with your doctor, but if they don’t ever actually help you when you need them, how good of a doctor are they? Would you look down upon your doctor for being “transactional” if they spent most of their time helping you when you needed them? 

What is the ultimate value you provide to candidates as a recruiter?

I recently wrote an article for Ryan Leary’s CruiterTalk blog titled, “Anyone Can Learn the ‘Art’ of Sourcing.”Although the main point I wanted to make was that sourcing isn’t all that mysterious or difficult, and that it can be taught and learned with a strong interest to do so and access to proper training and guidance, the post drew some comments and sparked a mini-debate on Twitter over whether or not sourcing and recruiting are more heavily based upon “science” or “art.” I’ve also found that a good number of people seem to think that the “art” of recruiting can’t be taught.

As expected, opinions will vary widely. However, I believe it is critical when examining this controversy that ”science” and “art” be defined. I’ve found that many people struggle to explain exactly what they mean when they say “recruiting is 60% art.” Without a common understanding of the terms involved, there is a danger of misinterpretation down to the semantic level, which can seriously hinder any productive discussion.

So let’s start with “art.”

Art Defined

The Merriam Webster Online Dictionary defines Art as “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation <the art of making friends>”. Additional definitions include ”a branch of learning” and ”an occupation requiring knowledge or skill <the art of organ building>.”

Looking at these definitions, I honestly think most people use the word “art” incorrectly when attempting to express their opinion about whether recruiting is an art or a science. If art is defined as skill acquired by experience, study, or observation, it means that it can be learned as well as taught. Furthermore, skill is defined as “the ability to use one’s knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance. A learned power of doing something competently; a developed aptitude or ability.” So when it comes to the very definition of the word “art,” it appears to be unequivocal that “art” can be learned and taught. 

When I’ve debated with recruiting professionals over the topic of recruiting as art vs. science, it seems to me that what most people think of as “art” is something that is mysterious and not easy explain or to learn, something based more on emotion and tradition than logic. Some have explained to me that the “art” of recruiting is based on intangibles - imagination, creativity, drive, tenacity, ambition, judgment, “feel,” etc. I agree that most of these things can’t be taught or transferred from one person to another. But these intangibles don’t even define “art” – at least not according to the dictionary.

Science Defined

The Merriam Webster Online Dictionary defines Science as “the state of knowing: knowledge as distibuished from ignorance or misunderstanding,” ”a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study <the science of theology>, “something (as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledge <have it down to a science>, and “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.”

“Systematized” means to order systematically - which means something that can be presented as a coherent body of ideas or principles, be methodical in procedure or plan, and marked by thoroughness and regularity.

In my experience, those who feel that recruiting is more art than science seem to look down upon the idea that recruiting can be broken down to a science, as if that would be a bad thing. However, I don’t see anything negative at all in that the entire recruiting life cycle can be systematically and thoroughly broken down into general truths and laws (aka best practices) that can be studied, learned, and applied. Does that sound like a bad thing to you? 

Heading to Wikipedia, we can find that “science” refers to ”any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome. In this sense, science may refer to a highly skilled technique or practice.”

I appreciate the concept that science can refer to a highly skilled technique or practice. Most sourcing and recruiting “experts” would consider themselves highly skilled (I hope). Let’s not forget that “skill” is actually the dictionary definition of “art” (skill acquired by experience, study, or observation).

What I find especially interesting about this definition is that it specifically references the ability to follow a practice that can produce predicable results. If there is not an underlying science to recruiting, how could a recruiter ever hope to produce consistent results and acheive consistent outcomes?

This is very similar to Dr. John Sullivan’s belief that “The primary difference between a function that is driven by science versus on driven by “art” is that the scientific approach allows a business or recruiting process to be repeated again and again with the exact same level of quality and results.” Dr. John Sullivan continues, “As B.V. Cooper, the CEO of QVS International put it so well, “One of our most difficult tasks we face as retained executive search and management consulting professionals is getting our clients to understand that business is (or should be) a repeatable process!” In short, there is little room for the “free form” approach of an art inside a business structure that rewards repeatability of both costs and quality.”

That passage was taken from one of my favorite recruiting articles of all time, “Best Recruiting Practices from the World’s Most Business-like Recruiting Function.” – be sure to click “next” at the bottom to read parts 3, 4, and 5.

All Training Is Not Created Equal

I feel that a good number of the people who think of recruiting as mostly “art” are those who have not had the opportunity to be trained by someone who is capable of breaking the recruiting life cycle down into a systematic practice that when consistently applied, produces predictable results. Others have perhaps never taken the time to think about their recruiting best practices (that hopefully they consistently perform!) and attempt to break them down into defined repeatable processes – but that does not mean that they can’t be broken down into systematized knowldge and taught to others so that they can produce similar results.  

