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Imagine that you were just assigned a position to recruit for and that you needed to present 2 fully screened, highly qualified and well matched candidates within 5 business days.

Your manager/client is requesting candidates with:

• 3-5 years of related work experience (your choice – something not too vanilla/easy/common, but not ”purple squirrel” either)
• Experience in a specific industry, and experience working in a similar environment (size/scale/team/software, etc.)  to the manager’s/client’s
• Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline

Furthermore, let’s say that you don’t have any qualified candidates in your pipeline, so you are essentially starting from scratch.

Under those conditions and assumptions, if you were limited to only 1 method/specific source for identifying candidates to contact, engage and recruit, which would you choose, and why? 

Please Respond to the (100% Anonymous!) Poll

Why Would You Choose That Method/Source?

Okay, this part isn’t so anonymous.

I’m interested to know exactly why you would choose that specific source/method of talent identification.

I believe the question ultimately boils down to which source/method do you believe has the highest probability of enabling you to produce the 2 fully screened, highly qualified and well matched candidates within 5 business days.

Would your answer be the same if you had to produce the candidates within 48 hours?

What about 24 hours?

How about same-day?

What – does that sound crazy to you? If you’ve never had a manager or client ask you to produce candidates same-day before, it actually happens quite often (to me, more times than I can count!).

I’m looking forward to your responses and supporting arguments as to which source/method you would use and why, and you can expect me to challenge them. If I get a good number of responses - I’ll share with you what MY answer would be.

Bring it!

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

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

Active recruiting?

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

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

Passive Recruiting?

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

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

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

How?

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

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

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

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

Active Recruiting?

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

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

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

Let’s Move Forward!

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

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

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

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

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

Passive and Active Sourcing

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

There are individuals in the HR/recruiting industry who believe that searching databases, the Internet, and social networking sites to source talent is relatively easy and that it can be automated through the use of technology.

I am happy to say that unfortunately for them, it’s not that simple.

While anyone can run a basic search and find some people, there are actually many different levels of talent mining – which I define as leveraging human capital data (in the form of resumes, social media profiles, etc.) for talent discovery and identification.

In this article, I am going to explain how there are at least 5 distinct levels of candidate sourcing – most of which cannot be replicated by software solutions and require a person with specific skills and abilities. 

Level 1 Sourcing / Talent Mining

Level 1 sourcing is essentially “buzzword bingo.” It involves little more than taking job titles and required skill terms from job descriptions, using them as search terms, and then performing straight lexical (word for word, title for title) matching. 

As such a superficial level of keyword sourcing and matching, Level 1 sourcing does not require any deep understanding of the roles, skills, responsibilities, or technologies involved in the hiring profiles or the candidates.

This level of basic keyword and title searching and matching will produce results, and this is where some people get the false sense that sourcing is easy. Here’s the catch - the results are limited to only those people who happen to match the titles and keywords search for. Which is never all of the best candidates that you have access to.

A single search cannot find all qualified candidates, as it will both include and exclude qualified candidates.

The danger of Level 1 sourcing lies in the fact that it will not (and can not) find people who are qualified but do not happen to have the exact titles searched for, nor those people who actually do have the right skills and experience but who 1) simply don’t happpen to mention all of them in their resume or social media profile, and/or 2) express their matching skills and experience using words that differ from those used in the job description and required skills – and thus those used in the search.

Level 1 sourcing creates hidden talent pools – entire populations of qualified candidates that you have access to, but your searches never retrieve them. If you didn’t find it, it doesn’t exist, right? :-)  

The good news is that level 1 sourcing works, gets results, and can be easily be performed by “junior” personnel/researchers, because almost anyone can match titles and keywords. Additionally, Level 1 sourcing can be completely automated using software - why pay people to match keywords when matching applications can do it for considerably less than $5 per hour?

The bad news is that in addition to creating huge hidden talent pools of fantastic people who will not and can not be found, level 1 sourcing provides no competitive advantage. If two companies are performing level 1 searching for the same types of people, they will find the same candidates. Same titles and keywords = same results. Interestingly enough – they will also NOT find the same people.

Think about it.

Level 2 Sourcing / Talent Mining

Level 2 sourcing goes beyond literal lexical matching and takes a step into conceptual search territory. Instead of relying solely on the exact titles and experience keywords provided in a given job description, level 2 sourcing involves the utilization of synonymous terms and concepts.

For example, let’s say you were sourcing for a position with a title of “Safety Physician.” While a level 1 sourcer would search only for the exact title of “Safety Physician” and find people who happen to have that title, a level 2 sourcer would perform research and discover that other organizations use a variety of other titles to describe the same role, such as Associate Director of PVRM, Pharmacovigilance Physician, Senior Drug Safety Associate, Global Safety Senior Medical Scientist, Global Pharmacovigilance (Contract) Physician, and Medical Director, Drug Safety & Pharmacovigilance. 

A level 1 sourcer using only the title “Safety Physician” in their search could not find appropriately qualified candidates that used one of the above titles instead of ”Safety Physician.” To the level 1 sourcer, those other candidates simply don’t exist – they are unware of their existence. However, a level 2 sourcer would find them.

At the skills search level, a level 1 sourcer looking to find software engineers with “Ruby on Rails” experience would search for that exact phrase, and would find only those people who happen to mention it. A level 2 sourcer would perform research and discover that some people with that experience may instead express “Ruby on Rails” as Rails, Ruby, or simply RoR. As such, the level 2 sourcer would be able to find candidates that the level 1 sourcer cannot.

