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

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

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

Just-In-Time Recruiting

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

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

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

How? I’m glad you asked.

How to Achieve Just-In-Time Recruiting

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

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

JIT Recruiting Requires Access to Human Capital Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Numbers

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

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

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

It’s simple statistics.

X Degrees of Separation

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

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

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

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

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

How’s that for power?

JIT Recruiting Benefits from High “Searchability”

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

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

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

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

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

JIT Recruiting Requires Effective Engagement and Referral Tactics and Strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just-In-Time Recruiting Requires Search Ability

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

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

Pipelining – Proactive vs. Reactive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There, that should make everyone happy.

Just-In-Time Recruiting is Not Anti-Relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I define e-sourcing as proactively searching information systems (ATS/CRM, Internet, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), to identify potential candidates. While there is much written on HOW to search the various talent sources available to recruiters today, there does not seem to be much written about their intrinsic value as sources of talent/human capital information. 

I believe that the value of any source of information is 50% based upon the actual information contained within, and 50% in the ability to extract out precisely and completely what the user needs. Information has no value if you are unable to access, search for, and find what you need and take action on it.

When it comes to leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition, it is critical to assess the depth of the talent/human capital data offered by the source as well as how “searchable” the source is.

Why?

Quite simply, the deeper the data offered by and the more searchable the the source is, the higher the ROI for your e-sourcing efforts. All electronic sources of talent are NOT created equal, and some offer sourcers and recruiters instrinsic advantages with regard to the ability to more quickly and precisely find more of the right people, yielding higher productivity.

I’ve created a graphic representation of a comparison of the data depth and searchability of the most common information systems used by sourcers and recruiters to find candidates.

Shallow Data Depth

The whole point of using information systems to search for candidates is to find people who have specific skills and experience, and typically people who live in a specific location. It’s not terribly difficult to find PEOPLE, but it can be very challenging to find the RIGHT people.

As you can see from the chart above, I’ve classified MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet (non-resume results, such as press releases, company directories, etc.) as shallow sources of talent data.

This is because these sources either don’t offer much in the way of professional/occupational information (often a title and little else), and/or they have very little information as to the exact location of the potential candidates. In most cases, they contain very little information regarding critical candidate variables such as skills and responsibilities, quantity and quality of experience, career history and accomplishments, education, precise location, etc.

Many shallow sources of candidate information simply do not provide ANY information regarding some of these details. This is because the majority of people who use sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace often don’t include professional/employment information on their profile. With little or no information to go on, it is extremely difficult to search for and identify candidates who have a high probability of at least meeting the minimum requirements for your opening, let alone exceeding them.

Low Searchability

While you can certainly search MySpace, Facebook, and the Internet – they have significant limitations with regard to their “searchability.” Facebook and MySpace are simply not designed to be highly searchable, at least not to find people you don’t know.

You may think I am crazy for saying that the Internet isn’t very “searchable,” but most search engines, including Google, don’t even support full Boolean logic. Also – the Internet itself is unstructured, which makes it intrinsically difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for without drowning in a sea of false positive results.

Sniffing out and following candidate leads based on shallow information and using sources that aren’t by design highly searchable comes with the territory of being a sourcer or recruiter, and the thrill of the hunt can be quite satisfying.

However, the angle of this article is ROI, or even more specifically ROTI (Return on Time Invested) – which is a good measure of productivity (Productivity + Work / Time). Trying to search shallow data sources with limited search capability can be an incredibly slow and time consuming process, as well as result in a significantly low return on time invested. I refer to this as “low yield” sourcing, and its cause is the shallow depth of information available and poor searchability of the sources – which cripples your ability to control or even identify critical candidate variables.

Deep Data But Low Searchability

In this quadrant we have many ATS/CRM solutions, as well as Internet resumes. In both cases, we’re dealing with resumes.

Resumes are definitely deep sources of talent data – and while they are not always complete or 100% accurate – most resumes do contain significant information about the people who wrote them. Even when poorly written, most resumes contain summaries of experience, objectives that can give you insight into the types of opportunities they are interested in, a work history giving you an idea of their capabilities based on their past responsibilities and experience, and of course an addresses – which can be critical in making an educated guess at whether or not they might be open to a particular commute.

While this deep level of talent data is wonderful – it’s of little use if your ability to search for and retrieve the data is limited. Unfortunately, many ATS/CRM solutions aren’t very searchable. In fact, some are laughably unsearchable, considering a major reason for storing human capital data is (you would think) to be able to retreive it to take action on it.

