Last week I wrote about how I learned to use Boolean search to leverage information systems to quickly source candidates, and I challenged the concept and practice of building candidate pipelines.

Amybeth Hale commented on my post (thank you – you inspired me to finally write this one!) and mentioned that she was puzzled by the mention of the fact that I never pipelined candidates. I’ve literally never had to. Not for the rarest skillset, the most challenging under-market compensation, the highest security clearance, 3rd shift, 100% travel - I’ve successfully recruited for these and more from scratch. Honestly, I’ve never known any other way.

Amybeth feels that my experience may be somewhat unique and this might not be replicable by other sourcers, recruiters, or recruiting organizations. I’ll agree on the first part – that my experience may be uncommon – I’m undeniably a product of the specific environment and circumstances under which I entered the recruiting industry. However, I have to respectfully disagree on the second part. I won’t apologize for it (nor would Amybeth want me to), because professional debate is a good thing, and we should all welcome it! There’s no critical thought or learning involved if we all agree on everything. 

On the surface, pipelining candidates and building candidate inventories seems to be just plain and simple common sense. However, sometimes what just “feels right” may in fact not actually be the most effective and efficient method of doing a thing.

Thomas Edison (I’m a fan) once said, “There is always a better way.” My goal has always been to find it. Whether it comes to quickly finding great candidates, creating voicemail and email techniques to get the non-job seeker to respond, developing candidate closing and control techniques, implementing effective time and activity management, etc. - I want to be using the BEST possible way to do a thing.  Don’t you?

Keep an Open Mind

I know I am in the minority in my view of candidate pipelining – I’m going to ask you (most likely in the majority) to have an open mind and not just simply “stick to your guns” and what you know/what you’ve been taught. If you are a passionate candidate pipeliner and you’ve built a successful career around that practice – congratulations!

However, be aware that there are other ways to be successful in recruiting, and they might actually be more efficient and/or effective. You’re reading the words of someone who’s been highly productive and successful without ever having to pipeline a single candidate, I’ve never had the benefit of a hiring forecast, and I’ve outperformed all candidate pipeliners I’ve worked with head-to-head on the same positions consistently – even when they’ve had a head start! 

How was I able to do this? That’s the good part - there’s a science of sorts behind the success, and it IS trainable and replicable.

Get ready for a paradigm shift – I’m going to move your cheese.

So What is Candidate “Pipelining” Anyway?

I think it’s critical that we first come to a common definition of pipelining candidates. While on the surface we may all appear to be talking about the same thing, we may not be – so to remove any confusion, let’s settle upon David Szary’s definition of developing candidate pipelines: “A pipeline/network of talented professionals (active and/or passive job seekers, pre-screened or not) that you regularly communicate with regarding opportunities with your organization. A pipeline of candidates, that when an opening comes up, you can immediately contact and engage in discussions about the opportunity and/or to network.”

That seems to be as good of an explanation of candidate pipelines as I’ve come across – let me know if you have any refinements or suggestions. I also agree with David’s assessment that most hiring managers have unrealistic expectations (having a candidate pipeline is the magical answer to all challenging hiring needs) and that pipelined candidates are always available (when in fact they are highly ”perishable” – regardless of their job search status).

Work-In-Process Inventory 

Developing a pipeline of candidates is essentially the development of a candidate “inventory” in the sense of supply chain management – candidates are “held available in stock” for ready access. Furthermore, the cache of candidates built through proactive pipeline recruiting can be classified as a specific type of candidate inventory: work-in-process.   

Work-in-process is a production/supply chain concept, used to describe “unfinished” inventory in a production process - this inventory is ”either just being fabricated or waiting in a queue for further processing or in a buffer storage.”

A group of candidates that a recruiter stays in routine contact with, without a specific and current need (essentially what Amybeth refers to as relationship maintenance), is essentially a work-in-process (WIP) candidate pipeline. 

When most recruiters talk about proactively pipelining candidates – they’re really referring to building work-in-process (WIP) candidate inventories. Candidates in a work-in-process pipeline are typically people identified by a sourcer or a recruiter as people whose work history/experience somewhat closely matches the kinds of positions that an organization typically recruits for. Once identified, these candidates are contacted and screened (to some extent).

These are candidates that are waiting on further “processing” (screening, interviewing, networking, etc.), or essentially remain permanently “in process” – a relationship is maintained with them indefinitely, as the vast majority of these candidates never become a “finished product” (are never hired).  

Candidates in a WIP pipeline may be active, passive, or not even looking, and may or may not precisely fit any current hiring needs. However, time and effort is expended to build and maintain a relationship with these candidates to be ready when an opening does arise, or when the candidate’s situation changes and they become available, or to simply network with to gain intel and referrals.

Building Candidate Pipelines is a “Push” Strategy

By definition, candidate pipelines consist of people that are contacted and communicated with without a current need – the whole point of a pipeline of candidates is to have a cache of candidates ready before a specific need arises.

This is what is referred to as a push-based strategy - one in which batches of a product (candidates) are created, not in response to an actual/current customer need, and are processed and “pushed” downstream (in-process) whether there is a need for the specific product produced or not. Push systems often result in the production of large inventories of product that perish (expire, are no longer available, etc.), or are never “sold” (fully finished/utilized/hired, etc.).

The “Logic” Behind Candidate Pipelining

On the surface, pipelining candidates seems like an excellent solution to the challenge of having well qualified candidates available when you need them.

The idea is that if you build a cache of strong candidates before you need them, you will surely fill positions quicker in the future when the need arises.  The belief behind building candidate pipelines is that time and energy invested on the “front end” (aka, “proactive recruiting”) can lead to significant time savings later, and perhaps even better candidates due to having more intimate knowledge of the individuals (from the ongoing recruiter/candidate relationship) you are pipelining than you would have with candidates you just identified and contacted for the first time once a hiring need arose (”reactive recruiting”). 

The Need For Candidate Pipelines

For many recruiting and staffing organizations, proactively building talent pipelines is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that appropriately qualified talent is available when the actual need arises. It appears to be the ultimate answer to the question of, “What will we do if we get an opening for which we do not have any candidates?”

I think it is very important to examine exactly why most organizations and recruiting professionals believe that building candidate pipelines is the only answer to filling open positions. 

This may seem too obvious, but no one ever seems to directly address it, so I will say it. I feel that most recruiters must proactively recruit and build candidate pipelines simply because they are unable to deliver high quality and well matched candidates within 24-48 hours of receiving a hiring need from scratch without a pre-built candidate pipeline. In other words – most people simply can’t do it any other way.

Is there an Alternative to Pipelining Candidates?

Although most recruiters are unable to deliver high quality and well matched candidates within 24-48 hours of receiving a hiring need from scratch without a network of pipelined candidates – it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Just because developing candidate pipelines is “the way it’s always been done” doesn’t mean it’s the most effective or efficient way to identify and recruit candidates and fill positions in a timely fashion. 

The ugly truth is that proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need has many intrinsic limitations and hidden costs that no one seems to want to think or talk about.

There’s always a better way. You’ll just have to wait until next week to read about it.

When it comes to my theories and best practices for leveraging information systems for quickly finding highly qualified candidates, I am often asked, ”So, how did you figure all of this stuff out?”

It’s a fantastic question, and I am happy to be asked it, but my answer doesn’t seem to satisfy anyone. 

The short answer is literally that “I just figured it out.”

The long answer provides some insight into how I figured some of this candidate search stuff out, but I think the real value and message of my personal story is that anyone can become quite proficient at electronic talent discovery – and it’s less dependent on any training you receive and more on how you approach your job.

When people ask me how I’ve managed to “figure out” all of this candidate search stuff, it seems they want to hear that I went through some specific training program, that I read a certain book, that I worked under some sourcing guru or something similar.

The reality is I’ve never worked under any sourcing guru, I’ve never attended any sourcing training classes, and I didn’t read any books on candidate sourcing. FAR from it.

In fact, when I started in the recruiting industry at a small, privately held staffing agency in Northern Virginia in January 1997, I received very little recruiting training, let alone any specialized training on how to find candidates.  I was shown a Lotus Notes-based C-PAS resume database and told “this is where you find candidates.”

It is important to know that I did not enter the staffing industry with any prior experience or advantages that would help me in leveraging information systems to identify talent. When I started in recruiting, I did not own a computer. I graduated college with a B.A. in Psychology, not “even” a B.S., let alone a technical degree like Computer Science or Information Systems. Although I was told that the company’s C-PAS database supported Boolean search, I did not know what Boolean search was. 

Not only did I not know what Boolean search was – I did not know you could find resumes on the Internet. I did not know about AltaVista, and Google did not exist yet.

