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The LinkedIn Illusion

Published on April 9, 2012 by in Recruitment Research

Just 17% of the nation’s workforce are members of LinkedIn.  What does that mean for employers? If you limit your passive candidate sourcing and recruiting efforts to LinkedIn, you are ignoring 4 out of every 5 potential candidates.

A growing number of employers are investing in LinkedIn recruiting licenses, and for less important roles, it can be an effective tool. However, for most executive, mission critical, and hard-to-fill technology roles, it simply does not go the distance. The talent pool is too shallow and, well, it’s been over-fished. Recently, a number of our clients have observed that an increasing number highly sought-after candidates — the ones you actually want to hire — are experiencing recruiter-fatigue.The minority of passive candidates that are on LinkedIn are getting barraged with LinkedIn InMails from talent acquisition teams. The more they hear from recruiters on LinkedIn, the less inclined they are to respond.

Question Mark Lady

Another disadvantage of focusing passive recruitment efforts on LinkedIn is that you are competing with every other employer that is vying for your candidate members’ attention. LinkedIn candidates are the proverbial low-hanging fruit ripe for talent acquisition’s plucking. By climbing higher up in the tree — by conducting original investigative research to identify and recruit top talent that is not so obvious — employers gain a powerful competitive advantage. Investigative research consistently uncovers candidates employers never dreamed existed. Even better, these candidates are not actively marketing their wares on LinkedIn.  In other words, by climbing higher in the tree, you pretty much get candidates all to yourself.

There are other things you should know about LinkedIn:

  • Only 1% of LinkedIn users visit daily, compared to Facebook’s 76%
  • The more senior the person (SVP, EVP, CXO), the less likely they are to have a member profile.
  • Many profiles like the most basic detail. (i.e. a profile with the title “Engineer” do not tell you what kind of engineer or what level.)
  • Many profiles are abandoned and outdated.

Ask yourself why LinkedIn doesn’t display the “last updated” date, a critical field that is available in every database. In other words, they have that data, but are choosing not to show it. If they displayed it, users would be shocked to discover that the vast majority of members haven’t updated their profiles or logged in for a very long time.

LinkedIn does not tell employers who is interested, who is qualified. and who is able to make a move at this point in their career. More important, it does not tell you who is good. In other words, there is still a lot of recruiting that needs to be done to turn LinkedIn prospects into viable candidates.  We regularly provide additional bandwidth to corporate executive search and recruiting teams.

In passive candidate sourcing strategy, LinkedIn is a but step in the process. To recruit the best talent, it is a step that must be followed by original, investigative research to uncover, map, profile, engage, screen, and qualify the contenders. In other words, LinkedIn is not a panacea. It is a starting place, not the finish line.

We invite your observations and comments.

 
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On-Again, Off-Again LinkedIn

Published on March 2, 2012 by in Recruitment Research

A few days ago, LinkedIn turned out the lights and, for a while, those of us who login daily stumbled around in the dark wondering what to do.

LinkedIn decided, in its inimitable wisdom, to make it impossible for users to select text in profiles by layering in some javascript that interfered with the ability to copy/paste. Needless, to say, the change did not fly with paying customers. Glen Cathey’s Boolean Blackbelt blog captured the angst as we puzzled over how LinkedIn could do such a thing, especially to those of us who pay hundreds of dollars monthly per seat for LinkedIn access.  AmyBeth Hale, ResearchGoddess that she is, weighed in:

Glen, we are experiencing that here at Microsoft right now with the Recruiter accounts. Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past LinkedIn at this point to re-introduce ‘copy/paste functionality’ as a paid feature after this move. Perhaps if we collectively make a big enough stink about this, they’ll reverse the decision.