Level 2 sourcing can be automated - there are many vendors (including Monster’s Power Resume Search and TalentSpring) offering applications that will take basic title and keyword searches and automatically search for synonymous titles, words, and phrases.

However, there limitations with automated solutions, and there are a few aspects of level 2 sourcing that can only be performed by humans:  

1. It takes a human being to interpret and understand the hiring need, which can not be effectively conveyed soley by a job description, titles, and required skills, to determine what search terms to use (and which ones not to use!).
2. Only a human sourcer can analyze the relevance of the results from initial searches and adaptively learn from them to creatively refine successive searches to increase both the quantity and the quality of relevant results.
3. Applications have no awareness of hidden talent pools - only human sourcers have the ability to be aware that their search criteria may actually eliminate qualified candidates. This awareness enables them to take appropriate action to alter their searches to uncover candidates that previous searches eliminated. 

Level 3 Sourcing / Talent Mining

Level 3 sourcing involves searching for and identifying what isn’t explicitly mentioned by candidates – in other words, searching for what isn’t there.

The fact is, most people have skills and experience that they do not directly express in their resumes and social media profiles. This is because: 

• People cannot effectively be reduced to and represented by a text-based document or form
• Job seekers are NOT professional resume writers
• Candidates don’t mention every skill they have or responsibility they’ve had, nor do they describe every environment they’ve worked in
• Most people still believe shorter resumes are better, which means that they are removing experience (data/info) from their resumes which can no longer be searched for
• There are many ways of expressing the same skills and experience
• Employers often don’t use the same job titles for the same job functions
• Candidates don’t create their resumes thinking how you will search for them
• Sometimes candidates don’t even use correct terminology 

This phenomenon creates HUGE volumes of resumes, candidate records, and social network profiles of people who have skills and experience that cannot be directly searched for because it isn’t there. Most sourcers and recruiters simply aren’t aware of these people because they can’t be returned by standard (level 1 and 2) search tactics.

Level 3 sourcing involves incorporating an understanding of the intrinsic limitations of resumes and social media profiles detailed above into sourcing strategies and tactics, and is a skill that can only be developed over time from observation and direct experience.

For example, let’s say a manager has an opening for someone with Rational Unified Process experience.

• A level 1 sourcer would search for “Rational Unified Process.” 
• A level 2 sourcer (human OR otherwise) would/could search for synonymous terms (RUP OR “Rational Unified Process”). 
• A level 3 sourcer would be able to find people with Rational Unified Process experience without actually searching for the terms by researching which companies use RUP and searching specifically for people who have worked for them but who do not say (RUP OR “Rational Unified Process”) by using the NOT operator.

A level 3 sourcer is capable of finding the same candidates someone who employs only level 1 and 2 sourcing tactics, as well as candidates level 1 and 2 sourcers cannot. Additionally, a level 3 sourcer can find candidates that matching applications employing level 2 sourcing concept/semantic search cannot – this is because an application cannot effectively search for words and concepts that cannot be found because they simply aren’t there.  

Level 4 Sourcing / Talent Mining

Level 4 sourcing involves searching for responsibilities and capabilities, not keywords or titles.

Moreover, level 4 sourcing takes concept searching beyond synonymous words and phrases (level 2 sourcing) and targets meaning at the sentence level – specifically targeting what people DO, not just what they SAY.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no applications available today that perform dynamic sentence-level (not static phrase level) semantic search via verb/noun combinations. However, any human sourcer can perform level 4 sourcing manually by searching for verb/noun cominations using a search engine that supports proximity search.

That includes Monster “classic” – which supports the NEAR operator (fixed proximity within 10 words), the Exalead Internet search engine, and nearly any ATS/CRM application which uses Lucene or dtSearch as their text search engine.

Search Example 1

Let’s say you’re looking for someone who has had experience performing administrative support for C-level executives.  Using Monster, you could use a search something like this:

support* near (CEO or CFO or CTO or CIO or “C-Level” or chief*)

Essentially this search is looking for any permutation of the verb “support” to be mentioned within 10 words (forwards or backwards) of one of the many ways of expressing a C-level title. This can effectively target sentences in which people express the responsibility of supporting C-level executives.

Here are snippets from 3 different resumes. Notice that no title search was necessary due to the power of targeting sentence-level meaning:

Search Example 2

If you were looking for someone who had experience configuring Juniper routers, you could run a search like this on Monster:

config* near juniper near router*

This search is essentially looking for people who mention that they have experience configuring Juniper routers, because some permutation of the root “config” has to be mentioned within 10 words of Juniper, which also has to be mentioned within 10 words of router or routers. In most cases, due to the proximity specifications, these 3 words variants will be found in the same sentence – expressing Juniper router configuration responsibility.  

Does it work? You decide.

Search Example 3

If you use PCRecruiter (which uses Lucene for text search) and you were looking for people who had experience creating Access databases, you could run this search:

“created access database”~7

That search is asking the database for any result in which the words “created,” Access,” and “Database” are all within 7 words of each other. And it works. 

Notice that this is not an exact phrase search - in the relevant phrases, the words are actually in a different order than expressed in the search above, yet the concept is the same.

Level 4 sourcing is user-defined, grammatical natural language search.