In 1997, my company did not use any job boards – I did not know Monster existed (or OCC, for that matter – for those who recall where Monster got their search interface from).

My company’s main source of candidates came from people responding to newspaper classified ads who faxed their resumes in, which were subsequently scanned into the C-PAS database, and from resumes collected from job fairs which were also scanned in. I believe that the resume database had about 70,000 records or so when I started with the company.

My Training

My “training” (picture me using air quotes for emphasis) consisted of someone showing me how to navigate C-PAS, telling me about the AND and OR Boolean operators (nothing about NOT), and being told that you could find candidates in C-PAS by entering in keywords from job descriptions. There certainly wasn’t any “formal” training – I think this was all explained to me in about 20 minutes.

Yes, I am serious.

I was never trained on cold calling/phone sourcing – it never even occurred to me to try to call into a company to find people. Our database was how we found candidates, and how any recruiter at any other company found their candidates, for all I knew.

How I Learned Boolean Search

Absent of any real training and lacking a mentor, I essentially learned the art and science of leveraging Boolean search strings to find candidates the hard way – through trial and error.

“Trial and error” is really common language for the scientific method- investigating, acquiring new knowledge, and correcting and integrating previous knowledge. According to Wikipedia, “To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.”

Although I did not know it at the time, and I certainly wouldn’t have told anyone that I was learning my job through the scientific method, this is pretty much what I was actually doing. If something I was trying to do didn’t work – I didn’t have anyone else to go to for answers - so I had to get creative, experiment, and keeping hacking at it until I finally found a way that worked and got me the results I needed. This is a horribly painful and frustrating process, but I have since learned that it’s actually a very effective method of learning. 

For example, if I needed a QA Test Engineer with experience testing applications developed in VB, I’d throw all of the search terms from the job description and required skills in and run with it. Once I exhausted those results, if I didn’t have the candidates I needed, failing to cover the position I was assigned was not an option – I had to find another way. So I’d try something else (i.e., experiment and test a hypothesis) – like wonder if every QA Test Engineer who has experience testing applications written in VB would actually mention VB in their resume…and I would then use AND NOT (VB or “Visual Basic”) to target those people and start calling QA Test Engineers who didn’t mention VB in their resume and simply ask them what languages the applications they have experience testing had been developed in.

After 5 calls to people who did not mention VB in their resume, I found a woman who had in fact tested applications written in VB (and I subsequently placed her). Thus I learned part 1 of what I now call the “Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing,” which states that for every search term you are thinking of using in your Boolean string, first ask yourself if everyone with that skill, experience, or title would mention it in their resume. Because I discovered that many don’t.

I learned part 2 of the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing(which states that for every search term you are thinking of using in your Boolean string, consider every possible way that it can be mentioned)  through simple observation. As I reviewed my search results, I would notice terms in resumes that I did not specifically search for that seemed to mean the same thing as my search terms. I would make note of these alternate terms and incorporate them back into my search, continuously refining and improving the searches. 

My Performance

Although I am pretty good at what I do now, my career in recruiting didn’t start with any indication that I would be any better than average at finding and placing candidates. In fact, the owner of the company told me later that he was almost sure I would fail.

I started in recruiting on January 13th, 1997, and I did not make my first placement until March – it was a financial analyst at AOL (everyone remembers their first hire, right?).  

However, from April to December 1997, I placed 71 more candidates, which is an average of just about 8 hires per month, leading me to be recognized as the Recruiter of the Year, outperforming more experienced and tenured recruiters by a wide margin (the next closest recruiter had 30 fewer placements for the year). And this was accomplished in an environment without any candidate “ownership,” for those who are familiar with the agency vernacular.

I can tell you precisely how I achieved those numbers. While I had pretty good candidate relationship development skills, good candidate closing and control, good voicemail techniques, and good matching skills (as good as any recruiter with 3-12 months of experience), I had developed the ability to use Boolean searches to quickly find large quantities of precisely matched and highly qualified candidates in direct response to client/manager needs – faster and better than most. And, I planned every single day, without fail.

Interestingly, to this day, I find that most sourcers and recruiters do not come in each day with a call plan. Having a daily call plan to execute first thing in the A.M. that I developed the previous afternoon from my searches was definitely one of the keys to my productivity and my success. I eventually got to the point that if I searched for and built a call list of 20 potential candidates for a given position, I would have 2 A+ candidates submitted on the position within 24-48 hours, and typically have 1-2 backups. 

For those who are interested, in my first year as an agency recruiter, I averaged over 3 external candidate submittals (candidates presented to client hiring managers) per day – my record was 14 in a single day. Most months I would have 65-70 external submittals and over 20 interviews (some call them send outs). As most recruiting managers/directors can attest to – it’s difficult to NOT get 6-10 hires per month from those numbers.

Based on my early performance, I was promoted to recruiting manager and then later to director of recruiting, where I focused most of my time on training and developing my recruiting staff. Interestingly, after the privately held company I worked for was acquired by a large publicly traded staffing firm, I took a position as a “market manager” of recruiting where I was responsible for personal production as a recruiter as well as for managing a team of recruiters. After 7 years of not “working a desk,” I was able to quickly ramp up and achieve “Platinum Performer” status (top 5% firm-wide) in less than 12 months.

When I hit the phones in 2005, I did not have a network of people/candidates – I started quite literally from scratch. I was able to quickly achieve high levels of performance based primarily on two things: #1 My ability to quickly find the right people, and #2 My daily planning. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Lessons Learned

I think it’s been a huge benefit to be self taught. By no means is the way I came to know what I know about candidate sourcing ideal, nor is it practical or scalable. However, by having to figure everything out on my own I had no preconceived notions about sourcing, recruiting, the “right way” to do anything, or what was possible/not possible. There was no proverbial “box.”

For example:

• Candidate Pipelines: I’ve literally never had to focus on pipelining candidates, because I’ve always been able to pretty much find whatever I needed within 24-48 hours. Many years into my career, I would read articles about the importance of developing talent pipelines, and my response was incredulity. I honestly could not figure out why anyone would have to identify candidates prior to having a confirmed need. It seemed like such a waste of time and effort based on my personal experience – what happens if the needs never come? What happens if the positions do finally come, but all of your pipelined candidates don’t match the requirements (they’re rarely exactly as forecasted), or are they are no longer available or entertaining making a change? Later I would learn that my instincts were surprisingly accurate, at least according to the Toyota Way/Lean philosophy. Why bother building inventories of candidates based on forecasts when you can achieve Just-In-Time recruiting?
• Active/Passive Candidates: I was never told that some candidates were “active” and that others were “passive,” nor was I brainwashed into thinking that “passive” candidates were always better than “active” candidates. If anything, I learned that everyone is a candidate. I never thought twice about calling a resume that was 1, 2, 3, or 4+ years old – in fact, some of my easiest, most frictionless placements came from people whose resume had not been updated in 4 years. It’s a funny thing – if you find the right people and present them with the right opportunity – you can turn a non-job seeker into one. Imagine that.
• Phone Sourcing: I’ve never had to make a truly “cold” call because I’ve always been able to quickly find the candidates I need, or find the people who know the candidates I need…and to be honest, after I learned that some people rely heavily on cold-call phone sourcing to identify candidates – it never really made sense to me, because it has many intrinsic limitations when compared to searching information systems, including low control over critical candidate variables, and a low ROI.

There is No Sourcing Gene

It always bothers me when people say I have a “talent” for candidate sourcing – that all too easily “explains away” everything I have worked so very hard to figure out. 

There is no gene for sourcing and recruiting. Besides, Talent is Overrated – deliberate practice is where it’s at. I literally come into work every day to get better at what I do. Most people don’t – they just come into work and do what they’ve always done. It seems like such a subtle difference, but I can assure you, it’s not.

I honestly don’t think there is anything unique about me – I am simply a product of my environment. If I had not started in the recruiting industry in a sink-or-swim environment, or if I had more in depth training (and learned the ”right” way to source/recruit) or if I had been taught that the only way to find high quality candidates was through phone sourcing and cold calling, I know for a fact that I would not have the skills or ability I have today, and you would not be reading this blog! Looking back, I am thankful for my lack of training and for the unique opportunity that I was given – it played a big part in making me who I am today.

While there is definitely no sourcing/recruiting gene – I do have to give some credit to my personality traits (there’s that B.A. in Psychology rearing its head again). I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I am very competitive (I hate to lose at anything), I don’t enjoy doing things unless I do them well, I really enjoy figuring things out/solving problems, and I don’t give up – I will find a way. 

If I were to self-diagnose, I’d say I have an obsessive personality. The more “PC” way to describe an obsessive personality includes “focused,” “driven,” “goal oriented,” “never gives up,” “has to be the best,” etc. I have a theory that most top performers in business or sports (or anything, for that matter) have obsessive personalities. But that’s another post entirely.

