Tag Archives: The Future of Sourcing

Big Data, Data Science and Moneyball Recruiting

28 Replies

With each passing day, an increasing amount of data is being generated and transmitted by and about more people than ever before.

At Google’s 2010 Atmosphere convention, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that “There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.”

In case you were wondering, an Exabyte is 1,000,000,000 gigabytes, or 10,000,000 terabytes. That’s a lot of information.

Interestingly, Google’s CEO may have actually underestimated the amount of data being generated at the time. From their research, RJMetrics believes that a more accurate figure would be approximately 6.6 exabytes every 2 days. One thing is for sure – the number is even bigger today.

What does any of this have to do with recruting? Why should HR, recruiting and sourcing professionals, as well as corporate executives care about big data?

Well, because a chunk of big data is human capital data, and as I have been ranting about for the better part of 3 years, human capital data can be leveraged to identify and hire more great people more quickly.

If you’re a dinosaur recruiter or sourcer, I don’t recommend you read the rest of this post, because:

  1. I will challenge they way you think and work, and that might make you uncomfortable
  2. You’ll probably think it’s a load of garbage
  3. It might make you aware of your pending extinction (the precise timing of which is debatable)

I have to warn you that this is not a short, quick-hit post – this may be the longest single post I have ever written, which explains why you didn’t see a post from me last week. I wrote this piece to introduce a human capital paradigm shift, to challenge the long-standing conventional wisdom in HR and recruiting, and to (hopefully!) provoke progressive thought from my peers. If that’s not your thing, turn back now.

If you want a glimpse into the future of talent identification and acquisition, you’re always interested in figuring out how your company can gain a competitive advantage, and you’re wondering what the heck my “Moneyball recruiting” reference could possibly be about, then read on.  Continue reading →

The Future of Sourcing and Talent Identification

6 Replies

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

12 Replies

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 →

Talent Mining and the Future of Sourcing and Recruiting

15 Replies

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 →