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). 

This question has been burning in my mind for quite some time – why is it that so many ATS/recruiting CRM vendors offer poor or limited candidate search functionality? I’m not talking about ATS vendors you’ve never heard of – I’m talking about some of the biggest names in Applicant Tracking/Candidate Relationship Management applications.

I’m well aware that ATS’s serve many critical functions beyond searching for the candidates contained within them, but let’s pull no punches here – you can’t hire someone, or begin to automate candidate relationship management with someone you haven’t FOUND in the first place. And just because a candidate is buried somewhere in your database, it doesn’t mean you’ve actually found them (or can find them when you want or need to).

The bottom line is that data is of little to no value if you can’t retrieve the information you want, when you need it. What is the point of storing human capital data if you can’t precisely retrieve exactly what you want, when you want it? 

Deficiencies Defined

I won’t get into automated/system-side semantic search and match in this post – I’m going to focus on the ability to manually enter search strings to find candidates.

When I say “poor/limited” candidate search capability, I mean at least one or more of the following:

• Unnecessarily short search fields (e.g., 100 characters, including spaces!)
• Lack of full Boolean search (e.g., inability to use AND, OR, and NOT, nesting, etc.)
• Lack of stemming/root word search (e.g., admin* yeilds administrator, administration, etc.)
• Lack of field-based search (e.g., most recent experience, most recent title, education, etc.)
• Lack of searching by zip code radius

Critical Candidate Pool

A company’s internal candidate database is made up of people who have responded to that company’s job postings, people who went to the company’s website and entered their resume and information (not in response to a specific job), and people who were identified elsewhere (employee referral, LinkedIn, Twitter, Monster, niche job board, the Internet, etc.) and entered into the database by an employee. 

One could easily argue that this pool of candidates should be the first place sourcers, recruiters and hiring managers look when they need to find candidates. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

ATS = Candidate Source of Last Resort

A relatively common observation/complaint I hear from recruiting managers in corporate and agency staffing environments is that when it comes to running searches to find potential candidates, their sourcers and recruiters tend to search LinkedIn and the job board resume databases they have access to first, or at least before they search their internal ATS/CRM application. In many cases, recruiters with access to job board resume databases will only use their own ATS as a “source of last resort.”

A recent survey conducted by TalentDrive, which polled over 8,000 companies and staffing firms, confirms this to a shocking degree. They found that “98% of the companies surveyed did not find Talent from within the existing Company ATS.” In other words, candidates can check in, but they don’t check out.

Not quite as shocking, but equally disturbing is that an Online Sourcing Survey conducted by TalentDrive found that almost two-thirds (64%) of the employers represented by the survey’s participants did not know how many qualified candidates were in their own ATS databases.

I think I know one of the major contributing factors to both statistics - most ATS’s aren’t very searchable!

Strong Candidate Search Capability is Out There

I believe the reason why Applicant Tracking Systems are often used as the “source of last resort” is because most ATS’s have candidate search functionality that is far inferior to what sourcers and recruiters have available to them in LinkedIn, any of the major job board resume databases, and even Google. Can we blame recruiters for going first to sources they have access to that actually ENABLE them with the power and control to quickly find the people they need?

If you take a look at large repositories of deep human capital data, such as those offered by LinkedIn and the “big 4″ job board resume databases (Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, and Dice), you’ll find robust search capability. All accept full Boolean logic, accept relatively long/complex/precise search strings, feature zip code radius search, and offer field-specific searching. Monster takes Boolean search one step further by offering proximity search with the NEAR operator, and Careerbuilder offers advanced AI matching with their R2 functionality(which I think it powered by Sovren – can anyone confirm this?). 

Regardless of how many excellent candidates may be buried in a company’s ATS/CRM, if recruiters can’t run appropriately precise searches to quickly and easily retrieve highly relevant results, they are actually incentivized to use other sources to identify candidates. Sourcers and recruiters will naturally gravitate to what works for them, and unfortunately, in many cases, it isn’t their ATS.

The Customer is Always Right?

When I recently challenged a major ATS vendor regarding their extremely short candidate search field (100 characters, including spaces), their response included this interesting and unanticipated angle - they claimed that 99% of their clients are statisfied with their short search field. In other words, very few prospective or current customers of their ATS asked about, commented on, or asked for improvement of the short search field.

A representative of another well-known ATS chimed in on Twitter and said they also don’t come across many clients asking for more than 100 characters in the candidate search field.

I can only assume that their customers either aren’t very proficient at talent mining, don’t understand the value of human capital data, or worse – both. Regardless, we’ve already seen the statistics from TalentDrive’s surveys - most companies don’t even use their ATS to identify candidates. If they’re not using their ATS to find talent, why would they care about the length of the search field, or even if it supports basic Boolean logic? 

