I just updated my free sourcing and recruiting resources page!

You can always navigate to the free resources page at any time by using the top nav bar which will escort you to a library of nearly 50 knowledge-laden links!

All in one page you can find a collection of articles related to sourcing and recruiting, including the 5 levels of talent mining/candidate sourcing, candidate sourcing best practices and mistakes, social recruiting, how to search LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Spoke, ZoomInfo and Jigsaw for free, Boolean logic, semantic search, Lean / Just-In-Time sourcing and recruiting, and automated candidate sourcing and matching solutions.

Click the image below to be taken to the free sourcing and recruiting resources page:

Be sure to bookmark or tag this page as I will continue to add more free sourcing and recruiting resources. Also – please “pay it forward” – share this page with anyone who might benefit!

Thanks!

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

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

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 consectuve searches to return results that have a high probability of being excellent potential hires. 

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

Recruiters Do Need to Know How to Perform Electronic Talent Discovery

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

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

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

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

More on that in a few paragraphs.

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

Access to Information is Not Enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ouch.

Breaking the Bonds of Pre-Existing Relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Networking

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just-In-Time Recruiting

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

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

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

How? I’m glad you asked.

How to Achieve Just-In-Time Recruiting

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

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

JIT Recruiting Requires Access to Human Capital Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Numbers

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

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

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

It’s simple statistics.

X Degrees of Separation

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

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

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

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

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

How’s that for power?

JIT Recruiting Benefits from High “Searchability”

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

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

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

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

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

JIT Recruiting Requires Effective Engagement and Referral Tactics and Strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just-In-Time Recruiting Requires Search Ability

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

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

Pipelining – Proactive vs. Reactive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There, that should make everyone happy.

Just-In-Time Recruiting is Not Anti-Relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In recent posts I’ve explained the Boolean Black Belt concept and exposed what I feel is the real “secret” behind learning how to master the art and science of leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition.

Now I would like to show you precisely WHY Boolean search is such a big deal in recruiting. There are 2 main factors: #1 candidate variable control and #2 speed of qualified candidate identification.

The goal of this article is to shed significant light on the science behind talent mining, how it can lead to higher productivity levels (more and better results with less effort), why I am so passionate about e-sourcing/e-recruiting, and why everyone in the HR, recruiting, and staffing industry should be as well.

Control is Power

Talent identification is arguably the most critical step in recruiting life cycle – you can’t acquire and hire someone you haven’t found and identified in the first place.

My experience has shown me that properly leveraging deep sources of talent/candidate data (ATS/CRM’s, resume databases, LinkedIn, etc.) can enable recruiters to more quickly identify a high volume of well matched and qualified candidates than ANY OTHER METHOD of candidate identification and acquisition (e.g., cold calling, referral recruiting, job posting).

The true power of Boolean search lies in the intrinsically high degree of control over critical candidate variables that using Boolean strings to search deep data sources such as resume databases, the Internet, and social media affords sourcers and recruiters. Applying that that high degree of control to large populations of candidates – tens of thousands (small internal ATS, niche resume database) to tens of millions (large ATS/CRM, Monster resume database, LinkedIn, etc.) enables adept e-sourcers/e-recruiters to perform feats of talent identification and acquisition most would think impossible.

Candidate Variables Defined

The match between a candidate and a specific job opening can be expressed as a combination of these 5 basic variables: Location, Skills (Experience/Education), Opportunity, Compensation, and Availability. There are certainly other factors at play when it comes to determining the right match between a candidate and a particular opportunity (e.g., cultural fit). However, these are the “big bucket” variables which render the rest pointless if they are not satisfied.

Control What You Can

Ultimately, the best match between an employer’s hiring need and a candidate is one where there is very close alignment between a candidate’s variables and those of the particular job opportunity.

Most job openings have a fixed set of variables – sourcers and recruiters don’t often have the opportunity to control or change the location of the position, the skills/experience/education required, the specific opportunity (the type of work involved in the position, the company/team culture, opportunities for growth/advancement, etc.), the compensation associated with the position, and when the position becomes available (open and ready to hire).

However, when it comes to searching deep sources of human capital data that support Boolean queries (such as your ATS/CRM, online resume databases, LinkedIn, etc.) to identify potential candidates for any particular job opening, sourcers and recruiters CAN exercise a significant degree of control over critical candidate matching variables.