When I started in recruiting, I received very little training. I learned most of my recruiting best practices by trial and error (the poor man’s scientific method) in the pursuit of achieving predicatable results – more closes/hires than anyone else in my company. If you had asked me back in 1997, after I had achieved 71 hires in 9 months within my first year of recruiting, if I felt recruiting was more of an art or more of a science, I probably would have told you that it was more art. However, that would be because at the time, I never thought twice about what I did day in and day out – I just did what I did and I got results.

Only once I was promoted into a recruiting management role did I take the time and effort to step back and take another view of my recruiting best practices. I had to. In order to be able to train others and develop their skills and ability, I had to break my thought processes and actions down into a system of repeatable processes that could produce consistent results. If I didn’t, how could I hope to transfer my knowledge and skills to anyone else?

Just because someone is or has been a top producer, it doesn’t mean that they will be an excellent trainer. I’ve worked with top performers who can tell you WHAT to do, but that can’t really tell you HOW to do it, or explain exactly WHY.  Highly skilled recruiting trainers can tell you WHAT to do, as well as HOW and WHY to do it. The HOW comes from the ability to break a recruiting best practice down to a repeatable process that anyone can apply and follow, and the WHY comes from the deep understanding of exactly why the particular technique or strategy produces consistent results and the ability to explain it in terms that anyone can easily understand.

It’s also important to point out that “once and done” training methods, typically provided by third-party recruiting trainers, aren’t as effective as training delivered by in-house recruiting experts. I’ve trained hundreds of recruiters in my career, and I can tell you definitively that I was most effective when I was in a Recruiting Director role where I worked with a recruiting team day in and day out, hands-on and “sleeves up.” Imagine learning how to play golf with Tiger Woods beside side you every time you played, coaching you and showing you techniques and explaining what he would do in each particular situation and why. 

When I compare that to training scenarios where I visit an office, spend three days with the recruiting team, and then leave and not return for a year (or more!) – it’s an apples to oranges comparison. That’s like getting 3 days of hands-on coaching from Tiger Woods – once. The difference is in the ability to apply the what you’ve been trained to do under the the constant guidance and supervision of an expert. People learn most effectively by DOING (especially under the guidance of an expert), not by listening and watching for an hour, or even for three days.    

Science is Cool and Creative!

I believe some people recoil at the thought that recruiting could be mostly a science because “science” can be perceived to be boring, sterile, and uncreative. However, I think nothing could be further from the truth. Some of the most creative minds are those who work in various scientific disciplines. Do you need to be reminded where Internet came from, Google, your iPhone, the theory of relativity, or Penicillin? Do you think there is nothing exciting or creative about attempting to find a cure for cancer?

The term “science” does not need to carry with it any perceptions of artificial rigidity or a lack of creative thought. The scientific method may sound sterile, yet it refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. Hmm… investigating and learning new things – worthy endeavors that everyone should strive to perform in my book!

The “science” of recruiting does not have to be limited to the mechanics of performing a task or following scripts word for word – the “science” of recruiting actually involves interpretive thought and the creative application of techniques and strategies “on the fly” in dynamic scenarios as required in order to produce consistent results. Yes, recruiters can be trained to think and be creative when faced with objections, difficult positions, hard closes, or any other recruiting challenge.   

My Opinion

Ultimately, recruiting isn’t an “art” OR a “science” – it’s a mix of both. My professional opinion is that recruiting (including sourcing) is 80% “science,” 20% “art.”

If you can’t break something in recruiting down into a process (the WHAT) and explain to someone HOW and WHY to do it, you can’t train it or learn it effectively. However, I firmly believe that recruiting best practices throughout the entire recruiting life cycle can be broken down into repeatable processes that can be explained and taught to others to apply creatively and dynamically. If recruiting could not be broken down into a series of repeatable steps and best practices that produce a predictable outcome, including steps involving thought, interpretation, and analysis - how could recruiting be taught and how could anyone learn it?

Furthermore, I believe that the 20% that is “art” is not actually tied to the recruiting life cycle or process itself. I believe the “art” comes from the person performing the recruiting role - in other words, the “human factor” in the equation. As I’ve previously mentioned – you can’t teach someone to be passionate about recruiting, nor can you teach someone to have a solid work ethic, or to be tenacious and driven to produce great win-win recruiting outcomes. Each recruiter is unique, inevitably bringing their own set of intangibles to the application of recruiting best practices.

In my experience, even judgment and “feel” can be taught to a certain extent – but it won’t come from a single training class. It can be accomplished under the guidance of recruiting manager, coach, or mentor (however you define the role) who works with you on a daily basis and provides you with feedback and suggestions for any scenario you encounter.