So what we have here is ATS vendors who are not developing and offering robust candidate search capability because their customers aren’t asking for it. Okay, I understand “the customer is always right,” but it’s a sad state of affairs when companies who create talent/human capital solutions are not incorporating strong/advanced candidate search capability into their products because their customers don’t understand the value and full potential of human capital data.

Whatever happened to educating and informing your customers, providing training, and offering a product that exceeds your customers’ expectations and provides them with a true competitive advantage?

100 Characters is Not Enough

I conducted a very informal poll on Twitter and Facebook, asking sourcers and recruiters what they thought of a 100 character candidate search field limit, and 100% of those who responded all felt that it would handicap their ability to find the right candidates. By comparison, Monster’s resume database has a keyword search field that accepts up to 500 characters, LinkedIn’s search field is bottomless (I just crammed 6003 characters in the keword field and LinkedIn laughed and asked, “Is that all you got?”), and even Google accepts up to 32 search terms (at an average term length of a little as 5 letters, that’s still 160 characters, NOT including spaces or operators). 

The TalentDrive survey discovered that the number one sourcing challenge facing companies currently is filtering through the mass of resumes and increased number of applicants. In other words, the candidate “haystack” is getting HUGE, and it’s becoming more challenging to sort through it to find the needles.

Ultimately, short and basic candidate searches are imprecise and yield a high volume of imprecise results, riddled w/false positives. Without more room to create search strings that are appropriately precise, relevance will suffer, and with more resumes to search through – the issue is exacerbated.

The Future of Staffing and Recruiting

I firmly believe that the one aspect of recruiting that has the most potential to improve the speed of talent identification (the time to find metric) and increase the quality and quantity of candidates identified is electronic talent discovery and identification. With each passing day, there is more data available on more people somewhere – on a social network, in a resume database, or in your ATS – and it will only increase and accelerate. The ability to slice and dice human capital data will afford companies a HUGE competitive advantage.

I will never get tired of quoting this passage from Google’s blog: “When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.”

The ability to extract value out of human capital data is already, and will continue to be, THE complimentary scarce in recruiting and staffing – but most people just don’t know it yet. ATS/Recruiting CRM vendors need to step up, recognize this, and offer their clients solutions that enable them to truly capitalize on their human capital data and offer them a competitive advantage.

If anything, I feel that employers and staffing firms should provide their recruiters access to MORE powerful and capable candidate search functionality than publicly and widely available resume databases or social networks. If they don’t, their ATS will continue to be the candidate source of last resort.

I believe that ATS/CRM apps should essentially serve as talent intelligence solutions, not unlike business intelligence solutions and decision support systems. The power lies primarily in the the human capital data/information stored within, and the ability to retrieve and analyze that information for talent identification and to make hiring decisions. 

One Thing has Changed

I don’t believe that the majority of the recruiting life cycle has changed over the past 20 years, or will change all that much in the future. Building relationships with current and potential candidates will always be at the heart of the recruiting process.

However, the one step in the recruiting process that has changed dramatically is sourcing, or talent discovery/identification. Information systems and applications have evolved rapidly over the past 20 years, and will likely continue to do so. With more information available about more people growing with each passing day, information retrieval becomes absolutely critical.

The ability to instantly retrieve information about the right people at the right time can accelerate a company’s ability to build relationships with more of the right people more quickly, leading to faster and higher quality hires with less effort.

If you find that concept interesting, I suggest you read these two posts about Lean/Just-in-Time recruiting.

A Call to All ATS/Recruiting CRM Vendors

If you work for or use an ATS that has strong candidate search functionality – Congratulations, you are among the fortunate few! Vendors – make sure your customers fully understand and leverage that power. Users – take full advantage of the candidate search capability, and be sure to not use your ATS as a source of last resort. Those candidates in your ATS are there for a reason – either they expressed interest in joining your company, or someone in your company expressed interest in them! 

If you work for an ATS vendor with poor/limited candidate search functionality - Why do you offer sub-par candidate search capability? Recognize that the future of human capital information systems lies primarily in talent discovery and identification. Either build in your own robust candidate search capability, or simply integrate any one of a number of excellent 3rd party text search and/or resume parse/search/match applications that are available. Educate your current and potential customers and explain to them the value and potential of human capital data. CRM functionality is great, but is of little value without the ability to find the right people to begin to manage relationships with in the first place!

If you currently use an ATS with poor/limited candidate search capability - Send this article to your vendor. Let me know how they respond, and if/how they can answer the question of why they offer such poor/limited candidate search functionality. They’re essentially putting you at a competitive disadvantage!