Or…

We could just not become over-reliant on one tool ;)

SocialTalent CEO Jonathan Campbell put together an excellent webinar detailing the recent LinkedIn changes with instructions on how to track them in the coming weeks and months.  Never one to miss a legitimate opportunity to partake in public discourse , we chimed in as well:

We’re experiencing un-selectable text here as well   . . . at our recruiting research firm Intellerati in Connecticut.   Thanks, Glen, for your superb documentation on a work-around. My issue is the following: 1. We helped build LinkedIn. They are penalizing the super-users who are the very people that evangelize their product and who serve as a powerful magnet attracting users to LinkedIn. Unlike Facebook where the vast majority of users login daily, only a small percentage on LinkedIn do. (That would be us.) 2. I am a paying customer. 3. Their security settings are idiotic. They cloak 3rd degree names that are visible in public profiles. So where’s the logic? The choice is pay and we hide the name as our way of thanking you or don’t pay and you get to see the entire profile because the member has chosen to make it public. Not only that, as you have documented so brilliantly, LinkedIn is also attempting to prod people to increase their privacy settings. Who’s the genius that came up with that brilliant move? If you encourage people to do things so that they will be found by fewer and fewer people, that would seem to me to be an invitation to shrink, not grow, a social network.  

This isn’t the first time we’ve noted LinkedIn toying with its members.  In an ERE.net article in December, The Trouble With LinkedIn: Grey Goo, we detailed our concerns:

Our “issue” with LinkedIn has to do to with how it attempts to be the arbiter of relationships. To this day, LinkedIn asserts in its list of  user agreement ”Do’s and Don’ts” that one must not invite “people you do not know to join your network”.  They assert the “legally binding” right to define how one must “know” an individual, and will (as it once did to me years ago) kick you out of the network without warning or explanation should someone forget how you two met at a conference. LinkedIn knows very well that a significant portion of its member base really does want connect with people they do not know.  Clearly, members who indicate they’re open to career opportunities want to network with recruiters — people they don’t yet know but are eager to meet — an activity that I sense is one of the leading drivers of growth in LinkedIn membership. By comparison, while it is by no means perfect, Facebook defers to its user’s own ability accept, reject, or ignore friend requests and to friend and unfriend people at will.

While LinkedIn’s skewed take on relationships is a disconnect that dates back to the very beginning in the fine print of its user agreement, a growing number of users just now are waking up to that reality.  Consequently, when LinkedIn made text impossible to select without first announcing when or why it would do such a thing, users on the site  thought it might first be a technical issue — some small bug or glitch –and then it dawned on them.

Social networks are built on trust and trust is a fragile thing with connections “loosely joined” on the Internet.  We may be Facebook “friends”, but we don’t really hang out.  We may network on LinkedIn, and for the ability to do so, we may have uploaded our entire business “social graph” to LinkedIn. But this latest move by LinkedIn and others like it are not “right purpose”.  LinkedIn explained they decided to make text un-copy/paste-able to protect the “data and privacy” of its members and “of the LinkedIn website”. Actually, I don’t think so.  Redacting data in profiles that LinkedIn users have chosen to make public is not acting in their best interest. Quite to the contrary, it is doing the opposite of what members have said that they want. Interfering with the ability to copy/paste to hinder networking is not acting our best interest. In other words, LinkedIn’s turning out the lights has nothing to do with us, and everything to do with LinkedIn,which is why our rant on Boolean Black Belt continued . . .

4. How is it that I cannot select data of my first degree connections or for public profile data that LinkedIn users have chosen to share with the world? Remember, all of the data that they’re steadfastly shutting off access to is only in the database by the grace of every user. (Well, that and they did a pretty good job of vacuum-cleaning up every name in our Outlook with ‘nary a thank you . . .) 5. I’ve noticed in Google search results that my public profile doesn’t have a Google cache link for the page. What’s up with that? Is that something that also has gone the way of the buffalo? I thought one reason people participated in LinkedIn was to “brand” themselves and to enable others to find them for business purposes. If LinkedIn text is not selectable and if, in so doing, they make it not indexable or if LinkedIn slowly disappears its public pages from Google cache as appears to be the case with my public profile, then how are people going to network? I mean, seriously! Even more important to LinkedIn, how are people going to find LinkedIn? It appears the social network is becoming decidedly anti-social as it attempts to monetize its recruiting business. We should take LinkedIn’s move as a cautionary shot across the bow and remind ourselves about the many implications of LinkedIn entering the recruiting business. Randomly doing stupid things like throwing a switch so that the UI frustrates its most loyal customers is a very risky move on their part. Social networks can turn on you. But apparently treating its relationship with us as disposable is the thanks we recruiters get for being the very reason so many people come here. LinkedIn is taking our money, our business relationships, and competing with us and as it does, it will continue to shut off access in every way it can so it can jack up its fees, even if it is to information that is otherwise public. Whenever Facebook has introduced a change that was an overstep, users objected en masse and Facebook,to some degree, relented. Perhaps its time we expressed our disappointment in their misbehavior. Alternatively, we can take our toys and go elsewhere. Google+ keeps looking better all the time . . .