Here’s a preview:

Controlling Candidate Variables Through Boolean Search

Location

When it comes to using resume databases (internal or online), sourcers and recruiters have nearly complete control over the location of the candidates identified – finding people in specific zip code ranges or by using a combination of area code and address search. A small percentage of the time, candidates with resumes not updated in the past 6-12 months may have moved from the address on their resume, but this is a fractional minority. Although using Boolean search strings to identify candidates in resume databases or online affords specific control over the location of candidates identified, there is less direct control over the commute tolerance/preference of the candidates – that can only be reliably determined by contacting each candidate. However, sourcers and recruiters can target people who live very close to the location of the job opportunity (5-15 miles), increasing the likelihood of solving the commute variable.

Skills/Experience/Education

Sourcers and recruiters can run Boolean strings when searching resume databases to precisely target specific experience, years of experience, education, certifications, environment/project, and industry experience. Those who are particularly adept at Boolean search 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. Although resumes are far from a perfect medium for accurately or wholly representing skills, experience, and capability, a well stocked resume database affords sourcers and recruiters the ability to run Boolean queries to quickly find candidates with highly specific experience closely matching the required skills and experience of the position being recruited for.

Desired Opportunity

Although sourcers and recruiters using Boolean search strings to mine talent from resume databases cannot precisely predict what candidates will want to do in their next career move, a resume or very detailed social media profile often affords significant insight into a possible “career trajectory.” In other words, a project manager over software development is likely to be interested in a similar role, or one that is a slight step up in responsibility. Similarly, a 3 year staff accountant is likely to be interested in a role as a staff accountant, or perhaps the next step up. Adept sourcers and recruiters can run Boolean strings to specifically target candidates who have experience similar to the work to be performed in the role being recruited for, increasing (but certainly not wholly controlling) the chances that candidates identified would be interested in the type of position they are recruiting for.

Compensation

As with the opportunity variable, sourcers and recruiters cannot precisely control the compensation requirements of candidates identified. However, resumes do enable recruiters to predict, to some extent, the desired compensation of candidates based on years of experience and market knowledge, and sourcers and recruiters can run Boolean search strings to target candidates with specific years of experience.

For example, in a given metro area, recruiters are likely to know what staff accountants with 3-5 years of experience (or software engineers with 3-5 years of Java programming, etc.) are being paid by most local employers, and from experience, what those types of candidates are looking for in terms of compensation when making a career move. Although this is certainly not precise control, it does allow some degree of control. Also, when reviewing resumes in a database, recruiters can make the educated decision not to call candidates with 10-12 years of accounting or Java programming (unless they want to ask for referrals), and specifically target and contact candidates with 3-5 years of experience instead.

Availability

When searching databases and online sources of candidates, there is no way to reliably predict or control whether or not people identified via Boolean search strings are available or open to make a career move at the time they are identified. However, when using online job board resume databases, searching for candidates with resumes posted within the past 30 days does increase the probability that the candidates identified are looking (actively or passively) to make a career move.

In Comparison: Cold Calling and Referral Recruiting

While cold calling and referral recruiting are tried and true methods of identifying talent, and I would never suggest that they be avoided – I’d like to expose the intrinsic ROI limitations they afford sourcers and recruiters, primarily the inability to control critical candidate variables.

Location

When it comes to cold calling into companies to source and identify potential candidates, there is very little control over where the candidates live. When calling into a company, you know where the candidates work, but the candidates could live anywhere within a 20, 30, 40, or even larger mile radius from that company location – in ANY direction. Because there is no way to know exactly where the people you are calling live prior to sourcing them, there is no way to significantly control the Location variable of the potential candidates, and each person identified will likely have a different commute tolerance/preference which is based specifically on where they currently live, not where they currently work.

As for referral recruiting, when we ask other people who they would recommend – we can neither control where the potential referred candidates work nor where they live, so there is even less location-specific control offered by referral recruiting over cold calling.

Opportunity

When cold calling into companies or referral recruiting to identify candidates, there is no way to predict or control what each person identified will be most interested in doing in their next career move.

Compensation

When cold calling into companies or referral recruiting to identify candidates, there is no way to control or predict what each person’s current compensation is, nor is there any way to predict their desired compensation. Even sourcing by title will not accurately or consistently predict the years of experience and specific responsibilities of each person identified prior to contacting them.

Experience/Capability

When cold calling into companies or seeking referrals in an effort to identify potential candidates, there is no way to predict or control each person’s capability to perform the responsibilities of the position being sourced for. Although you could ask for someone if they can recommend/refer to you a person with a specific title or experience, you simply can’t control actual experience of the people referred or identified, nor is there any way to control their career history, years of experience, education, or certifications.

