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 response to my recent post about the deficiencies in the search capability of many Applicant Tracking Systems, a few people commented to the fact that resumes stored in applicant tracking systems become stale and outdated over time, which may explain why ATS resume databases are often the candidate “source of last resort.”

While candidate records inevitably age over time and can become outdated, this definitely does not have to be the case.

A candidate record can only truly go “stale” if no one ever makes contact and updates the record with more current information from time to time – and it need not even be every 6 months.

Any recruiter worth their salt will attempt to maintain periodic contact with most candidates and update their information as appropriate, regardless of their job search status. This can also be automated to some extent with strong and effective CRM functionality – so even if the recruiter forgets to follow up with someone every 6 months, the CRM won’t.

Resumes Are Like Wine

While human capital data in the form of resumes and candidate profiles may get outdated, it never truly loses its value. Resumes and candidate records are like fine wine – they only get better with age.

Yes, I believe the value of human capital data actually increases over time.

If I find a resume of a 2 year Unix systems administrator today and permanently capture them into my ATS, over time that person will gain experience and expertise, and likely advance their career along the way. In 5 years I will have a 7 year Unix admin, a Unix systems engineer, perhaps a project manager or even a storage area network specialist – who knows? No matter their career path and progression, I will stay in touch with them and routinely update their information - regardless of their job search status.

The same is true of nearly every profession – accountants, attorneys, physicians, customer service reps, mechanical engineers, recent college grads, etc. – they will all gain experience and advance their careers over time. 

Limited Shelf Life

Did you know that some people who post their resume in online resume databases (job boards and such) sometimes pull their resume down shortly after they post it, rendering it unfindable? Sometimes in a matter of hours!

Social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter can also suffer from a similar effect. Because they are based on UGC (User Generated Content), at any time any user can make their profile private and unsearchable (even via X-Ray searching in some cases!), or simply remove content that may aid you in searching for/identifying them based on their professional skills and experience.

However, if you’re always on the lookout for certain types of professionals, scouring every source available to you, and you permanently capture the information you find into your ATS/CRM, you may essentially be collecting rare vintages (yes, I’m going to continue with the wine analogy) that may no longer be in circulation in the near future. 

In other words, when you find and capture that resume or profile of the 2 year Unix admin (or accountant, or attorney, or recent grad, etc.) who pulls their resume or alters their social networking profile at some point in the future – you may have in your possession a candidate that may never be found by anyone else again.

This would allow you to specifically search for that particular candidate and reach out to them in a year or two’s time – when they are passively looking or not looking at all – and present them with a position that is well aligned with the next step in their career. At this point, you may literally be one of the few people who have quick and easy access to that candidate as their career progresses, regardless of their job search status.

ATS Databases are 70% Passive/Not Looking by Volume

I believe that a well stocked ATS candidate database is likely to consist of mostly (approximately 70%) candidates who are not looking or who are passively looking. That percentage is probably even higher when you consider only candidate records that have been entered/created over 3 months ago. So, if you’re one of those recruiting professionals who believe the hype that active candidates are bad and passive candidates are good, you should be excited about the prospect of building a private “passive” candidate database that you can mine to your heart’s content.

While I am most decidedly NOT one of those people who buys into the idea that passive candidates are the “best” candidates, I can tell you from experience that candidate closing and control is almost a non-issue when you are dealing primarily with people who are not actively looking, are not being called by every other recruiter in the known universe, and don’t have 5 interviews scheduled this week and 2 offers in hand.

So it IS nice to be able to purposefully target and dip into a large pool of well qualified candidates, who are not actively looking, and many of whom no one else has quick and easy access to. 

It’s not just nice; it’s also a significant competitive advantage.

Let Your Candidate Data Age Naturally

If you have a relatively large candidate database (10,000 to 1,000,000+), you needn’t worry about trying to maintain “relationships” with all of them – it’s actually impossible, unless your definition of “relationship” includes automated emails.

If you’re overly concerned with having ultra-fresh information on all of the candidates in your system at all times - don’t be. It isn’t really necessary.

