Category Archives: Talent Intelligence

The Future of Sourcing and Talent Identification

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If you listen to certain people in the recruiting industry, you’d think that being able to leverage information systems for talent discovery and identification will be an obsolete skill for recruiters and that sourcers will have to find another profession in the near future.

According to these folks, people with sourcing skills won’t be necessary because the future of sourcing will lie in total automation – they believe that applications that employ semantic search, AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) will be able to perform the entire candidate matching process for you.

However, neither Watson, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing nor semantic search will be putting any sourcer or recruiter out of a job anytime soon unless all they’re doing is basic keyword and title searching. Continue reading →

Sourcers and Recruiters – Don’t Fear Watson or Semantic Search

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I’ve read a few articles recently talking about IBM’s Watson and how the technology they developed may be the harbinger of unemployment for people in many professions.

Here’s one from Fortune magazine, asking if IBM’s Watson will put your job in jeopardy.

Here’s another suggesting that those who train others in Internet, social media, ATS, and resume database sourcing techniques and strategies will be eventually eliminated by semantic search solutions.

Watson Winning at Jeopardy isn’t Surprising

First, let’s first recognize that it’s an apples to oranges comparison between Jeopardy and sourcing/recruiting. Continue reading →

Is Finding and Recruiting Top Talent Really Your #1 Priority?

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Do these quotes sound familiar?

  • “People are our greatest asset.”
  • “The only real sustainable competitive advantage of any company is the recruitment and retention of great people.”
  • “Talent is our #1 priority as a company.”
  • “Your technologies, products and structures can be copied by competitors, but your people can’t be.”
  • “No matter what kind of business you are in, having the right people determines your company’s success or failure.”
  • “The ability to find and hire the right people can make or break your business. It is as plain as that. No matter where you are in the life cycle of your business, bringing in great talent should always be a top priority.” – Michael Dell

How many times have you read or heard something similar?

The ubiquitous “people are our greatest asset” sentiment sounds good, and no doubt feels good to say, but whenever I hear or read it, the first question that comes to my mind is “What are you doing to ensure that you are identifying and acquiring the right people?”

If you believe that finding and acquiring top talent is your #1 priority, then I have a few questions for you.

Continue reading →

Talent Mining and the Future of Sourcing and Recruiting

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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 →

Why Do So Many ATS Vendors Offer Poor Search Capability?

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JIT Talent IdentificationThis 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? Continue reading →

Do You Have Talent Intelligence?

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Does your recruiting or staffing organziation have Talent Intelligence?

I believe that all staffing organizations should view and value their internal resume/candidate database/ATS as a proprietary business intelligence tool.  Business intelligence refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information and help companies develop consistent and “data-based” business decisions — producing better results than basing decisions on “guesswork.”

I define “Talent Intelligence” as refering to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze Talent-related (Human Capital) data and information and help organizations develop consistent and “data-based” Talent-related decisions.

Business intelligence applications are usually supported by a data warehouse, which is the main repository of an organization’s historical data, also known as corporate memory (the total body of data, information and knowledge required to deliver the strategic aims and objectives of an organization). A company’s “Talent Warehouse” should serve as the main repository of an organization’s Human Capital data, and it would serve as the raw material for a Talent Support System (TSS) – a computerized system for helping to make Talent-related decisions, such as talent identification and acquisition.

Practically every Fortune 1000 company (and many smaller ones too) utilizes and leverages business intelligence solutions to make better decisions and run their companies more effectively and efficiently. However, very few – if ANY – companies actually have a true Talent Intelligence solution. Although many Applicant Tracking Systems ,HRMS/HRIS solutions and Recruiting CRM applications make lofty claims as to their capabilities and functionality, I don’t consider many vendor solutions currently on the market to be a true Talent Intelligence solution. Most are simply systems that track and organize applicants.

I find it ironic that companies in nearly every industry invest millions and millions of dollars on their data warehousing/business intelligence initiatives – just to be able to retrieve and analyze their data to enable them to make better business decisions, yet I’d argue that every company’s Human Capital is actually their most valuable and critical asset. So why is it that HR, recruiting, and staffing technology is so far behind in technologies used for gathering, retrieving, and analyzing financial, manufacturing, etc., data?  Continue reading →