In the past, I’ve explained the Boolean Black Belt concept and exposed what I feel is the real “secret” behind learning how to master the art and science of leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition.

Now I would like to show you precisely WHY Boolean search is such a big deal in recruiting.

There are 2 main factors:

1. Candidate variable control
2. Speed of qualified candidate identification.

The goal of this article is to shed significant light on the science behind talent mining, how it can lead to higher productivity levels (more and better results with less effort), why I am so passionate sourcing, and why everyone in the HR, recruiting, and staffing industry should be as well.

Control is Power

Talent identification is arguably the most critical step in recruiting life cycle – you can’t engage, recruit, acquire, hire and develop someone you haven’t found and identified in the first place.

My experience has shown me that properly leveraging deep sources of talent/candidate data (ATS/CRM’s, resume databases, LinkedIn, etc.) can enable recruiters to more quickly identify a high volume of well matched and qualified candidates than any other method of candidate identification and acquisition (e.g., cold calling, referral recruiting, job posting).

The true power of Boolean search lies in the intrinsically high degree of control over critical candidate variables that using Boolean strings to search deep data sources such as resume databases, the Internet, and social media affords sourcers and recruiters.

Applying that that high degree of control to large populations of candidates – tens of thousands (small internal ATS, niche resume database) to tens of millions (large ATS/CRM, Monster resume database, LinkedIn, etc.) enables adept sourcers to perform feats of talent identification and acquisition most would think impossible.

Candidate Variables Defined

The match between a candidate and a specific job opening can be expressed as a combination of these 5 basic variables:

1. Location
2. Skills (Experience/Education)
3. Opportunity
4. Compensation
5. Availability

There are certainly other factors at play when it comes to determining the right match between a candidate and a particular opportunity (e.g., cultural fit). However, these are the “big bucket” variables which render the rest pointless if they are not satisfied.

Control What You Can

Ultimately, the best match between an employer’s hiring need and a candidate is one where there is very close alignment between a candidate’s variables and those of the particular job opportunity.

Most job openings have a fixed set of variables – sourcers and recruiters don’t often have the opportunity to control or change the location of the position, the skills/experience/education required, the specific opportunity (the type of work involved in the position, the company/team culture, opportunities for growth/advancement, etc.), the compensation associated with the position, and when the position becomes available (open and ready to hire).

However, when it comes to searching deep sources of human capital data that support Boolean queries (such as your ATS/CRM, online resume databases, LinkedIn, etc.) to identify potential candidates for any particular job opening, sourcers and recruiters CAN exercise a significant degree of control over critical candidate matching variables.

Here’s a preview:

Controlling Candidate Variables Through Boolean Search

Location

When it comes to using resume databases (internal or online), sourcers and recruiters have nearly complete control over the location of the candidates identified – finding people in specific zip code ranges or by using a combination of area code and address search.

A small percentage of the time, candidates with resumes not updated in the past 6-12 months may have moved from the address on their resume, but this is a fractional minority.

Although using Boolean search strings to identify candidates in resume databases or online affords specific control over the location of candidates identified, there is less direct control over the commute tolerance/preference of the candidates – that can only be reliably determined by contacting each candidate.

However, sourcers and recruiters can target people who live very close to the location of the job opportunity (5-15 miles), increasing the likelihood of solving the commute variable.

Skills/Experience/Education

Sourcers and recruiters can run Boolean strings when searching resume databases to precisely target specific experience, years of experience, education, certifications, environment/project, and industry experience.

Those who are particularly adept at Boolean search 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.

Although resumes are far from a perfect medium for accurately or wholly representing skills, experience, and capability, a well stocked resume database affords sourcers and recruiters the ability to run Boolean queries to quickly find candidates with highly specific experience closely matching the required skills and experience of the position being recruited for.

Desired Opportunity

Although sourcers and recruiters using Boolean search strings to mine talent from resume databases cannot precisely predict what candidates will want to do in their next career move, a resume or very detailed social media profile often affords significant insight into a possible “career trajectory.”

In other words, a project manager over software development is likely to be interested in a similar role, or one that is a slight step up in responsibility.

Similarly, a 3 year staff accountant is likely to be interested in a role as a staff accountant, or perhaps the next step up.

Adept sourcers and recruiters can run Boolean strings to specifically target candidates who have experience similar to the work to be performed in the role being recruited for, increasing (but certainly not wholly controlling) the chances that candidates identified would be interested in the type of position they are recruiting for.

Compensation

As with the opportunity variable, sourcers and recruiters cannot precisely control the compensation requirements of candidates identified.

However, resumes do enable recruiters to predict, to some extent, the desired compensation of candidates based on years of experience and market knowledge, and sourcers and recruiters can run Boolean search strings to target candidates with specific years of experience.

For example, in a given metro area, recruiters are likely to know what staff accountants with 3-5 years of experience (or software engineers with 3-5 years of Java programming, etc.) are being paid by most local employers, and from experience, what those types of candidates are looking for in terms of compensation when making a career move.

Although this is certainly not precise control, it does allow some degree of control. Also, when reviewing resumes in a database, recruiters can make the educated decision not to call candidates with 10-12 years of accounting or Java programming (unless they want to ask for referrals), and specifically target and contact candidates with 3-5 years of experience instead.

Availability

When searching databases and online sources of candidates, there is no way to reliably predict or control whether or not people identified via Boolean search strings are available or open to make a career move at the time they are identified.

However, when using online job board resume databases, searching for candidates with resumes posted within the past 30 days does increase the probability that the candidates identified are looking (actively or passively) to make a career move.

Statistically, anyone whose resume is hasn’t been updated in the past 30 days is likely to be a passive candidate, or not actively seeking employment opportunities. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t recruitable.

In Comparison: Cold Calling and Referral Recruiting

While cold calling and referral recruiting are tried and true methods of identifying talent, and I would never suggest that they be avoided – I’d like to expose the intrinsic ROI limitations they afford sourcers and recruiters, primarily the inability to control critical candidate variables.

Location

When it comes to cold calling into companies to source and identify potential candidates, there is very little control over where the candidates live. When calling into a company, you know where the candidates work, but the candidates could live anywhere within a 20, 30, 40, or even larger mile radius from that company location – in ANY direction.

Because there is no way to know exactly where the people you are calling live prior to sourcing them, there is no way to significantly control the Location variable of the potential candidates, and each person identified will likely have a different commute tolerance/preference which is based specifically on where they currently live, not where they currently work.

As for referral recruiting, when we ask other people who they would recommend – we can neither control where the potential referred candidates work nor where they live, so there is even less location-specific control offered by referral recruiting over cold calling.

Opportunity

When cold calling into companies or referral recruiting to identify candidates, there is no way to predict or control what each person identified will be most interested in doing in their next career move.

Compensation

When cold calling into companies or referral recruiting to identify candidates, there is no way to control or predict what each person’s current compensation is, nor is there any way to predict their desired compensation. Even sourcing by title will not accurately or consistently predict the years of experience and specific responsibilities of each person identified prior to contacting them.

Experience/Capability

When cold calling into companies or seeking referrals in an effort to identify potential candidates, there is no way to predict or control each person’s capability to perform the responsibilities of the position being sourced for. Although you could ask for someone if they can recommend/refer to you a person with a specific title or experience, you simply can’t control actual experience of the people referred or identified, nor is there any way to control their career history, years of experience, education, or certifications.

The one aspect of experience/capability that can be controlled through cold calling is industry-related experience – if you call into a pharmaceutical company, you can be assured that everyone you identify has experience working in the pharmaceutical industry.

However, the same cannot be said for referral recruiting, as there is no reliable way to control the specific industry of the people who are offered as referrals.

Either the people you are seeking referrals from know of someone with the appropriate skills and experience and will recommend them to you or not. In either case, you are not the one in control – you are completely dependent upon each person you attempt to network with.

Availability

There is no way to reliably predict or control whether or not people identified via cold calling and referral recruiting are available or open to make a career move at the time they are identified.

Although you could ask people if they can recommend people who might be looking, whether or not they actually do know people who might be looking to make a change is not under your control, and the specific availability status of any referred candidate cannot be predicted or determined prior to actually speaking with the candidate.

Job Posting

For sourcers and recruiters – posting a job affords absolutely no control over critical candidate variables, as you are 100% at the mercy of other people finding and responding to the posting.

Anyone with any experience in the HR/Recruiting/Staffing industry knows that very few people who apply to positions are well matched across the 5 critical candidate variables with regard to the position they apply for. When you post a job online, you simply cannot control who will respond, what their skills/experience/education will be, or even where they live.

While not truly representative of any degree of control, when people respond to a job posting – it is often because they are actively (or perhaps passively, depending on your definition) looking for a change of employment from their current employer or their unemployed status. After all – if someone is looking at job postings, they’re considering their options to a lesser or greater extent.

So if your sourcing and recruiting strategy targets active candidates, this is the only bright spot when it comes to using job postings to identify potential candidates. However, just because someone responds to your job posting – it does not necessarily indicate that they are truly and unconditionally available to make a change.

Candidate Variable Control: Comparison of Sourcing Methods

In review, let’s take another look at the comparison of sourcing candidates via Boolean search vs. cold calling, referral recruiting, and job posting as with regard to the degree of control over critical candidate matching variables for talent identification:

Using Boolean search strings to identify and mine talent from private and online sources of talent empowers recruiters with the ability to apply a significant degree of control over the location, skills, experience, education, opportunity, and compensation candidate variables – more than any other method of talent identification.

Speed of Qualified Candidate Identification

The second piece of the puzzle that explains why sourcing via Boolean search strings coupled with deep sources of candidate data (resumes and detailed social media profiles) is so powerful is the speed at which candidates who closely match the critical variables of a given position can be identified.

Sourcing via Human Capital Data

Sourcers and recruiters who are competent at crafting Boolean search strings can find quickly find a large volume of candidates that are likely to closely match the 5 critical variables of the position they are seeking to fill.

I’ve personally achieved, as well as trained other recruiters to achieve, anywhere from 20-60 well matched candidates identified per hour mining talent with Boolean search strings (20/hour for a very challenging position to 60/hour for positions/skills that are more common).

I’m talking about finding 20-60 people in 1 hour who have the skills, experience and education required for the position I’m recruiting for, live in a commutable radius for the location of the position, are highly likely to be attracted to the opportunity, and who are highly likely to be within the compensation range of the position.

