There are people in the HR/recruiting industry who believe that searching databases, the Internet, and social networking sites to source talent is relatively easy and that it can be automated through the use of technology. While those people are actually right (to an extent), I am happy to say that unfortunately for them, it’s not that simple. While anyone can manually write or automate basic searches and find … Read More
Boolean Strings, Semantic and Natural Language Search – Oh My!
An entertaining blog post by Matt Charney was recently brought to my attention in which he tells the world to shut up and stop talking about Boolean strings – he argues that Boolean search is a dying art and that “investing time or energy into becoming a master at Boolean is a lot like learning the fine art of calligraphy … Read More
Using Extended Boolean to Achieve Semantic Search in Sourcing
When it comes to sourcing and recruiting, semantic search is perhaps the most powerful way to quickly find people who have experience you’re looking for. Now, I am not talking about black box semantic search (e.g., Google, Monster’s 6Sense, etc.). I’m referring to user-defined semantic search, where you tell a search engine exactly what you want with your query, and … Read More
Facebook Graph Search Sourcing and Recruiting Initial Test Drive
For those who don’t yet have access to Facebook’s Graph Search – I put together a video detailing 5 live searches for: product managers who work at Microsoft and live in Seattle software engineers who work at Google and live in New York (developer OR programmer OR engineer) underwriters in Charlotte accountants who live near Alpharetta I must … Read More
The Guide to Semantic Search for Sourcing and Recruiting
If you have nearly any tenure in HR, sourcing or recruiting, you’ve probably heard something about “semantic search” and perhaps you would like to learn more. Well – you’ve found the right article. As a follow-up to my recent Slideshare on AI sourcing and matching, I am going to provide an overview of semantic search, the claims that semantic search … Read More
Beyond Boolean Search: Proximity and Weighting
Beyond Basic Boolean Most sourcing, recruiting, and staffing professionals are familiar with the basic Boolean operators of AND, OR, and NOT. However, I have found that few are familiar with what some refer to as “extended” Boolean functionality, such as proximity search and term weighting. Proximity and term weighting, where supported, are not actually logical (Boolean) operators – they are … Read More