The moral of this story is that you don’t need any special training or any particular background to become exceptional at sourcing candidates or any step in the recruiting life cycle  - in fact, I’d argue that all you really need is the desire to become very good at it, and the focus and drive to put in the deliberate practice necessary to achieve your goal. If you’re truly committed and dedicated to mastering a thing, you will, or you’ll come close trying.

When I deliver presentations on how to leverage LinkedIn to source candidates, I have the opportunity to get a sense of what most people seem to know about using LinkedIn.  Recently I have been making it a point to ask how people tend to sort their search results when searching LinkedIn, and the overwhelming majority leave their results sorting at the default value, which is “relevance.”

I find this especially interesting, because most people do not seem to realize that when you sort your search results by “relevance” on LinkedIn, you are not getting results based solely on the search terms entered – you are getting results ordered by a combination of factors – including your “social graph.” 

LinkedIn’s definition of “relevance” is decidedly different than practically every other searchable source of potential candidates – Monster, Google, Applicant Tracking Systems, Twitter, etc. – and what LinkedIn *thinks* is relevant to you may actually not be based on what you are specifically looking for.

What are Relevant Results?

First, it is important to get to the heart of the term “relevance” when it comes to search results.  

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines relevance as  ”the ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user.”

When it comes to the philosophical concept of relevance, “relevance is a term used to describe how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is to a given matter,” and can be defined as: ”Something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the likelihood of accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T.”

Therein lies the challenge and the issue - only the person performing the search can actually define what is relevant based on the task they are performing. So how exactly does LinkedIn define what is relevant?

LinkedIn’s Definition of Relevance

Nearly a year ago, LinkedIn announced their new search platform, and they explained that the relevance of search results is affected by each individual’s professional network on LinkedIn:

So, how exactly does LinkedIn determine who is “most likely to be of interest” to you?

I’m not sure if anyone outside of LinkedIn knows the relevance algorithm. We can perhaps safely assume it is determined by some combination of the specific search terms used and the searcher’s personal view on the “social graph” – their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections - with a strong favoritism towards closer connections. 

That does seem to be a safe assumption, because a Principal Search Engineer at LinkedIn commented to this combination, although without going into specific detail as to *exactly* how LinkedIn determines what is relevant for each search/searcher.

Additionally, exploring LinkedIn’s Learning Center , we can find a brief reference to this combination:

While we see that LinkedIn claims that “relevance” is based on the keywords and the searcher’s network…is it safe to assume that sorting by relevance is a mix of “Relationship” sorting and “Keyword” sorting, as described above?

Is it just me or does anyone else find it odd that only first degree, second degree, and groups are mentioned under the order of results sorted by “Relationship?” What happened to third degree connections? Are group connections ranked higher than third degree connections? 

Scrolling further down the LinkedIn Learning Center page, we find the answer (I hope!):

Okay, so this seems to say that the order of relationships does include 3rd degree connections and that 3rd degree connections are ranked higher than group connections.

However, the verbiage under “Relevance” is confusing – I have to believe that this is simply out of date (pre-launch of the new search platform in 11/08), as this definition of “relevance” makes it sound as if sorting results by relevance is based solely on the keywords used in the search, which conflicts with basically all other documentation I’ve found. 

The $64,000 Relevance Questions

When it comes to sorting results by “relevance,” I would really like to know:

• How are a searcher’s keywords weighed in comparison to the searcher’s connections?
• Could LinkedIn believe the most relevant result is a 1st degree connection but a relatively weak match based on the search terms used (keywords, titles, companies, etc.)?
• Does location have anything to do with the relevance of the results and each person’s “social graph” (e.g., are 1st degree connections in the same metro area ranked as more “relevant” than 1st degree connections elsewhere?)?

The answer to those questions would be quite enlightening!

Sorting by Keyword

As I mentioned earlier, from my own informal research, it seems that a great many people never even touch the “sort by” option list. I believe that this is mainly because they assume “relevance” is returning results based solely on the keywords they’ve entered. Which we now know is wrong.

However, we can’t really blame these folks or judge them too harshly because for just about any other database or system they have access to (job board resume databases, their ATS, Twitter, etc.), “relevance” IS based purely on the keywords used in the search.

I have found that a quite a few people are surprised to find out that LinkedIn’s “relevance” isn’t based purely on their search terms (keywords, titles, companies, etc.). The good news is that LinkedIn does offer the ability to sort results based on the keywords only (see image below).

You can also do this after you’ve executed the search:

Many of you probably already knew that – but you would be surprised at how many people don’t, or don’t even think to change the default results sorting from “relevance” based on their understanding of and experience with sorting results by “relevance” with every other system they search.

As a social network, it is nice to be able to search LinkedIn for people based on a combination of keywords and their relationship to you – when you are looking to identify potential candidates, it can make a great deal of sense to start with people with whom you have closer ties.

However, to many sourcers and recruiters, the most “relevant” people returned from a search are those who most closely match the search criteria they specified through their keywords, titles, and companies, not how closely they are connected to them on LinkedIn. 

The $64,000 Keyword Question

When it comes to sorting results by “keyword,” I would really like to know:

• Are keywords found in certain fields weighed more heavily than others (e.g., titles vs. summaries vs. experience descriptions vs. specialties…), and if so, how?

The Top 4 Keyword Relevant Results in the United States

I was just checking to see how many U.S. profiles there are on LinkedIn (by not entering any search criteria, selecting “located in or near,” selecting “United States,” and leaving the zip code BLANK) and I decided to sort the results by keyword.

Now this is interesting because I didn’t actually enter any keywords – I left every field on the advanced search form blank – the only option selected was the country.  Here is what LinkedIn considers the top 4 most relevant results in the U.S. based on keywords when there aren’t any keywords:

Interesting insights into LinkedIn’s search algorithm, right?  Please try this yourself, and let me know if you get the same top 4 results when you sort by keyword.

Final Thoughts

Please check with your peers and friends in the recruiting and staffing industry – ask them if they ever change the results sorting on LinkedIn from the default of “relevance.” You may be as surprised as I have been lately at how many people don’t realize that what LinkedIn thinks is relevant to them may not actually be.

I personally prefer to sort my LinkedIn search results by keyword, not relevance. This is because I want to see the best matches LinkedIn can offer based upon my search criteria (keywords, titles, and companies, etc.), regardless of how they are or are not connected to me. If they’re not connected to me, they are only an X-Ray away.

For anyone without premium access to LinkedIn, which means they are limited to viewing only the first 100 results of any given search, it is important to know that sorting by “relevance” may prevent you from seeing the people who may actually be the most relevant based on your search terms. This can happen any time when the people who best match your search criteria who are not in your LinkedIn network are pushed to the bottom end of the results – perhaps past result #100 – and become unviewable without premium access.

Regarding LinkedIn SEO, I’ve recently seen a presentation detailing how LinkedIn users can dramatically affect their profile’s search rank - I would advise you to thoroughly research any such claims and the information presented (such as which fields make a difference to search rankings and the specific impact of recommendations on keywords) - a good amount of the information may in fact not be accurate (at least not according to sources at LinkedIn). If you feel you have accurate info with regard to whether or not/how certain fields (e.g., titles vs. summaries vs. experience descriptions vs. specialties…) are weighted more heavily, please let me know!

And for those who’ve read all the way down here – is it just me, or did LinkedIn remove the ability to sort results by # of connections a while ago, only to sneak it back in? When did this happen?

I literally just noticed it while writing this post – they did remove sorting results by # of connections as an option for a period of time – I am not imagining that, am I?

Many individuals and organizations treat the sourcing role and function of recruiting – searching for and identifying potential candidates – as an entry level position, and/or a simple and basic task that does not require much skill or experience. 

I agree.

I believe that it does not take much skill or experience to simply transcribe job titles and required skill keywords into LinkedIn, Monster, or an ATS and click “search.”

However, that oversimplified view of sourcing talent only describes the most basic level of talent identification, of which, I believe there are at least two.

Level 1 Sourcing

Level 1 Sourcing involves little more than taking titles and words from job descriptions and entering them into Internet search engines, social networks, job board resume databases, and applicant tracking systems to search for candidates.   

This is the proverbial “buzzword bingo,” and does not necessarily involve any real understanding (beyond surface level) of the roles, skills, responsibilities, or technologies involved in the hiring profiles or the candidates. These basic search terms produce search results that are then cursorily reviewed for keyword matching. 