As complex as that sounds, it’s essentially intelligent keyword search empowered by proximity search capability (extended Boolean) that effectively enables semantic search targeting verb/noun combinations. Best of all, it produces highly relevant results, matched at the responsibility level – what people have done and can do, not just words they happen to mention. 

Level 5 Sourcing / Talent Mining

Level 5 sourcing is a creative use of human capital data in which sourcers deliberately search for the “wrong people” in order to find the “right people.” 

This can involve #1 searching for under/overqualified professionals – people who do not have enough years of experience for a specific position, or those who are very experienced and likely to be looking for compensation above what you can offer for a given position, as well as #2 searching for people who likely work with or know the professionals you need to find.

In some ways this isn’t much different than cold calling, yet it has the advantage of specificity and candidate variable control. For example, let’s say you’re looking for C# software engineers with at least 3 years of SharePoint portal development experience, and you know from experience that people with more than 5 years of applicable experience tend to want a higher level of compensation than you are able to offer.

Once you’ve exhausted all searches/sources for direct matches to your need (C# software engineers with 3 to 5 years of SharePoint portal development experience), you could deliberately search for people with precisely the right experience, but less than 3 years or more than 5.

While you may not be able to immediately assist these people, by identifying them ahead of need you can effectively and proactively build your candidate pipelines for junior and more senior C#/SharePoint portal developers, and you afford yourself the opportunity to network with these individuals to identify people they know who do have 3-5 years of applicable experience. 

Going one step further, you could search specifically for people who would have experience working with your target candidate pool. This could include software testers, business analysts, development/project managers, etc. By searching for, identifying and contacting testers, business analysts, and managers who have experience working on C#/SharePoint portal projects, you can proactively build your pipeline of candidates with these skills, as well as network with them in an effort to identify C# software engineers with SharePoint portal development experience.

Beyond the 5 Levels 

I believe that it is all too easy for people to oversimplify the sourcing role and function, as well as suggest that sourcing is easy, that it can be effectively mastered and performed by junior personnel, and that it can be fully automated through the use of search and match applications.

All of which is precisely why I took the time to analyze talent mining and share with you the fact that there are at least 5 distinct levels of candidate sourcing. 

I say “at least” because I am not satisfied to say that there are only 5 levels - there may be more than 5 distinct levels of talent mining and candidate sourcing. I’m looking forward to the sourcing and recruiting cognoscenti to digest my assessment of sourcing/talent mining and offer their thoughts and feedback.

You’ll notice that in my assessment, only level 1 and to some extent level 2 sourcing can be performed solely by search and match applications without human involvement.

Some aspects of level 2 sourcing can only be accomplished by a living, breathing, thinking person. For example: Interpreting and understanding the hiring need, analyzing the relevance of the results from initial searches and adaptively learning from them to creatively refine successive searches to increase both the quantity and the quality of relevant results, and leveraging an awareness of hidden talent pools to take appropriate action to alter searches to specifically uncover candidates that previous searches eliminated.

Similarly, only people are capable of interfacing with and searching databases and Internet sites to perform level 3 – 5 sourcing.

I believe that the solution to the talent sourcing challenge lies in:

1. The ability of  people to truly understand the positions being sourced for, an awareness and appreciation of the intrinsic limitations of human capital data, and the ability to employ sound search/data mining tactics and strategies to go beyond these limitations and leverage human capital data to find all of the best candidates, both directly and indirectly.
2. Companies finally “getting it” by understanding and appreciating of the true value of human capital data, which is directly proportional to the ability to quickly retrieve exactly what you want when you want it. This should lead companies to offer their sourcing and recruiting teams better search capability and technology (for both internal databases and external resources). 

Whatever your thoughts may be regarding the sourcing role, companies and their HR/staffing organizations have at least 2 ways of handling the talent discovery/identification function: 1) Simply allow full life cycle recruiters to handle the sourcing role as an integrated function, or 2) Separate out the sourcing function and assign the work to people who are solely responsible for talent identification.

So which is the superior model?

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer here, as I do not believe that either way of handling the sourcing function is intrinsically “better” than the other. However, as someone who has always personally performed his own sourcing and as someone who trains dedicated sourcers whose sole purpose is to identify potential candidates, I can share my insights with you.

One Mind, One Understanding

Having 1 person being responsible for the entire recruiting life cycle, including the talent identification stage, has an obvious benefit of not suffering from any communication/”lost in translation” issues when it comes to understanding a particular position and the kinds of people the hiring manager is ideally looking for.

Who is to say that the sourcer walks away with the same understanding of a specific position’s requirements as the recruiter, and that the sourcer would employ the same search strategies and tactics to identify potential candidates as the recruiter would?

Accountability

While teams can enjoy certain benefits over lone wolves, there is something to be said for a single point of accountability. A full life cycle recruiter who performs their own sourcing cannot point the finger at or blame anyone else for their lack of results with something like, “my sourcer isn’t getting me enough of the right people.” Moreover, a sourcer can’t claim that the recruiter is failing to successfully contact and engage the prospective candidates they have identified, or that the recruiter simply isn’t calling the people they’re finding because the recruiter doesn’t care for the resumes. Sound familair?