I feel that I’ve been able to take what most people mislabel as the “art” of recruiting and transform it to a science – taking recruiting beyond just something that people do and can’t explain, and systematically and thoroughly breaking down the entire recruiting life cycle into general truths and best practices that can be taught, studied, learned, and applied with great success. And I am not alone or special in this regard – many others have been able to accomplish the same thing.

The inability of a person to learn recruiting is more often the result of poor training, a lack of genuine interest and motivation, or a general lack of ability to learn and apply the specific skills necessary to be a recruiter. It is not because recruiting is more “art” than “science.” Just because some people can’t learn recruiting, it does not mean that it can’t be taught. It’s no different than the reason why some people will never be great golfers – no matter how good their training or instructor is, or how often they practice. It just means that some people are not able to pick up the skills necessary to be a highly competant recruiter.  

As for me, I’ve got sourcing and recruiting down to a science.

Let Me Know Your Thoughts

Have an opinion about this topic? Let me know! I am especially interested in getting more ideas from those of you who believe recruiting is more “art” than “science.” My one request is to please do your best to articulate precisely what aspects of recruiting you believe to be “art” – and please be sure to let me know exactly how you define ”art.” Thanks – I look forward to your comments!

As you might be able to tell from the name of my blog, I’m passionate about leveraging information systems for finding candidates. Unless you’re running 1 word or title-only queries, you can’t search the Internet, LinkedIn, Twitter, your ATS/CRM, or a job board resume database without using at least the most basic Boolean logic.

When I post links to my search-focused articles in various LinkedIn groups, I often get comments and responses expressing the sentiment that using various sites and technologies to search for candidates isn’t “real recruiting.” I’m always a little saddened and frustrated to see responses like this, because it reflects the fact that there are plenty of people in the recruiting and staffing industry that just don’t “get it.”

Hysteron Proteron

To say that “real recruiting” lies only in the aspects of establishing relationships with and gaining the interest of, selling to, and consultatively closing ”passive” candidates is preposterous, and in most cases – self serving.

You can be the best relationship builder, interest generator, objection overcomer, opportunity seller, and candidate closer in the universe, but you won’t achieve a single hire/placement until you find the right person to build a relationship with and “close.”

Bottom line - you cannot recruit someone you haven’t found in the first place (that’s where the hysteron proteron part comes in). In other words, that would be like putting the cart before the horse. However, it’s worth pointing out that even the worst “recruiter” in the world, with horrible closing and consulting skills, could get a hire if they found the right person at the right time.

Let that one sink in deeply before reading further. It’s important.

Talent Identification AND Acquisition

The recruiting life cycle includes both sourcing (talent identification) and recruiting (talent acquisition). You can’t hire someone you haven’t identified/found. If anyone reading this article has actually accomplished this feat – please let me know.

While I could be politically correct and make some people feel comfortable by saying that the recruiting life cycle is 50% talent identification and 50% talent acquisition, I won’t. I have to be true to what I know from being in the trenches of the recruiting and staffing industry for a little over 12 years (yet I will be the first to tell you that years of experience is meaningless – you can master the craft of recruiting in less than 2).

Because you can’t close and hire someone you haven’t found, I’d have to say that the talent identification piece of the recruiting lifecycle puzzle is actually bigger than what most people consider to be the “real” part of recruiting – building relationships, overcoming objections, selling and closing. It’s certainly more critical, because in reality, talent acquisition is DEPENDENT upon talent identification.

The Match

Let’s not forget that a significant and highly critical portion of the recruiting lifecycle is actually screening, evaluating, matching and selecting potential candidates. Even if you can find candidates to establish relationships with and uncover and address their career “wounds,” you won’t achieve any hires if you can’t accurately and effectively screen, evaluate and match candidates based on their skills, experience, capabilities, and personality to the positions you’re recruiting for.

And before you can effectively screen and evaluate candidates, you have to first have a deep understanding of the position (and department, project, manager, etc.) you’re hiring for.  Good luck performing ”real recruiting” on positions to don’t fully understand with candidates you can’t truly assess and evaluate.

“Real Recruiting” is Actually Quite Easy

Although many proclaim that building relationships with passive job seekers, understanding the needs and desires of potential candidates, and consultatively selling and closing is the myserious and hard-to-learn “art” of recruiting - I don’t buy it. I’ve never found the “art” of recruiting to be difficult or challenging.

I’ve called plenty of candidates “out of the blue,” with no indication as to what their job search status was – and they had no idea who I was, how I found them, or why I was calling. Talking with potential candidates to discover what’s happening with them, what’s important to them, what they would ideally like to be doing, and matching them with opportunities that closely align with their ideal employment scenario has never been the challenge for me – and I don’t think I’m special or unique in this regard.