Level 1 Sourcing involves a level of matching potential candidates to hiring profiles that is often superficial and generic – very little, if any, interpretive analysis is performed. This level of sourcing can in fact quite easily be performed by “junior” personnel/researchers – almost anyone can match keywords.

Not only can Level 1 Sourcing be performed by junior associates, it can (and often is) outsourced for $5 – $7 an hour.

However, don’t be fooled into thinking you are getting something fantastic for that $5 – $7 an hour – you’re getting exactly what you’ve paid for. Which is Level 1 Sourcing.

In my opinion, there is no need to outsource Level 1 Sourcing, because it does not require any deep understanding of the roles being sourced for, nor does it involve any true analysis or creativity. As such, Level 1 Sourcing is well suited for total automation. Why pay people to match keywords when matching applications can do it for you for considerably less than $5 per hour?

Many people are blissfully unaware of the fact that Level 1 Sourcers from any company will essentially find the same potential candidates as any other Level 1 Sourcer. It’s a simple equation: same keywords = same results. This is one of the reasons why Level 1 Sourcing provides no competitive advantage. 

Additionally, while Level 1 Sourcers can and will find SOME candidates, they will not and can not find ALL potentially qualified candidates available to them in the sources they are searching - that would be impossible, for many reasons that I’ve written about previously that are beyond the scope of this post. 

And finally, Level 1 Sourcers are typically unaware of the people that are in the ATS, job board resume database, or social network that they are searching that their queries did not return. In fact, to them, anyone that they don’t find simply doesn’t exist. 

Level 2 Sourcing

This is the good stuff. Level 2 Sourcing moves well beyond simple keyword matching and most certainly beyond a basic mastery of Boolean logic. 

Boolean logic is easy to learn – after all, there’s only 3 main operators! However, the “magic” of leveraging databases and information systems for talent identification does not lie in the Boolean search operators themselves, but in the following process: 

1. Analyzing, understanding, and interpreting job opening/position requirements - including elements which may or may not be explicitly mentioned in the position description or BQ’s
2. Taking that understanding and intelligently and creatively selecting titles, skills, technologies, companies, responsibilities, terms, etc., to include (or to purposefully exclude!) in a query employing appropriate Boolean operators and query modifiers
3. Analyzing the results of the initial search to assess relevance as well as scanning the results for additional and alternate relevant search terms, phrases, and companies 
4. Based upon the observed relevance of and intel gained from the search results, modifying the search string appropriately and running it again
5. Repeating steps 3 and 4 until an acceptably large volume of highly relevant results is achieved   

The “real” work of creating effective Boolean search strings lies in the interpretive analysis of the need, in determining what terms to include and exclude from searches and in what specific combination, in the analysis of the relevance of the initial search results, and in the adaptive process of learning from the results to creatively refine the Boolean search strings to find well qualified candidates – people who are highly likely to be (or know!) the right match for any particular hiring need. 

Unlike Level 1 Sourcing, Level 2 Sourcing involves and in fact requires a deeper understanding of the roles, skills, responsibilities, and technologies involved in the hiring profiles being sourced for. In this regard, Level 2 Sourcing goes well beyond explicit keyword matching and deep into implied experience and capability matching.

In addition to finding all of the candidates that Level 1 Sourcers can find, Level 2 Sourcers can also find the candidates that Level 1 Sourcers have access to, but can not and do not find. Interestingly, all Level 2 Sourcers will not find all of the same candidates, specifically due to their varying experience and creative and analytical ability.

And unlike Level 1 Sourcers, Level 2 Sourcers are acutely aware of the candidates they have not found, because they understand that every Boolean string and search strategy will find some candidates, and exclude others.

Level 2 Sourcing is Not a Junior Role and Cannot Be Automated

It is precisely because of the aforementioned reasons that Level 2 Sourcing cannot be performed by  junior level associates – it is not an entry level role, nor can it be outsourced for $5 – $7 an hour. Okay, it CAN be outsourced at those rates, but you won’t get Level 2 results. Remember, you get what you pay for.

Level 2 sourcing cannot be automated, regardless of what the vendor representatives of “artificial intelligence” resume parse/match applications may claim. This is because Level 2 sourcing requires “a posteriori” knowledge – which comes from experience, which comprises knowledge and skill gained through involvement and exposure. 

Applications do not accumulate experience or gain knowledge or skill, in the true sense of the terms.

AI matching applications essentially perform a form of pattern recognition to classify data through parsing resumes and employing a keyword/phrase taxonomy, which is built based on “a priori” knowledge/information extracted from the patterns and programmed into the matching logic. 

I recently spoke at the PDS Technology Conference and had the honor of seeing Dr. Michio Kaku present on the world of 2020 and beyond. Dr. Kaku believes that “Progress in artificial intelligence may come to a gradual halt around 2020. The two problems facing AI are pattern recognition and common sense.” 

I was happy to hear that Dr. Michio Kaku believes that the employment market of the future will be “dominated by jobs involving common sense (e.g. leadership, judgment, entertainment, art, analysis, creativity) and pattern recognition (e.g. vision and non-repetitive jobs).  Jobs like brokers, tellers, agents, low level accountants and jobs involving inventory and repetition will be eliminated.”

That’s great news for anyone performing Level 2 Sourcing, primarily because it requires creativity, interpretive analysis, judgment, and common sense (a natural understanding based upon experience) - four things that machines and applications are intrinsically incapable of.

Unlike AI matching applications, Level 2 Sourcers intrinsically understand that resumes and social media profiles are imperfect and incomplete representations of the people who created them, and that they often do not explicitly mention all of their skills and experience. As such, Level 2 Sourcers are not only able to find qualified candidates based on the words they use - many can also specifically search for and find people who have experience that they do not mention. In other words, some Level 2 Sourcers can find people based on what they don’t say. This is a skill that can only be developed over time from observation and experience.  

Final Thoughts

Level 1 Sourcing can be performed by entry level associates or be completely automated, as the level of matching produced is superficial and based primarily on explicit keyword and phrase matching. This can be quite sufficient for static and repetitive hiring needs for simple hiring profiles, where title searches will often suffice.

The value and the results provided by Level 1 and Level 2 Sourcing is vastly different - this is why some organizations see the sourcing function as a low level or junior role, simply outsource it for $5 – $7 and hour, or completely automate it. Interestingly, there are sourcers who make $50 to over $100 an hour, and they are worth every penny for the competitive advantage  and value they provide to the organizations they support.

Dr. Michio Kaku would classify Level 1 Sourcing as ”commodity based capital,” in that it is a product that is the same no matter who produces it - man, woman, or machine.

People who perform Level 2 Sourcing are true knowledge workers, whose value is intellectual capital – based in creativity, judgment, analysis, ”common sense” and “a posteriori” knowledge developed over time based upon experience – similar to senior Financial Analysts, Business Analysts, Data Analysts and Business Intelligence Analysts. Level 2 Sourcers produce a product that is quite different based on who produces it, and it cannot be reliably replicated by machines.

To be sure, one could easily break Level 2 Sourcing out to at least 3 different levels, because to lump everything more advanced and sophisticated than Level 1 Sourcing into one broad category is horribly limiting, but for the purposes of this article, it shall suffice.

Human Capital Data data is the sword of the 21st century – those who wield it well are the Sourcing Samurai.

In response to my recent post about the deficiencies in the search capability of many Applicant Tracking Systems, a few people commented to the fact that resumes stored in applicant tracking systems become stale and outdated over time, which may explain why ATS resume databases are often the candidate “source of last resort.”

While candidate records inevitably age over time and can become outdated, this definitely does not have to be the case.

A candidate record can only truly go “stale” if no one ever makes contact and updates the record with more current information from time to time – and it need not even be every 6 months.

Any recruiter worth their salt will attempt to maintain periodic contact with most candidates and update their information as appropriate, regardless of their job search status. This can also be automated to some extent with strong and effective CRM functionality – so even if the recruiter forgets to follow up with someone every 6 months, the CRM won’t.

Resumes Are Like Wine

While human capital data in the form of resumes and candidate profiles may get outdated, it never truly loses its value. Resumes and candidate records are like fine wine – they only get better with age.

Yes, I believe the value of human capital data actually increases over time.

If I find a resume of a 2 year Unix systems administrator today and permanently capture them into my ATS, over time that person will gain experience and expertise, and likely advance their career along the way. In 5 years I will have a 7 year Unix admin, a Unix systems engineer, perhaps a project manager or even a storage area network specialist – who knows? No matter their career path and progression, I will stay in touch with them and routinely update their information - regardless of their job search status.

The same is true of nearly every profession – accountants, attorneys, physicians, customer service reps, mechanical engineers, recent college grads, etc. – they will all gain experience and advance their careers over time. 