The one aspect of experience/capability that can be controlled through cold calling is industry-related experience – if you call into a pharmaceutical company, you can be assured that everyone you identify has experience working in the pharmaceutical industry. However, the same cannot be said for referral recruiting, as there is no reliable way to control the specific industry of the people who are offered as referrals. Either the people you are seeking referrals from know of someone with the appropriate skills and experience and will recommend them to you or not. In either case, you are not the one in control – you are completely dependent upon each person you attempt to network with. 

Availability

There is no way to reliably predict or control whether or not people identified via cold calling and referral recruiting are available or open to make a career move at the time they are identified. Although you could ask people if they can recommend people who might be looking, whether or not they actually do know people who might be looking to make a change is not under your control, and the specific availability status of any referred candidate cannot be predicted or determined prior to actually speaking with the candidate.

Job Posting

For sourcers and recruiters – posting a job affords absolutely no control over critical candidate variables, as you are 100% at the mercy of other people finding and responding to the posting. Anyone with any experience in the HR/Recruiting/Staffing industry knows that very few people who apply to positions are well matched across the 5 critical candidate variables with regard to the position they apply for. When you post a job online, you simply cannot control who will respond, what their skills/experience/education will be, or even where they live.

While not truly representative of any degree of control, when people respond to a job posting – it is often because they are actively (or perhaps passively, depending on your definition) looking for a change of employment from their current employer or their unemployed status. After all – if someone is looking at job postings, they’re considering their options to a lesser or greater extent. So if your sourcing and recruiting strategy targets active candidates, this is the only bright spot when it comes to using job postings to identify potential candidates. However, just because someone responds to your job posting – it does not necessarily indicate that they are truly and unconditionally available to make a change. 

Candidate Variable Control: Comparison of Sourcing Methods

In review, let’s take another look at the comparison of Boolean search vs. cold calling, referral recruiting, and job posting as with regard to the degree of control over critical candidate matching variables for talent identification:

Using Boolean search strings to identify and mine talent from private and online sources of talent empowers recruiters with the ability to apply a significant degree of control over the location, skills, experience, education, opportunity, and compensation candidate variables – more than any other method of talent identification. 

Speed of Qualified Candidate Identification

The second piece of the puzzle that explains why Boolean search strings coupled with deep sources of candidate data (resumes and detailed social media profiles) is so powerful is the speed at which candidates who closely match the critical variables of a given position can be identified. 

E-Sourcing vis Boolean Search

Sourcers and recruiters who are competent at crafting Boolean search strings can find quickly find a large volume of candidates that are likely to closely match the 5 critical variables of the position they are seeking to fill. I’ve personally achieved, as well as trained other recruiters to achieve, anywhere from 20-60 well matched candidates identified per hour mining talent with Boolean search strings (20/hour for a very challenging position to 60/hour for positions/skills that are more common).

I’m talking about finding 20-60 people in 1 hour who have the skills, experience and education required for the position I’m recruiting for, live in a commutable radius for the location of the position, are highly likely to be attracted to the opportunity, and who are highly likely to be within the compensation range of the position. The only thing left to do is establish contact and a relationship with them, and attempt to solve the final variable – availability (whether they would accept an offer for the position if they interviewed well and felt it was a strong match).

Cold Calling/Referral Recruiting

While cold calling into companies can produce results, it is a slow and laborious process. Cold calling into companies can in some cases quickly yield a high volume of names, but the intrinsically low degree of control over critical candidate variables that cold calling affords sourcers and recruiters severely limits the speed of identifying candidates who closely match the position being recruited for. 

Referral recruiting, for many reasons can in produce some of the best candidates – most companies are proud to brag about the large percentage of referral hires they make. However, referral recruiting is also a slow and unpredictable process – not every person contacted will yield a referral, and even those that do are not statistically likely to closely match all 5 of the critical candidate variables. 

Job Posting

When it comes to posting jobs to identify potential candidates, it’s similar to setting a trap. It’s a 100% passive strategy - the only thing you are in control of is setting the trap. You cannot control what, if anything, actually wanders into your trap, or if anything ever does.

It’s the same with posting jobs – some jobs never get any responses. Others do get a large influx of candidate responses, but the probablity that any given person is a close match across the 5 critical candidate variables is intrinsically low.

Speed of Qualified Candidate Identification: Comparison of Sourcing Methods

Conclusion

I hope you now have a much deeper appreciation of the “method to the madness” behind leveraging Boolean search strings for sourcing and recruiting and understand why Boolean search is such a big deal in recruiting. There are tangible reasons why using Boolean strings to search private and online repositories of candidates can enable sourcers and recruiters to identify and recruit more well qualified candidates at a faster rate and a higher volume than any other method of candidate identification. Quality X Quantity X Quickness = Results.