 And then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over.  We awoke today to discover LinkedIn had turned back on the lights. We could see again because we could copy/paste again for legitimate business reasons. Because in the end, the information belongs to us, to our friends, and to friends of friends,  not to LinkedIn, no matter how hard it tries.

 
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LinkedIn Street Cred: Low User ID

Published on December 7, 2011 by in Recruitment Research

How Low Can You Go?

In social networking circles, a low LinkedIn member ID number gives you street cred. Because LinkedIn numbers its users sequentially. the lower the member ID, the longer you’ve called LinkedIn your business networking home.  Of course that raises the question, how does one find one’s user number, particularly if your LinkedIn profile sports a vanity URL? For instance my personalized LinkedIn profile ID is http://www.linkedin.com/in/kristabradford. However, that’s just my public profile. When I click on the button View Full Profile, I get taken to a page that has my ID in the URL.  Just look for the number after the “id=” part of the URL.  Your number comes right are the equal sign in   http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=.

 

It’s a little easier to find the exact date that you joined LinkedIN.  Simply login and click on Setting in the drop-down under your name in the upper right hand corner of your screen. Settings wil take you to a window where LinkedIn displays your start date after the words “Member since” on the upper left side of the screen:

The How Do I Find My User ID topic came up in comments on a article I wrote for ERE.net called The Trouble with LinkedIn: Grey Goo.

I thought it would be fun to set up a separate thread to invite people to share their LinkedIn numbers and start dates.  It would be interesting to see when most people started as well as to see how low we can go!  Please comment with your start date and user ID To begin the experiment:

Krista Bradford: December 10, 2003, LinkedIn Member ID 5957

 
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Name Gen. Really!?! Why Recruiting Needs to Be Investigative

Published on December 1, 2011 by in Recruitment Research

Allow Intellerati this one rant.  We will, of course, reward you with our latest presentation on why recruiting needs to be investigative. (A hint: It is not that there are too few candidates: it’s that there are too many.)

This brings us to a special segment we like to call “REALLY!?!”

Why is it that when we think recruitment research, we think name gen –  as if it were a synonym for the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. I mean, really !?!

Really!  As if name gen were something really cool and exotic, or so hard to do that only that super smart, nerdy guy in your IT department could figure out how to assemble  . . (wait for it)  . . .  a list of names.  Really !?!

Really! Name Generation. What’s up with this obsession with names? Since when have names been so special?  I’ll tell you since when! Since lists of names were printed in big fat yellow books that they gave away for free. You know,  p-h-o-n-e  b-o-o-k-s. They’re the four inch thick encyclopedia-o-names that my cousin Jimmy used as a booster seat.  I mean, really!

Really! Yeah., names . ..  they’re the words people who dress in business suits print on tiny little cards to hand out as if they were candy on Halloween,  How dare they!  I mean, really!

Really, name gen!  Like there’s a such a shortage of names that the 100 million registered users on LinkedIn feel so all-alone. That’s like saying that brothers and sisters on  the TV show 19 Kids and Counting just can’t get enough of each other or that the Octamom is lonely. Oh, wait, . . . She still is! I mean, really!

Really!  Oh, what’s that? There are so many names, you don’t know who’s a potential candidate or who’s good?  Really?  I mean, REALLY !?!

 

 
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The Dumbest Things Recruiters Do, Redux

Published on November 28, 2011 by in Recruitment Research
Dr. John Sullivan

Dr. John Sullivan

HR thoughtleader and ERE columnist Dr. John Sullivan recently came out with a list of the dumbest things recruiters do, asking readers to choose their top five from a list of thirty.  (Today, he reported the results of that survey.) Those lacking a sense of humor may find Sullivan’s “linguistic frame” a bit harsh. Corporate recruiters may do dumb things, but many of them are managing a stunning number of requisitions (250+) with limited tools and support. With that disclaimer, we at Intellerati thought the list was a valid exercise aimed at improving recruiting for one and all.  As we sifted through Sullivan’s initial list thirty, five “dumb things” stood out as being particularly relevant to candidate sourcing efforts focused on the front end of the recruiting process. Below is our Fav Five gleaned from Dr. Sullivan’s initial list.

