Boolean Search Strings, Referrals and Source of Hire
I read an article on ERE about the other day titled “Love Writing Boolean Instead of Recruiting? Then Don’t Read This Post.”
While I happen to be pretty good at and thoroughly enjoy writing Boolean queries for talent mining, I actually love the entire recruiting life cycle. Sourcing is a means to an end, not a means in and of itself for me. Even so – with such a provocative post title (nice work John!), I had to read the article.
The article is a pretty strong pitch for Scavado, which “does the search work for you, saving hours of time otherwise spent developing Boolean search strings and applying them manually to each site searched.”
Things really got interesting when I got down to the comments on the article, as I stumbled into an interesting exchange between Amybeth Hale and Keith Halperin which covered direct sourcing, referral recruiting, and outsourcing sourcing at $6.25/hour.
Read on to learn my thoughts on all of the above.
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LinkedIn’s Talent Connect, Talent Pipeline, and Certification
Talent Connect 2011 in Las Vegas was just as good as, if not better than, Talent Connect 2010 in San Francisco.
Nearly 2,000 people showed up, which is around 3 times as many attendees as last year’s conference, and they represented over 700 companies from 17 countries.
One thing’s for sure – LinkedIn knows how to put on a conference. The Talent Connect events have been the most well coordinated, polished and produced conferences I have ever attended.
I won’t bore you with all of the details – but I will highlight LinkedIn’s new Talent Pipeline offering, Web 3.0 (the shift from social to data), touch upon how to automatically build Boolean search strings (yes, that came up at the conference), and inform you about LinkedIn’s Recruiter Expert certification.
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What is a Boolean Black Belt Anyway?
I’ve been blogging nearly 3 years now, and I realized I’ve never come out and actually defined the term ”Boolean Black Belt.”
The concept seems pretty self explanatory, but there has been at least 1 person who’s taken the opportunity to point out (and gain some traffic in the process – but it’s all good!) that it could be perceived as a bit of an oxymoron to be an “expert” in something as simple as 3 Boolean operators.
Interestingly, however, I’ve found that most sourcers and recruiters don’t even fully exploit the various powers of the OR and NOT operators – not even close.
So what is a “Boolean Black Belt” anyway?
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How to Use Resume Search Aggregators
I am often asked my opinion on the best use of resume search “aggregators” such as those offered by infoGIST, TalentHook, Data Frenzy RAM, DaXtra, AIRS SourcePoint and others.
If you’re not familiar with resume search aggregators, a resume search aggregator is an application that allows a user to enter a search string that will simultaneously execute across multiple free and paid job board resume sites and aggregate the results.
Many HR, sourcing, recruiting and staffing teams tend to use resume search aggregators at the associate level – enabling individual sourcers and recruiters to run Boolean search strings focused on specific hiring needs through a resume search aggregator to to simultaneously search several paid job boards as well as in some cases 100+ free job board resume databases.
While there is a huge convenience factor in using resume search aggregators in this fashion, as each sourcer or recruiter can save time and effort in not having to log into multiple job boards to execute Boolean search strings on each one individually, there are some limitations of resume search aggregators you need to be aware of, and I feel there is a better way to use this technology.
Limitations of Resume Search Aggregators
Limited Boolean Logic Support
Many of the resume search aggregator applications do not support full Boolean logic or even symbols such as the asterisk for root word/stem searching.
That, in and of itself, is a major limitation when attempting to mine information systems such as job board resume databases, because highly effective and precise search strings cannot be created.
Also, some of the aggregators don’t even allow you to “hand code” Boolean search strings – instead, forcing you to create searches using a query builder which often significantly limits the ability to create effective searches.
Similarly, not all job board resume databases support full Boolean logic.
Even if a resume aggregator application supported full Boolean logic, if it is being used to search a site that does not support it – you will not get the results you are looking for (or any results) because the job board resume database can’t execute your search string.
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Big Data, Data Science and Moneyball Recruiting
With each passing day, an increasing amount of data is being generated and transmitted by and about more people than ever before.
At Google’s 2010 Atmosphere convention, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that “There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.”
In case you were wondering, an Exabyte is 1,000,000,000 gigabytes, or 10,000,000 terabytes. That’s a lot of information.
Interestingly, Google’s CEO may have actually underestimated the amount of data being generated at the time. From their research, RJMetrics believes that a more accurate figure would be approximately 6.6 exabytes every 2 days. One thing is for sure – the number is even bigger today.
What does any of this have to do with recruting? Why should HR, recruiting and sourcing professionals, as well as corporate executives care about big data?
Well, because a chunk of big data is human capital data, and as I have been ranting about for the better part of 3 years, human capital data can be leveraged to identify and hire more great people more quickly.
If you’re a dinosaur recruiter or sourcer, I don’t recommend you read the rest of this post, because:
- I will challenge they way you think and work, and that might make you uncomfortable
- You’ll probably think it’s a load of garbage
- It might make you aware of your pending extinction (the precise timing of which is debatable)
I have to warn you that this is not a short, quick-hit post – this may be the longest single post I have ever written, which explains why you didn’t see a post from me last week. I wrote this piece to introduce a human capital paradigm shift, to challenge the long-standing conventional wisdom in HR and recruiting, and to (hopefully!) provoke progressive thought from my peers. If that’s not your thing, turn back now.