Limited Shelf Life

Did you know that some people who post their resume in online resume databases (job boards and such) sometimes pull their resume down shortly after they post it, rendering it unfindable? Sometimes in a matter of hours!

Social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter can also suffer from a similar effect. Because they are based on UGC (User Generated Content), at any time any user can make their profile private and unsearchable (even via X-Ray searching in some cases!), or simply remove content that may aid you in searching for/identifying them based on their professional skills and experience.

However, if you’re always on the lookout for certain types of professionals, scouring every source available to you, and you permanently capture the information you find into your ATS/CRM, you may essentially be collecting rare vintages (yes, I’m going to continue with the wine analogy) that may no longer be in circulation in the near future. 

In other words, when you find and capture that resume or profile of the 2 year Unix admin (or accountant, or attorney, or recent grad, etc.) who pulls their resume or alters their social networking profile at some point in the future – you may have in your possession a candidate that may never be found by anyone else again.

This would allow you to specifically search for that particular candidate and reach out to them in a year or two’s time – when they are passively looking or not looking at all – and present them with a position that is well aligned with the next step in their career. At this point, you may literally be one of the few people who have quick and easy access to that candidate as their career progresses, regardless of their job search status.

ATS Databases are 70% Passive/Not Looking by Volume

I believe that a well stocked ATS candidate database is likely to consist of mostly (approximately 70%) candidates who are not looking or who are passively looking. That percentage is probably even higher when you consider only candidate records that have been entered/created over 3 months ago. So, if you’re one of those recruiting professionals who believe the hype that active candidates are bad and passive candidates are good, you should be excited about the prospect of building a private “passive” candidate database that you can mine to your heart’s content.

While I am most decidedly NOT one of those people who buys into the idea that passive candidates are the “best” candidates, I can tell you from experience that candidate closing and control is almost a non-issue when you are dealing primarily with people who are not actively looking, are not being called by every other recruiter in the known universe, and don’t have 5 interviews scheduled this week and 2 offers in hand.

So it IS nice to be able to purposefully target and dip into a large pool of well qualified candidates, who are not actively looking, and many of whom no one else has quick and easy access to. 

It’s not just nice; it’s also a significant competitive advantage.

Let Your Candidate Data Age Naturally

If you have a relatively large candidate database (10,000 to 1,000,000+), you needn’t worry about trying to maintain “relationships” with all of them – it’s actually impossible, unless your definition of “relationship” includes automated emails.

If you’re overly concerned with having ultra-fresh information on all of the candidates in your system at all times - don’t be. It isn’t really necessary.

I’ve called and made easy, frictionless hires with candidates who had records/resumes that had not been updated in 4 years. A seasoned sourcer or recruiter can easily make an educated guess at “career trajectory,” and when you make a call to someone whose resume is not on the Internet, not on LinkedIn, not in an online resume database – you essentially have a candidate no one else has practical, targeted access to – and closing/control is a non-issue when you call with the right opportunity, by design.

Final Thoughts

If you permanently capture data on your target professionals relatively early in their careers, you can cultivate their candidate records as their careers progress, allowing you quick and easy access to them as they evolve into more experienced passive or even non-job seekers – the virtually “ungettable” candidates that your competitors wish they had access to.  

If this approach to valuing and leveraging your candidate data doesn’t appeal to you, and you happen to be growing tired of having to store all of those old, stale resumes in your ATS/CRM – give me a ring – I’d be glad to take them off your hands.

Posting jobs in an attempt to attract qualified talent has many intrinsic flaws, and I feel that the 2 most significant limitations inherently involved with posting jobs  is that:

1. Job posting is a passive strategy that affords no control over candidate qualifications
2. Job ads only attract candidates who are actively looking

In comparison, proactively searching for qualified candidates is an active strategy which offers significant control over candidate qualifications and can be used to specifically target passive and non-job seekers.

In this post I will compare and contrast job posting and candidate search as means of identifying talent, and I hope to open your eyes to a new way of looking at the value/ROI of posting jobs.

Job Posting is a Passive Strategy

One of my favorite analogies for job posting is that it is just like setting a trap. The strategy is to set a trap in a place where you think your quarry might come across it and be ensnared.  This is very much a passive, hope-based strategy, and hope is actually not a strategy.

Job Posting Offers No Control Over Candidate Qualifications

If you are trying to snare a rabbit, you could just as easily end up snaring a raccoon, a skunk, an opossum – or basically any small indigenous animal that wanders by.

This is the same with job posting. If you post a job for a windows system engineer with a minimum of 5 years of experience, MCSE certification, and web hosting industry experience - literally ANYONE can respond, whether they have the appropriate experience, certification, or industry experience or not. As a passive strategy, you simply cannot control who responds – unqualified, underqualified, overqualified, out of area, etc.

This isn’t just my experience and opinion. A recent Atlanta Business Chronicle article cited a study of 501 hiring managers by Robert Half and CareerBuilder, which found that 44 percent of resumes presented to hiring managers are submitted by unqualified applicants. Additionally, the 2009 EDGE Report also found that 47 percent of hiring managers cited under-qualified applicants as their most common hiring challenge. 

Job Posting Attracts Active Job Seekers Only

Not only can you not control who responds to your job posting, the only people who are going to get “snared” by the trap you’ve set are people who are actively looking for a job.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, here is the breakdown of job seeker status:

• 32% passively looking
• 34% not looking
• 20% casually looking
• 14% actively looking

Now, unlike many people, I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with active job seekers – they are not all desperate, unemployable people (can you believe people in the recruiting industry actually believe that?). However, the real issue at hand is that with job posting, you are essentially missing the other 86% of the workforce.

That means that when you post a job for an opening you need to fill in the next 2 weeks, you are realistically only tapping into 14% of the available workforce.  On top of that, many people who respond will not actually be qualified for the position.

That’s an issue!

One could argue that some of the people who are “casually looking” might stumble across your ad, but even if all of them did (which is highly unlikely), you are still missing 66% of the available workforce.

Your Ads and Postings are Invisible to Most People

Truly “passive” job seekers and certainly those who are not looking at all don’t even SEE ads for jobs right in front of their face, no matter how “targeted” and well placed your ads are.  Additionally, the reality is that most people tune out ads of any kind – on the Internet, on TV, billboards, etc.

When’s the last time you clicked on an ad or bought something/took action specifically because of a commercial or billboard you saw?

Even for those people who do “see” or “tune in” your ad/job posting – the reality is that most will not take action. Changing a job is a BIG deal – most casual, passive, and practically all inactive job seekers will not likely be inspired to take action and explore leaving their current position because they saw an online job ad. 

SEO Is Not Enough

I agree 100% with Marvin Smith that SEO is not enough. How could it be anyway? For SEO to work, you have to have someone searching for jobs and/or information about your company, and as we’ve already seen, that is going to be the active job seekers and perhaps some of the casual job seekers – which is only a small sample of the available talent, the clear minority.

Resume Search is an Active Strategy

Unlike job posting, which is a passive method of attracting talent (I would argue that it’s not even a method of identifying talent), searching for candidates in Applicant Tracking Systems, recruiting CRM’s, job board resume databases, and LinkedIn is an active method of talent identification. 

Instead of setting a trap and waiting for the right person to stumble across it (aka, “post and pray”), when you create and execute searches to find candidates, you are actively “hunting” for talent – targeting people with specific qualifications and experience, who live in specific areas – regardless of their job search status. 

Resume Search Affords Significant Control

When it comes to searching for candidates, I’m focusing specifically on resume search, because searching for resumes offers significant intrinsic advantages over non-resume candidate searches. Resumes (including complete LinkedIn profiles) are “deep” sources of data which enable sourcers and recruiters with a high degree of control over critical candidate variables, including skills/experience, industry, location, education, and to a lesser but still significant extent, desired opportunity and compensation. 

Sourcers and recruiters who are adept at leveraging deep human capital data (resumes and detailed social network profiles) create queries that control critical candidate qualification variables, allowing them to quickly identify people with highly specific experience, who live in specific locations who are likely to be interested in the role and compensation offered by the position the recruiter is working on. 

Resume Search Can Target Passive and Non Job Seekers

Unlike job posting and SEO which require some action on the part of candidates (actively looking at ads or running keyword searches) and are quite literally invisible to those who are not taking any action to look for a new job (the majority of all people), when you actively search for candidates, you can target people who are not actively looking.

How can you search for resumes of passive and non job seekers? Quite easily. 

Ready for a paradigm shift?

If someone responds to a job posting you posted recently and they enter their information into your ATS/recruiting CRM – they are most likely actively seeking a new job, although there is a chance you could also be collecting a casual job seeker.

Statistically, many people who respond to job postings are not actually qualified for the position they applied for. If they are not a match for any current openings, it is likely they will find a position with another company with a position they are actually qualified for.