Feedback Loop

A full life cycle recruiter who is responsible for sourcing their own candidates has the advantage of an instantaneous real-time feedback look from sourcing efforts – there is no dependency upon or need to wait to hear back from the sourcer as to what they are or are not finding. I’ve always sourced by own candidates, and I benefit from and enjoy adaptively learning from my research and sourcing efforts to modify, improve and evolve my searches to more quickly find more of the right people to engage.

Cost

Whether a corporate or agency environment, it’s typically less expensive to employ 1 person to perform the entire recruiting life cycle than it is to employ 2 people with mutually exclusive responsibilities within the recruiting life cycle, even if the sourcer is offshore.

Due to the cost factor of employing 2 people to perform the entire recruiting life cycle, many staffing organizations “skimp” on the sourcing role, viewing the candidate sourcing role as a junior function, and correspondingly pay the sourcer less than the recruiter.

My only guess as to why this is the case is because a great many people and the organizations they work for don’t yet understand the true value of the sourcing function. Sourcers are undeniably true knowledge workers – and their function cannot be commoditized any more than business intelligence and financial analytics can, regardless of the excessive desire to.

The cliche of “you get what you pay for” applies no less to sourcing than it does anything else.

Efficiency

Depending on the kind of roles being recruited for, finding the right people to engage and recruit can be very time consuming. I know many recruiters who lament their lack of time to really dig into their sourcing function based on their requirement/job opening load – they’re spending so much time reaching out to, engaging, evaluating and processing referrals and active candidates that have responded to job postings that they don’t have much time to go out and actually look for those elusive and prized “passive” candidates.

It can easily be argued that having one person handle the entire recruiting life cycle is inefficient – like having 1 person build your house. Even though there are individuals who are entirely capable of designing a home as well as performing all carpentry, drywall, flooring, plumbing, electrical and HVAC work – it’s not an efficient way to build a home.  

One person that is solely responsible for sourcing candidates can undeniably source a higher volume of candidates per hour, day, and week than a person who has to juggle all of the other steps of the recruiting life cycle. And without having to worry about finding candidates to contact, a recruiter can engage and assess more candidates per hour, day and week than a recruiter who has to source their own candidates.

Typers vs. Talkers

Some people believe that recruiting/HR professionals can be lumped into two main types: typers and talkers. I’ll grant that to some extent this is accurate. I’ve certainly experienced it myself when I have hired and trained full life cycle recruiters – both experienced and inexperienced. Some people are simply better with the people engagement aspect (aka the human element) of recruiting than the investigative hunt of talent discovery and vice versa.

It is a fallacy to assume that just because someone has an uncanny way with potential candidates when it comes to messaging, engagement, screening and closing and control that they will have an equally uncanny ability to leverage the phone and/or technology (databases, ATS/CRM systems, the Internet, etc.) to actually FIND potential candidates, and vice versa.

Specialization of Function

There is definitely an advantage to specialization of function. Asking one person to do (too) many different things can prevent them from being highly productive, and it can also prevent them from developing advanced skills and ability in any one aspect of their job – the concept of the generalist vs. the specialist.

Perhaps it is best to let the typers type and the talkers talk. Two specialists who are able to divide and conquer the recruiting life cycle by leveraging their respective skills and ability can likely outperform a single generalist responsible for the entire recruiting process. However, as previously stated, 2 people – especially specialists – are typically more expensive than 1 generalist, or even a single “super recruiter” who can do it all.

My Thoughts

Technology Enables

Now more than ever, recruiting technology and the unprecedented access to and ever increasing volume of human capital data should actually enable a single person responsible for the entire recruiting life cycle to be highly productive.

If anything, a separate sourcing function was never more necessary than 15+ years ago. Today – not so much, in my opinion.

As I have written before, today – a properly trained and capable person leveraging available technologies can identify 20 or so well qualified and local candidates in under an hour (sometimes in as little as 30 minutes) – not counting ad responses. 15 years ago – without LinkedIn, a well stocked Internet, highly searchable resume databases (free, premium, and private ATS/CRM solutions) and social media, you’d be lucky to identify 20 well qualified local candidates in a week.

And by “well qualified” I don’t mean names – I mean people who match on all variables – specific years of and type of experience, industry, environment, degree, compensation, precise location, etc., and have a high probability of being the right match and ultimately being hired. 

As I am fond of saying – finding people (sourcing names) has never been particularly difficult, but finding the right people (with specific skills, experience, and qualifications)quickly has always been a challenge, although less so today for those with the right skills, experience, and capability.

Hire Right

Yes, it’s true that there are typers and there are talkers. However, I would not suggest designing a sourcing/recruiting model around this phenomenon.

Solid talent management principles would state that you should leverage people for their strengths and not rely on them for their weaknesses – why have high expectations of someone performing a specific function for which they don’t appear to have any innate ability/propensity?

If you need a true full life cycle recruiter who can source their own candidates, make sure you’re hiring the right people who are equally good at typing and talking. Trust me – they exist.  There are many people who can type and talk with equal skill and ability, and they can also be developed from scratch.  Been there, done that.

Value and Invest in Sourcing

There is no doubt that splitting the recruiting life cycle up between typers and talkers can be effective and highly productive. Specialization of function has many benefits.

I believe that for staffing teams employing dedicated sourcers, specialized sourcing training should be available, there should be a clear career path offering advancement for the sourcing role, and compensation for the sourcers should be commensurate with ability and the value provided. There are a few companies I am aware of that pay their senior sourcers more than their senior recruiters who do not source – kudos for “getting it!”