The only thing left to do is establish contact and a relationship with them, and attempt to solve the final variable – availability (whether they would accept an offer for the position if they interviewed well and felt it was a strong match).

Cold Calling/Referral Recruiting

While cold calling into companies can produce results, it is a slow and laborious process.

Cold calling into companies can in some cases quickly yield a high volume of names, but the intrinsically low degree of control over critical candidate variables that cold calling affords sourcers and recruiters severely limits the speed of identifying candidates who closely match the position being recruited for.

Referral recruiting, for many reasons can in produce some of the best candidates – most companies are proud to brag about the large percentage of referral hires they make.

However, referral recruiting is also a slow and unpredictable process – not every person contacted will yield a referral, and even those that do are not statistically likely to closely match all 5 of the critical candidate variables.

Job Posting

When it comes to posting jobs to identify potential candidates, it’s similar to setting a trap. It’s a 100% passive strategy - the only thing you are in control of is setting the trap.

You cannot control what, if anything, actually wanders into your trap, or if anything ever does.

It’s the same with posting jobs – some jobs never get any responses. Others do get a large influx of candidate responses, but the probablity that any given person is a close match across the 5 critical candidate variables is intrinsically low.

Speed of Qualified Candidate Identification: Comparison of Sourcing Methods

Conclusion

I hope you now have a much deeper appreciation of the “method to the madness” behind sourcing candidates via Boolean search strings and understand why Boolean search is such a big deal in recruiting.

There are tangible reasons why using Boolean strings to search private and online repositories of candidates can enable sourcers and recruiters to identify and recruit more well qualified candidates at a faster rate and a higher volume than any other method of candidate identification.

Quality X Quantity X Quickness = Results.

Although cold calling and referral recruiting are proven and viable methods of candidate identification (and I would never recommend not performing them), there is no denying that they do not offer sourcers and recruiters a much (or any, in some cases!) control over critical candidate matching variables. They are also intrinsically slow methods of identifying precisely matched and qualified candidates.

Undeniably, talent mining via Boolean search strings affords sourcers and recruiters the ability to exert a high degree of direct control over the specific location of candidates, the skills, experience, and education of candidates, as well as the ability to specifically target candidates who are highly likely to be interested in the opportunity being recruited for, and the compensation offered by the opportunity.

Imagine being able to find a minimum of 20 people in less that 1 hour of research who have the skills, experience and education required for the position you’re recruiting for, live in a commutable radius for the location of the position, are highly likely to be attracted to the opportunity, and who are highly likely to be within the compensation range of the position. The only thing left to do is “smile and dial!” If this sounds crazy or impossible – trust me – there are people who can do this day in and day out.

LinkedIn, the Internet, job board resume databases, and most corporate ATS/CRM databases are huge repositories of candidates – many companies have hundreds of thousands to several million resumes stored in their internal resume database. The major online job boards all have 20M+ resumes each, and often have over 100,000 resumes in each major metro area. LinkedIn has over 40M profiles worldwide, and 20M in the U.S. alone.

Large databases afford sourcers and recruiters to benefit from the laws of statisitcs with regard to large sample sizes. If a recruiter or sourcer were looking to hire for a rare skillset or combination of skills and experience that represented only 1/2 of 1% of the available candidates, and they had access to a resume database of 100,000 local candidates – 1/2 of 1% of 100,000 is 500 people. Eye opening, isn’t it? If you ever find yourself thinking you’re working on an impossible position, always remember the candidates you’re looking for actually DO exist, in more numbers than you would perhaps like to believe. You just need to figure out how to find them!

Sourcing candidates via Boolean search strings has the distinct advantages of speed, volume, and controlled accuracy of match across multiple and critical candidate variables which can enable recruiters to perform Just-In-Time delivery of well qualified candidates with less effort. The speed and match precision of searching for candidates with Boolean search strings effectively allows recruiters to produce more accurate results in less time, increasing productivity and reducing response time. Using proven Boolean search/information retrieval best practices, the probability that any given call will produce the right match is intrinsically higher than any other method of recruiting (cold calling, referral recruiting, networking, user groups, etc.).

Everyone will have their own opinions about the pros and cons of cold calling, referral recruiting, and sourcing via Boolean queries and which one is the superior method of talent identification – that debate will rage on indefinitely.

However, there is no denying the objective and intrinsic advantages of precise control over critical candidate matching variables and high speed identification of accurately matched candidates that sourcers and recruiters adept at wielding Boolean search strings can achieve when coupled with a resume database of a decent size.

From late April through May, I will be presenting at 5 talent acquisition events in 3 countries and 4 cities.

If you are already scheduled to attend one of these events, please be sure to take a moment to introduce yourself if we haven’t already had the chance to meet in person.

If you’re thinking about attending one of these conferences but have yet to commit, this will be a good opportunity for you to learn a little more and perhaps decide to sign up.

HCI 2012 Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference

Unfortunately, if you haven’t yet signed up for HCI’s 2012 Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference in NYC, you’re out of luck, as it is now sold out – at least for live attendance. The good news is that you can still attend virtually – click here to learn more.

On Monday, April 30th, I will be heading up the “LinkedIn: Beyond the Basics” workshop with Eric Jaquith from 8:00 to 10:00 AM.

We all know LinkedIn is a powerful weapon in the war for talent, but few organizations leverage LinkedIn to their full advantage. Eric and I will be walking the workshop attendees through LinkedIn’s “missing manual,” including:

• Practical and effective LinkedIn recruiting tips, tactics, and strategies
• Powerful, but seldom used search functionality
• How to leverage LinkedIn for competitive intelligence
• How to use profiles to receive top ranking and visibility
• How to find people on LinkedIn that other people can’t and don’t find
• How to get the most value from free and premium LinkedIn solutions
• How to effectively build a far reaching and valuable LinkedIn network

I’m really looking forward to this interactive workshop!

As for the rest of the conference, I am impressed by the speaker lineup and the topics being addressed. I must say I am especially interested in seeing the conference’s closing session by Paul DePodesta, the New York Mets VP of Player Development and Scouting, who is known for his notable appearance in the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - as I’ve read the book, seen the movie, and written a few articles on the subject of Moneyball Recruiting.

LinkedIn Toronto

On May 15th, I will be presenting two sessions at the largest Canadian LinkedIn event ever, which is being held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

As of April 12th, only 2 days after opening for registrations, 450 had already signed up!

I’ll be running two sessions at #inToronto, one for LinkedIn Recruiter users, and one for LinkedIn RPS users.

In both sessions, I will be digging into how to go beyond the basics and the “low hanging fruit” to get maximum ROI from your LinkedIn investment.

If you’re in Canada or in the U.S. and relatively close to Toronto and you didn’t get the chance to attend either of  the LinkedIn Talent Connect events (San Francisco in 2010 or Las Vegas in 2011), you will definitely want to sign up for #inToronto!

2012 Australasian Talent Conference

In 2011, I had the honor of being asked by Trevor Vas, Martin Warren, Kevin Wheeler and Horace Chai to present at their talent sourcing event in Melbourne. I must have done a decent job, as they’ve asked me back to Australia in 2012.

From May 22-24, I will be attending and presenting at the 2012 Australasian Talent Conference event – Dealing and Winning in a Roller Coaster Talent Market in Sydney, Australia.

I get the chance to lead several sessions, including a pre-conference workshop on Lean and Agile sourcing, a keynote on the Moneyball Approach to Recruitment: Big Data = Big Changes, a session on CareerOne’s/Monster’s SeeMore and 6Sense technology, as well as an unconference session that is sure to be entertaining!

If you’re anywhere within 10 hours’ flight time of Sydney, you won’t want to miss this talent conference, the ATC speaker lineup is stacked! Dr. John Sullivan, Master Burnett, Kevin Wheeler, Greg Savage – talk about industry heavyweights – and they’re just the tip of the ATC event iceberg!

ATC Agency Recruitment Masterclasses

After the ATC event I mentioned above, I will be leading master-class agency workshops in Sydney on May 25th and in Melbourne on May 28th along with Martin Warren (Principal Consultant, Insidejob) and Greg Savage (CEO, Firebrand).

In these agency-only workshops, attendees will learn tactics and methodologies that will allow you to gain greater business and establish a true partnership, including how to:

• Become a strategic partner by selling the value of your services to corporate recruitment leaders;
• Develop and present visual Sourcing Mind Maps demonstrating your in-depth knowledge and reach within targeted markets;
• Locate and leverage candidates on professional and social network channels such as LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Facebook and others that your clients cannot;
• Use channels such as LinkedIn to gain competitive intelligence and prospects for clients and business development; and
• Establish key time management best practices for sourcing vs. engaging critical talent.

Between the three of us, Greg, Martin and I have over 45 years of highly successful agency experience – so if you’re an agency recruitment professional that’s within practical travel distance to either Sydney or Melbourne, you won’t want to miss these workshops!

Hope to See You!

As my speaking engagement calendar develops throughout the year, I will keep you updated on the events and locations.

If you’re ever at an event I am speaking at, please be sure to introduce yourself!

If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, simply let me know – thanks!

I had the distinct honor and privilege of serving as the conference chair of the biggest-ever SourceCon, held at the Georgia Aquarium in February. Part of my responsibility in that role involved kicking off the event, and I took the opportunity to touch upon my observations and opinions on the current state of sourcing, as well as what I believe will be the future of sourcing.

Even as I was standing on stage I knew I would be writing a post on this topic, because it was apparent that there is much misunderstanding and debate surrounding sourcing, and certainly no shortage of opinion, qualified or otherwise.

If you’re ready, I’ll walk you though my definition of sourcing, my observations on the current state of sourcing, and what I (and others!) see as the future state of sourcing.

WARNING: If you don’t like/have time to read long posts, I suggest you turn back now. While I could have split this content up into 9 weeks worth of 500 word posts, I’d prefer to give you the goods rather than string you along.

What is Sourcing?

First and foremost, I believe it is critical to have a common understanding of what sourcing is.

I define sourcing to include any and all activities whose primary purpose is talent discovery and identification.

My definition is purposefully broad, because I find too many people seem to associate sourcing solely with searching the Internet with Boolean search strings.

While some companies may limit their sourcers to exactly that – searching only the Internet and generating names for someone else to engage – sourcing is and should be much more than that.

Sourcing encompasses the use of any source of human capital data – an ATS, Monster, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps, etc., and it can also include the phone, email, and messaging work of engaging potential candidates and networking with them to yield referrals and the opportunity to identify more potential candidates.

