4 Ways to Keep Candidate Data Fresh

Join us for a HCI webinar sponsored by Talent Circles on 3/6 at 12 PM EST "How to Build a Strategic Candidate Pipeline." Register here.
 
By Jessica Miller-Merrell
 
In order to keep up with the job seeker you must make sure the information you have is always up to date and fresh. Outdated information can easily have a significant effect on your decision to hire a certain prospect. Working together and in a talent community will allow recruiters and job seekers to keep a tight reign on the amount of information that is outdated. Here are a few tips for companies that are looking to sharpen their skills in pulling newer, fresh content to make the best hire.

By-Directional Engagement. If you’ve done a good job at building your community and the interactions between recruiters and candidates just talk to them! The easiest way to update outdated and stale information is to ask a candidate to update their profile. If a job seeker is active they will always make sure that all their information in your ATS or CRM is 100% up to date and accurate. Asking for this information shouldn’t be done on a monthly basis, but quarterly would be more appropriate as job skills & experience are updated every so often.

Recruiter Engagement. In a successful Talent Network recruiters will be engagement with suspects and prospects throughout the entire process. Asking how they’re doing at home, updating them on career opportunities, and even discussing sports or current events. When recruiters become personal with candidates it allows them to garner information that the candidate might not put out there on their resume or in their profile. This allows the recruiter to tag certain candidates and categorize them that fits their needs.

If a candidate expresses that they are looking for a 50/50 work/home situation, recruiters are able to put them in a specific category that alerts them when a job to their liking becomes available. Interacting with those in a talent community allow recruiters to build a better culture fit for candidates interested in applying with their company. In doing so, a candidate’s wants and needs are always kept up to date and the data in your system keeps fresh.

Data Aggregation. Compiling several hundreds of GBs worth of data is important to find the best fit for a specific job. Using different social technologies to pull data from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are essential practices for keeping your data fresh. A candidate is more likely to update their LinkedIn when they add new certifications or specific accolades before they would re-upload their resume into a talent community. Being able to pull data when it becomes relevant will keep everything up to date. A candidate that wasn’t hirable 3 months ago based on a resume they uploaded, but not they are because of new certifications is important. Being able to pull this data from other sources is critical to keep fresh.

Analytics. The last piece of information to keep things fresh is marketing analytics. Have you sent them emails that they have responded to better than others? Do they click on certain things in blogs or on your website? Pulling analytics on a candidate’s history will allow some deeper insight into where they go and why they go there. This will help you gain a deeper level of understand into what your candidate is doing online and their purpose for being in your community.

More employers are actively recruiting employees from other companies. Almost 20 percent of employees in the survey reported having been approached by a potential employer in 2012 even though they hadn’t applied for a job at that company.

Enacting different practices to keep information fresh can be time consuming, but the downfall of outdated information is recruiting less strategically. Each company wants the brightest talent for their organization and those who get to them early might have a better shot at having them sign on the dotted line. Don’t take shortcuts when finding perfect talent because they will save you in the long run.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Join us for a HCI webinar sponsored by Talent Circles on 3/6 at 12 PM EST "How to Build a Strategic Candidate Pipeline." Register here. 

Photo Credit.

How to Harness the Power of Big Data in HR & Recruiting

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Since the creation of analytics for human resource professionals and the need to evaluate the workplace, big data is here to stay.  In 2012, the buzz in HR circulated around the need for big data and how to effectively use it in your organization. Since the inception of analytics, reporting, and increasing the need for evaluation, big data has helped the old HR department in multiple ways.

Big Data's Role in Human Resources 

Big data is complex especially in an HR context.  I liken big data to your bedroom closet.  It is unorganized with purses, bags, and shoes thrown everywhere.  You are overwhelmed and don't know where to begin.  

In bigger ways than before, HR departments are tapping into information from job seekers, exiting employees, and current staff using seemingly unrelated data that upon further analysis correlates to one another. Before the use of big data HR was the go to department when something went array. This has caused a shift in the blame game in the workplace.

According to research compiled by Bersin & Associates, 6% of HR departments believe they are “excellent” in analytics and more than 60% feel they are poor or behind. While the trend is still new, most organizations will start investing huge resources into becoming current in big data. HR professionals are flooded with data from all spectrums, from employee data, location data, compensation data and many, many more. In order to help fix your organization, you must look at the problem instead of the data.

Analyzing Human Capital Metrics  

One of the biggest ways to harness the power of big data is to start with the problem and then analyze the data. With tons of information at your disposal unless you know how to use it to better your organization, it’s just data. If your company has problems with turnover, sales productivity, or anything else it’s important to understand which data is important and how to utilize it. Don’t fall into the trap of looking at a wide array of data because it can get expensive. Take the time to build out your platform and make it scalable.  Working in scale is especially important when it comes to human capital and human capital metrics.  