If you look closely at the chart above, you will notice it says “Most ATS’s.” That’s because there are some highly searchable ATS/CRM solutions on the market (Avature and Bullhorn come to mind), and I am also aware of some “home-grown” systems that are also highly searchable. So while there are some highly searchable ATS/CRM solutions available, too many are unacceptably low on the “searchability” scale.

When it comes to the Internet - while you can search the Internet and find resumes, only MS Live supports queries employing full Boolean logic. The irony there is that Live limits you to 10 search terms (unless that’s changed recently). It’s nice that Google gives you 32 search terms, but in some cases, this limits your ability to configure queries that are precise enough and/or remove all false positives.

And while finding some local resumes can be done using Internet search engines, it is difficult to be sure if you are actually finding ALL of, or even the best available, resumes. Because the Internet is unstructured, when you search for area codes, state abbreviations, and zip ranges (as you can with Google), you often get a number of false positive results. And if a person puts their resume online but does not list an address or a phone number – good luck trying to find them as a local candidate.

To be highly “searchable” – it should not be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for, and you should not have to suffer many irrelevant results.

Highly Searchable but Shallow Data

Here we have Twitter and LinkedIn.

I’ve written about this many times before – Twitter is an extremely shallow source of talent data. The operative word in the term microblog is “micro” – 140 characters for Tweets and 160 characters for a bio.  That’s not a whole lot to go on. While some Tweeps do Tweet about their professional life, many do not. Also, many people don’t give away much information in their micro-bio either. 

Unlike Twitter, which by design is a shallow source of talent data, LinkedIn is a deeper source of human capital data. However, while some LinkedIn profiles are as detailed as a traditional resume, there are still plenty of profiles with very little, if any, information on them. I have no doubt that over time more people will flesh out their profiles with more information and LinkedIn will move to the upper right quadrant of the chart.

Here’s where both Twitter and LinkedIn shine brightly – searchability.

Twitter employs tag searching (hashtags #), supports full Boolean logic, enables location searching via geocoding ( SQL near:DC within:25mi), and some third party applications (e.g., Twellow) allow you to search specific fields such as bios (@bio developer). Click here to learn more about searching Twitter for sourcing candidates.

LinkedIn supports full Boolean logic and can accept and run insanely long and complex queries, allows for Boolean searching of structured data (current/company, current/past title, school…), has configurable location searching, supports industry and group search, as well as “hand-coding” of searches with LinkedIn’s own advanced operators (ccompany:, ptitle:, joined:, etc).

Deep Data and Highly Searchable

Here’s the sweet spot for sourcing and recruiting – sources of talent data that offer significant depth of information AND are highly searchable. In this quadrant we have the job board resume databases and something I like to refer to as Talent Warehouse solutions.

The job major job board resume databases (Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice) all have…that’s right – resumes, which as we have already seen are deep sources of talent data. Resumes offer a work history including career progression, skills and experience (at least to some extent), environment/group/division/project information, education, and precise location. In many cases, resumes will detail specific responsibilities and responsibility level, as well as accomplishments and achievements.

In addition, all of the job board resume databases are also highly searchable, supporting full Boolean logic, useful query modifiers such as the asterisk for root-word searching, structured field searching (recent experience/titles, etc.), and configurable location searching. 

Sourcers and recruiters can run Boolean strings and structured queries when searching job board resume databases to precisely target specific experience, years of experience, education, certifications, environmental/project, and industry experience. Those who are particularly adept can even achieve semantic search by crafting Boolean strings that go well beyond buzzword matching and target specific responsibilities, or in other words, what the candidates have actually done as well as what they have done it with.

The combination of deep data and high searchability affords you the ability to search for and essentially control critical candidate qualification variables enabling “high yield” e-sourcing – a high volume of more accurately and appropriately matched results in less time.

Talent Warehouse

When you saw that large yellow bubble labeled “Talent Warehouse” in the upper right hand corner of the chart, I’m sure most of your were wondering, “What the heck is a Talent Warehouse?” 

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

The core of a Talent Warehouse is a relational resume database. We’ve already established that resumes are deep sources of human capital data – but you may have noticed that on the chart above, “Talent Warehouse” is actually higher on the scale of data depth than other sources of resumes. “What’s a deeper source of human capital data than a resume you ask?” 

A Talent Warehouse adds more depth to resumes through the use of comments/notes and tags – sourcers and recruiters can add additional information to candidate records and resumes based on phone screens, in-person interviews, references, tests and evaluations, etc. Imagine being able to search for candidates based on information contained in their resumes AS WELL AS information gleaned from the candidates through interviews. Imagine that! 