Yes, networking with people – whether they be new hires, existing staff and management, or complete strangers – to find and identify potential candidates is also sourcing, regardless of method (electronically, over the phone, or in person).

Of course, sourcing also includes traditional phone sourcing as effectively addressed and dramatically demonstrated at the SourceCon event by Conni LaDouceur.

And finally, although passive and offering little-to-no control over the qualifications and experience of the talent discovered, job posting is even a form of sourcing – the primary purpose of posting a job is to discover talent.

The Critical Importance of Sourcing

When it comes to the entire talent management lifecycle, nothing is more important than sourcing.

That’s because, quite simply, the entire talent management lifecycle is completely dependent upon discovering and identifying potential talent in the first place.

You cannot engage, build a relationship with, recruit, hire, retain and develop someone you haven’t found.

Period.

Try cutting and polishing a poor quality diamond, or better yet – try cutting a diamond you don’t actually have. You could have the best diamond cutters in the world on your staff, but without a steady supply of high quality rough diamonds, you simply won’t be in business.

When it comes to hiring and retaining, all future outcomes are dependent upon that magical moment when a sourcer/recruiter first finds and makes contact with a potential candidate.

The Current State of Sourcing

I believe that sourcing is largely misunderstood, undervalued, and under-invested in today.

I offer as evidence:

• An alarming number of people seem to believe that sourcing is all about Boolean logic
• There are people who believe that sourcing is a function that can be easily replaced by software
• There are well respected companies who don’t give their sourcers or recruiters any premium or purpose-built tools or resources
• The recently conducted sourcing compensation survey illustrated that 23% of the respondents make less than $40,000 annually

Sourcing: Beyond Boolean

As the “Boolean Black Belt,” I believe I am qualified to say that sourcing isn’t all about Boolean logic. In fact, it’s hardly about Boolean search at all. As I have already explained, sourcing involves any and all activities whose primary purpose is talent discovery and identification.

When it comes to leveraging information systems for sourcing, Boolean logic just happens to be one of the simplest ways to construct a query to retrieve information.

Using information systems for talent discovery is actually all about human-computer information retrieval and analysis, which has nothing to do with query syntax.

Sourcing human capital data isn’t about search strings – sourcing is a process.

Sourcing is a Process

Because sourcing is a process, I am fascinated by people who believe that sourcing can be automated by software.

That’s like believing that software development can be automated.

While certain aspects and portions of software development can be automated, the entire process from concept, requirements analysis, design, implementation, and verification/test simply cannot be automated.

The same is true of sourcing.

If you think the analogy is a stretch – I can assure you it’s not. I encourage you to read this comparison of the sourcing process with the Agile software development, which ideally involves an iterative process.

Don’t get me wrong – I totally understand why companies create software that attempts to automate the sourcing step of the talent management life cycle. It’s because there is a common misconception that sourcing is “hard” and/or that it is a mysterious “art,” and that it can be laborious and difficult to learn.

However, I can definitively tell you that sourcing isn’t intrinsically difficult, it can easily be broken down to a science (that’s the process part I referred to above), it doesn’t have to be terribly time consuming, and it can be effectively taught to others.

Unfortunately, the people who are often in positions to consider purchasing tools and technology for sourcing aren’t the most qualified to assess whether or not the software actually performs as claimed, nor are they assessing them for their ability to find the best people.

To many, some fast and easy search results are enough.

I feel sorry for any company whose talent acquisition strategy is based on “fast and easy.”

I always like to point out that anyone that is easy for you to find is also easy for your competitors to find. Where is your competitive advantage?

It certainly doesn’t lie in a small amount of easily identified people.

Sourcing Results are Proportional to Investment

Granted, sourcing CAN be incredibly time consuming and difficult if you are expected to produce results with little-to-no support or investment.

I am both amused and disappointed when I speak with sourcers, recruiters and leaders in talent acquisition roles and discover that they aren’t given any resources beyond an unsearchable ATS and the Internet to source talent.

That’s like expecting a gourmet meal from a chef, but limiting them to whatever ingredients they can find out in the out in the woods, and not giving them any equipment to cook with.

It should be obvious that if you want the best possible meal, you would make sure your chef has access to the best ingredients and has the right equipment to do the job.

The same goes for sourcing and recruiting.

Although the Internet can of course be used to find information about people, it is critical to recognize that the Internet was neither built nor intended for sourcing talent. As such, it would be foolish not to recognize how ridiculous it is to rely heavily on Internet search engines for sourcing success.

The Internet doesn’t have nearly as many resumes as some claim, and while it does have quite a bit of non-resume human capital data (think lists, directories, press releases, patents, blogs, etc.) there are significant intrinsic limitations associated with searching the Internet for talent identification.

Ultimately, searching the Internet is largely an effort in garbage sifting, especially when using Internet search engines such as Bing and Google (including custom search engines).

If you want your sourcers/recruiters to be effective, give them effective and purpose-built tools.

Don’t ask them to hammer a nail with a screwdriver and then wonder why they have a hard time getting the job done, or why your company isn’t winning the war for talent.

Sourcing: Beyond the Internet

Speaking of purpose-built sourcing tools, job board resume databases are highly searchable, contain up to 10′s of millions of resumes filled with deep and actionable human capital data.

So why is it that the 2012 CareerXroads Source of Hire: Channels of Influence Study showed that when it comes to using job boards, more than two-thirds of the respondents (68.6 percent) said more hires are made from postings than from resume searching, and that only 5.7 percent said they make more hires by searching the resume database than by posting jobs.

5.7%!

I was shocked when I saw that statistic. Although I know that “post and pray” is quite prevalent whether people like to admit it or not, 5.7% is a surprisingly low number.

While posting jobs “works,” it is a passive sourcing strategy (if you can even call it a strategy), offers you absolutely no control over candidate qualifications, and only attracts the smallest percentage of available talent (active job seekers).

Now, the CareerXroads study focused on corporate recruiting functions – I would assume (hope!) that staffing agencies would have a much higher percentage of hires attributable to searching job board resume databases as opposed to posting jobs. If you are an agency recruiter/manager/owner, can you please weigh in on this?

Over the course of my career, I would estimate that at least 95% of the hires I’ve made using job boards have come from searching the resume databases, and 5% (at best!) came from posting jobs.

The explanation is easy for me – searching for talent is an active strategy that affords a very high level of control over critical candidate qualification and experience variables, and the advantage of being able to specifically target the deepest end of the talent pool – passive candidates and the elusive non job-seekers.

So why aren’t more companies using purpose-built talent sourcing tools such as job board resume databases that offer direct access to 50M+ people?

Is it because people assume the only people you can find in job board resume databases are active candidates?

That’s an incorrect assumption.

My research has shown that typically 75% – 80% of the resumes on an average job board are dated over 30 days old. Many resumes are 1, 2, and 3+ years old.

“Old” resumes are not worthless and no one should care if they are slightly out of date – the person behind the resume still exists, they now have more experience, and you have their actionable data (phone + email)!

Statistically speaking, a random sample of resumes over 30 days old on any given resume database would show you that 66% of them would end up being passive or not looking.

Yes, that’s right – there are more passive candidates in resume databases like Monster by volume than active candidates.

Now that we’ve cleared the the whole active/passive thing up – is the reason why there isn’t more usage of online resume databases because a large percentage of recruiters aren’t adept at information retrieval?

I can understand why many recruiters don’t search their ATS/CRM system – a surprising number of them aren’t very searcahble and trying to find someone with specific experience in a specific location can be like pulling teeth, if it is even possible at all!

However, Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice and many other job board resume databases are highly searcahble, so to be quite honest, I am confused as to why the the number was so low for the percentage of CareerXroads Source of hire respondents who attributed more hires to resume database searching than job posting.

The 5.7% figure doesn’t make the current state of sourcing look very good.

In fact, given the mountains of rich, searchable, and actionable human capital data these resume databases offer, it makes it look quite sad.

Sourcing isn’t Valued in Proportion to Corporate Impact

Many companies tout that their people are their greatest asset, and it has been argued that the ability to attract, develop and retain great people is the only sustainable competitive advantage in business.

However, one does not have to look far to see that many companies clearly do not value their sourcing and recruiting function in that they do not invest in and value their sourcing capability.

Don’t get me wrong – there are companies that thoroughly understand the importance of sourcing, pay their sourcers very well, and invest in tools and technology that enable their sourcers to be as effective, productive, and successful as possible. Some companies even welcome sourcing and recruiting leadership to “a seat at the table.”

Unfortunately, they seem few and far between.

Companies that produce products and deliver services highly value the people responsible for conceiving and creating the products and delivering their services, but why aren’t the people responsible for finding the people who ultimately create the new products and deliver the services just as highly valued?

Unfortunately, HR, sourcing and recruiting are often seen as administrative roles by hiring managers and executives, and they seem to completely miss the connection between the great people in their company and how they actually got there in the first place.

Like many, I hold Apple in high regard, but I was disappointed (but perhaps not surprised) to read in a recent Fortune article (The Secrets Apple Keeps) that “In terms of corporate coolness, functions such as sales, human resources, and customer service wouldn’t even rate.”

Somewhat similarly, I was reminded by a recent Wired article that Google “engineers are famously allowed to spend 20 percent of their time working on side projects; frequently those ideas are conceived at internal tests where up to 100 engineers assemble to rapidly hack Google’s own products. Established tech companies from LinkedIn and Yelp to upstarts like RockMelt and Path all host overnight coding contests to foster creativity and stave off boredom.”

However, the same does not apply to sourcing and recruiting.

But it could.

And I believe it should.

Imagine “20% time” and hackathons for sourcing and recruiting, designed to enable them to develop more effective ways of finding and recruiting the best talent – the people who will be developing, delivering, and supporting the new products and services that will bring their company millions of dollars in revenue.

When it comes to compensation, SourceCon recently conducted a sourcing compensation survey which found that 23% of sourcers made less than $40,000 annually.

Again, I find myself disappointed but not surprised.

There are too many people and companies who view sourcing as a low and even entry level position.

This is very odd, because in the talent sourcing value stream, sourcing (talent discovery, identification, and engagement) provides the highest value.

As I mentioned previously, the entire talent management lifecycle is completely dependent upon discovering, identifying and engaging potential talent in the first place. You simply cannot engage, build a relationship with, recruit, hire, retain and develop someone you haven’t found.

