Back in March 2010, I had the distinct honor of delivering the keynote presentation at SourceCon on the topic of resume search and match solutions claiming to use artificial intelligence in comparison with people using their natural intelligence for talent discovery and identification.

Now that nearly 2 years has passed, and given that in that time I’ve had even more hands-on experience with a number of the top AI/semantic search applications available (I won’t be naming names, sorry), I decided it was time to revisit the topic which I am very passionate about.

If you’ve ever been curious about semantic search applications that “do the work for you” when it comes to finding potential candidates, you’re in the right place, because I’ve updated the slide deck and published it to Slideshare. Here’s what you’ll find in the 86 slide presentation:

• A deep dive into the deceptively simple challenge of sourcing talent via human capital data (resumes, social network profiles, etc.)
• How resume and LinkedIn profile sourcing and matching solutions claiming to use artificial intelligence, semantic search, and NLP actually work and achieve their claims
• The pros, cons, and limitations of automated/black box matching solutions
• An insightful (and funny!) video of Dr. Michio Kaku and his thoughts on the limitations of artificial intelligence
• Examples of what sourcers and recruiters can do that even the most advanced automated search and match algorithms can’t do
• The concept of Human Capital Data Information Retrieval and Analysis (HCDIR & A)
• Boolean and extended Boolean
• Semantic search
• Dynamic inference
• Dark Matter resumes and social network profiles
• What I believe to be the ideal resume search and matching solution

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

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

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

Why is Data Depth and Searchability Important?

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

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

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

Shallow Data Depth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low Searchability

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

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

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

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

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

Deep Data But Low Searchability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highly Searchable but Shallow Data

Here we have Twitter and LinkedIn.

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

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

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

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

Deep Data and Highly Searchable

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talent Warehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I spoke at the LinkedIn Talent Connect event last year, I dropped a big question on the 500+ audience:

“What’s your informational and competitive advantage when you all have access to the same people?”

Think about it.

If you have a LinkedIn Recruiter account (over 55% of the Fortune 100 do!), you have access to view any and all LinkedIn profiles.

So do your competitors that are hunting to identify and recruit the same talent.

Regardless of your LinkedIn account type (Free, Business, Business Plus, Executive, Pro, Talent Basic, Talent Finder, Talent Pro, or Recruiter), you still have access to viewing any and all public profiles, although you just might have to jump through some flaming hoops with a small network and a free account.

So now I will ask you – if the majority of sourcers, recruiters and human resources professionals in the world use LinkedIn for sourcing and talent acquisition (there’s nearly a million!), what’s your competitive advantage over your rivals?

What is Competitive Advantage Anyway?

I use this term frequently because it’s a critical concept.

Competitive advantage is defined as the strategic advantage one business entity has over its rival entities within its competitive industry. It can also be described as simply as something you can do that your rivals cannot, or something you can do significantly better than your rivals.

Traditional explanations of competitive advantage often refer to access to resources (e.g., natural, human, or information). However, as I’ve already addressed, access isn’t the advantage in the case of LinkedIn (or the Internet, for that matter).

So what can you and your company do with LinkedIn that your competitors cannot? How can you leverage LinkedIn better than your rivals?

LinkedIn is Seriously Passionate about Data

We all know LinkedIn has a lot of data, with over 85 million profiles worldwide and information on millions of companies. Depending on your source of estimates, LinkedIn may have as many profiles of U.S.-based professionals as Monster has resumes.

However, LinkedIn doesn’t just hoard data – they are constantly looking for ways to extract value and insights from the information they have collected.

As a human capital data nut, I could not have been more thrilled to hear Reid Hoffman (Co-Founder and Chairman of LinkedIn, if you didn’t know) talk at Talent Connect 2010 about “data as a platform” and data as web 3.0 .

You may be interested to learn that Reid recently invested in Groupon, specifically because of “the power of data.”

Speaking of investments, LinkedIn also recently snagged a top scientist from Google whose specialty is data and information retrieval.

Coincidence? More like a calculated strategic move.

Daniel Tunkelang is now the Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn, and he wrote on his blog that he will be working on “products and discover insights from a data collection,” tackling his favorite challenges in the areas of computer science, which happen to be “information extraction, matching, recommendation, social network analysis, and network visualization.” Sounds like my kind of guy!

Oh, and did I forget to mention Daniel was the Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of Endeca?

