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.”

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

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

Who Defines Value?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relationships – How Many and How Deep?

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

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

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

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

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

Some points to ponder:

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

“Transactional” Recruiting

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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.