So when I see such a large percentage of sourcers being compensated as entry level professionals, it’s quite clear that either those companies don’t fully understand and appreciate the true value of sourcing, or those companies don’t have very productive/effective sourcers, or both.

The Future State of Sourcing

The human element of sourcing and recruiting hasn’t changed much in the past 20 years, nor is it likely to in the next 20.

The one major shift has involved technology, and that shift is far from over.

There is more professional data available generated by more people every minute of every day than ever before – the volume, variety, and velocity continues to increase and there isn’t an end in sight. Resumes and social network profiles are created and updated, and mobile and social status and location updates provide real-time data and insights into 100′s of millions of people, creating unprecedented amounts of information to be leveraged and analyzed for those who have the insight and ability to do so.

Access to all of this data is fantastic and offers unprecedented opportunity for sourcing and recruiting, but data has absolutely NO value without the ability to retrieve precisely what you need when you need it.

If you do happen to have the access AND the expertise to retrieve precisely what you want, the next opportunity is to leverage that data for insight.

Through analysis, data yields information, which can provide knowledge, which in turn can provide insight and the ability to make informed, data-based decisions.

Insights such as where your best employees really come from, rather than targeting the schools, companies and specific experience the hiring manager likes (think Moneyball Recruiting).

Decisions such as who to try and engage and recruit to become your company’s next top hire, whether they’re already working for your company somewhere, working for a competitor, or still in school.

Data Science

While it’s not new to use data to find insights in business (e.g. business intelligence), it is new to use human capital data to uncover insights such as where your best hires come from, and who you should try to engage and recruit who has the potential to become your company’s next top hire.

It’s great that we have all of this human capital data, but once you have it, how do you explore it, learn from it and use it?

All of the data being generated is of no value if you can’t retrieve it and begin to make sense of it to make informed, intelligent decisions, and that’s where data science comes into the picture as the next big opportunity in sourcing and recruiting.

Monica Rogati of LinkedIn describes data scientists as “half hacker, half analyst, they use data to…find insights. It’s Columbus meet Columbo – starry eyed explorers and skeptical detectives.”

Does this sound remarkably like any sourcers or recruiters that you know who are passionate about finding great talent?

The leap that needs to happen from the current state of sourcing (basic keyword searching of resumes, social network profiles and updates, and Internet content, not fully leveraging the stockpile of rich and valuable human capital data trapped in your ATS, not mining the “deep end” of resume databases, etc.) is a jump forward to aggregated and parsed human capital data that can be sliced and diced surgically, both manually and algorithmically, for predictive insights to drive behavior (where to source to find the people you need, who is highly likely to be both qualified for and interested in your opportunity, who to recruit & hire, etc.).

Human capital data has a high degree of predictive value – it can give you predictive insight into what kind of responsibilities they’ve been entrusted with, the work a person is capable of, what they would likely want to do next in their career, how good they are at what they do, where they would like to work, what kind of compensation they are likely to be willing to accept, and even who they are likely to know – from specific people to certain types of professionals, which can accelerate networking and referral recruiting.

Although there are already some companies that are trying to push “black box” solutions that claim to have the ability to automate the sourcing function and find you the best potential candidates to call, I think it’s insightful to hear what Monica from LinkedIn has to say about that notion in general: “ There is a natural desire to try to automate the job of the data scientist, and large parts of it are becoming automated, but ultimately the communication and creativity with data is not so easily automated. Initially, a lot of companies want a capability to have a black box to produce the results a data scientist would give you, but that’s not happening any time soon.”

In sourcing and recruiting, what can be automated today is keyword searching and basic semantic search.

However, there are massive holes and limitations in those solutions, most of them a direct result of the imperfect and dynamic nature of human capital data as well as the unique challenges of finding people with specific knowledge, skills and experience.

As Monica points out, communication and creativity is not so easily automated, if it can be at all.

In sourcing and recruiting – the communication piece comes into play when discovering and getting to the core of what the hiring manager is really looking for and needs in a new hire.

Ultimately, you cannot directly translate hiring requirements into keyword search. Well, you can try, but that’s basic keyword search, or what I would call Level 1 Talent Mining, which is intrinsically limited and excludes many great potential candidates.

The creativity in sourcing comes into play when interpreting hiring profiles into sourcing strategies that have a high probability of quickly identifying the right people, whether they say the right keywords or not – this goes well beyond keyword search.

Evolving sourcing from keyword search to a more data science-based approach to human capital becomes even more powerful when coupled with big data.

Big Data

While there are many definitions of big data, the concept of big data centers around huge amounts of data that are not only increasing in volume, but also in velocity and variety.

The data velocity aspect is the speed at which new data is generated. One example of the increasing velocity of human capital data would be social media posts/updates. For example, Twitter crossed the 200M tweets/day mark last year - that’s 1 billion tweets every five days.

Now consider how much data is being generated on Facebook!

The variety of data sources and types should be obvious, especially when it comes to human capital data – LinkedIn profiles (which can now be converted into resumes/CVs) and updates, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter profiles and updates, recommendations/awards/endorsements, blogs, blog comments, mobile updates, press releases, and much, much more.

If you’re new to the concept of big data – it’s been a big deal for a while, just not in recruiting. And it’s big business – a $50B market in 5 years!

And if you think big data is strictly an I.T. play – you’re dead wrong. The majority of the 2011 big data-related revenues came from services (44%), followed by hardware (35%), and software (21%).

According to Wikibon’s “Big Data Manifesto,” “Make no mistake: Big Data is the new definitive source of competitive advantage across all industries. Enterprises and technology vendors that dismiss Big Data as a passing fad do so at their peril and, in our opinion, will soon find themselves struggling to keep up with more foreword-thinking rivals.”

Similarly, the McKinsey Global Institute has already proclaimed that big data is “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.”

Furthermore, McKinsey’s full position on the opportunity that big data presents is that “The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. From the standpoint of competitiveness and the potential capture of value, all companies need to take big data seriously. In most industries, established competitors and new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value from deep and up-to-real-time information. Indeed, we found early examples of such use of data in every sector we examined.”

That’s ALL industries and sectors – including HR, staffing and recruiting.

Will your organization be a leader, a follower, or a loser in this space?

Big Analytics

Big analytics involves analyzing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data to deliver unique insights or analysis.

We all have access to massive amounts of structured (parsed ATS/CRM resumes, LinkedIn profiles, performance assessments, etc.) and unstructured human capital data (Facebook, Google+ and Twitter profiles and updates, mobile check-ins and updates, recommendations/awards/endorsements, blogs & blog comments, press releases, etc.).

The organizations who can aggregate all of this data (no more direct Internet search!) and filter the data with BI and visualization tools will be able to gain actionable insights into the types of people and specific individuals to identify, engage and recruit who have a high probability of being top hires and significant contributors – whether they are already somewhere in your organization, working for someone else, or still in school.

As many corporate executives often say, the only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to find, attract, hire and retain great people.

Big data and big analytics are the weapons that will power this sustainable competitive advantage and will position the companies that execute this strategy properly to win the war for talent.

The Sourcers of Tomorrow

In competitive organizations, the sourcers of today will evolve into data scientists that specialize in human capital data, with specific responsibility for leveraging data for competitive talent intelligence, to identify what really makes up their top hires, where to find them, and how to effectively engage them.

Here is an excellent big data/big analytics visual from Karmasphere that I have modified to illustrate how big data and big analytics can fit into sourcing and recruiting:

A critical piece to note is the aggregation of structured and unstructured data into a central repository – forward thinking organizations will realize there is a low ROI to having people manually searching the Internet (using Boolean search strings or custom search engines) and multiple sites separately and manually.

Just as with data warehouses and data marts that power business intelligence, the power of human capital data multiplies when it is aggregated from multiple sources into a central talent repository where sourcers (data analysts) can slice and dice the data for insight with more powerful query and analytics tools than any single source can offer.

By the way, the technology already exists to automatically pull human capital data from the Internet, resume databases, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. - TheSocialCV is an example of what can be done with free Internet and social data.

Now imagine something similar that sits within your organization that automatically aggregates a mashup of externally sourced human capital data (social profiles and activity, mobile activity, resumes, etc.) and combines it seamlessly with your ATS/CRM and workforce analytics data. Drool much?

Many companies actually already have the ability to develop these solutions for themselves right now.

If any companies are working towards this kind of solution right now, they’re keeping it a secret, and for good reason – because it gives them a competitive advantage.

This Isn’t Crazy Talk

If you think I am alone in my view of how important big data will be in the future of talent sourcing and acquisition, I suggest you read this excellent article by Andrew Karpie, who is a Research Analyst for Staffing Industry Analysts. Interestingly, he holds an MS in Quantitative Policy Analysis from Carnegie Mellon University.

Here is a highly relevant snippet from that article:

“What is not always clearly pointed out is the implication of the large amounts of data and information that will come along with these new ways of finding, relating to, and securing talent.  For that there is another buzz word:  “big data,” or the massive amounts of data that are generated daily by people (talent, candidates) who are present and active on the web, leaving a trail of information (electronic signatures and footprints).

So what are some these implications?

First of all, I believe a greater weight of importance will be put on “sourcing processes and specialists,” who will be charged with the development of talent communities and candidate pools.  Recruiters will be as important as ever in engaging candidates, relating to them, and moving them through the many steps of the assessment, selection, and hiring process.  But they will do so from a starting foundation of sourced and pre-qualified candidates who have been gathered into talent communities.  This gathering and culling of candidates will increasingly be performed through data-intensive sourcing processes (sifting through “big data” for electronic footprints and finding the right patterns of information to identify talent and engage and form relationships with potential candidates).

Second, “sourcing processes and specialists” will become much more data-intensive and data-specialized than they are even today– and more of them will be required.”

These are exciting times to be in sourcing and recruiting!

Make sure you’re poised to ride the big data/analytics wave, or you might find yourself swept under by it.

When it comes to recruiting – it’s all about timing and opportunity, right?

I’ve had a great 15 year run in the staffing industry, starting off in 1997 at a small privately held company in Chantilly, VA, and ultimately ending up at Kforce after they acquired that no-longer-small staffing company back in February of 2005.

Over the years, I’ve progressed from a top producing recruiter to a VP of recruiting, and I’ve relocated twice with Kforce from Ashburn, VA to Tampa and more recently to Atlanta.

As with most people in the recruiting and staffing industry, I’d received my fair share of opportunity pitches.