Intellerati Top 5 – The Dumbest Things Recruiters Do

    1. Using “active” approaches to recruit “passive” candidates — most who apply for jobs are active candidates however, many recruiters make the mistake of using the same active approaches to find the currently employed who are not looking for a job.
    2. Mistaking software as systems or solutions — software is a tool that supports or automates process, but by itself it accomplishes little. Great efforts require that tools be wrapped in well-designed processes and procedures, which combined make up a system or solution.
    3. Assuming that recruiting tools work — it’s a mistake to use the approaches that “everyone else is using,” good recruiters assess on their own what tools work and what tools don’t work.
    4. Dropping  rejected candidates – it’s a major mistake to discard the resumes of top candidates who were not hired, rather than shopping them to other hiring managers or revisiting them later.
    5. Dropping the overqualified — prematurely dropping candidates who are overqualified can cause you to lose some superior talent.

To drill down, we thought it might help to share our thoughts on the Top 5 and our reasons for selecting them.

Sullivan: Using “active” approaches to recruit “passive” andidates — most who apply for jobs are active candidates however, many recruiters make the mistake of using the same active approaches to find the currently employed who are not looking for a job.

The first dumb thing that recruiters do is treat passive candidates like active ones, a stance that mistakenly presumes intense interest, if not desperate need, for the job. However, I would add recruiters who do want to treat passive candidates differently often lack the right tools. Outside of an email inbox or a spreadsheet, most recruiters don’t have  a place to put passive candidates that enables them to manage those relationships in a scaleable way.

Sullivan: Mistaking software as systems or solutions — software is a tool that supports or automates process, but by itself it accomplishes little. Great efforts require that tools be wrapped in well-designed processes and procedures, which combined make up a system or solution.

That observation brings us to the second bullet point in our Top 5: mistaking software as a system or solution.  Applicant tracking software does not a passive candidate system make. Applicant Tracking Systems are not designed for evergreen candidates.  The workflow is wrong.  In addition, for EEO reporting considerations, it is best to keep your applicant database separate. Increasingly, we help clients find better ways to manage passive candidates and integrate research to leverage its full value.

Sullivan: Assuming that recruiting tools work — it’s a mistake to use the approaches that “everyone else is using,” good recruiters assess on their own what tools work and what tools don’t work.

Increasingly, we see clients replacing traditional recruiting tools — job boards and job postings — with a much more proactive approach.  Would you rather post a job and hope the right candidate applies or identify the best candidates and then simply recruit them? We have found the latter is the most direct route to the best hires.

Sullivan: Dropping  rejected candidates – it’s a major mistake to discard the resumes of top candidates who were not hired, rather than shopping them to other hiring managers or revisiting them later.

I would agree that dropping rejected candidates or applicants is short-sighted. But again, the problem is the lack of passive candidate tracking systems to make those efforts possible.

Sullivan: Dropping the overqualified — prematurely dropping candidates who are overqualified can cause you to lose some superior talent.

Last, from where we sit, dropping the overqualified is so dumb it verges on insane. But it happens so frequently we have lost count. On numerous occasions, stellar A-player candidates who were motivated, interested, and fine with the salary range were ultimately snubbed by the recruiter because they were overqualified. If a candidate is serious about joining an employer at the level they have been offered, then that is not a problem — it is an opportunity.

 
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Candidate Mapping: Never Get Lost

Published on November 27, 2011 by in Recruitment Research

Candidate mapping —  tracing the reporting relationships of prospective candidates you identify — is a powerful way to bulletproof talent acquisition. When you map specific teams at target companies out of which you recruit, you are raising your game by making sure you that your don’t miss talent that should be included on your list of prospects.  However, despite that benefit, recruiting and candidate sourcing teams regularly  skip the org charting step and, as a result, regularly fail to discover A-players – candidates who, without a doubt, would be perfect for the job if  only those teams knew they were there.