When I saw that Daniel’s Twitter bio mentioned “HCIR Guy” – I was especially excited because I thought I was no longer the only person passionate about Human Capital Information Retrieval. However, after a quick search, I found out that I’ll have to settle for human-computer information retrieval.

If you need more proof that LinkedIn is passionate about data, specifically with regard to recruiting, watch this video of Jeff Weiner being interviewed at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010, read this post on how LinkedIn recently hired a neurosurgeon as a data scientist, and this article on the secrets of LinkedIn data scientists.

What is the Value of Data?

Having a ton of data is fantastic, especially human capital and company data if you’re in recruiting.

However, I argue that the value of data lies not in the data itself, nor access to it – but in the ability to retrieve the data and extract value from it.

Quite simply, data has no value if you don’t recognize it, don’t review it, or cannot retrieve it.

Of course, LinkedIn doesn’t prevent you from retrieving any data. It might be easier for some people to access certain profiles and certain information (out of network results and full names, depending on your network size and account), but the information is there to be retrieved if you know how and you’re particularly adept.

However, just because the information is there and you have access to it, it doesn’t mean you can retrieve or, or even recognize its worth if you do. Many people unknowingly only retrieve a fraction of the available results when searching LinkedIn – the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

To be sure, anyone who runs a search on LinkedIn will get results – but that most certainly does not mean anyone is actually finding all of the best candidates that LinkedIn has to offer.

If 20 recruiters from 20 different companies are looking for candidates with the same experience and hiring profile, they would likely get 20 different searches, with some recruiters finding some of the same candidates. However, some will find profiles that the others do not.

You may not believe it, but the reality is that some of the best candidates are never found by the people who are searching for them on LinkedIn. That’s not LinkedIn’s fault or problem – you just can’t be aware of something your searches do not, or cannot return.

The Competitive Advantage of LinkedIn

Having access to and using LinkedIn doesn’t afford you any competitive advantage over your rivals in the war for talent.

If you have a premium or ultra-premium account on LinkedIn, you do have access to use more Talent Filters, which certainly make it easy to slice and dice the data by years of experience, years in most recent position and current company, groups (any), company size, Fortune rank, etc. You also have more saved searches and InMails for contacting prospects. However, your competitors who also use LinkedIn Recruiter have access to exactly the same features.

If 5 companies that compete for the same kinds of talent are all using LinkedIn Recruiter, they all have access to view all profiles, and they all have access to the same premium filters and features – so where’s the competitive advantage?

If you don’t have access to some or any of LinkedIn’s Talent Filters, don’t fret too much. While the premium Talent Filters can make very short work of narrowing down results, they do have limitations that few understand and appreciate, and someone with strong information retrieval skills can find precisely what they want and need without the use of filters/facets.

I think LinkedIn has done a great job with their faceted search, and they continue to offer new ways of slicing and dicing the LinkedIn network. However, the only true and significant competitive advantage to be gained through the use of LinkedIn is how effectively you use (and search) LinkedIn.

Does LinkedIn Offer Recruiters any Competitive Advantage?

Yes, but your competitive advantage is dependent upon and directly proportional to your information retrieval skills.

The war for talent will be won and lost over human capital data and information, and more precisely over human capital information retrieval and analytics.

Simply having access to the information does not afford a sourcer, recruiter or organization any competitive advantage.

However, a human capital informational and competitive advantage can be achieved through more effective retrieval – in other words, more effective queries (i.e., Boolean search strings and facet utilization).

A query is simply a formal statement of an information need.

When it comes to sourcing and recruiting, your queries are formal statements of your talent/human capital needs. When searching to identify talent, the more effective you are at translating your talent needs (skills, experience, qualifications, etc.) into queries, the more likely you are to find all of the best candidates any particular source of talent has to offer.

While LinkedIn might be the Ferrari of social recruiting solutions, having a set of keys doesn’t mean you can drive it like a pro.

Do these quotes sound familiar?

• “People are our greatest asset.”
• “The only real sustainable competitive advantage of any company is the recruitment and retention of great people.”
• “Talent is our #1 priority as a company.”
• “Your technologies, products and structures can be copied by competitors, but your people can’t be.”
• “No matter what kind of business you are in, having the right people determines your company’s success or failure.”
• “The ability to find and hire the right people can make or break your business. It is as plain as that. No matter where you are in the life cycle of your business, bringing in great talent should always be a top priority.” – Michael Dell

How many times have you read or heard something similar?