If you examine the entire recruiting life cycle for value, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that any step provides more value than finding the right person in the first place. You simply cannot engage, recruit and hire someone you haven’t found. Unfortunately, many staffing organizations pay their sourcers in an inverse proportion to the value their role can provide their company.

Your Thoughts?

Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting and HR blogs?

I know I am - a new recruiting blog seems to pop up almost daily!

So how can anyone possibly stay on top of all of them? Subscribing via email? Using an RSS reader?  

My initial approach to not missing a post from my favorite recruiting bloggers was to use Google’s Reader. However, I found that over time, I simply stopped reviewing all of the posts and articles that were piling up.  Admittedly, my Google Reader is now essentially a dumping ground.

I switched to email subscriptions, but I found that to be equally unmanageable.

Then, not too long ago, I stumbled across a couple of interesting sites - Alltop and POPURLS - and I started to think…why not create a similar site that is focused 100% on aggregating sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting, and HR blogs?

So I did create one - and thus Recruiting Pulse was born.

Recruiting Pulse features the most recent 3 posts from over 50 sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting, HR, and UK recruiting blogs. On the main page, you will find a mix of 40+ blogs from all categories.

At the bottom of the page, you will find links to pages where blogs are arranged by category:

• HR Blogs
• Recruiting Blogs
• Social Recruiting Blogs
• Sourcing Blogs
• UK Recruiting Blogs

So What’s the Big Deal?

I didn’t say it was a big deal. :-)

I simply created the site as a blog post dashboard of sorts to enable people (including myself, I must admit) to easily stay on top of the content generated by over 50 of the top sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting and UK recruiting blogs.

Mouse over a link and you can see the beginning of each post.

If you like what you see, you can click the link to be taken directly to the entire post.

It’s that easy.

A Work In Progress

I did not intend to make Recruiting Pulse a site that tracks every last sourcing, recruiting and HR blog in existence – that would defeat the purpose of what I am trying to accomplish.

To keep it manageable, I chose a combination of blogs from HR Examiner’s Top 25 lists and some blogs I read on a regular basis written by people I respect.

However, I am open to suggestions – so please feel free to let me know if there is a high quality sourcing, recruiting, or HR blog you think should be added to the site and I will take it into consideration.

I must say there are a few well known sourcing/recruiting blogs that I wanted to add to Recruiting Pulse, but I could not find an RSS feed for their blog (which is odd), and I found some Ning-based sites that only offered a “recent activity” feed as opposed to feeds for posts or discussions.

If you are a blog author and don’t see your blog on any of the pages of Recruiting Pulse – please let me know if you would like to be added. I can’t promise to add every blog/site as I am looking to keep Recruiting Pulse to a relatively reasonable size. However, I am open to adding blogs with quality content and at least weekly posts.

I do plan to modify the site in the future to feature even more specialized categories (e.g., global recruiting) – so let me know if you have any ideas there.

I hope at least a few people find the site helpful!

In the original LinkedIn Current Title Search: Internal vs. X-Ray post, I found that there was a large disparity in results between identical internal and external (Google X-Ray) current title searches on LinkedIn. 

At the end of the post I asked if anyone had any ideas as to where the missing 288 profiles were, why they weren’t returned using the basic Google X-Ray current title search technique, and how can you find them?

I received a few interesting and insightful responses - I will review them in this post as well as provide my own insight as to the difference in results experienced when running an internal LinkedIn search and a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn using the same search criteria.

I’ll also show you some interesting LinkedIn search phenomena.

Does Results Sorting Matter?

Kathy Breitenbucher noticed as I did that LinkedIn seems to be taking some liberties with the “Director of Accounting” title, and she decided to sort the results by keywords rather than the default setting of “relevance” (which really isn’t relevance based on keywords, in case you didn’t know).

I decided to sort the results by keyword as well – but I did not see the result she referenced (”The first person on the list is an Executive Director, HR & Accounting”) in the first 10 pages. However, I did notice that on the main results listing, some in fact do not mention “Director of Accounting.”

For example:

However, if you click on the result to view the profile, you will notice there is some reference to “Director of Accounting:”

So be careful not to judge a search result by what is or is not displayed on the main results listing. As I discovered in all cases, even if some form of “Director of Accounting” was not present on the main results listing, when I opened each result, there was in fact at least one relevant hit of the phrase (regardless of order – more on that later).

Does LinkedIn Ignore Quotes?

Medhavi Misra believed that “…quotes are completely ignored in linkedin search and thus the number of results is more.” 

I am not so sure that LinkedIn completely ignores quotes. In every result that I reviewed during my research, there was always at least one instance in which “director” and “accounting” were within close proximity, which leads me to believe that LinkedIn is honoring some form of general phrase proximity.

On the other hand, Medhavi was very observant to notice that a search for “director of accounting” on LinkedIn also returns results with phrases like “Director – Accounting”, “Director & Accounting”, “Director, Accounting”, “Accounting Director.”

This in fact is one of the major factors that causes an internal LinkedIn search for “Director of Accounting” to return more results than a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn for the same phrase.

However, that is only half of this particular phenomenon. 

Google is Strict, LinkedIn gets Loose

Yogesh Kumar and Irina Shamaeva both pointed out that Google seems to strictly honor phrase searching with quotation marks. In other words, when you use Google to search for “Director of Accounting,” it will only return results with the exact phrase of “Director of Accounting.”