If you want a glimpse into the future of talent identification and acquisition, you’re always interested in figuring out how your company can gain a competitive advantage, and you’re wondering what the heck my “Moneyball recruiting” reference could possibly be about, then read on.
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LinkedIn User Demographics and Visitor Statistics 2011
Would you like to know more about LinkedIn’s user demographics, as well as LinkedIn’s visitor statistics broken down by country, city, and state?
If so, you’ve come to the right place!
After patiently waiting for a whole year since my last post on LinkedIn statistics, I’m excited to bring you LinkedIn’s latest user demographics and visitor statistics for 2011.
In this post, I will compare the data I presented in September 2010 to the data I just pulled from Quantcast.
Quantcast is used by 9 of the top 10 media agencies because they quite accurately quantify Internet audiences.
While some sites are not directly measured and only have estimated data at this time (such as Facebook and Twitter), LinkedIn is fully “quantified.”
In other words, Quantcast directly measures LinkedIn’s visitors – which gives us great information and some very interesting insights!
Read on to see the following LinkedIn data:
- Global monthly visitors
- Global monthly visits
- Visits per person
- Pageviews per person
- Visit frequency
- Business activity
- User demographics (gender, age, ethnicity, income, education level)
- Monthly visitors by country
- Monthly visitors by city (global)
- Monthly visitors by state (U.S.)
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Talent Sourcing: Beyond Tips, Tricks, Hacks and the Internet
It’s bothered me for quite some time now that many people essentially equate sourcing with Internet search – using search engines such as Google and Bing to find resumes, lists, press releases, etc.
It bothers me because sourcing is so much more than that.
It also bothers me because I am aware that many companies (some quite large and well respected) limit their sourcers and recruiters primarily to the Internet as the only source of information.
I believe a major contributing factor as to why sourcing isn’t highly valued by some organizations and why sourcing doesn’t get as much widespread respect and recognition as it should is because too many people associate sourcing primarily with Internet search.
The future of talent sourcing will involve a shift from manual Internet search and ATS/CRM systems with only rudimentary search and analysis capability to highly specialized tools specifically designed for mining vast and proprietary human capital data sets dynamically compiled from multiple sources that enables predictive analytics.
It’s coming – will you be ready? Will you be ahead of the curve or behind it?
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Do You Have the Proper Perspective in Recruiting?
It is all too easy for sourcers, recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers/teams to develop a skewed, distorted, and decidedly one-way view of the world. Perhaps spending 99% of the time on only one side of the recruiting process is to blame.
Regardless of the cause, it is absolutely critical to regularly take the time and think about, understand, and appreciate the recruiting life cycle from the candidate’s side – the job seeker, the passive candidate, the non-job seeker, and the elusive “A+ player.”
In this article I’m going to walk you through over 10 different scenarios in which I think recruiters and hiring teams can benefit greatly by taking the candidate’s perspective into careful consideration.
If you don’t take well to being challenged to think differently from time to time, or if you don’t like long blog posts, you may not want to read any further. This one clocks in at 3700+ words.
Consider yourself warned. 
How to Search for Top Students and GPA’s on LinkedIn
Have you ever wanted or needed to search for top students of people who have achieved high grade point averages in high school or college?
While GPA is relatively unimportant to many employers – to others, a high GPA is indicative of a person’s ability to achieve results in an unstructured environment (no one is there making you go to class or study for your exams), which can provide clues to self-management capability and the drive to excel.
Some employers simply won’t hire candidates for certain roles without a specific GPA or higher, with few exceptions (e.g. Google).
Regardless of your personal philosophy on the (in)significance of GPA’s, a grade point average is an objective measure of performance and achievement, and one of the very few that can be found on a resume or a social media profile.
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All Recruiting Sources Are NOT Created Equal
While there is much written on the subject of how to search the various talent sources available to recruiters and sourcers today, such as the Internet, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, ATS/CRM systems, etc., there does not seem to be much written about their ROI as sources of talent/human capital information.
I believe that the value of any source of information is 50% based upon the actual information contained within (data depth), and 50% in the ability to extract out precisely and completely what the user needs (searchability). Information has no value if you are unable to easily access, effectively search for and find what you need and take action on it.
When it comes to leveraging information systems for talent identification and acquisition, it is critical to assess the depth of the talent/human capital data offered by the source as well as how “searchable” the source is.
Why is Data Depth and Searchability Important?
Quite simply, the deeper the data offered by and the more searchable the the source is, the higher the ROI for your sourcing efforts.
All electronic sources of talent are NOT created equal, and some offer sourcers and recruiters instrinsic advantages with regard to the ability to more quickly and precisely find more of the right people, yielding higher productivity.
I’ve created a graphic representation of a comparison of the data depth and searchability of the most common information systems used by sourcers and recruiters to find candidates.
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