I’ve called and made easy, frictionless hires with candidates who had records/resumes that had not been updated in 4 years. A seasoned sourcer or recruiter can easily make an educated guess at “career trajectory,” and when you make a call to someone whose resume is not on the Internet, not on LinkedIn, not in an online resume database – you essentially have a candidate no one else has practical, targeted access to – and closing/control is a non-issue when you call with the right opportunity, by design.

Final Thoughts

If you permanently capture data on your target professionals relatively early in their careers, you can cultivate their candidate records as their careers progress, allowing you quick and easy access to them as they evolve into more experienced passive or even non-job seekers – the virtually “ungettable” candidates that your competitors wish they had access to.  

If this approach to valuing and leveraging your candidate data doesn’t appeal to you, and you happen to be growing tired of having to store all of those old, stale resumes in your ATS/CRM – give me a ring – I’d be glad to take them off your hands.

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

I am often asked my opinion on the best use of resume search “aggregators” such as those offered by infoGIST, TalentHook, DataFrenzy, AIRS and others. If you’re not familair with the term, a resume search aggregator is an application that allows a user to enter a search string that will execute across multiple free and paid job board resume sites and aggregate the results.

Many staffing and recruiting organizations tend to use resume search aggregators at the associate level – enabling individual sourcers and recruiters to run Boolean search strings focused on specific hiring needs through a resume search aggregator to to simultaneously search several paid job boards as well as in some cases 100+ free job board resume databases.

While there is a huge convenience factor in using resume search aggregators in this fashion, as each sourcer or recruiter can save time and effort in not having to log into multiple job boards to execute Boolean search strings on each one individually, there are some limitations of resume search aggregators you need to be aware of, and I feel there is a better way to use this technology. 

Limitations of Resume Search Aggregators

Limited Boolean Logic Support

Many of the resume search aggregator applications do not support full Boolean logic or even symbols such as the asterisk for root word/stem searching. That, in itself, is a major limitation when attempting to mine information systems such as job board resume databases, because highly effective and precise search strings cannot be created. Also, some of the aggregators don’t even allow you to “hand code” Boolean search strings – instead, forcing you to create searches using a query builder which often significantly limits the ability to create effective searches.

Similarly, not all job board resume databases support full Boolean logic.  Even if a resume aggregator application supported full Boolean logic, if it is being used to search a site that does not support it – you will not get the results you are looking for (or any results) because the job board resume database can’t execute your search string.

Limited Zip Code Radius and Education Searching

Some job board resume databases do not support zip code radius or education searching. If you are attempting to use a search aggregator to find candidates in a specific area via zip code radius, or candidates with specific a education level, you will not get results from any job board resume database that does not support that kind of search. On the other hand, some search aggregators do not support the ability to search by zip code or education. If the search aggregator itself can’t perform these kinds of searches (and/or you can’t configure a Boolean to accomplish the same thing), you simply can’t do it through the aggregator.

Sorting by Relevance

Some resume search aggregators do not allow users to sort the results returned from a Boolean search across multiple job board databases by relevance. This is a huge flunk – when it comes to search, the whole point of searching for information is to get relevant results, and the most effective way to sort results is by relevance.

Search Limits

Most resume search aggregators have limits on the number of results that can be returned from each search – some are as low as 150. If a sourcer/recruiter is running a search on job boards and opening up the parameters to search resumes posted in the last 90, 120, or 365+ days, in many cases the number of results can exceed the limits imposed by the aggregator. That means in some cases, sourcers and recruiters simply CANNOT find and retrieve some results because of the artificial limits.

The reason why some aggregators have limits on the quantity of results that can be returned per search and in some cases per DAY from specific job boards (usually the big ones like Monster) is because the big boards don’t want people strip-mining their databases via software.

A Better Way to Use Resume Search Aggregators

In contrast to how many organizations leverage resume search aggregators, I propose that the ideal utilization of these applications involves largely automated 24 X 7 mining of job board resume databases, whereby “broad” Boolean searches are configured and saved into the resume search aggregator application designed specifically to pull relatively general results into an internal database/Applicant Tracking System (ATS) on a daily basis.

Once the resumes are pulled into the internal resume database/ATS, sourcers and recruiters can run more precise, configurable, and powerful full Boolean queries, searching by location, and sort the results by relevance, and find the best candidates available without artificial limits on the number of results. (Note: if your internal database/ATS does not support full Boolean logic and sorting by relevance – it should – but that’s another post entirely). 