But you still have their resume in your ATS.

Alternatively, their resume may still be posted in an online resume database somewhere (many people either don’t or forget to take them down after they take a new job). In fact, my own research has shown that approximately 75% of all resumes on the job boards are over 30 days old. So if you think that all of the resumes stored in online resume databases are of active job seekers, you are quite wrong. Statistically, the majority are likely to be not looking or passively looking. 

In about 3 months to 2 years’ time, those active job seekers turn into people who are likely to either to be not looking at all for a new position, or who may be satisfied with the new position they took, but open to better opportunities (passively looking).

Unlike job posting, when you are searching for resumes, you can actually specifically target people who are not likely to be actively looking.

An Alternative View of Job Posting

While most people see the primary value of job posting as a method of trying to attract the right person at the right time – I see it quite differently. 

If I post a job, I am not expecting results – experience and statistics show that most people who respond are not qualified for the position. Certainly, there have been times when the right person has responded to a job posting at the right time, but as an intrinsically passive strategy with no ”built-in” ability to control the experience and qualification of respondents, to rely on job posting would be folly. After posting a position, I will not wait and hope that the right people find my position. I am going to take control of the process and go out and actually FIND the right people.

So if the main value of posting jobs isn’t finding the right person at the right time, what could it be?

Another way to look at the value of job posting is that it can essentially become a method of cultivating your ATS/CRM into a wine cellar of sorts. All of those active job seekers who respond to your ads but who are not qualified (or simply not selected) for the specific position they applied to today may in fact be well qualified for other positions you have in the future. 

Active candidates who enter your ATS/CRM today (or post their resume online) become tomorrow’s casual, passive, and non-job seekers.
   

ATS Search Capability is Critical

In order to capitalize on your database of casual, passive, and non-job seekers – you need to have an appropriately capable candidate search interface coupled with the ability to run precise queries, enabling you to quickly target and access candidates of ANY job search status.

An ATS with poor/limited candidate search capability is like having a well stocked wine cellar that you can’t access because you don’t have the key to the door.  Or even if you had the key – you had no way of finding the exact bottle you were looking for.

Final Thoughts

Job posting is part of a balanced “diet” of recruiting methods, and it can produce results. I would never recommend to NOT post jobs – that would be ridiculous. However, if posting jobs is your primary method of trying to find the right candidates at the right time, I believe you are at a competitive disadvantage.

I would argue that the value of posting jobs does not primarily lie in the ability to find and attract the right candidate at the right time.  Job posting is essentially like trapping: set the snare and wait for the right person to stumble by - it is an inherently passive strategy with no control over what wanders in. Additionally, the only people who will search for or even “see” ads for jobs are those who are actively or casually looking.

I believe the less obvious but true value of job posting lies primarily in the collection of active candidates and the ability to cultivate them over time into more experienced/qualified candidates who will inevitably become passive/inactive job seekers.

Human capital data stored within your ATS/CRM increases in value over time, but it’s actually of NO value unless you have the ability and skill to retrieve and leverage that data.

This question has been burning in my mind for quite some time – why is it that so many ATS/recruiting CRM vendors offer poor or limited candidate search functionality? I’m not talking about ATS vendors you’ve never heard of – I’m talking about some of the biggest names in Applicant Tracking/Candidate Relationship Management applications.

I’m well aware that ATS’s serve many critical functions beyond searching for the candidates contained within them, but let’s pull no punches here – you can’t hire someone, or begin to automate candidate relationship management with someone you haven’t FOUND in the first place. And just because a candidate is buried somewhere in your database, it doesn’t mean you’ve actually found them (or can find them when you want or need to).

The bottom line is that data is of little to no value if you can’t retrieve the information you want, when you need it. What is the point of storing human capital data if you can’t precisely retrieve exactly what you want, when you want it? 

Deficiencies Defined

I won’t get into automated/system-side semantic search and match in this post – I’m going to focus on the ability to manually enter search strings to find candidates.

When I say “poor/limited” candidate search capability, I mean at least one or more of the following:

• Unnecessarily short search fields (e.g., 100 characters, including spaces!)
• Lack of full Boolean search (e.g., inability to use AND, OR, and NOT, nesting, etc.)
• Lack of stemming/root word search (e.g., admin* yeilds administrator, administration, etc.)
• Lack of field-based search (e.g., most recent experience, most recent title, education, etc.)
• Lack of searching by zip code radius

Critical Candidate Pool

A company’s internal candidate database is made up of people who have responded to that company’s job postings, people who went to the company’s website and entered their resume and information (not in response to a specific job), and people who were identified elsewhere (employee referral, LinkedIn, Twitter, Monster, niche job board, the Internet, etc.) and entered into the database by an employee. 

One could easily argue that this pool of candidates should be the first place sourcers, recruiters and hiring managers look when they need to find candidates. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

ATS = Candidate Source of Last Resort

A relatively common observation/complaint I hear from recruiting managers in corporate and agency staffing environments is that when it comes to running searches to find potential candidates, their sourcers and recruiters tend to search LinkedIn and the job board resume databases they have access to first, or at least before they search their internal ATS/CRM application. In many cases, recruiters with access to job board resume databases will only use their own ATS as a “source of last resort.”

A recent survey conducted by TalentDrive, which polled over 8,000 companies and staffing firms, confirms this to a shocking degree. They found that “98% of the companies surveyed did not find Talent from within the existing Company ATS.” In other words, candidates can check in, but they don’t check out.

Not quite as shocking, but equally disturbing is 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.

I think I know one of the major contributing factors to both statistics - most ATS’s aren’t very searchable!

Strong Candidate Search Capability is Out There

I believe the reason why Applicant Tracking Systems are often used as the “source of last resort” is because most ATS’s have candidate search functionality that is far inferior to what sourcers and recruiters have available to them in LinkedIn, any of the major job board resume databases, and even Google. Can we blame recruiters for going first to sources they have access to that actually ENABLE them with the power and control to quickly find the people they need?

If you take a look at large repositories of deep human capital data, such as those offered by LinkedIn and the “big 4″ job board resume databases (Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, and Dice), you’ll find robust search capability. All accept full Boolean logic, accept relatively long/complex/precise search strings, feature zip code radius search, and offer field-specific searching. Monster takes Boolean search one step further by offering proximity search with the NEAR operator, and Careerbuilder offers advanced AI matching with their R2 functionality(which I think it powered by Sovren – can anyone confirm this?). 

Regardless of how many excellent candidates may be buried in a company’s ATS/CRM, if recruiters can’t run appropriately precise searches to quickly and easily retrieve highly relevant results, they are actually incentivized to use other sources to identify candidates. Sourcers and recruiters will naturally gravitate to what works for them, and unfortunately, in many cases, it isn’t their ATS.

The Customer is Always Right?

When I recently challenged a major ATS vendor regarding their extremely short candidate search field (100 characters, including spaces), their response included this interesting and unanticipated angle - they claimed that 99% of their clients are statisfied with their short search field. In other words, very few prospective or current customers of their ATS asked about, commented on, or asked for improvement of the short search field.

A representative of another well-known ATS chimed in on Twitter and said they also don’t come across many clients asking for more than 100 characters in the candidate search field.

I can only assume that their customers either aren’t very proficient at talent mining, don’t understand the value of human capital data, or worse – both. Regardless, we’ve already seen the statistics from TalentDrive’s surveys - most companies don’t even use their ATS to identify candidates. If they’re not using their ATS to find talent, why would they care about the length of the search field, or even if it supports basic Boolean logic? 

So what we have here is ATS vendors who are not developing and offering robust candidate search capability because their customers aren’t asking for it. Okay, I understand “the customer is always right,” but it’s a sad state of affairs when companies who create talent/human capital solutions are not incorporating strong/advanced candidate search capability into their products because their customers don’t understand the value and full potential of human capital data.

Whatever happened to educating and informing your customers, providing training, and offering a product that exceeds your customers’ expectations and provides them with a true competitive advantage?

100 Characters is Not Enough

I conducted a very informal poll on Twitter and Facebook, asking sourcers and recruiters what they thought of a 100 character candidate search field limit, and 100% of those who responded all felt that it would handicap their ability to find the right candidates. By comparison, Monster’s resume database has a keyword search field that accepts up to 500 characters, LinkedIn’s search field is bottomless (I just crammed 6003 characters in the keword field and LinkedIn laughed and asked, “Is that all you got?”), and even Google accepts up to 32 search terms (at an average term length of a little as 5 letters, that’s still 160 characters, NOT including spaces or operators). 