Although cold calling and referral recruiting are proven and viable methods of candidate identification (and I would never recommend not performing them), there is no denying that they do not offer sourcers and recruiters a much (or any, in some cases!) control over critical candidate matching variables. They are also intrinsically slow methods of identifying precisely matched and qualified candidates.

Undeniably, talent mining via Boolean search strings affords sourcers and recruiters the ability to exert a high degree of direct control over the specific location of candidates, the skills, experience, and education of candidates, as well as the ability to specifically target candidates who are highly likely to be interested in the opportunity being recruited for, and the compensation offered by the opportunity.

Imagine being able to find a minimum of 20 people in less that 1 hour of research who have the skills, experience and education required for the position you’re recruiting for, live in a commutable radius for the location of the position, are highly likely to be attracted to the opportunity, and who are highly likely to be within the compensation range of the position. The only thing left to do is “smile and dial!” If this sounds crazy or impossible – trust me – there are people who can do this day in and day out.

LinkedIn, the Internet, job board resume databases, and most corporate ATS/CRM databases are huge repositories of candidates – many companies have hundreds of thousands to several million resumes stored in their internal resume database. The major online job boards all have 20M+ resumes each, and often have over 100,000 resumes in each major metro area. LinkedIn has over 40M profiles worldwide, and 20M in the U.S. alone.

Large databases afford sourcers and recruiters to benefit from the laws of statisitcs with regard to large sample sizes. If a recruiter or sourcer were looking to hire for a rare skillset or combination of skills and experience that represented only 1/2 of 1% of the available candidates, and they had access to a resume database of 100,000 local candidates – 1/2 of 1% of 100,000 is 500 people. Eye opening, isn’t it? If you ever find yourself thinking you’re working on an impossible position, always remember the candidates you’re looking for actually DO exist, in more numbers than you would perhaps like to believe. You just need to figure out how to find them!

E-sourcing/e-recruiting via Boolean search strings has the distinct advantages of speed, volume, and controlled accuracy of match across multiple and critical candidate variables which can enable recruiters to perform Just-In-Time delivery of well qualified candidates with less effort. The speed and match precision of searching for candidates with Boolean search strings effectively allows recruiters to produce more accurate results in less time, increasing productivity and reducing response time. Using proven Boolean search/e-sourcing best practices, the probability that any given call will produce the right match is intrinsically higher than any other method of recruiting (cold calling, referral recruiting, networking, user groups, etc.).

Everyone will have their own opinions about the pros and cons of cold calling, referral recruiting, and e-sourcing and which one is the superior method of talent identification – that debate will rage on indefinitely. However, there is no denying the objective and intrinsic advantages of precise control over critical candidate matching variables and high speed identification of accurately matched candidates that sourcers and recruiters adept at wielding Boolean search strings can achieve when coupled with a resume database of a decent size.

I define e-sourcing as proactively searching information systems (ATS/CRM, Internet, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), to identify potential candidates. While there is much written on HOW to search the various talent sources available to recruiters today, there does not seem to be much written about their intrinsic value 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, and 50% in the ability to extract out precisely and completely what the user needs. Information has no value if you are unable to access, 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?

Quite simply, the deeper the data offered by and the more searchable the the source is, the higher the ROI for your e-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 MySpace, Facebook, 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, 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, Facebook, and MySpace 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 MySpace, Facebook, and the Internet – they have significant limitations with regard to their “searchability.” Facebook and MySpace are simply not designed to be highly searchable, at least not to find people you don’t know.

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 (Avature and Bullhorn come to mind), 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 MS Live supports queries employing full Boolean logic. The irony there is that Live limits you to 10 search terms (unless that’s changed recently). 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:, joined:, 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 productivity!

Conclusion

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, Myspace, 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.

I define E-sourcing as leveraging information systems for active talent identification – searching the Internet, social media, job board resume databases, and applicant tracking systems to find candidates. The proper use of technology in the sourcing and recruiting process should increase your efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness.  I’ve created the SlideShare presentation below to cover a number of different ways for you to maximize your ability to find more of the right people more quickly, to accelerate and enable your recruiting efforts.

Click on the presentation below to review:

• Boolean operators and common query modifiers
• Searching LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook
• X-Ray searching Social Media
• Search automation and aggregation
• Semantic search: manual and artificial intelligence matching solutions
• Search ROI – a comparison of the searchability and data depth of the Internet, Social Media, Resume Databases, and ATSs
• Talent Warehouse concepts

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.