Organizational Chart

Candidate Mapping for Talent You’d Miss on LinkedIn

How is it that candidate mapping or org charting might surface talent that might otherwise lay fallow were a sourcing team to rely exclusively on LinkedIn instead ?  LinkedIn data is only as good as the users who enter the information. It frequently lacks specificity and, in many cases, the information is out of date.  That means there are lots of people whose profiles show they’re currently working at a company, when they have moved on and actually are working at one of your target companies. That lapse is a hole in your sourcing research. In addition, there is still a sizable chuck of people who have not gone social due to concerns about privacy, data security, identity theft, or because they don’t want  to appear as though they are looking for a job.  The more powerful the executive, often more elusive they become on social networks.  For instance,  I’ve noticed that powerful Hollywood executives either avoid social networks  entirely — cultivating an elite image by making themselves “unlisted” online — or they prefer Facebook to LinkedIn for networking, because the networking is easier to do “behind closed doors” with select Facebook friends, much like a back room a at hot nightclub that admits only VIPs.

When does it make sense to map talent?  It makes sense to map target companies out of which your regularly recruit, and to refresh that candidate sourcing data on a regular basis. Candidate mapping makes sense for senior-level executive searches whenever the aim is to hire the best talent the market has to offer.  It also makes sense whenever you have an important search that has hit the wall. Intellerati is regularly called on to rescue ailing search efforts for openings that prior search firms and recruiting teams have struggled without success to fill. Every time we’ve been brought in to help, the client makes it a point to advise us not to look for candidates that live within recruiting distance because they’ve “already seen everybody” over the course of the 9 months or year that they’ve been looking.  However, in every instance, we’ve come back with a robust list of prospective local talent. While I’d like to say that identify those missed candidates was hard —  we are capable of doing real investigative research — in most cases the candidates were pretty easy to find.  However, those individuals were overlooked  because prior efforts had not gone to the trouble of mapping relevant teams at all of the target companies.

The next time you have a critical search or a multiple openings that send you back the the same target companies over and over again, experiment with mapping candidates and building out org charts of their teams. It  is the only way to identify and plug holes in your research as you discover great talent. Executive maps turn candidate chaos and they lay down serious due diligence. The org charts tell you where the talent is and where it is not. It documents where you’ve been and where you’ve still have left to go.   It is the only way to answer the question , “Do we have everyone?”  For executive search and mission-critical openings, candidate mapping offer a road map to never getting lost.

 
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Recruiting Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less

Published on November 27, 2011 by in Recruitment Research

The Recruiting Paradox of Choice is that the more candidates there are, the unhappier we become.  The reason? There is research that suggests that the more candidates a recruiter or hiring executive considers, the less satisfied he or she will be with any of the contenders. American psychologist and professor Barry Schwartz points to  research that demonstrates abundance robs us of satisfaction. The research suggests we would be better off if we embraced “voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.”  Schwartz ia the author of a book called the The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less in which he makes the case that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers. And what is talent acquisition but shopping for talent?

Excessive Choice: The Recruiting Paradox

While freedom of choice and independence are critical to our well-being, these days we seem to be confronted with more choice than ever before.  This week, I went to Target to take advantage of all of the deals offered over the Thanksgiving holiday. I’ve been thinking about replacing an ancient Sony TV with a flat screen, but soon I was faced with a complex array of choices in brands (Vizio, Sylvania, Sony, Samsung, Haier, Panasonic) in video resolution (HD, 720p, 1080p), in hertz (60 – 600 hz), in  type (plasma, LCD, LED), and other features from web-enabled to 3D.  I’m sure any  one of the televisions would have satisfied my need. All would represent a major upgrade from the old Sony box I currently watch.  Still, I left television-less.  All that choice, demanded I review a buying guide and conduct research first. My reluctance to decide grew with the number of choices I discovered. The same holds true in talent acquisition.