As you can see below, LinkedIn isn’t so strict.

This is also evident on individual LinkedIn profiles.

For the most part – this is a good thing! LinkedIn is “smart” enough to realize that people can represent titles and phrases in various ways while the meaning of the concept remains intact.

LinkedIn’s flexibility with phrase searching and Google’s strict adherence to exact phrase searching likely accounts for a large portion of the missing 288 results referenced in my original post. 

Yogesh Kumar and Kameron Swinton pointed out that LinkedIn appears to ignore common words (such as of, or, at, for – as many search engines do), even if they are contained in what most people would assume is a strict exact phrase search using quotes, such as “Director of Accounting.”

Proof of this can be seen here, where the word “of” is not highlighted:

To compensate for LinkedIn’s phrase search flexibility and how it ignores common words, Yogesh suggested the following Google X-Ray search string to more closely approximate what LinkedIn is doing:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory “greater new york city area” “current * * * director * accounting”

That search yields nearly 13,000 results- quite a bit more than the 393 that LinkedIn returns!

When you examine the results, you can see what’s going on here – the replacement of “of” with an asterisk [Director * Accounting] allows Google to return results with titles such as:

• Director Corporate Accounting
• Managing Director at DSZ Forensic Accounting
• Director – NAC Accounting & Planning
• Associate Director, Finance & Accounting
• Managing Director at NetWorth Tax Accounting
• Director/Vice President, Accounting & Finance
• Director Corporate Reporting & Accounting

This search actually represents an improvement on the original search of “Director of Accounting” because in addition to returning that exact phrase, it also returns results that do not match the exact phrase yet still match the intent of the search – which is to find people at the director level who oversee accounting functions.

As such, this is a wonderful example of semantic search – targeting the meaning of the concept of director level responsibility over accounting without being restricted to an exact phrase.

However, all is not perfect with this search.  Remember those 13,000 results? When I navigated through the results pages on Google to review them for accuracy and relevance, I noticed that the results stopped at page 6:

I tried running the X-Ray search in IE and Firefox and got the same results – I could not navigate past page 6, and the actual total number of results ended up being 57. A far cry from 13,000!

Any ideas as to what’s going on here?

What about Indexing?

Gov’t Recruiter took a totally different angle than anyone else who responded to my challenge. His answer as to why the Google X-Ray search returned fewer results than the equivalent search inside of LinkedIn is that ”LinkedIn indexes with its RDBMS immediately as a new profile has been created, granting LinkedIn an Instant Refresh. Google’s results are based off spiders and metatags keying and registering  typically taking 45 days to index for most search and meta search engines.”

Now, I am not certain of the accuracy of his claims of it taking around 45 days for Google to find and index pages (such as public LinkedIn profiles), but I do think he is onto something here. Certainly if someone creates a new LinkedIn profile today, it is not likely to be indexed by Google (or any search engine) in the same day and thus searchable and retreivable via Google immediately, whereas new profiles ARE instantly retrievable when searching inside of LinkedIn.

Do you have any thoughts, additional insight or facts (such as exactly how long it DOES take for Google to crawl and index a new LinkedIn profile) to share on this concept?

Overlap and Private Profiles

Irina Shamaeva offered a few ideas as to the variance in results between an internal LinkedIn search and a Google X-Ray search: 1. The results of using one, two, and three asterisks may be different, so we need to combine them all for an X-ray answer. 2. Private profiles won’t show up in Google. 3. It seems LI may decide that “director accounting” is the same as “director of accounting”; Google takes words in quotation marks as they are; am I right?

While the possibility of combining the search results from the 3 separate searches is a sound theory, when I wrote the orignal post, I carefully reviewed the results of 1, 2, and 3 asterisks in the phrase “current  */* */* * * director” and I found there to be significant overlap in the results. Thus we cannot simply add the results of the search with 1 asterisk (85) to the results of the searches with  2 and 3 asterisks (98 and 105 respectively) to explain the variance in results.

However, Irina correctly pointed out that any LinkedIn profile that is not published to the web would not be indexed and thus searchable/retrievable via a Google X-Ray search. I don’t have the stats on how many people actually change their account settings from the default/recommended “publish profile to web” to “None off,” but from my experience it is likely a small percentage of people.  Nonetheless, this is a legitimate explanation of why you may not get as many results from an X-Ray search as you would when searching within LinkedIn. 

Irina also nailed the difference in how Google and LinkedIn process phrase searching with quotation marks, as did Medhavi and Yogesh. Well done! 

My Thoughts

I enjoyed not giving away any answers in the original post. Although I was hoping to have more people try and figure out exactly why there can be such a huge difference between equivalent internal and external LinkedIn searches, I was pleased to receive insightful thoughts from a number of sharp sourcers around the world.

I have found that the best sourcers are people who are curious, analytical, investigative problem solvers. This exercise has proven something that I continually espouse – that it is critical to ask “why?” when you encounter something that doesn’t seem to work quite right, to experiment via the scientific method, and that a significant portion of learning comes from examing the results – especially for what isn’t highlighted.

In addition to what was accurately revealed by all of the people I’ve referenced in this post, I wanted to share a couple of other phenomena I encountered while exploring the differences between internal LinkedIn searches and X-Ray searches.