Some came from companies I would have loved to work for, but none were the right match for what I was looking to do, and disappointingly, most seemed to be looking for someone to fit into very defined and scoped roles offering little room for me to bring all of my knowledge, experience, and passion for sourcing and recruiting to bear.

I’ve enjoyed many rewarding roles at Kforce that offered me the ability to stretch the boundaries of my job descriptions to be able to add value to the entire firm in as many ways as possible. When I was contacted about positions that were limited in scope and seemed more like the company was looking for a specific piece to fit their puzzle, it was an easy decision to not pursue them any further, as I promised myself I would never take a step backwards, even if it was an opportunity with a marquee company.

However, after 15 years in the staffing industry, the right opportunity finally came along.

My friend Eric Jaquith had recently joined SourceRight Solutions, the RPO business of the SFN Group which had been acquired by Randstad. He let me know they were looking for someone to come in and lead/architect the evolution of SourceRight’s sourcing and recruiting.

As I found out more about the opportunity, it was quite clear they were not looking for a specific puzzle piece with clearly defined and limited responsibility to fit neatly within a job description. In fact, it was quite the exact opposite.

I found out that SourceRight was looking for the right person to come in as serve as their sourcing and recruiting thought leader and wanted to give this person carte blanche to ensure SourceRight would have the most effective sourcing and recruiting capability as possible.

On top of that, I learned that Randstad, a $22.5 billion global provider of HR services & the 2nd largest staffing organization in the world, was interested in expanding their RPO offerings and capability globally (they have presence in 40 countries!) and that I’d be able to play a key role in that global expansion.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’d be leading a team including Eric Jaquith and Shally Steckerl.

And their office is 4.3 miles from my house.

Are you kidding me?

How often does an opportunity like this present itself?

Even so, it’s never easy to leave a company that’s treated you well for 15 years, and I was in a great position working with a great team (shout out to the Kforce Atlanta office!), and I was being compensated handsomely for getting strong results. I could have easily retired with Kforce.

That’s part of the problem though, at least with me.

Whenever I get comfortable, I get uncomfortable – I am always hungry for the next challenge.

Once I climb a mountain – I am not satisfied to sit at the peak and enjoy the view. Sometimes I wish I could though – life would be much less stressful.

However, that kind of life would also be much less challenging and rewarding. If you don’t challenge yourself, you rob yourself of the opportunity to learn exactly how far you can go and what you are able to accomplish in life.

Ultimately, leaving my comfortable and familiar position to strike out and tackle the unique challenge that SourceRight was offering was a “no brainer.”

I knew it was a special and incredibly rare opportunity, that it was highly unlikely that anything even remotely close would come along again, and quite importantly, the SourceRight role presented me with a mountain I hadn’t climbed before, with a peak well above the clouds.

Not only was I prepared for the challenge, I’m now relishing it!

I am now leading SourceRight’s Sourcing Center of Excellence along with sourcing and recruiting luminaries Eric Jaquith and Shally Steckerl where we are responsible for conceiving, evaluating, testing, implementing, and continually improving sourcing and talent acquisition tactics, processes, strategies, and technologies in pursuit of the most efficient and effective methods of talent discovery and acquisition.

And I couldn’t be happier with my decision!

For those of you who may be considering making a change to pursue the next challenge in your career, I offer you words from Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech that resonated deeply with me and that I found extremely helpful when making my own decision:

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Practically everything I have learned about sourcing and recruiting didn’t come from a mentor or any formal training.

Instead, I learned how to become a top performing recruiter “the hard way.”

What that really means is that when it came to finding top talent, I tried a lot of things that didn’t work, and because I refuse to make excuses, give up, or accept anything less than the best results, I kept experimenting until I discovered things that enabled me to find people that others can’t and don’t.

With over fifteen years of experience in sourcing and recruiting, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes along the way. I’ve also had the opportunity to assess, train and coach corporate and agency sourcers and recruiters, which has exposed me to many myths, misconceptions and mistakes when it comes to leveraging information systems for sourcing and recruiting.

Here are what I believe to be some of the most common productivity-robbing and results-reducing mistakes sourcers and recruiters make when looking for the right match.

In no particular order…

The Top 15 Sourcing and Recruiting Mistakes

#1 Overanalyzing resumes

Resumes are by nature imperfect and are poor representations of a person’s experience and capabilities.

As such, I’ve always advised sourcers and recruiters to use my “10 second rule:” Don’t read resumes – scan them. If you can’t absolutely disqualify/rule out a candidate based on reviewing their resume in 10 seconds, pick up the phone and call them.

Interestingly, a recent study by TheLadders that used eye tracking technology while recruiters scanned resume search results showed that recruiters spend an average of 6 seconds assessing a resume before making the judgment on whether or not the person might be a good fit for the position they are being sourced for.

However, when reviewing resumes in search results, I think it’s critical to not be looking to determine if the person might be a good fit for the position you’re sourcing/recruiting for. Wanting to make a judgment of a potential match between a resume and a job opening is natural, but it is important to remember resumes are not complete pictures of the people who write them.

As such, you should only be looking  to see whether or not you can rule them out based on basic qualifications.  If you can’t, you should call them/email them to find out more.

While you may not be crazy about a particular resume, it’s important that you try to engage every potential match, because I have learned through experience that some of the best people have uninspiring and lackluster resumes.

#2 Running overly generic/basic searches

Basic keyword and title searches yield generic and basic results, typically what I’ve overheard people refer to as “too many.”

When you run basic and generic searches, you return result sets that are often so large that you can’t review them all, creating a hidden talent pool of dark matter results.

People making this mistake unknowingly increase the size of the pool of candidates they don’t find (results returned but not reviewed).

It’s also worth noting that anyone can run a basic/generic search, so they offer you no competitive advantage.

#3 Making assumptions about people based on their resumes

See mistake #1.

Have you ever heard the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover?”

Don’t assume anything from a resume- including how far you think the person might commute, if they are willing to relocate, if they would be open to a contract position, if they have enough experience, that they don’t have experience with something just because it’s not in their resume, etc.

#4 Research, test and refine your searches before you start tacking action on the results

You should always take time to analyze your search criteria to assess the possibility that your search terms may not find all qualified candidates, and in fact might actually be eliminating viable candidates.

I have found that the more time I spend on the front-end of a search, the more relevant my results become, which in turn increases my productivity by enabling me to find more and better candidates more quickly. Imagine that!

There is sourcing wisdom to be learned from Abraham Lincoln, who once said “Give me six hours to shop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Take some time to sharpen your search strings before you start taking action on the search results, or else you are likely performing the equivalent of trying to chop down a tree with a dull axe.

#5 Having sourcing tunnel vision

Don’t see each resume as only a potential match for the position you’re currently sourcing for.

Any resume database you have access to can be leveraged in much the same way as LinkedIn can – every person is actually a conduit to a larger network of people. So even if a particular resume you’re reviewing doesn’t appear to be an ideal match – they actually might be (see mistakes #1 and #3), and/or they may know someone who is.

#6 Assuming 1 search finds all qualified candidates

It’s actually impossible. Trust me.

Consider that every search you run both includes qualified people and excludes qualified people.

#7 Searching only resumes posted within 30 days on major job boards

Did you know that 75% – 80% of all resumes on the major job boards are dated over 30 days old?

Did you also know that most people don’t even look at them, let alone take action on them?

You should never limit yourself to only searching resumes posted in the last 30 days. Opening up your searches to ALL resumes enables you to tap into the deep end of the talent pool – the estimated 66% of people who are not currently looking but can be recruited for the right opportunity.

The fact that people tell me they don’t like to call people whose resumes are over 6 months old baffles me – as if the people who wrote them have an expiration date.

#8 Not calling candidates that appear to be under- or over-qualified

1. See mistakes #1 and #3
2. See mistake #5
3. People who are in fact too junior or too senior for your current needs might fit future needs
4. People who are either too junior or too senior for a particular position might work with or know someone who is an exact match

Need any more reasons?

#9 Submitting the first 2 -3 candidates you find that fit your job/hiring profile and moving on to the next open position

Sound crazy?

I can hear someone asking, “Why shouldn’t I submit the first candidates I find that fit the requirements?”

Well, ask yourself this tough question and be brutally honest  - what’s the statistical probability that the first 2 people you speak magically happen to are the best candidates you can possibly find? The most closeable and controllable? The most “affordable?”

Sourcing and recruiting should not be conducted on a FIFO basis, but on a BIFO basis. Think about it.

#10 Thinking that after searching a particular source (your ATS, a job board, the Internet, LinkedIn, etc.) that you’ve found all of the available candidates and cannot find any more

If you ever feel like you’ve found everyone to be found, you’re wrong.

Invariably you’ve created and left behind dark matter resultsof people who actually DO match your positions, but you could not find them because your Boolean search strings made it impossible to do so.

Being aware of this is a major step on the path towards sourcing enlightenment.

Also, see mistake #4.

#11 Thinking that the major online job boards have poor quality candidates

There are just as many great, high quality candidates in each job board resume database (e.g., Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice, TheLadders, etc.) as there are on LinkedIn, or any other source for that matter.

I will be publishing an article soon to back this claim up statistically.

#12 Relying solely or heavily on title-based searches

Not all companies use the same titles for the same roles and responsibilities, so making this mistake contributes to you not finding candidates that match your hiring profile or job order but has a title that you didn’t think of and include in your search.

See mistake #4.

#13 Not using the NOT operator

The Boolean NOT operator is the least utilized, and in my opinion, actually the most powerful standard/basic Boolean operator.

It’s not just for getting rid of stuff you don’t want.

I will dedicate an entire post to the NOT operator in the near future.

Puns intended.

#14 Only using skill/tech terms (e.g., Java, Oracle, Accounts Payable, EMR, etc.) when creating Boolean search strings

The best and most effective searches don’t rely solely on skill/technology based terms, but also include responsibility terms and environmental terms where applicable.

This is the a critical step in moving beyond simple buzz-word search and match, which gives sourcing a bad name and allows some people to view sourcing as a low or entry level position.

#15 Spending 80% of your time using low-yield resources that can only provide 20% (or less!) of the results

For example – spending hours searching the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest (!)  for potential candidates and not heavily/effectively leveraging your internal resume database/ATS or other, better suited tools at your disposal.

While you can certainly find some great people on the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest, none of them are particularly deep sources of human capital data, and neither are any of them specifically designed for retrieving detailed work-related human capital data. Trying to use them to find potential candidates can be massively time consuming and can be largely an effort in sifting through irrelevant results and attempts to reduce false positives.