For too long, candidate sourcing has focused on volume — the more names and the more candidates, the better.  On the face of it, the impulse seems logical. If one is pipelining talent for multiple openings, scooping up as many candidates as possible seems to make sense. However, too many candidates get in the way of an organization’s ability to focus on the most qualified.  Also, too many rounds of interviews with too many finalists confuse, rather than illuminate, the selection process.  In fact, delays from interviewing lesser candidates often result in losing better ones, because the A-players don’t need to wait around for your company to make up its mind.

With excessive choice comes a growing compulsion be careful in one’s decision-making.  If I make the wrong TV decision, I would either have to live with it or return it and go through the difficult choice process all over again.  In recruiting, however, one cannot return a bad hire. One must fire that individual and that exacts a tremendous cost on all parties involved. So, in addressing excessive choice, one shouldn’t eliminate measured, careful consideration of candidates. Rather, moderation is the key.  One must be focused and efficient in one’s candidate sourcing and selection process. Consequently, the most effective sourcers and recruiters limit choices from the very beginning by working with hiring executives to define a tight list of requirements for the role and the ideal candidate profile.  Your definition of the best should cleave to that agreed-to standard.  While it is a recruitment “best practice”  to seek excellence in the candidates one recruits and to pursue A-players, “the best” will forever remain an illusion. Hypothetically, there will also be someone who might be better. And that is why choice in search is such a paradox.  Schwartz learned that instead of seeking the “best” choice, we would be better off seeking “good enough”.  In other words, “good enough” is actually better than the “best.”  In recruiting, as in life, more is less and less is more.

 
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A Sourcer’s Worth? How About $100-Million+

Published on November 27, 2011 by in Recruitment Research

What is a sourcer’s worth these days? Amybeth Hale, Editor of ERE Media’s The Fordyce Letter, raised that question in a recent column entitled Determining a Sourcer’s Worth.

Amybeth Hale, Research Goddess

Amybeth Hale, Research Goddess

In it, Amybeth (also known affectionately in sourcing circles as the Research Goddess) notes that the answer she gets back frequently ranges from an hourly rate of  $6 dollars  to well in excess of $100. The difference in cost reflects a difference in approach from quantitative and qualitative sourcing. However, while the hourly rate may tell you what the going rate is for most sourcers, it doesn’t necessarily answer Amybeth’s question of worth.

Recruiting research known as sourcing — the study of the talent ecosystem — can be extraordinarily valuable once you realize it can do oh-so-much-more than inform than talent acquisition.  Qualitative, investigative sourcing — the kind Intellerati does —  can also be used to inform other corporate activities, including M& A.  To that end, what would you say a sourcer is worth if that research also leads to the acquisition of a business worth in excess of $100-million dollars?  When you stop to think about it, the most talented executives and technologist can be found gathering around emergent technologies, hot startups, and stealth market-creating enterprises. The movement and aggregation of top talent create patterns that gifted qualitative researchers recognize and analyze for competitive insights that are  so valuable to they verge on priceless.

Of course, there is a place for quantitative sourcing. For volume recruiting, quantity may, indeed, be the requirement.  To that end, there may be advantages to be found in global labor arbitrage that reduces the cost of some candidate sourcing activities to as low as $6 an hour.  Of course, often low hourly rates are off-set by reduced efficiency and limitations on what kinds of work they are capable of doing. Off-shore sourcing tend to be more appropriate for repetitive, data-entry intensive sourcing tasks – the kind that can be described in step-by-step instructions, such as resume database searching and Internet sourcing using a list of bookmarked boolean keyword search strings.  For companies whose number of openings more resemble an onslaught, recruiting processes first need to scale, in order to move from reactive to proactive mode. Sourcing, whether offshore or on, is an an effective way to create and sustain talent pipelines.  It can help take some of the pain away. However, if you’re not careful, a quantitative approach can create even more pain if the real problem is that there are many candidates, instead of too few.

A Sourcer’s Worth: M&A Intelligence

Qualitative sourcing takes a strategic approach to recruiting research, one that focuses on recruiting top talent. It drives efficiencies in recruiting, in diversity initiatives, and succession planning because it supercharges recruiting research with competitive intelligence. Its filter is critical thinking — analysis that transforms information into actionable intelligence that identifies the shortest path to best and brightest.  It is that critical thinking that leads to other competitive insights — observations that return extraordinary organizational return on investment, known as ROI. You don’t get that kind of value from sourcers performing repetitive, if not mindless, tasks. Quite the contrary. This is about as mindful as one can get.