Another way to harness the power would be to clean your data. Since HR companies compile an extensive amount of data it’s important to keep up to date with all the information. Fields change on a daily basis and it’s easy to get buried in the vast amounts of data available. Without a clean and concise set of data all sorts of problems will arise. There are tools out there to help you with this process, but one ex-Google scientist, DJ Patil, once said that this process is ultimately a manual people-intensive process.

The future of Big Data in the HR space is limitless. With companies investing more and research more on the benefits, big data will continue to get bigger. This process is more than just analytics and requires a deeper understanding of the numbers and the root of the problem. If you put the hard work into compiling, analyzing, and researching you will obtain the numbers you need to better your organization. Big data is here to stay, how will you use it?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

Through the recruiting lens

By Kevin W. Grossman

It’s not like the polar ice caps of data have been sliding into the warming world around us of late; we’ve been accumulating this stuff for a long, long time.

In recruiting, companies have been accumulating tons of applicant data, mostly in the form of the infamous resume, although more often these days it’s in the form of online profiles (thankfully). Thousands and thousands of people apply for jobs every day at companies around the world, and all that information goes into some kind of data storage – spreadsheets, applicant tracking systems, talent networks and communities, talent management systems and human resource management systems once they’re hired…

Add to that the other sourcing activities of recruiting lore like name generation via stealth cold calls; internet searching and advanced Boolean search; and more recently LinkedIn sourcing; social recruiting sourcing across Facebook, Twitter and other networks; and let’s not forget the old-school way of sourcing at live networking events. There’s more data being stored about applicants (and potential applicants when they’re just shopping employment brands) than ever before – an almost 360-view of professional and personal.

Lots of valuable data that’s then stuffed into electronic boxes and stored somewhat disheveled in the back room. The irony of course being that once they’re stored away, ain’t nobody digging through the boxes at a later time.

Segue into something related that I wrote this week:

"Put a lens on it for me."

I sat across from him at the table, his team and mine along the periphery, waiting for him to expound on the statement.

He kept flipping back and forth in the proposal pages as if magical insight would jump forth and say, here I am -- buy me!

"Yes, that's what I need to see -- put a lens on this for me so I understand what to expect."

That was only a few weeks ago and has stuck with me ever sense. That's what any of us need in business, right? Give me a lens on "information" I'm interested in so I can make fact-based correlations, recommendations, decisions and predictions.

The ol' what's in it for me shtick. Really this time, in real-time. Because Googling, managing spreadsheets and guessing is so 2007.

Managing data is mind-bending. Even though the human brain can store vast amounts of information, our working memory can only recall up to 7 things at one time.

Easy peasy. But recalling vast amounts of data to make fact-based decisions?

Not gonna happen humanly (yet). Imagine the sheer volume along and you'll pass out. A petabyte of information is equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes. My goodness that's a lot of information. Our minds have a hard enough fathoming a gig much less a handful of megabytes.

Or up to 7 items at once.

But today we can put a lenses on the vast amounts of data we deal with in business and again make fact-based correlations, recommendations, decisions and predictions. We have the storage space and the magic algorithms that make it all happen.

That means that the art of sourcing is becoming more science than art (don’t tell my recruiting friends that). The term is “Big Data” and it truly is big. According to a recent New York Times article titled The Age of Big Data:

Data-guided management is spreading across corporate America and starting to pay off. They studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.

And more closer to recruiting home:

Today, social-network research involves mining huge digital data sets of collective behavior online. Among the findings: people whom you know but don’t communicate with often — “weak ties,” in sociology — are the best sources of tips about job openings. They travel in slightly different social worlds than close friends, so they see opportunities you and your best friends do not.

We’re going to need more data-literate recruiting analytics experts to better monitor and manage applicant data – from outside the orgs as well as in – and that’s what will give companies competitive advantage in the years to come. Not that sourcing pros and recruiters can’t do some of this today, but as the warm data waters rise, we’re going to have to be able to dive deeper than ever before to monitor, analyze and comprehend an increasingly complex world of work and vast amounts of information while delivering more effective sourcing, recruiting and quality of hire.

"Put a lens on the recruiting world for me, would you?"

Absolutely. We can do that now. As Dominique Hermsdorff, VP of Engineering at TalentCircles puts it, "Today, we have too much data and not enough of the right information. Moving from resumes to profiles and profile analysis will transform your data into actionable information."