If you have access to an ATS or internal resume database, it’s specifically designed to store and retrieve resumes, probably has more local and more qualified candidates than the Internet, and (hopefully) has a better search interface enabling more precise searching.

Let’s also not forget about LinkedIn, which isspecifically designed for storing and retrieving deeper human capital data, and if you have access to any of the major job boards, they actually have a larger percentage of passive job seekers than active and they have some fantastic candidates – see mistakes #7 and #11.

Until you can say that you have honestly exhausted your ATS, LinkedIn, and any job board resume databases you have access to (to the best of your efforts/knowledge – see mistake #10), you shouldn’t be spending a ton of effort trying to find people on the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest.

Did I Miss Any?

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it certainly covers what I believe are some of the most common and major mistakes sourcers and recruiters make while searching for potential candidates.

Do you have a mistake to add to the list?

Post a comment and let the world know.

Thanks!

At the time of this article, there were 1,236,675 LinkedIn groups. With so many groups, how do you find and choose which groups to join?

Depending on your LinkedIn group strategy, you may be interested in finding the largest groups of a specific type.

LinkedIn groups are very searchable, and when you start typing letters into the search box, you will get a dynamically updated list of groups matching the letters/words you input, typically (but not always exactly) sorted by the number of members.

Being the search geek that I am, I wondered what would happen if I executed a null search – a query for nothing.

Many search engines/interfaces don’t allow null searches, and others that do tend to return only partial results. For example, with LinkedIn’s people search, you can’t search all of LinkedIn without entering a keyword – you will only get results from 1st degree, 2nd degree, and group connections. You have to enter a keyword in order to dip into the people categorized as “3rd + Everyone Else,” representing the deep end of the people pool on LinkedIn.

However, lucky for us, a null search of LinkedIn groups not only works, it returns all groups sorted primarily by the number of members. That makes it remarkably simple to find the largest groups on LinkedIn.

Why Should Anyone Care About Large LinkedIn Groups?

I’m glad you asked! Not everyone will care about finding and joining massively large LinkedIn groups, but some will, for very specific and strategic purposes. Most notably, being a member of very large groups allows you to:

#1 Send messages to a large number of people for free, without using an InMail.

I still find that the vast majority of people in groups allow messages from other group members, so this comes in quite handy.

#2 Easily send legitimate invitations to connect to a large audience with a high acceptance rate.

I know of some people who send invitations to people they don’t know claiming to be their colleague when they’re not or that they’ve done business together when they haven’t, and I do not condone, nor am I a fan of prevarication.

If you share a group with someone, it’s one of the easiest, most straight forward and honest ways of inviting someone to connect with you – especially if they are a weak or nearly absent tie.

The 50 Largest LinkedIn Groups

Here is the official list of the 50 largest LinkedIn groups at the time of this article’s writing. The largest group has over 730,000 members, and 48 of the 50 have 100,000 or more members.

Click on each group of 10 to be taken directly to the LinkedIn group search results so you can explore the groups and join them if it makes sense for you.

Were you surprised by any of the groups in the top 50?

You might notice that the order of the groups isn’t exactly sorted by the number of members – some are slightly out of order.

For example, one group with 100,603 members is listed below a group with 100,000 members.

This could be a result of LinkedIn estimating the number of members due to the dynamic nature of LinkedIn’s data (people can join and leave at any moment). Does anyone have any other ideas?

Are Larger LinkedIn Groups Better than Smaller Groups?

No, not necessarily.

The groups you join should not be based on size, but in accordance with your LinkedIn strategy, and your group strategy on LinkedIn can and should be vastly different than another person’s because you (hopefully) have your own specific reasons for being in the groups you’ve selected.

However, there is no denying the power and benefit of being able to send messages for free and invitations to connect to very large numbers of people that you don’t have to be connected to at any other level (e.g., 1st, 2nd, or 3rd). There are those who claim that smaller LinkedIn groups are more “valuable” than large groups because they are more likely to be “off the radar” of spammers, irrelevant content posters, and recruiters (sorry!), and as such, are more likely to have better dialogue and interactions between the members.

This is true in some cases, but certainly not all.

I’ve performed quite a bit of LinkedIn group research, and some of the smaller, very niche groups still have have far fewer “real” members than recruiters and other “lurkers” who are clearly not in the group for the group’s main purpose.

For a quick and simple example using a large and (in theory) very specific group, if you search the Java Developers group with this query in the keyword field: java -(recruiter OR recruitment OR recruiting OR talent OR HR OR “human resources” OR “executive search” OR sourcer OR sourcing), you get around 14,000 results. The group has about 120,000 members.

Ultimately, for a group to be engaging and high value for its members, the group needs to have active and vigilant moderators and members who care about who gets in and what kinds of content that can get posted.

It doesn’t take long at all for a group to become overrun with noise or irrelevant and often annoying content that causes people to tune out, stop engaging in the group, and even leave.

First it was social recruiting, then it was mobile recruiting.

Now talent communities are apparently the latest cure for all of your talent troubles.

One the surface, the talent community concept seems like a brilliant “no brainer.”

However, like Socrates, I believe there is value in questioning everything. So when I start seeing  a strong buzz about just about anything, I immediately hit it with a dose of healthy skepticism and start asking some tough questions.

I’m well aware that there are talent acquisition leaders out there right now that are saying, “What we really need is a talent community,” primarily because of the buzz the concept has been building over the past year or so. I worry that these same people are placing blind faith into the talent community concept out of the hope that it will help them in some significant manner with their talent acquisition challenges.

When I attended a webinar on building sustainable talent communities the other day, I felt it raised more questions than it provided answers. Because I know I can’t be the only person wondering about the validity of the talent community concept, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you my thoughts and questions.

What is a Talent Community?

One of the fun things about highly buzzed-about concepts like talent communities is that they’re actually hard to define concisely. If you ask 10 people about what they think a talent community is, you will likely get 10 different answers.

I’ll share two of the better definitions I could find with you.

This first one comes from Marvin Smith:

• “A talent community is a segmented audience of targeted talent that can meet the current and future hiring needs and maps to an organization’s workforce plan.”

The second comes from Stephanie Lloyd:

• “A talent community is an opt-in, interactive forum where individuals with particular skill sets and interests can interact in a personal and meaningful way with corporate HR and company management in order to better understand – and be a part of – the firm and all that it has to offer from an employment perspective.”

There are many more definitions, and while they all vary to some extent, they do for the most part agree than a talent community is not a database of people, and your ATS doesn’t qualify.

Also, most people tend to agree that a defining characteristic of a talent community is that interaction among members is key.

The Wikipedia entry on “talent community” starts off  with “A talent community is a method of social recruiting…,” then it rambles a bit about 2-way communication and engagement, and claims the following as the benefits of talent communities:

1. Qualified candidates at a recruiter’s fingertips
2. Less dependence on ineffective job boards
3. Less money spent on job advertisements
4. Increased interaction with potential candidates
5. Better quality of applicants to job openings
6. Creation of a talent pipeline for future job openings
7. Attraction of passive candidates

Sounds great, right?

I mean, after seeing that, who wouldn’t want to build a talent community?

Challenges to the Talent Community Concept

We get a healthy reality check when we explore the “Talk” page associated with the talent community entry on Wikipedia (emphasis mine):

• “This page seems to be based on several assumptions…There is no description of what the author actually means by “talent community” as opposed to any other type of community or social group. I tried to edit it to be more coherent but couldn’t work out what they meant in the first place. As such, this article seems to be referring to a “talent community” as a tool for communication for the purposes of recruitment, possibly a software platform or other type of system. This leads me to inquire whether the original author has created such a platform or system and is using Wikipedia as a channel for advertorial content. The “Description” sub-section in particular is evidence of this. In addition, the emotional nature of the response to the article’s proposed deletion in this talk section supports the idea that it is advertorial and biased, as does the fact that the two external links are to the website of a consultant and speaker in the recruitment field. I dispute the article’s notability because if it was edited to remove bias and inconsistencies, it would basically be a duplication of parts of the main “Community” or “Outline of community” articles.”

Well said, in my humble opinion, and it echoes many of my same concerns and issues that I have with most that is written and spoken about when it comes to the concept of talent communities.

What I love about Wikipedia is that it’s similar to the scientific community – if you make a claim, you had better be able to back it up with unbiased facts or else you will be called out on it.

Lets go back to the claimed benefits of talent communities, because I’d like to personally challenge ALL of the following:

1. Qualified candidates at a recruiter’s fingertips
2. Less dependence on ineffective job boards
3. Less money spent on job advertisements
4. Increased interaction with potential candidates
5. Better quality of applicants to job openings
6. Creation of a talent pipeline for future job openings
7. Attraction of passive candidates

I would like for someone to show me real data that proves any of the above claims.

I don’t believe that talent communities offer companies qualified candidates at a recruiter’s fingertips, any more so than other proven methods of sourcing and recruitment.

While I can see how a really good talent community could theoretically reduce dependence upon job boards, why is using job boards a bad thing, and who says they are “ineffective?”

The most recent CareerXRoads Source of Hire Report showed that job boards are still pretty effective, weighing in at the #2 spot.

By the way, I thought job boards were supposed to die over 10 years ago.

I guess no one told them, nor did anyone tell job seekers.

Talent Communities and Applicant Quality

I’d love to see any data that clearly shows that talent communities increase applicant quality.

As I’ve written many times before, you don’t have any control over who applies to any job at any company.

Similarly, a talent community doesn’t give you any magical ability to control who comes in and starts to participate. so who can argue that talent communities attracts and produce better candidates and applicants?

The first question I asked myself when I was first exposed to the talent community concept was what are the chances that a talent community will attract the best talent?

I think that’s  perhaps the most critical question to ask of any sourcing or recruiting strategy or tactic.

I believe the data that has yet to be collected and/or presented would show that talent communities are made up of a normal distribution of people.

It’s basic statistics.

Because there is no control over who joins and participates in a talent community, most talent communities would be characterized by a random sample. That means that talent communities will typically be a normal distribution of people (the classic “bell curve”), which means they will have a large percentage of average folks (B and C players), and a small percentage of “top talent.”

Without a mechanism to effectively and reliably pre-screen who joins a talent community, any claims that talent communities produce better candidates or applicants are baseless.

