Many people equate sourcing candidates with simply creating and running Boolean search strings.
In my opinion and experience, Boolean search neither adequately describes nor gives proper credit to what sourcers and recruiters are really doing when they leverage the Internet, resume databases, ATS/CRM applications and social networking sites such as LinkedIn to find candidates, and to what some very talented and highly skilled professionals are able to accomplish with human capital data.
I had the distinct honor of delivering the keynote presentation at SourceCon 2010 which was held at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. I spoke about a specialized form of information retrieval and text/data mining which I call talent mining, defined as querying and analyzing human capital data for talent discovery, identification, and ultimately acquisition.
At the strategic level, talent mining is the process of transforming human capital data into an informational and competitive advantage – much more than simply writing Boolean search strings. Continue reading
Did you attend the 
I’m not sure how many people read LinkedIn’s blog, but from the looks of my heavily recruiting-laden online social network, not many recruiters in my network do. At least I don’t see people in my network chatting about what LinkedIn just decided to share with the world, which is surprising to me given how cool it is. Hopefully this post will correct that. :-)
I recently wrote about 
I had an associate with a free LinkedIn account contact me late last week complaining about how he could no longer see the full names of his LinkedIn search results for 3rd degree connections – his results only showed the first initial of the last name. Furthermore, he claimed that LinkedIn had started charging for the ability to see the full names of 3rd degree connections in search results.