If you’re a recruiter and you find talking to and establishing a rapport with people difficult, or if you have a hard time finding out what’s important to people in their career and assisting them with making sound decisions to advance themselves professionally - I’d advise you to make a career change.

Oh…the irony.

E-Sourcing Only SEEMS Easy

Finding and talking with and relating to people isn’t difficult. Finding the right people to talk to has and will always be the real challenge. As I’ve said before – the proverbial haystack is getting larger, exacerbating the issue. Perhaps for this reason alone, sourcing isn’t dead and will never die.

Many of the people who respond to my articles who believe that e-sourcing isn’t a part of “real recruiting” often say that running searches to find people is easy, and that anyone can do it. I agree – running simple and imprecise searches on the Internet, LinkedIn, an ATS/CRM, Monster, etc., is actually quite easy. In fact, deceptively simple.

However, just because you CAN do something, it doesn’t mean you’re any good at it. I can cook, but I’m certainly not a chef. It’s also important to point out that simply having access to something (e.g., the Internet, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) does not imply any level of expertise.

Ever step on a golf course?

Bottom line – finding people is easy. Finding the right people is not.

Illusory Competance

Unfortunately, many people are in a state of ignorant bliss when it comes to their sourcing skills. I believe one of the major contributors to this phenomenon is the fact that when you search a site or a database, it’s impossible to see the candidates your search didn’t find. Sadly, to most sourcers and recruiters – anyone not retrieved by their searches is assumed to simply not exist. The fact that most people aren’t even aware of this is the crux of the issue.

Also at work here is that most people don’t have any basis of comparison when it comes to running searches on social networking sites, the Internet, and resume databases to find people. That’s similar to someone believing they’re pretty good at golf, yet they’ve never seen anyone else, let alone a top professional, play the game.

Technology is Ever-Changing

The core aspects and best practices of what many believe to be the “real” part of the recruiting life cycle haven’t really changed or evolved over time. Essentially – what worked well 20 years ago will still work beautifully today. And that’s a good thing!

However, in just the past 5 years we’ve seen advances in Internet search techniques, highly evolved ATS/CRM applications become available, the rise of social media and social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and countless niche job board resume databases spring up. It seems that a new way to find people electronically springs up almost daily.

With each passing moment, more data becomes available for more people somewhere – whether it be a social media profile, a resume submitted to a company, a Tweet, a blog, a press release, etc. While you can not DIRECTLY find everyone online or in a database somewhere today - with each passing day, you can find more and more people through sourcing. And you actually CAN indirectly find anyone electronically – but that’s a whole ‘nother article.

Unlike relationship building and consultative selling, technology will continue to rapidly change and evolve, requiring those in the recruiting industry to adapt to and learn how to effectively leverage these sources of talent. Anyone failing to do so will be at a competitive disadvantage, whether they are aware of it or not.

The Secret

I’m going to let you in on a little secret I discovered only a few months into my recruiting career. If you can find the right people, there really isn’t much heavy lifting required in the realm of so-called “real recruiting.” Yes, even for the most ”passive” of candidates.

The recruiting life cycle will always involve establishing a rapport with potential candidates, building relationships, gaining an understanding of what’s important to candidates, and consultatively selling and closing candidates. However – when you are able to find the right person at the right time, by design, you will find you don’t really have to “sell” the opportunity or “close” the candidate. The most satisfying “closes” of my career were actually the ones that “closed” themselves.

In fact, I believe that some people that have to rely heavily on their “real recruiting” skills of closing and selling do so out of necessity – because they lack the ability to find the right person at the right time. If you can’t find a round peg for a round hole, perhaps shaving away the corners of a square peg will facilitate a fit. However, I’ll happily continue to focus my efforts and expertise on finding the round peg in the first place.

Conclusion

“Real” recruiting involves the entire recruiting life cycle: sourcing (aka talent identification), establishing rapport, building relationships, gaining the interest of and uncovering the needs and motivations of potential candidates, candidate screening, matching and selection, as well as consultatively selling and closing to result in hires (aka talent acquisition).

No single step of the recruiting life cycle is any more “real” than another. However, due to the simple fact that you cannot recruit people you can’t find in the first place, talent identification is the most critical step of the recruiting life cycle.

Ideally, one should strive to excel at every aspect of the recruiting life cycle. If your relationship building and consultative selling and closing skills are already well-honed, mastering the critical first step of the recruiting life cycle enables you to find more of the right people more quickly, allowing you to increase your quantity of hires while maintaining, if not improving the quality of your hires.