Although many Applicant Tracking Systems, HRMS/HRIS solutions and Recruiting CRM applications make lofty claims as to their capabilities and functionality, I don’t consider (m)any vendor solutions currently on the market to be a true Talent Intelligence/Talent Warehouse solution. Most are simply systems that track and organize applicants (ATS), and/or enable the management of “relationships” (CRM), and they often they lack a critical piece of the puzzle – searchability.

A true Talent Warehouse has a search interface that supports the searching of resumes as well as tags and notes using both standard and extended Boolean queries (including configurable proximity and variable term weighting) to enable effective semantic search as well include an Artificial Intelligence resume/job matching engine to cover all angles. This kind of search interface and engine can enable sourcers and recruiters to quickly and precisely find quantities of well qualified candidates.

In the hands of an adept Talent Miner, a Talent Warehouse can yield a high volume of results with a high percentage of candidates who have specific skills and experience, specific responsibilities, specific years of experience, specific environmental/project experience, and who live in a specific area. What this essentially affords a recruiter is the ability to leverage technology to find, contact, and establish and build relationships with more of the RIGHT PEOPLE, MORE QUICKLY, increasing productivity!

Conclusion

You can find and hire people by searching any electronic source of talent data – resume or otherwise. However, searching shallow and less searchable sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, blogs, the Internet and other similarly shallow sources of candidate data takes a higher amount of effort for a smaller return – a low ROI. This results in low yield sourcing and recruiting and ultimately lower productivity.

If you have deeper and more searchable sources of talent data, why would you go out of your way to (or allow your sourcing/recruiting team to) focus on low yield sourcing and recruiting?

Highly searchable and deeper sources of human capital data enable you find more appropriately qualified candidates more quickly, through your ability to search for, control, and quickly analyze and assess critical candidate variables such as specific roles/responsibilities, years of experience, skills/technologies, environment, education, and location. This results in a higher return on time invested and higher productivity.

While it may sound perfectly logical to start with the deepest and most searchable sources of talent data available to you, I assure you – not everyone actually does this. I continue to see and hear about sourcers and recruiters who are blinded by buzz of sources like Twitter and Facebook and who spend more time using them than their own ATS/CRM, or other deeper and/or more searchable sources available to them.

And If your private candidate database/ATS/CRM isn’t as searchable as it could be – consider doing something about it- because it should be.  

Make the conscious decision to focus the majority of your e-sourcing efforts on the highest ROI sources – those with deep data and those that are highly searchable.

Most recruiting and staffing organizations, ranging from executive search sole proprietorships to staffing agencies and Fortune 500 companies, have internal databases filled with information on thousands to literally tens of millions of applicants, candidates, and professionals. 

You would think that a private internal database of people that an organization has actively and passively, tactically and strategically collected over the years would be a prized posession and be viewed and leveraged as a significant resource and competitive advantage.

However, I recently read this post on Weddles and found out that a recent 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.

Yes – you read that correctly. Most companies don’t even know how many people are in their Applicant Tracking Systems.

Surprised?

While that is an especially disturbing statistic and a sad reality, I’m actually not that surprised. Most Applicant Tracking Systems have horrible search interfaces and extremely limited search capability. Prospective candidates go in, but they don’t come back out. If you can’t easily search your internal database, how can you find the top talent hidden within, let alone determine the total candidate population?

How Searchable is YOUR ATS/CRM?

Deposits and Withdrawals

Having an ATS/CRM/candidate database that is not highly searchable is like putting your money into an insolvent financial institution - you can deposit money/assets in – but you can’t easily or reliably make withdrawals! Anything designed to store something should have strong retrieval capability – once you put it in, you should expect to be able to get it back out. Quickly and easily, no less. If you can easily enter prospective candidates into your ATS but you cannot easily retrieve the right ones at the right time – you’re essentially sitting on a giant Hidden Talent Pool.

Illiquid Human Capital

Everyone agrees that people are an organization’s most valuable asset. However, if you cannot quickly, easily, and precisely search for and retrieve highly qualified candidates from your private database, your ATS is essentially a source of illiquid (human) assets. In other words, you cannot easily convert the human capital data stored in your system into hires or placements.

The Black Hole

Just like light heading into a black hole, applicants and candidates often go into applicant tracking systems - but they don’t come back out. Presumably, there are only 2 main ways a person can end up in a company’s ATS: #1 They responded to a job posting #2 Someone ran a search (manual or automated) and found the candidate’s profile/resume and entered it into the database In both cases, someone – either a candidate or a sourcer/recruiter – has shown interest in a potential match at some point in time, and this should be worth something. People applying to jobs should be able to expect a response of some kind, and recruiters should be able to easily find well qualified candidates they found and entered into the system in the past.   

