Who is the Boolean Black Belt?

I’m Glen Cathey, and here’s my story.

I started out as a technical recruiter in January 1997 working for a small contingent staffing agency in Northern VA. With very little training and using an internal Lotus Notes-based CPAS resume database as my only source of candidates, through trial and error I taught myself the art and science of leveraging Boolean search strings to quickly extract large quantities of precisely matched and highly qualified candidates in direct response to client/manager needs.

While it took me 3 months to make my first placement, after that I averaged 8 hires per month, and was recognized as the agency’s Recruiter of the Year, outperforming more experienced and tenured recruiters by a wide margin. Although I did not know it then, I had essentially used a resume database to achieve Just-In-Time recruiting.

Over the past 14 years, I have continued to develop a high level of expertise in leveraging information systems to achieve Just-In-Time talent identification and acquisition - sourcing, recruiting, and hiring/placing candidates from ATS-based resume databases, the internet, job board databases, social networking sites and any other source of human capital data I can get my hands on.

When not working a desk in a production capacity, I’ve recruited, trained and managed highly productive individual teams of up to 20+ recruiters responsible for 700 – 900 hires per year. I’ve also trained hundreds of Information Technology, Defense, Finance and Accounting, Clinical Research, and Health Information Management recruiters nationally that are responsible for over 10,000 hires annually.

I created this blog to share my personal thoughts and theories with regard to sourcing, recruiting, and talent discovery, identification and acquisition. Explore my site to learn more about the concepts of Moneyball Recruiting, talent mining, social media/social recruiting, Information Retrieval via Boolean queries, semantic search, and Lean/Just-in-Time recruiting.

I hope you enjoy – thanks for visiting!