LinkedIn is Rebellious and Inconsistent

First, I noticed that when searching inside of LinkedIn with a phrase of “Director of Accounting” in the current title field…

…that LinkedIn would highlight one of the search terms (accounting) by itself, not in a phrase, and not even in the title section, as you can see in the “Specialties” section! What gives?

Although I clearly searched for the phrase “Director of Accounting” in the current title field, “accounting” is highlighted by itself outside of the title fields – and yet I noticed that neither the individual search terms nor the phrase “Director Accounting” were highlighted when they were in fact present elsewhere in the profile (see above). 

Anyone from LinkedIn care to explain?

LinkedIn Puts it in Reverse

Second, I also found a few examples in which LinkedIn would actually reverse the order of the keywords in the phrase “Director of Accounting,” which I found quite interesting:

LinkedIn Searches for Relevant Abbreviations

Third, LinkedIn also returned results that did not even spell out the word “Director:”

Kudos to the search team at LinkedIn – nice work!

Thank You!

Thank you to everyone who responded to my original post with thoughts and ideas! Please let me know if you can provide any additional insight to the questions I raised in this article.

The other day I came across an insightful post on Fistful of Talent by Josh Letourneau in which he addresses the arms race that rages on in the talent acquisition universe – the never-ending attempt of people and companies to achieve some sort of technological advantage over the competition.

Josh would rather have a recruiter “with the “will to fight,” in other words – someone with a never-say-die-because-I-will-make-it-happen Recruiter/Sourcer. If I have that, then I can introduce technology and truly accelerate their success. But if it’s a lazy Recruiter who would rather let their Careers Site do the work, then all the technology in the world would prove wasteful in their hands.”

I could not agree more!

A driven, no-excuses sourcer/recruiter will always out-perform a lazy sourcer/recruiter – no matter how bleeding-edge their technology.

High Tech or Low Tech – Information is the Key

Although Dan Hilbert, a recruiting leader who’s unequivocally proven what technology can do for a Fortune 25 company’s recruiting efforts (read this excellent 5 part series by Dr. John Sullivan: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5) has said that “When the war for talent is waged over the Internet, major corporations will be won and lost over staffing technology,” it certainly doesn’t take sophisticated sourcing applications, the best contact management system, a better branded careers site, or a “bleeding edge” social media strategy to be hugely successful in the war for talent (or the latest term du jour).

However, regardless of high-tech or low-tech (or no-tech!) sourcing and recruiting approach, I will say that today’s level of access to large volumes of information/data at the candidate and corporate level is a game changer.

The ability to filter through the noise and abstract, evaluate and understand relevant information (intel, to stay in Josh’s analogy) and extract value out of it in a timely manner confers an advantage over those who are unable to. The quality, quantity, and timeliness of intel (good, bad, late, none, etc.) can drastically affect the outcome of any staffing and recruiting effort, provided that the person, team, or organization has the capability of effectively leveraging it. 

There’s an unprecedented amount of candidate data out there, both public and private – and interestingly,  it doesn’t take advanced technology (or a great careers site or a social media strategy) to take full advantage of it.  Talent mining via basic Boolean logic and a sound search strategy can yield great results!

Passive vs. Active Sourcers/Recruiters 

Unfortunately, there are a good number of sourcers and recruiters who either knowingly or unknowingly take a primarily passive role in their company’s talent identification efforts. These people are content to let their employer’s brand ( job postings, etc.), employee referral program, social media presence, and/or cutting-edge sourcing applications do the vast majority of the work in identifying/attracting talent.

In many cases, these sourcers and recruiters simply wait until the right person stumbles into their grasp through one of the aforementioned means.  Whenever that fails, they either wait longer, assume that the candidates simply don’t exist, or perhaps turn over the position to a third party recruiter who will produce the right candidates for a fee, although most of the time the third party recruiter won’t actually do anything the corporate recruiter could not do themselves. In fact, most third party recruiters get excellent results leveraging sources of candidate information that most corporate recruiters have access to. 

How wrong is that?   

The best active sourcers and recruiters can and will find a way to get excellent results, regardless of their employer’s brand draw, referral program, social media strategy, job board access, or artificial intelligence/semantic matching engines.

The best sourcers and recruiters are results-oriented and never complain about or make excuses for how challenging a particular position is. Failure is simply not an option for these sourcers and recruiters, and they actually thrill in rising to meet a challenge that others avoid, and to succeed where others fail. These people are (I believe) ultimately competitive control freaks who would never be content to wait for the right candidate to come to them, nor would they willingly give up any position to a third party recruiter.

Active sourcers and recruiters are true hunters – they will go out and find the right candidates, whether the candidates woke up that morning looking for a job (only about 14% of all people) or woke up that morning thinking they have the best job on the planet.

These sourcers and recruiters hunt in the deep end of the candidate pool – specifically targeting and taking advantage of the fact that 66% of all people are either not looking or are passive candidates – this vast majority does not search for job openings on career sites, job boards, or vertical search engines, nor do they “see” targeted ads positioned in the places they frequent online. 

To active sourcers and recruiters, everyone is a candidate – they just don’t know it yet.

Some Questions For You

Are you a problem identifier or a solution identifier?

Do you complain about difficult positions and make excuses as to why you can’t find the right person, or do you put your head down, grit your teeth, and revel in the challenge of solving the difficult hiring challenge? 

Do you sit in the back seat and wait for your employer’s brand, referral program or social media presence bring candidates to you, or do you sit in the driver’s seat and take an active role in finding the best candidates, whether they are looking or not?