Sourcer/Recruiter Behavior

Can we blame sourcers and recruiters for NOT searching and leveraging their ATS/CRM if other sources they may have access to (such as LinkedIn and job board resume databases) are 10X more searchable? If trying to find appropriately qualified candidates in an ATS is as difficult and painful as pulling teeth, we should not be surprised when sourcers and recruiters search the Internet for candidates first, and the ATS last (if at all!).  A company’s private candidate database should, if anything, be MORE searchable and EASIER to use than publicly available systems and databases. As mentioned previously – people in your ATS have either shown specific interest in your company or were found elsewhere by a sourcer or recruiter and entered into the system. Both types of people should receive “priority handling.” 

Expect a Return on Investment

Many companies spend tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars on their Applicant Tracking/CRM systems, and they should expect a significant return on that money invested. I say that the value of a database lies not in the information contained within, but in the ability of a user to extract out precisely and completely what the user needs. If you can’t easily, quickly, and precisely retrieve talent out of your ATS – you didn’t get what you actually paid for. If you’ve been a corporate recruiter at some point in your career – did you ever have a 3rd party search firm/agency submit candidates to you that you already had in your ATS? Did you know that some companies will pay a fee or a premium (contract to hire) for candidates that 3rd party firms source and recruit that were in fact hiding in the company’s ATS? Without going into why companies would actually pay another firm for candidates they had buried in their ATS – the $64,000 question is why didn’t the corporate sourcers/recruiters find the candidate themselves? The answer is usually quite simple – because the company’s ATS isn’t very searchable. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the “20-30% of the first year’s salary” question. Ouch!

What Companies Can Do

To ensure that your private candidate database/ATS isn’t just one big fat black hole where candidates enter but they never come back out, here are a few things you can do:

Replace or upgrade your ATS/CRM

Yes, this will likely involve spending money. However, if people really are the greatest and most valuable asset of your organization – investing in a system that allows you to effectively capitalize on this asset is well worth the cost, nearly at any price! From a corporate perspective, moving to a system that makes it easy to find appropriately qualified candidates that you have already sourced can significantly reduce your cost-per-hire as well as your reliance on 3rd party search firms.  From a search firm/agency perspective, investing in replacing or upgrading your candidate database/tracking system can help increase your productivity (and likely profitability) by enabling you to more quickly and effectively capitalize on candidates you have already sourced, interviewed and qualified rather than having to try and source ”new” candidates from scratch for each job order/client request you receive. 

Integrate a New Search Interface/Engine Into Your ATS

Typically less expensive than switching out your whole ATS/CRM – there are several 3rd party search applications available ranging from highly configurable text search (Lucene, dtSearch, etc.) to conceptual/artificial intelligence search/match applications (Autonomy, BurningGlass, TalentSpring, Pure Discovery, Actonomy, etc.) that you can integrate into your existing ATS/CRM to significantly boost its “searchability.” Some of the aforementioned solutions are free (Lucene) and others are surprisingly affordable.

Train Your Sourcers and Recruiters (AND/OR Yourself)!

Sometimes an ATS/CRM is a black hole from which candidates never return because the sourcers and recruiters simply aren’t very proficient in how to effectively search information systems for talent identification (aka Talent Mining). If you already have a highly searchable ATS or CRM, invest in training your associates with the latest search best practices, tactics, and strategies. You don’t need a super-expensive “state of the art” search application to quickly find the right people. In fact – all you need is a search interface that supports full Boolean logic. I personally averaged 8 hires per month only after 3 months of experience as a recruiter – and my sole source of candidates was an old CPAS ATS developed by VCG. No Monster, no Linkedin, no cold calls – just a plain old resume database with about 80,000 records and a search interface that supported full Boolean logic. How’s that for ROI?

The Bottom Line

If your ATS/CRM is as easy to search as it is to put candidates in, you will be able to fill more of your company’s openings from talent you’ve already sourced. Any opening you can fill with candidates already in your internal system saves you the time, effort, and cost of advertising and searching for “new” candidates. Filling openings with candidates already in your ATS can afford you significant and measurable cost-per-hire and time-to-fill savings.  Additionally, having a highly searchable ATS/CRM can help you reduce your reliance on paid resources if you currently use them (such as Monster, a premium LinkedIn account, etc.). Is it easier to search public systems such as LinkedIn or Monster to find appropriately qualified candidates than it is to search your private ATS/CRM? It shouldn’t be.

How Many Candidates Are In Your ATS/Private Database?

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

Click on the presentation below to review:

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