The TalentDrive survey discovered that the number one sourcing challenge facing companies currently is filtering through the mass of resumes and increased number of applicants. In other words, the candidate “haystack” is getting HUGE, and it’s becoming more challenging to sort through it to find the needles.

Ultimately, short and basic candidate searches are imprecise and yield a high volume of imprecise results, riddled w/false positives. Without more room to create search strings that are appropriately precise, relevance will suffer, and with more resumes to search through – the issue is exacerbated.

The Future of Staffing and Recruiting

I firmly believe that the one aspect of recruiting that has the most potential to improve the speed of talent identification (the time to find metric) and increase the quality and quantity of candidates identified is electronic talent discovery and identification. With each passing day, there is more data available on more people somewhere – on a social network, in a resume database, or in your ATS – and it will only increase and accelerate. The ability to slice and dice human capital data will afford companies a HUGE competitive advantage.

I will never get tired of quoting this passage from Google’s blog: “When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.”

The ability to extract value out of human capital data is already, and will continue to be, THE complimentary scarce in recruiting and staffing – but most people just don’t know it yet. ATS/Recruiting CRM vendors need to step up, recognize this, and offer their clients solutions that enable them to truly capitalize on their human capital data and offer them a competitive advantage.

If anything, I feel that employers and staffing firms should provide their recruiters access to MORE powerful and capable candidate search functionality than publicly and widely available resume databases or social networks. If they don’t, their ATS will continue to be the candidate source of last resort.

I believe that ATS/CRM apps should essentially serve as talent intelligence solutions, not unlike business intelligence solutions and decision support systems. The power lies primarily in the the human capital data/information stored within, and the ability to retrieve and analyze that information for talent identification and to make hiring decisions. 

One Thing has Changed

I don’t believe that the majority of the recruiting life cycle has changed over the past 20 years, or will change all that much in the future. Building relationships with current and potential candidates will always be at the heart of the recruiting process.

However, the one step in the recruiting process that has changed dramatically is sourcing, or talent discovery/identification. Information systems and applications have evolved rapidly over the past 20 years, and will likely continue to do so. With more information available about more people growing with each passing day, information retrieval becomes absolutely critical.

The ability to instantly retrieve information about the right people at the right time can accelerate a company’s ability to build relationships with more of the right people more quickly, leading to faster and higher quality hires with less effort.

If you find that concept interesting, I suggest you read these two posts about Lean/Just-in-Time recruiting.

A Call to All ATS/Recruiting CRM Vendors

If you work for or use an ATS that has strong candidate search functionality – Congratulations, you are among the fortunate few! Vendors – make sure your customers fully understand and leverage that power. Users – take full advantage of the candidate search capability, and be sure to not use your ATS as a source of last resort. Those candidates in your ATS are there for a reason – either they expressed interest in joining your company, or someone in your company expressed interest in them! 

If you work for an ATS vendor with poor/limited candidate search functionality - Why do you offer sub-par candidate search capability? Recognize that the future of human capital information systems lies primarily in talent discovery and identification. Either build in your own robust candidate search capability, or simply integrate any one of a number of excellent 3rd party text search and/or resume parse/search/match applications that are available. Educate your current and potential customers and explain to them the value and potential of human capital data. CRM functionality is great, but is of little value without the ability to find the right people to begin to manage relationships with in the first place!

If you currently use an ATS with poor/limited candidate search capability - Send this article to your vendor. Let me know how they respond, and if/how they can answer the question of why they offer such poor/limited candidate search functionality. They’re essentially putting you at a competitive disadvantage!

I’ve been making a habit of posting the U.S. traffic data for the “big 3″ social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter – the ones that seem to matter most to sourcers and recruiters) on a monthly basis.

Last month, I predicted that all 3 of the sites would experience a decline in monthly unique U.S. visitors, and as it turns out, I was right only about 1 of them.

And I was quite surprised to see which one it was.

Facebook Unique U.S. Visitors Declines for First Time in a LONG Time

Amid all of the recent press Facebook has been getting for crossing the 300M user mark and finally becoming cash flow positive, I haven’t come across anyone who’s pointing out that Facebook’s monthly unique U.S. visitors actually dropped in August. So, I’ll step up and be “that guy.”

Facebook’s unique U.S. visitors has been on a tear upwards over the past 12 months – and I can’t recall the last time (if there WAS a time) when Facebook’s visitors has declined. I don’t have premium access to www.compete.com, otherwise I could tell you definitively if Facebook’s monthly visitor count has declined in the past 24 months. Does anyone have access to Facebook’s unique visitor data for the past 2-5 years? If so – please share!

Okay, so exactly how much of a decline did Facebook experience? Well, Facebook’s unique U.S. visitors only dropped by .37%, or 456,197 visitors from July to August. Admittedly, that’s a VERY small drop. However, it’s a drop nonetheless, and I personally find it odd that it’s dropped at all while Facebook is at the same time passing the 300M user mark.

Perhaps Facebook is growing more on a global basis, adding a higher volume and percentage of non-U.S. users? Perhaps more people in the U.S. are creating Facebook accounts, but are not returning on a monthly basis? I don’t have the answer, but I do know that although the total number of U.S visitors shrank slightly in August – those visitors actually visited more often: total U.S. visits to Facebook in August rose 4.69% to 2,202,528,780. 

In any event, regardless of how small a decline it may be, I find it newsworthy (and interesting) that Facebook’s monthly unique U.S. visitors declined in August, for the first time in a long time, and in the same time frame that Facebook crossed the 300M user mark.

LinkedIn U.S. Visitors Surge in August

LinkedIn’s monthly unique U.S. visitors climbed past the 14M mark for the first time ever in August, up 8.19%, or 1,077,955 visitors. While LinkedIn’s U.S. visitor traffic has cooled significantly this year, declining from January to February, and from March to May, LinkedIn has been on a bit of a upwards tear from June onward.

Not only did the number of unqiue U.S. visitors to LinkedIn increase in August, those visitors also visited more – with visits climbing 9.94% to 53,593,375 visits. It’s nice to see LinkedIn on the rise again after experiencing some choppiness earlier in the year.

Twitter Gains Visitors, Declines in Total Visits

If any one of the “big 3″ social media sites were to experience a visitor decline in August, I would have placed my money on it being Twitter. However, Twitter managed to thwart a decline in monthly unique U.S. visitors, growing by 1.27%, or 294,649 visitors. But all that glitters is not gold for Twitter, as they experienced a decrease in total visits in August by 2.99%. This is noteworthy, because it is the first such decline in total monthly visits for Twitter in 2009, with the last decline happening in November, 2008.

Still, Twitter logged 148, 651, 794 total visits in August, which isn’t too shabby considering that many Twitter users don’t actually visit Twitter at all, instead accessing Twitter through 3rd party applications such as TweetDeck and Seesmic.

Final Thoughts

Think you know all there is to know about Google search?

I was recently asked a question regarding the use of the asterisk when searching on Google, specifically in conjunction with certain punctuation.

This person was under the impression that if you used the equal sign on either side of an asterisk when searching Google, it would function as a multiple word wildcard operator. For example, searching for [linux=*=administrator] should return results of linux system administrator, linux systems administrator, linux network administrator, linux server administrator, etc.

The short answer is that Google ignores most punctuation, and that there is no need to combine the asterisk with any other punctuation or symbols for it to perform as a single or multiple word wildcard.

The long answer is much more interesting. I decided to perform some experiments with Google’s wildcard asterisk and I uncovered a few oddities and unsolved mysteries. I’m curious if you might be able to shed some light on them. But first, I will show you exactly how you can make good use of Google’s asterisk when searching for resumes on the Internet, as well as when X-Ray searching LinkedIn and Twitter. 

The Asterisk Operator on Google

Google treats the asterisk (*) as a placeholder for 1 or more words – it can also be referred to as a single or multiple word wildcard operator, because Google treats the asterisk as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) for which it tries to find the best match(es).  Essentially, Google “fills in the blanks” wherever there is an asterisk.

According to Google, here is an example of proper syntax when leveraging the asterisk: [ Obama voted * on the * bill ] – notice how there is a space on either side of each asterisk.

Searching for Candidates using Google’s Asterisk Operator 

Judicious use of the asterisk on Google when searching for candidates can yield great results and can increase relevance.

For example, if you are looking for someone who has experience administering linux, you could search for rigid phrases such as “administered linux,” or perhaps “linux systems administrator.” However, utilizing the asterisk on Google, you can add greater flexibility in your search and capture a wider variety and a larger number of results. 

(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) “~administer * linux” -job -jobs

Notice the variety of the results of this search:

The variety of relevant phrases that Google’s wildcard operator returns from just these 6 results is eye-opening. No sourcer or recruiter would sit down and be able to think of every conceivable phrase a candidate could say to represent their linux administration experience. With the proper use of Google’s asterisk search operator, there’s no need to, because the asterisk “fills in the blanks.”