The ubiquitous “people are our greatest asset” sentiment sounds good, and no doubt feels good to say, but whenever I hear or read it, the first question that comes to my mind is “What are you doing to ensure that you are identifying and acquiring the right people?”

If you believe that finding and acquiring top talent is your #1 priority, then I have a few questions for you.

Critical Questions for Sourcers and Recruiters

• What do you do on a consistent basis to ensure that you are finding and recruiting top talent – the best people that can be found?
• Do you have a strategy to find the best candidates?
• Once you have identified a candidate who is a match for the need you are sourcing and/or recruiting for, how do you know they are a good candidate beyond the skills and experience match?
• Are the people you find the best people you can find, or the first people you could find, or the easiest people for you to find?
• Do you think that the people who apply to your jobs posted online are the best candidates available? How would you know?
• What is your strategy to find great people that your competitors can’t and don’t find?

Critical Questions for Companies

• If talent is your #1 priority, where does your investment in talent identification and acquisition rank compared to all other corporate expenditures? (Payroll doesn’t count)
• How much does your company spend on business intelligence applications and data warehousing? (Ballpark estimate will do)
• Do you think that acquiring and analyzing customer, product, sales, etc., data in order to make better business decisions is more important to your company’s long term success than acquiring and analyzing human capital data to make better hiring decisions?
• How much does your company spend on applications and technologies that enable your company to discover and identify great people? (Most ATS’s and CRM’s don’t count)
• Do you have a budget for sourcing and recruiting technology and process R&D?
• What is your talent identification and acquisition strategy? (Posting jobs and soliciting referrals doesn’t count – more on this in a bit)

Talent Attraction & Referrals vs. Talent Discovery and Identification

Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, has said that many companies think that a cunning strategy or great performance will attract the right applicants, but that’s backward – people must come first.

I could not agree more.

Talent attraction, whether it be in the form of employer branding efforts, posting jobs online or social recruiting via social media, is not a method of discovering and identifying talent that involves any assurance of or control over candidate quality.

Soliciting referrals from current employees is generally accepted as a sound talent discovery strategy, and many companies publish data that suggests that referrals do tend to be “higher quality” and have a higher retention rate. I think this is mostly due to the fact that people typically avoid referring others that would reflect poorly upon themselves, so the selection process does have a bit of built-in candidate quality control.

However, while we all know that referrals are a great source of hires, are referrals really the best people you or your organization are capable of finding?

Soliciting employees for referrals is one of the easiest and lowest cost methods of talent discovery, so it’s no wonder it’s so popular as a method of talent discovery. However, referral recruiting isn’t guaranteed to net you the best people available to be found if you really tried.

Referral recruiting can only yield you people that someone in your organization knows, and the right or best people are not always already known to someone in your company.

Talent attraction efforts and soliciting referrals have their place – I’m not challenging that. However, companies that claim that talent is their #1 priority need to incorporate a strategy of talent discovery and identification that involves actively researching and hunting for top talent – specifically those great people who:

1. Are not already known to someone in your company and cannot be referred to you
2. Are doing an excellent job for their current employer and won’t ever “see” employer branding or a job posting even if it was placed directly in front of them

Investing in Talent Discovery and Identification

Jim Collins has said, “People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”

Practically all technologies, products and services can be copied and rarely remain a company’s competitive advantage for long. Being able to consistently find and hire the right people is truly the only means by which a company can attain a sustainable competitive advantage, regardless of industry.

Spending time and money on posting jobs, social recruiting efforts, and executing a sound referral recruiting strategy will always yield candidates, but they are not enough to ensure that you are discovering the best people that can be found and identified.

While many companies think it’s logical and necessary to invest large sums of money and effort into business intelligence applications to analyze product, customer, sales and all other kinds of data, too few companies invest anything beyond trivial amounts of money and effort into technologies, applications and research that can help them actively acquire and analyze human capital data to make better hiring decisions and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

So what are you doing to ensure that you are identifying and acquiring the best people for your company?

Are you attending or thinking about attending SourceCon 2010 in San Diego in March?

I am going to be the keynote speaker for the event, and I will be presenting on Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Cognition when it comes to sourcing and matching resumes.