Talent Communities Attract Active Candidates

I found the claim that talent communities would attract passive candidates to be particularly interesting.

If you take a look at this infographic on the differences between a talent pool and a talent community, you will notice the talent community path starts with someone being interested in an employer’s brand.

Arguably, the vast majority of people who become interested in an employer’s brand (aside from liking their products) become so because they would consider working for that company. Passive job seekers and people who aren’t looking at all would not likely take action to join another employer’s talent community.

Sorry.

That means the majority of the people who join and participate in a talent community will be active job seekers.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – just please don’t make claims that talent communities attract passive candidates until you have the data to back them up.

Talent Community Turnover

Gareth Jones wrote a spot-on piece about the myth of the talent community – I urge you to read it if you haven’t already.

Gareth astutely points out that “Job seeking is an event, not an interest,” and that fact alone will render many corporate branded talent communities into pit stops along the career highway, frequented mostly by transients and passers-by.

My guess is that isn’t how most companies would like to view their talent communities, but it is an accurate reality.

Talent community populations are destined to have a high turnover rate, because once the active and casual job seekers actually find their next position, the engagement will drop off.

As such, long term engagement in corporate branded talent communities is intrinsically limited.

Is the value of a talent community diminished when the majority of the members are constantly turning over?

Too Many Talent Communities?

Have you ever wondered about how many talent communities that the people you are looking to identify, attract and perhaps hire at some point can possibly belong to?

Although some hiring managers have a Ptolemaic view that the talent universe revolves around the company they work for, the people you’re looking to attract and hire have lots of choices, and your competitors and other companies are vying for the same talent you are.

Your talent community is one of many that the talent you so covet can chose from. As such, the question must be asked – how many talent communities can a person realistically belong to?

How about actually participate in?

Or better yet, actually want to belong to and participate in?

Organic vs. Artificial Talent Communities

Natural talent communities – not those whose primary purpose is to serve as a virtual water hole for talent – already exist. Hence the argument made by Sarah against the talent community entry on Wikipedia - that without the obvious bias to the text, it would basically be a duplication of parts of the main Community or Outline of Community entries on Wikipedia.

The addition of “talent” to the word “community” seems to automatically denote that the main or dual purpose of the community is for recruiting. If you take the recruiting aspect away from the intent of any “talent” community, it simply becomes a community.

A “community” is defined as “an interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location.” One of the other definitions is “a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society.”

Natural or organic talent communities already exist on LinkedIn, Facebook, Github, Ning, and many other sites. My use of “talent” here is to distinguish them as professional groups – people who share similar work-related interests and experience (Java, supply chain management, mobile app development, Six Sigma, project management, etc.).

Natural/organic talent communities are typically created by actual members of the community – not recruiters or HR professionals, nor were the communities created with recruitment as one of the main purposes.

Artificial talent communities are those that are created by recruiters or anyone with the main or dual purpose of recruitment.

I don’t use “artificial” to insinuate any negative connotation. I use “artificial” simply as a reflection of the fact that the community was not created solely to bring together a body of persons with common and professional interests and facilitate interaction among  them.

Think about natural and created diamonds. Regardless of how they were made, they’re diamonds – it’s just a matter of how they were formed and for what purpose.

Which has greater value?

Do You Need to Create a Talent Community?

Do you really need to create a talent community?

Are you having trouble finding and attracting the talent you need?

What do you think that a talent community will accomplish for you that all of the other options you have at your disposal won’t do?

If you’re looking to identify people that are passionate about and interested in what they do for a living, that’s great – but is creating a talent community the best and most effective method of doing so?

Besides, natural or organic talent communities may in fact already exist for the types of people you are looking to hire.

If they don’t, you could go about creating one.

However, if you do – would you brand it with your company?

A corporate branded talent community attracts active job seekers – people who have an interest in learning more about a potential employer and will take action to do so.

However, to the passive or non-job seeker, any corporate branded site is like a watering hole during the drought season with crocodiles in the water and lions lying in wait in the brush.

It doesn’t take much Internet research to find people complaining about the fact that recruiters “ruin” organic talent communities. If you poke around many LinkedIn and Facebook groups for any relatively in-demand skillset, you’ll likely find more recruiters than non-recruiters, spamming jobs and soliciting referrals with aplomb.

It’s one thing if you’re going to claim that your employer’s micro site or Facebook page is a talent community (I’d argue they really aren’t, but that’s another discussion), however, if you’re going to try and create a talent community of a specific group of professionals, I’d recommend to not brand it so that it’s less artificial and disingenuous.

In that talent community webinar I recently attended, I recalled a moment when the presenters said, “Remember – it’s not about you, it’s about them.”

Umm…not really.

It is about you, because you’re not creating a talent community out of the kindness of your heart or out of sheer altruism – the main reason you’re creating it is to attract talent that you can recruit.

Just be honest and upfront and don’t try to fool anybody, including yourself.

Of course, just because you try to create a talent community, it doesn’t mean anyone will come.

Final Thoughts

Please don’t construe any of the above to mean that I don’t see any value in the talent community concept.

My main intent is to introduce a healthy dose of questioning to the concept and the claims of talent communities, because I have yet to see any of the claims to be backed up with data, and I don’t want people to be blinded by “bright shiny object syndrome.”

I’m a fan of natural or organic talent communities, and I don’t believe that attempts to artificially create them reduces “dependence” upon job boards, increases the quality of applicants, creates a talent pipeline, or attracts passive candidates.

I’d love to see data that shows me otherwise – and you should demand it before buying into the concept of building a talent community.

Last week, I had someone ask me what was going on with LinkedIn.

She told me she was having difficulty selecting text from a LinkedIn profile in order to copy and paste it into a search engine to find the public profile.

I jumped onto her computer to check out what she was talking about, and I found out that she was definitely not suffering from user error – she was not able to copy text from any LinkedIn profile.

As this was the first time I have ever encountered something like this, I went back to my computer and tried selecting profile text and had no troubles, so I was not exactly sure what was going on.

A part of me wondered if LinkedIn was beginning to roll out a change. Even though I didn’t have the same problem copying profile text, I know from past functionality changes that LinkedIn has made that they typically don’t roll them out to all users at once.

To be honest, I didn’t really think about it much after that day.

Until I got an email later in the same week from someone in my network about the exact same thing.

Only this person had already contacted LinkedIn support and asked why he wasn’t able to copy text from LinkedIn profiles anymore.

Here is LinkedIn’s response:

This person has a premium Business account, so this change isn’t limited to only free accounts.

What Does This Mean?

Honestly, I am not 100% sure other than that LinkedIn is taking steps to lock down their data, which is certainly within their rights.

I went back to the first person who contacted me about this change and performed a few tests with her – I was still able to go to Bing and Google and X-Ray/site: search for the text on anyone’s profile that I could not select and copy text from using her account, so public LinkedIn profiles that are crawled and indexed by search engines aren’t affected.

I also found that I could copy and paste text from the search results pages of a LinkedIn searches, as well as from the PDF versions of profiles.

The only place where I could not select and copy text was from the actual profile in LinkedIn.

Presumably, this could be because they do not want people to easily scrape full profiles into an ATS or other system.

While I can appreciate LinkedIn taking steps to protect their data, they still have the challenge of what to do about public profile data which anyone can leverage, and many companies do through the use of scraping software.

I and many people have been waiting to see what, if anything, LinkedIn can and will do to exert control over public profile data.

Can’t Copy LinkedIn Profile Text?

Are you no longer able to select text from LinkedIn profiles?

I’d like to know, because I still have no problems selecting text from LinkedIn profiles, and as such, I haven’t been able to do any extensive testing.

Also – if you use or make software that leverages LinkedIn profile text and your ability to scrape text has been affected, please let me know.

Special thanks go out to those of you who alert me as soon as you find or notice anything of interest with LinkedIn and other sites – you know who you are.

Update! How to be Able to Select and Copy LinkedIn Profile Text

If you have been affected, a few helpful readers (thank you!) have suggested to disable JavaScript in your browser which will enable you to be able to once again copy and paste text from LinkedIn profiles, without having to open the PDF to do so.

If you use Firefox, there is an add-on called NoScript which will allow you to selectively allow or block JavaScript.

If you use Chrome, you can go to Options -> Under the Hood -> Content Settings-> JavaScript – Manage Exceptions and add www.linkedin.com as an exception. That way, you don’t need to block JavaScript across all sites – just LinkedIn.

Chrome will then notify you when its blocking JavaScript from LinkedIn.

Most companies and staffing organizations, ranging from executive search sole proprietorships to staffing agencies to Fortune 500 companies, have internal databases filled with rich and actionable 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, this post on Weddles details 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.

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 information retrieval capability.

As such, like a black hole, prospective candidates go in, but they don’t come back out.

If you can’t easily search your internal database, how can you determine the total candidate population, let alone find the top talent hidden within?

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.

The bottom line is that data has no value if you can’t retrieve it.

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/placements.

The Time Value of Resumes

Even after 15 years in recruiting, I am still shocked to hear HR pros, sourcers, recruiters, and talent acquisition leaders comment about how resumes get “stale” and lose their value after 6 months.

While the information on resumes certainly goes out of date over time, the resumes themselves do no lose their value.

In fact, I argue that resumes get more valuable over time.

This is because the active candidates you capture today become the passive and non job seekers in time – yes, those magical people that are supposedly so valuable and so difficult to find.

Right in your database.

With phone numbers and email addresses.

That person that responded to your job posting a year ago will not likely be actively looking today, will not have their resume posted online anywhere, and will not have updated their LinkedIn profile for quite some time – yet, you have their contact information, and it doesn’t take a rocket doctor to figure out what kind of opportunity they would be interested in.

Although you don’t know exactly what a person whose resume is a year or more old is doing now, most people follow a relatively predictable career trajectory.

I’ve personally dredged up resumes from an ATS that were over 4 years old and got them hired.

When I called one of these candidates, he asked me, “How did you know I was looking?” I replied, “I didn’t – your resume is 4 years old – I don’t even know if you’re doing the same kind of work.”

He was.

It also turned out he was beginning to think about making a change, but hadn’t even written his resume.

I had caught him at the perfect time, before anyone else could even imagine of finding him. The funny thing is that most people probably wouldn’t have even called him simply because his resume was “stale” and out of date.

This and many more similar examples I have prove the time value of resumes.

However, you can’t leverage the time value of resumes if you can’t quickly, easily, and precisely retrieve them!

