Tag Archives: Glen Cathey

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 →

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 →

Boolean Black Belt Website Visitor Analytics

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I’ve been blogging since 10/2/2008.

Since then, my blog has had visitors from 9,704 cities in 171 countries around the world, and has been read in 90 languages.

I don’t blog to monetize my website – I write because I’m passionate about recruiting and technology. Okay, I may be a little obsessed too. Maybe more than a little. :-)

Because I am not a professional blogger, I’ve never really drilled into my website analytics beyond the basics. I recently had a friend ask me about the visitors to my blog, and I really couldn’t tell him much other than the obvious, which made me feel a little stupid. Okay, maybe more than a little.

So, I decided to dig into my website analytics and share with you what I found. I hope you find it as interesting as I do! Continue reading →

How I Learned What I Know About Candidate Sourcing

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How_did_Glen_Cathey_learn_how_to_source_candidatesWhen 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. Continue reading →