If you’re curious to know what kinds of things I’ll be addressing during the session, here is a sneak peek:

1. The intrinsic and often overlooked challenges associated with sourcing resumes
2. What artificially intelligent semantic search and match applications claim to do and how they actually work
3. The limits of artificial intelligence
4. What people can do that semantic search applications cannot
5. The 5 levels of semantic search
6. The 5 levels of secondary/e-sourcing
7. What I believe would be the ideal candidate sourcing/talent identification solution

If you’ve ever wondered about the fantastic claims that some of the semantic search application vendors on the market make as to how their solution can mimic a senior recruiter when finding candidates, then you will be very interested in hearing what I have to say about the reality of what they can do.

If you’re a sourcer and you’re concerned that your role/position might eventually be replaced by sourcing software, you will be encouraged by my analysis and supporting arguments that explain why the abilities of creative and investigative sourcers will always be in demand – tomorrow and 50 years from now.

I hope you will be able to attend SourceCon 2010 – I know I’m looking forward to it!

If you’re unable to attend, the good news is that the presentations will likely be streamed. Additionally, I plan on posting my expanded slide deck, including all talking points – so you won’t be stuck staring at some pretty pictures wondering what the heck I talked about.

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

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

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

Just-In-Time Recruiting

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

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

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

How? I’m glad you asked.

How to Achieve Just-In-Time Recruiting

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

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

JIT Recruiting Requires Access to Human Capital Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Numbers

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

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

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

It’s simple statistics.

X Degrees of Separation

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

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

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

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

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

How’s that for power?

JIT Recruiting Benefits from High “Searchability”

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

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

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

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

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

JIT Recruiting Requires Effective Engagement and Referral Tactics and Strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just-In-Time Recruiting Requires Search Ability

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

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

Pipelining – Proactive vs. Reactive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There, that should make everyone happy.

Just-In-Time Recruiting is Not Anti-Relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology and Relationships are not Oil and Water

When I write posts about creating Boolean search strings to source and find talent/human capital – I often get responses from readers and those I train, especially staffing industry veterans who focus on executive search, that state that the foundation of recruiting is based on relationships built by human interaction and networking.

I couldn’t agree more.

Why does it seem to be ingrained in human nature to have an either/or mentality – as if things have to be one way or the other, but not both. Like phone sourcing vs database sourcing. You can and should do both, and I hope you are trying to contact and develop relationships with people identified via both methods.

If I wanted to be obtuse, I could argue that the phone is impersonal – and that to be a really good recruiter, I should never leverage the phone to make contact with people. Instead – I’ll just wander around looking for people to meet in person to establish a wonderful professional relationship with.

By the way – there isn’t anything instrinsically impersonal about leveraging technology to find or communicate with people. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s this thing called email that quite a few people use these days, and you know what? – it seems to work. I’ve also heard that there are millions of people communicating with something called text messaging, and that there are more text messages sent every day than phone calls made. How impersonal!

Let’s face it – if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t exist and be used by so many people so often.

When I talk about leveraging technology for talent identification and acquisition, my primary point is NOT that it is a replacement for any other method of candidate identification, nor am I saying technology is a replacement for human interaction and relationship building. My point is that there is more and more information stored about more people somewhere electronically every day – and you can either learn how to harness the power of using Boolean logic to create search strings for Talent Mining that can ACCELERATE your ability to establish MORE relationships with MORE of the RIGHT people, MORE quickly…..or not.

Running Boolean queries on the Internet, an internal corporate candidate database, or an online job board to find people who meet and hopefully exceed your basic/minimum qualifications isn’t anti-relationship. In fact – it has nothing directly to do with relationships. It’s nothing other than a method of identifying people who are likely to be able to meet the needs of your organization or client. Nothing more, nothing less.

I will, however, say that if you are particularly adept at Boolean search strings and have access to 1 or more databases of significant size (50,000+ local candidates), you can more quickly find more qualified candidates than by any other method of candidate indentification. And being able to find a large number of well qualified candidates quickly enables you to begin to contact and build relationships with those people. It’s a competitive advantage for those who can do this, and a competitive disadvantage for those who cannot.

I love analogies, so I’ll use two here to drive my point home.

Analogy #1

20 years ago, if you found something in your attic, closet, or basement that you no longer had a use for, but thought someone might pay money for it, you could try selling it at a garage sale, or perhaps put an ad in the local paper and see if it draws any interest.