A military force using outdated gear and weapons but with abundant and highly accurate intel and the ability to to leverage it has a significant advantage over an opposing force with the latest weapons and gear with low quality or no intel at all.

Similarly, a team of recruiters with the “will to fight” but lacking a big-name employer brand, industry-leading referral program, award-winning social media strategy, and high-tech ATS/CRM has an advantage over lazy recruiters who may do little more than hide behind a strong employer brand, industry-recognized social media efforts, and matching applications, and those who don’t or simply can’t take advantage of the vast amount of human capital data available to them.

Human capital data is the sword of the 21st century sourcer/recruiter.

Is your sword displayed on the wall, or do you spend countless hours practicing with and using it daily in combat in the war for talent?

When I run recruiter training classes, I often ask for the trainees to bring me example positions they are having trouble working on to use for live sourcing training.

During one such class (a little over 2 years ago), I had a recruiter bring me an opening for a challenging position at Google that had been open for a while. He had been working this position for a couple of weeks and had failed to produce a single candidate that Google was interested in interviewing. 

Many Had Already Tried and Failed…

As I asked him for a little background on the position, I found out it had been open for 4 months. 

That’s almost always a bad sign to a recruiter, as it had no doubt been thoroughly beaten up by countless other recruiters/vendors to Google. However, he assured me this was not a “black hole” requirement and that Google would indeed interview and hire candidates.

Now, the position this recruiter was working on was a network performance test engineer, which poses some unique searching challenges because most of the Boolean search strings that recruiters will employ will result in many false positives – resumes of candidates that contain all of the search terms, but who are not primarily responsible for the performance testing of networks. A simple game of “buzzword bingo” would not work for this position.

This was also independently verified by Google, as they commented that most of the candidates they were receiving were not appropriately qualified – most were QA/test engineers who had performance tested software and network applications, but not networks and network hardware specifically.

Give Me Four Hours to Chop Down a Tree…

When I first accepted the challenge of helping this recruiter, my initial searches did pull many false positives. However, after about 20 minutes of manipulating search strings and observing the corresponding changes in the results, I came up with a handful of Boolean queries that resulted in fewer false positives and a larger percentage of resumes of people who were primarily responsible for the performance testing of networks.

Once I gave these searches to the recruiter and he put them to use, in 2 weeks he called to let me know Google had already hired one of his candidates he had found using the Boolean search strings, and he had an interview request for another.

Where Did He Find the Candidates No One Else Could Find?

So where do you think he found these candidates that no one else had been able to find and submit to Google for the network performance testing positions?

Cold calling? Referral recruiting? Blogs? User groups? LinkedIn? Twitter? Facebook?

Nope – he found them on (drumroll please)…………..Monster.

Yes – this recruiter was able to use a resume database that presumably quite a few (if not all) other vendors to Google (and likely Google’s contract recruiters as well) had access to and most likely used to try and find candidates for these positions for several months.

Interestingly enough, the candidates this recruiter was able to find were not new candidates who just posted their resume – their resumes were over 3 months old, which tells me that they had been in Monster’s resume database ever since Google released their network performance testing positions.

I specifically point this out because I love to continuously disprove the commonly held belief that if many recruiters have access to the same resume database that they will be able to find the same candidates, the best candidates, and all of the appropriately qualified candidates.

Holding onto that belief is as foolish as thinking that if 10 people go fishing in the same lake, that they will all catch the same fish, as well as the biggest fish in the lake.

Job Board Resume Databases Do Have High Quality Talent

This is also a good example of how, contrary to popular belief, you actually CAN find extremely good candidates (Google is notoriously elitist, which I respect) on the job boards. I continue to see well-respected recruiting and staffing thought leaders comment on how the job boards have mostly “mediocre” and declining levels of talent.

This may be subjectively true, but certainly not objectively true. Besides, when’s the last time they ran a search and hired someone from a job board? Nothing bothers me more than people talking about something they have little-to-no direct experience with. 

All Boolean Search Strings “Work”

I am 100% positive MANY recuriters searched Monster in an attempt to find candidates for the network performance testing positions at Google. But there’s a funny thing about Talent Mining – you’re only aware of the candidates you actually find, and conversely, you are not aware of the candidates you didn’t find.

However, that does not mean the candidates you want and need aren’t in the database you’re searching. It just means you weren’t capable of finding them. When most recruiters search any particular database, including their own ATS or LinkedIn, and don’t find the people they’re looking for, they assume the candidates don’t exist.

But they’re there. Trust me.

The Power of Talent Mining with Boolean Search Strings

Here’s the search string that produced one of the candidates who was hired at Google:

Test* and (qa or quality) and (perl or tcl*) and (cisco or rout*) and (lab* or case* or plan* or script*) and (ixia or smartbit* or “smart bit”) and (L2* or LACP or STP or RSTP or VRRP or UDLD) and protocol* and (bgp* or eigrp or rip or ospf or mpls)

Interestingly, most of the search terms in the string above were not in the job description or required skills.

So it took me about 20 minutes of experimenting and refining search strings to come up with that search, from which a recruiter was able to make a hire from less than 10 phone calls on a position that had been worked for 4 months by countless other recruiters who had access to the exact same database.

How’s that for ROI?

That’s the power of effective e-talent discovery.

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.”