When it comes to leveraging the asterisk in a Google search, don’t think in terms of single keywords – think about sentences and phrases that candidates might use to express their responsibilities.

Using Google’s Asterisk in a LinkedIn X-Ray Search

You can make use of Google’s wildcard operator to target current titles when performing an X-Ray search.

For example:  

site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory (”current * project manager” OR “current * program manager”)

This is how the asterisk is put to work – it “bridges the gap” across the word “current” to the current title – in this case – “Program Manager.”

Please note, however, that this technique is not flawless. In my testing, while this approach does find many profiles with the target current title, it does not actually find EVERY profile with the target current title. You can test this for yourself by running back-to-back external X-Ray and internal LinkedIn searches.

LinkedIn Phrase Searching

Of course you can also use the asterisk to search for flexible phrases just as we did with the Linux admin search above.

For example:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory engineer “* cisco routers”

Instead of just searching for “cisco” and “router” or “routers” and simply matching keywords, we’re actually trying to target PHRASES that communicate responsibility. As sourcers and recruiters – you should not be looking just for keywords, you should really be looking for what people have DONE, not just mentions of search terms. Below you can see how using the asterisk has yielded results of people talking about configuring and implementing routers:

Google essentially “filled in the blank” of the asterisk preceding the two words of “cisco routers.” Clicking on a “cached” result shows exactly how our use of the asterisk pulled a phrase on this LinkedIn profile of someone who has been responsible for configuring Cisco routers.

Using Google’s Asterisk in a Twitter X-Ray Search

When X-Ray searching Twitter, you can use Google’s asterisk to search specifically for words mentioned in the “Bio” field. This is especially helpful because this is the place where you can more reliably find titles and professional skills.

Let’s try looking for people who mention the word “accountant” in their Twitter bio:

site:twitter.com “bio * accountant”

Click here for the 579 results.

Clicking into a result, we can see how this worked beautifully:

You can go a step further and try using two asterisks to reach further into the bio field:

site:twitter.com “bio * * accountant”

Click here for the 468 results.  Notice the lack of overlap in the results with the single asterisk search above.

Remember that Google treats the asterisk as a single or multiple word wildcard. Exactly how many words? I am not sure, and Google’s documentation does not appear to say. Using 2 asterisks in the example above essentially extends the distance between the word “bio” and the word “accountant” – inserting more “blanks” for Google to fill in.

And you can keep adding more. For example, let’s try 3 asterisks:

site:twitter.com “bio * * * accountant”

Click here for the 350 results.

Punctuation in Google Search Strings

Now let’s get back to the initial question about combining the asterisk with punctuation.

Google’s basic help page USED to explain that “with some exceptions, punctuation is ignored (that is, you can’t search for @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and other special characters).” I say “USED” to because I can no longer find that specific statement on Google’s basic or advanced help pages, although it can be found quoted in the web search help forum.

Interestingly, if you search Google’s web search help for “punctuation,” the second result is this:

There’s the phrase I’m looking for – however, when you click on the result, it takes you to this page, which doesn’t actually contain the phrase “with some exceptions, punctuation is ignored (that is, you can’t search for @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and other special characters).”

Weird. I wonder why it’s been removed. No doubt due to my Google-thinks-I’m-not-human search experiments.

In any event, Google is supposed to ignore the equal sign, along with @#$%^&*()+[]\. Remember that list – I’m going to show you that Google doesn’t actually ignore all of those symbols/punctuation marks.

Experimenting with the Asterisk

While Google states that you can’t search FOR the equal sign, I decided to do a little testing to see exactly what Google makes of it if you do use it on either side of an asterisk in a query, just like the person who asked me the initial question apparently did (e.g. linux=*=administrator).

I also tried several different searches using some of the other supposedly ignored punctuation in combination with the asterisk, as well as one scenario where I didn’t use any spaces on either side of the asterisk – just to see what would happen. Yeah – this is what I do in my spare time. I’m that guy.

Search #1 =*=

(inurl:resume | intitle:resume) linux=*=administrator (301 OR 703)  -job -jobs

1 result.

Search #2 /*/

(inurl:resume | intitle:resume) linux/*/administrator 301 -job -jobs

1 result- the same as the one from search #1

Search #3 Single space on either side of the asterisk, using quotes

In addition, I added quotation marks around the “linux * administrator” phrase to more closely approximate searches #1 and #2 above, as there is technically no space on either side of the asterisk, keeping it a single phrase.

(inurl:resume | intitle:resume) “linux * administrator” 301 -job -jobs

1 result again, same as before.

So this shows that Google does in fact ignore the equal sign and the slash - it doesn’t have any effect on the asterisk/wild card operator over a space.

However – things get a little interesting when you try the question mark.

Search #4 ?*?

(inurl:resume | intitle:resume) linux?*?administrator 301 -job -jobs

We get 357 results.

Okay – we go from 1 result with the = and the /, as well as spaces enclosed by quotation marks, to 357 results simply by using a question mark? Something is going on with the question mark, but I am not sure exactly what. However -let’s remember that Google doesn’t explicitly mention the question mark in their list of ignored punctuation: @#$%^&*()=+[]\.

So the question mark really is a question mark. Yeah, I went there.

Do you have any insight as to why Google treats the question mark (?) any differently than an equal sign or a slash?

Search #5 A single space on either side of the asterisk, without quotes

(inurl:resume | intitle:resume) linux * administrator 301 -job -jobs

357 results again.

These results provide SOME insight, because they return the same number of results as search #4 that used the question marks. This leads me to believe that the question mark is actually ignored, because it returns the same number of results as the string that simply has spaces on either side of the asterisk.

However, if the question mark is ignored, then how can Google return fewer/different results in searches #1 and #2 that use the = and the /, which should also be ignored?

More questions than answers here. Have any insight?

Search #6 No space on either side of the asterisk

(inurl:resume | intitle:resume) linux*administrator 301 -job -jobs

499 results this time. Interesting, yes?

This reveals another mystery, because I can’t explain exactly why linux*administrator (no spaces) and linux * administrator (single space on either side of the asterisk) return different results, let alone why the search with no spaces returns broader results, which is a little counterintuitive considering all we did was eliminate the spaces around the asterisk. If anything, one might assume the results should tighten?

I attached a capture of 3 results from page 10 – notice how far apart the words administrator/administration and Linux are from each other. 

Search #7 &*&

It gets even more interesting. As we’ve seen, Google claims to ignore most punctuation, including the ampersand. However, it certainly does not ignore the &, as evidenced by the fact that this search returns 0 results:

(inurl:resume | intitle:resume) linux&*&administrator 301 -job -jobs

Zero results.

Conclusion

The single/multiple word wildcard operator on Google has many uses – it can help you target current titles with LinkedIn X-Ray searches, search for terms and titles in Twitter bios, and move beyond simply searching for keywords and step into the realm of searching for phrases that suggest actual responsibilities.

As for the combination of punctuation and the asterisk operator, it appears that the = sign (as well as a few other supposedly ignored symbols) actually seem to “bridge the gap” and effectively convert strings employing the asterisk (*) to something very similar to a phrase search using quotation marks (e.g., “linux * administrator”). While the asterisk can represent 1 or more words, when used in conjunction with a phrase search using quotation marks (or, as we have seen with = or / punctuation on either side of a single asterisk), Google returns results where the words on the left of the asterisk are always very close to those on the right of the asterisk – in most cases they are separated by only 1 word.

However, as we have seen – not all symbols are created equal. The linux?*?administrator is not processed the same way as linux=*=administrator. It appears that the ? does not “bridge the gap” of the words on either side of the asterisk as the = sign does, and the results are much looser – resembling the results of linux * administrator without quotations. Without the quotations, Google expands the proximity/distance between the words on the left and the right of the asterisk, in many cases well beyond 3 words.

Do you have any answers to the mysteries revealed in this post? If so – please let me know. Thanks!

A short while ago, I wrote an article on CruiterTalk explaining how I believe anyone can learn the “Art” of sourcing candidates.

In my recruiting career, I’ve come across many people who believe that sourcing candidates from databases, ATS’s, and the Internet is difficult to learn.

I think that there are a number of contributing factors to this belief, including the idea that sourcing is more art than science, exposure to poor and/or ineffective training, the lack of access to a sourcing mentor, and in some cases – the absence of a true desire to master the craft.

My opinion is that sourcing is actually more science than art and can be relatively easy to learn, provided you actually WANT to learn and have access to the proper training and resources.

Read the full article here on CruiterTalk, and don’t miss the comments!