Today, although you could try selling it at a garage sale or put an ad in the local paper, you could also put the item on Craig’s List, or on eBay. Arguably, you should probably try all 4 methods because you can’t predict where your highest bidder will come from. However, there is no arguing the point that we now have access to technology (the Internet and sites like eBay) that can more quickly expose you to more potential buyers than ever before. Now, one might draw more satisfaction from selling an item at a garage sale because they can meet the potential buyers in person, but let’s get real here – the main point is selling the item at the highest price possible (for most people – if not, just donate it). Exposing yourself to more and a wider variety of potential buyers does increase the statistical probability that you will encounter more opportunities to sell your item at a higher price. You can either have 20 people see the item at a garage sale, or 1000 people see it on eBay. It’s a no brainer. But why not do both?

Analogy #2

20 years ago, if you were single and wanted to meet someone, you could head to a local hot spot where you might encounter people looking to do the same. Or you could get lucky and just happen to run into the “right” person at the grocery store, soccer field, DMV, whatever. In any of these cases, you’re really only exposing yourself to a relatively small number of people that just *happen* to be where you are at any point in time, and you literally have no control over whether the people you meet via this method are single and looking, nor do you have any control over the type of people you might encounter and your potential compatibility with any one of them. Meeting people is easy – meeting the RIGHT people isn’t so easy.

Today, if you are so inclined, you could leverage technology and try an online service such as EHarmony or Match.com. With either, you are in all likelihood exposing yourself to more people than you could if you just went to the local bar (coffee or otherwise). Also, with these services, you have some degree of control over your preferences and potential compatibility – it’s not a science – but it’s definitely better than making contact with random strangers out in public who you cannot tell if they are open to a relationship or not. Using an online service, the vast majority of people are actually looking for a relationship, and you can actually get to know someone before meeting them in person.

Using services like EHarmony and Match.com isn’t a replacement for meeting people in person and establishing relationships – in fact, it’s about accelerating and facilitating your ability to potentially meet more of the right people – people who are looking for a relationship and people who are looking for a relationship as well, people who you may not every run into otherwise, and people who may be more compatible with you based on their profile? Yes, I am sure it’s not all accurate, but neither are resumes. Wow – this analogy is really getting good!

So – if you were single and looking for a relationship – why not be ready to meet and potentially get to know people you run into as you go about your normal daily routine at work and out in public AND leverage technology to expose yourself to even more people more quickly – people who are looking for a relationship as well and people you may not otherwise ever have the chance to cross paths with? You can’t predict where and when you will meet your soul mate – but why not play the odds and work with a larger sample of the population?

Conclusion

You may be unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or inexperienced with recruiting and staffing technology – there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But there is no denying that when properly leveraged, technology can typically help you do things faster, better, more often, and more accurately. In the case of talent identification and acquisition – aka sourcing and recruiting – you can choose to embrace technology or not. Your choice should be made based on personal perference and the FACTS - not in a belief that somehow using technology and information systems is impersonal and is anti-relationship. That would be silly. Or some other word starting with “s.”

Make no mistake – properly trained sourcers and recruiters who are skilled in the art and science of Talent Mining – running Boolean search strings in resume databases and on the Internet – can find more and more accurately qualified candidates more quickly than with any other method of candidate identification. That gives them the ability to begin to establish contact with and build relationships with more of the right people more quickly – a competitive advantage over people who do not or cannot leverage information systems.

True – you can find and contact candidates via phone sourcing and referral recruiting that you cannot find online, on LinkedIn, or in a resume database somewhere. Ah – but the knife cuts both ways…the converse is also true, so there is no inherent advantage of “exclusivity” for either method over the other. However, I will say that because of the speed, accuracy, and volume advantages of Talent Mining, sourcers and recruiters leveraging information systems automatically gain the advantage of accelerated and higher volume referral recruiting and networking opportunities as a result. Sweet.

Be advised – recruiting and staffing technology and information systems are not going away. They are not only here to stay – expect them to evolve and advance rapidly. The recruiting and staffing industry isn’t going back to paper resumes and faxes. Every day, there is more information about more people made available electronically somewhere – on the Internet, in a Social Network, or in an internal candidate database. And you either know how to quickly and precisely leverage these information systems to find the right people at the right time or you don’t.

If you can’t, or simply don’t by choice – don’t use the excuse that technology is impersonal and that the recruiting industry is based on relationships. We all know that. But thankfully today we have technology available, that when properly utilized, can help sourcers and recruiters to more quickly find and contact and build relationships with more of the right people.