Who is the Boolean Black Belt?
I’m Glen Cathey, and 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 trail 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 pleacement, 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 12 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. My searching methodology has evolved into a fast, effective, and systematic process that involves successive and semantic searching tactics employing insightful and creative extended Boolean queries to quickly, thoroughly and methodically uncover all potentially qualified candidates from the highest to lowest probability of match. I enjoy “cracking the code” of challenging hiring profiles and creating search strategies that quickly allow sourcers and recruiters to achieve successful hires, with the best candidate, typically in 24-48 hours, in 20 calls or less.
I have a theory that there is a hidden talent pool in every database comprised of 2 types of candidates: #1 – the candidates that recruiters do not find, and #2 – the candidates that recruiters can not find. I believe this hidden talent pool is at least 30-40% of the candidates in each database and I have practically made a career out of being able to easily find what others do not and can not.
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. In my current role – I train hundreds of Information Technology, Defense, Finance and Accounting, Clinical Research, and Health Information Management recruiters nationally that are responsible for nearly 10,000 hires annually.
I created this blog to share my thoughts, experience, and theories with regard to the art and science of talent discovery and indentification. Explore my site to learn more about talent mining, social media, Boolean logic, semantic search, Lean/Just-in-Time recruiting, and how to leverage information systems to find more well qualified candidates faster than most people think is possible.
Feel free to send me an email at gecathey [ a t ] gmail.com for questions, discussions, or requests.
I hope you enjoy – thanks for visiting!