Coal Into Diamonds

For each position sourced for and posted online, there are inevitably volumes of potential candidates that do not fit, as well as candidates that do not get interviewed and hired.

However, this does not mean that they are bad or unqualified people.

In fact, many of the people who respond to job postings are very good candidates – they’re just not very good at matching themselves.

Those under qualified candidates? While they may not meet the basic qualifications of the specific job the responded to, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t fully qualified for other jobs that are open now, or jobs that will open in the future.

In a year or two, they will have a year or two more experience and be a qualified candidate.  See the Time Value of Resumes above.

What about those over qualified candidates? While they may be “over qualified” for the position they applied to – they may in fact be qualified for other openings now and in the future.

What about those applicants that are a complete mismatch for the positions they applied to? They often match other currently open and future jobs.

How about the people who almost got the job? For every opening, there can only be one hire, so there is often a slew of strong runners-up that could be fantastic candidates for other opportunities.

Over the years, I’ve consistently found time and again that what appears to be coal can quickly turn into diamonds.

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 3 main ways a person can end up in a company’s ATS:

1. They responded to a job posting
2. Someone ran a search and found the candidate’s profile/resume on the Internet, on a resume database such as Monster, Dice, Careerbuilder, etc., or on LinkedIn and entered it into the database
3. The person was a referral and entered into the system

In all three cases, someone – either a potential 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.

Looking to Build a Talent Community?

Everyone seems to want to build a “talent community” these days.

What I find funny is that many companies are already sitting on the makings of a talent community in their own ATS.

Anyone in your ATS got there either because they wanted to join your company (they responded to a job posting) or because you wanted them to join your company (you sourced them).

Can you think of a better population for a talent community?

If your ATS doesn’t have CRM functionality that enables you to stay in touch with the people who’ve expressed interest in your company and the people you’d like to potentially employ, it’s time for you to start thinking about what you can do about this, because you’re sitting on a diamond mine.

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!”

Demand an ROI on Your ATS!

Many companies spend tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars on their Applicant Tracking/CRM systems, and they should expect demand 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 You 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 or expressed interest in your company 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, Sovren, 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 simply because the sourcers and recruiters 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.

In my first year as an agency recruiter, I 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 Google, 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 and from people who have expressed an interest in joining your company.

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!

Sourcing talent via social media requires an entirely different mindset than sourcing with other forms of human capital data, such as resumes/CV’s, employee directories, conference attendee lists, etc.

Back in early 2009, one of only 2 guest posts ever co-written on my site was published on the topic of non-standard descriptors and the role they play in social media. Valerie Scarsellato was a Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation at the time when she put together the framework for the original article on sourcing via social media, and she has now moved into a Segment Marketing Specialist role at Intel and is loving it. For those of you who feel that employer marketing/branding/communications is a logical extension of sourcing, Valerie would wholeheartedly agree with you – check out this video in which she discussed her award winning _codehearted; work for Intel.

Now that nearly 2 years has passed since the Searching Social Media Requires Outside-the-box Thinking article was published, social media usage has continued to explode – monthly visitors to LinkedIn and Facebook have doubled, they’ve nearly quadrupled for Twitter , and we now have Google+, Pinterest and others springing on the scene, making the topic even more relevant today. As such, I wanted to rework the original piece and update it with a few more examples.

The primary challenge when leveraging social media for sourcing talent is that nonstandard terminology is prevalent – it’s generally acceptable to use slang and other verbiage that would otherwise never be found on a resume, even when it comes to describing one’s profession.

If you use the same query terms when sourcing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. as you would when searching for resumes, you will certainly find people. However, you will also exclude a decent portion of the available results, unknowingly relegating them to Dark Matter and otherwise undiscovered talent. This is because you can only retrieve what you explicitly search for.

Go Outside-the-Box

Social media and networking sites offer people a creative outlet that is free from restrictions on what is deemed to be “acceptable” when describing themselves and what they do for a living. In fact, it seems a decent number of people appreciate the opportunity to find cool and non-corporate ways to describe who they are and what they do.

LinkedIn is “the” professional social network, and as such, a great many people do fill out their profiles as they would a resume. However, even on LinkedIn, you will find people that stray from the norm when it comes to titles and even company names.

What I find particularly fascinating about sourcing via social media is that you have to begin to wonder what non-standard titles and terminology people might use. There is no list or guide, and you can only find what you search for. Discovering non-standard titles and terms is somewhat of an Easter-Egg hunt.

For example, as I was writing this post, I wondered if anyone abbreviated “engineer” into “engr” as a title on LinkedIn.

To test this hypothesis (yes, the Scientific Method is very much a part of any sound sourcing strategy!), I ran this search on LinkedIn:

Here is an example of the results returned:

Well, it’s obvious that some people do actually say “Engr” on their LinkedIn profile and also do NOT mention “engineer” anywhere on them. These are perfect examples of Dark Matter search results, as well as proof that even when sourcing LinkedIn, you are not safe in your assumption that people will only use standard terminology.

You would not likely find “Engineer” abbreviated to “Engr” on a resume, but unless you specifically search for [Engr -engineer] on LinkedIn, you will not find any of those 20,000+ profiles, quite simply because you can’t.

Lest you think that only people from lesser known (respected?) companies would use such abbreviations on a professional profile, here’s the top 10 current companies from the above search:

How many more examples like this can we find? That’s what I love about this approach – the only limit is your “I wonder if” ability to hypothesize and explore.

Here’s one more interesting and certainly nonstandard title I found when tinkering around online for this article:

Nonstandard Term Discovery

To illustrate the discovery of nonstandard terms, let’s start with another simple abbreviation.

Instead of searching for “software engineer,” I decided to see if anyone used “sw engineer” instead. Again, not something terribly nonstandard, but certainly not something people would commonly use on a resume.

In this example, I poked around Pinterest with this query:

Here is the first result:

More important than actually getting a result for “sw engineer” is noticing the reference to “sometime-Rubyist,” which alludes to Ruby-based software development.

Taking “Rubyist” and searching for it specifically, we can see what comes back with this Boolean search:

Some of the results are very interesting – yielding even more ideas for future searches to find people who use nonstandard references:

This illustrates how you can begin an investigative search process with an “I wonder if…” search that can lead to the discovery of more nonstandard references.

Google+ Sourcing & Discovery Example

Switching to Google+, I decided to search for the term “enthusiast” and purposefully excluded more common terms such as programmer, developer and engineer:

Scrolling down the results, I noticed this one:

So you can see that this person mentions “enthusiast” and links to an article he wrote on Extreme Programming, and that Java is mentioned in the article.

However, interestingly, when you check out the person’s profile – here is what you get:

He hasn’t filled out his profile, but he does refer to himself as “Geek dad.”

If you were searching Google+ for profiles of Java software engineers, you would not be able to find Chris by standard search terms.

Twitter Sourcing

When it comes to resumes, most people will refer to themselves by industry-standard titles such as Programmer, Developer, Engineer, Marketer, etc.  However, when it comes to Social Media, many people purposefully avoid “corporate” and resume-level descriptors and ”tag” themselves using more informal language that results in a more personalized identity, rather than conforming to industry-standard job titles.

For example, the computer programmer at work becomes “geek” or “tech nerd” in his/her Twitter bio. While these may not be considered “professional” descriptors, they are important to note in order to be able to effectively target and search for talent on social networking sites. As such, you will need to shift your way of thinking in the way we search for people, and you have to become open to non-standard descriptors such as “geek,” “nerd”, “techie,” “evangelist,” “droid,” “drone,” “junkie,” and “enthusiast” to name a few.

When it comes to Twitter, you will also need to think outside the box when it comes to sourcing talent in specific locations. Some people on Twitter can be quite creative when describing where they are from.

Searching bios on Twitter will yield you nonstandard yet easily recognizable results such as Silicon Valley, Central New York, North NJ, Suburbs of Boston, NoCal, and Southern CA.

However, some people take it a step further and utilize popular slang terms - for example: City of Angels, Big Apple, Bay area and Chi Town.

There are the even more creative “tweeps” that want to remain mysterious, their location may be “Universe,” “Everywhere,” or “Narnia.” Perhaps even more intriguing is that some people simply list their latitude and longitude via their iPhones.

When I clicked on her URL, I discovered that she is a software engineer.

When I clicked on her URL, I discovered that she is a web designer.

Facebook Sourcing

When it comes to titles and work details, Facebook isn’t much different than Twitter in that people can and do enter anything they want, as you can see from the following examples:

You simply could not find any of the above people using standard search terms.

Save Your Nonstandard Search Terms!

As you search for candidates using Social Media and uncover these non-standard descriptors, I recommend that you create a living document of search terms that are relevant to your hiring needs and profiles, taking special note of which ones may return the best results.

While there is a lack of consistency in some of the non-standard descriptors, ”geek” and “nerd” seem to be the new way to describe different flavors of technologists. You will also find that a good majority of these people will have a link to their personal blog, website or other social networking sites which may reveal a more detailed view of their professional focus, as can be seen in some of the results above.

Final Thoughts

As I always say – anyone that’s easy for you to find is also easy for anyone else to find, including your competitors.

Your goal should be to find everyone your competitors can find, as well as the people they cannot.

I’ve illustrated a few simple examples of ways to uncover people who can’t be found using the standard search terms most people would use. It is important to note that the examples only scratch the surface, and it’s up to you to take the ball and run with it to discover more previously “unfindable” search results.

I apologize to those of who who do not source/recruit in the I.T. space, but it is important to note that the examples I use are actually no less relevant to anyone sourcing for any other type of talent.

It’s not the terms I am using that are important – it’s the thought, experimentation and discovery process. No matter what you source and recruit for, you can be guaranteed that a portion of the people will use nonstandard terminology on social networking sites when referring to themselves and what they do for a living. Its up to you to discover them.

As social media continues to explode, the importance of thinking outside-the-box is critical in giving you a competitive advantage to find people that are there to be found and identified, but that most people simply cannot find because they search solely using standard/corporate terminology.

If sourcing via social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, et al is a part of your talent identification and acquisition strategy, you MUST think outside of the box when choosing your search terms, or else you run the risk of unknowingly preventing yourself from finding all of the best talent available.

Before you resort to garbage sifting on the Internet, I strongly suggest you make sure you have uncovered all of the available talent to be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

You can’t find everyone using standard search terms, and because of that, there are people to be found that you currently don’t and actually can’t. You just need to know HOW to find them.

Think outside the box.