Does your recruiting or staffing organziation have Talent Intelligence?

I believe that all staffing organizations should view and value their internal resume/candidate database/ATS as a proprietary business intelligence tool.  Business intelligence refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information and help companies develop consistent and “data-based” business decisions — producing better results than basing decisions on “guesswork.”

I define “Talent Intelligence” as refering to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze Talent-related (Human Capital) data and information and help organizations develop consistent and “data-based” Talent-related decisions.  

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

Practically every Fortune 1000 company (and many smaller ones too) utilizes and leverages business intelligence solutions to make better decisions and run their companies more effectively and efficiently. However, very few – if ANY – companies actually have a true Talent Intelligence solution. Although many Applicant Tracking Systems ,HRMS/HRIS solutions and Recruiting CRM applications make lofty claims as to their capabilities and functionality, I don’t consider many vendor solutions currently on the market to be a true Talent Intelligence solution. Most are simply systems that track and organize applicants. 

I find it ironic that companies in nearly every industry invest millions and millions of dollars on their data warehousing/business intelligence initiatives – just to be able to retrieve and analyze their data to enable them to make better business decisions, yet I’d argue that every company’s Human Capital is actually their most valuable and critical asset. So why is it that HR, recruiting, and staffing technology is so far behind in technologies used for gathering, retrieving, and analyzing financial, manufacturing, etc., data? 

Recruiting and staffing organizations should be looking to leverage technology to support the effectiveness and productivity of their sourcing and recruiting associates by building a deep and broad Talent Warehouse and empower their recruiters and sourcers with a search interface that affords them the ability to perform highly precise queries and semantic search strategies that execute quickly and produce highly relevant results.

While there are many important aspects of Talent Intelligence solutions that distinguish them from your garden-variety ATS and HRMS solutions, here are 2 critical aspects of building and utilizing a Talent Intelligence system:

Populating the Talent Warehouse

A Talent Warehouse should be both broad and deep. While Talent Warehouses vary in size, I would say on the low end, for smaller organizations in a single metro area, a Talent Warehouse should be no less than 20,000 resumes and/or candidate profiles. There is perhaps no upper limit to the size of a Talent Warehouse – larger corporate and agency staffing organizations often have several million resumes/candidate profiles in their repository.

Statistically – size does matter. Please take a look at this post I wrote about statistics and the size of resume databases a while back that goes into quite a bit of detail regarding normal distributions, the Central Limit Theorem, and the Law of Large Numbers. The short version is that more resumes/candidate profiles = a higher probability that you have a given quantity of candidates who match any given hiring need. This can enable Lean/JIT sourcing and recruiting.

In an ideal setup, a Talent Warehouse is fed new resumes/candidate profiles both manually (by sourcers, recruiters, and candidates themselves) and automatically (using search aggregators such as infoGIST, TalentHook, DataFrenzy’s RAM, etc.) from a wide variety of sources – to include the Internet, referrals/networking, Job Boards, RSS feeds/automated Internet search alerts, ad responses, career fairs (of all kinds), LinkedIn, Blogs, and various and sundry other social media.

Search Interface and Searchability

Having TONS of great talent/human capital data is wonderful, however – it’s of little value without the ability of a user to precisely extract out relevant and useful information from the system that can be used for quick and accurate talent identification and acquisition.

The value of a database (or Talent Warehouse) lies not only in the information contained within, but moreso in the ability of a user to extract out precisely and completely what the user needs. See this post to read more about this concept: The Value of a Database

When using information systems, sourcers and recruiters perform Talent Mining to extract useful and relevant human capital/talent data. Just as a data warehouse can be a significant enabler of commercial business applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) applications, a Talent Warehouse can and should be a significant enabler of Human Capital Relationship Management (HCRM) applications.

The ideal search interface of a Talent Warehouse or Talent Support System should support both standard and extended Boolean queries (including configurable proximity and variable term weighting) to enable effective semantic search as well include an Artificial Intelligence resume/job matching engine to cover all angles. This kind of search interface and engine can enable sourcers and recruiters to quickly and precisely find quantities of well qualified candidates.

Conclusion

A well designed and fully featured Talent Intelligence solution can significantly improve sourcer and recruiter effectiveness and productivity, reduce reliance on the major job boards, and reduce the amount of time sourcers and recruiters spend trying to source candidates via free but very low ROTI (return on time invested). It’s well past time for HR, recruiting and staffing technology to catch up to technologies such as data warehousing and business intelligence applications that have been utilized to support financial, manufacturing, and just about every other critical aspect of business for decades. After all, is there anything more important to an organization than Human Capital/Talent?