 
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Passive Candidate Sourcing: Shallow versus Deep Data

Published on November 23, 2011 by in Recruitment Research

Passive candidate sourcing for candidates is difficult for corporate recruiting teams to scale.   The data is shallow: it rarely provides the depth of information needed to determine whether a candidate is qualified.  Details found in press releases, articles, on corporate websites, as well as in Twitter, Facebook, and in many LinkedIn profiles are often minimalistic, devoid of rich descriptions that speak to a candidate’s breadth and depth of experience and expertise.  That shortfall means there is still a great deal of research and recruiting work to be done to determine whether someone you’ve identified as a potential candidate is viable. It makes passive candidate recruitment laborious.  It also makes it difficult to scale.

Deeper candidate data is often trapped in separate silos. Applicant tracking systems, resume databases, and job boards rarely play nicely together: they have little motivation to do so because so often they are owned by companies that are competitors. Consequently, so even though the candidate information is much more detailed and structured, it remains isolated, if not abandoned altogether. And that’s a shame, because all those binary zeroes and ones become much more powerful when two or more databases are brought together, a valuable lesson in computer-assisted research that I learned in my prior career as an investigative reporter.

Binary Code

Passive Candidate Sourcing: Deep Data is Best

Boolean Blackbelt blogger Glen Cathey makes an important point in a SourceCon presentation called The Five Levels of Talent Mining. He  speaks of the need for “deeper, more structured, more searchable” data that would enable you to reach in and immediately pull out potential candidates that are spot-on, talent and human capital intelligence data warehouses that could be mined with the sophistical analytics tools that are so very common in other industries. Cathey finds it remarkable, as do I, that no deep data talent warehouse solution exists for public consumption. However, private solutions are possible.  There are a number of innovative ways employers can leverage candidate data more intelligently. Ultimately, sourcers and recruiters shouldn’t have to work so hard. Sourcing solutions should scale. The good news is that they can.

 
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Random Sourcing: Missing the Best Candidates

Published on November 15, 2011 by in Recruitment Research

Random Sourcing.

A database search here, a little Google there, a LinkedIn query or two and pretty soon anyone who fancies himself a recruiter can assemble a list of potential candidates that, upon first glance, looks as though they might be right. But upon closer scrutiny, you’ll quickly discover that the research is flawed. It has failed to include qualified talent from top target companies. In fact, about half of that talent is MIA. It includes sub-par talent from companies from which you would never recruit. It misses potential candidates at other relevant major players and emergent companies that are giving your competitors a run for their money. Worse, it includes talent with unsavory backgrounds and questionable reputations, candidates who are quite simply not worth your time. Like rolling dice, random research leaves your process up to chance. Only with dice, there is an underlying statistical probably of certain outcomes. With haphazard, catch-as-catch-can sourcing, there is no such logic. In other words, it is illogical. But it is what recruiting teams do every day.

Tumbling Dice

Random Sourcing: Certain Chaos

For talent acquisition organizations where recruiting more resembles dialing “911″, surfacing candidates that are simply “good enough” often is all an over-worked, under-resourced recruiting team feels can do.  However, if you stop and zoom out, you’ll soon notice that a tremendous amount of time and energy is wasted processing applicants that are “off” and recruiting candidates who should never have been considered in the first place. In other words, there are enormous inefficiencies that come baked into the recruiting process. And that, my friends, is an opportunity in the making.

Recruiting research and  candidate sourcing intelligence is designed to wring inefficiencies out of recruiting to yield a better result. There is a significant benefit to pausing to put your thinking cap on and formulating a research strategy, to deploying sourcers with investigative research expertise, and to supercharging your efforts with computer-assisted research and competitive intelligence. This isn’t about doing more work. It is about doing less. about honing in with laser-like focus on the shortest path to best talent.

One simple test to see whether your sourcing is operating at the optimal level is simply to ask your recruiters a simple question: “how do you know these are the best candidates the market has to offer?” If your recruiting team’s response resembles a deer frozen in headlights, chances are they’re working too hard. The good news is you’ve just identified a tremendous opportunity. Seize the day.

 
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