I recommend automated daily searches because even in the largest metro areas and running relatively broad and generic searches, you are not likely to bump into any search aggregator’s max result limit because there are only so many people who will post their resume every day of any given skillset.

I recommend using search aggregator applications to run broader searches because most can’t run precise Boolean queries anyway, so why try to do so and miss picking up candidates in the first place? Keep in mind that every single search aggregator is limited to the search interfaces they search through, and they will be “dummied down” to the lowest common denominator (the least configurable/capable search engine). In many cases, more complex and precise queries are impossible to achieve anyway.

Instead of a running the risk that a search aggregator (or the job boards I am searching through it) is incapable of returning results of candidates that DO exist but are incapable of returning from a complex Boolean search string, I would much rather get them into my internal database for permanent data capture. And while broader searches can yield some “false positives,” I have not found it to be a problem. I have worked with resume databases from 100,000 to over 3,000,000 records. Statistically, the more, the better – and sometimes the best candidates have lackluster resumes – you never know anything about a person until you get them on the phone/meet them in person and talk to them!

I also believe that automating the input of search results into an internal database/ATS because all too often, sourcers and recruiters over-analyze resumes and unknowingly miss fantastic candidates. This is the #1 mistake (out of 15) sourcers and recruiters make when performing secondary search.

Benefits of My Proposed Utilization of Resume Search Aggregators

1. Lower paid job board costs – you will not likely need as many passwords and/or resume views per job board because sourcers and recruiters will be motivated to run searches in your internal resume database/ATS first, and in many cases will have no need to search the job boards individually, as the majority of candidates they would find would already be in the internal database.

2. It can build the breadth and depth of your internal candidate database faster and more thoroughly than any team of people could, automatically, and at a lower cost.

3. Increased ability to find the right people. The larger and more varied your internal candidate database, the higher the statistical probability that you will have the right candidate for any given opening. 

4. Your organization can be better insulated against and prepared for a future labor shortage. The larger and more varied your internal candidate database is now, the more likely you will be insulated against and prepared for an impending labor shortage when fewer candidates may be actively looking for jobs. You can effectively work on building a large passive candidate database, as well as effectively increasing the referral recruiting opportunities/capacity of every sourcer/recruiter in your organization.

5. Automatic, guaranteed, permanent data capture. Unlike sourcers and recruiters, resume search aggregator applications won’t look at a resume and not enter it into your internal database because it doesn’t match the job opening/hiring profile the recruiter is currently working on. Without such a system, if a sourcer/recruiter does not enter a candidate into your internal database from a job board search – that candidate will typically remove their resume from the job board at some point, and you may never be able to find them in the future when you may need them (or the referrals they can provide). Also, unlike many sourcers/recruiters, resume search aggregators won’t dislike certain job boards and simply not search them. You can never know where the best candidate for any given job order will come from. However, if you are automatically searching just about every database in existence on a daily basis, you have the highest probability of finding them, capturing them, and having them when you need them. 

6. Guaranteed and incentivized utilization of your internal candidate database. In many organizations, there are sourcers/recruiters who never search their internal resume database/ATS, opting to search Monster and/or other paid sites exclusively instead. Your internal ATS should be the first source of candidate generation for sourcers and recruiters, and it is more likely to be so if sourcers and recruiters know that the majority of the candidates they would find on the paid job boards are already in your internal system because of the automated daily mining of candidates.

7. Increased sourcer/recruiter productivity. Instead of sourcers/recruiters running their database queries on multiple job boards daily, they will save time by only having to search your internal system for the majority of their assignments, as they would be assured that the majority of the candidate hiring profiles they need have already been mined and entered into Recruitmax.

Conclusion

If you already use or are considering using a resume search aggregator application such as infoGIST, DataFrenzy, TalentHook, or AIRS, I highly recommend that you consider the limitations of search aggregators and that you contemplate the advantages and benefits of using an aggregator application to perform broader, more general automated daily searches to enter results into your internal resume database/ATS for permanent data capture and for more precise search/retrieval from your internal system than your aggregator or the job boards allow.