Talent42 Keynote: The Current and Future State of Talent Sourcing

The Current and Future State of Sourcing
Glen Cathey
V.P. Sourcing and Recruiting
Center of Expertise

Who is this guy?
VP, Sourcing and Recruiting COE
• Lead Randstad Sourceright's (RPO) Sourcing Center of Excellence
from Alpharetta, GA, U.S.A.
• 70,000+ hires annually (Honeywell & Cisco 2 largest clients)
16+ years in recruiting (B.G. – before Google)
• I.T. (commercial & Federal), H.I.T., Engineering
• Sourcer & recruiter training (1,000+)
Sourcing/Recruiting Blogger
• www.booleanblackbelt.com
• 15K+ unique visitors per week from >100 countries
Creator of:
• Sourcing Maturity Model, Agile Sourcing Methodology, Probabilistic &
Exhaustive Sourcing, Dark Matter/Hidden Talent Pool concepts
Speaker
• 5X (soon to be 7X) LinkedIn Talent Connect speaker (US, CA, UK), 6X
SourceCon speaker, 2X ATC (Sydney & Melbourne), 2X TruLondon,
1X Talent42 
LinkedIn Certified, #20 globally, #1 in Seattle 
Glen Cathey / Future of Sourcing
Tough Tech Fills:
• SAN engineer w/Yankee White
• TS/SCI full scope poly swe's
• mod_perl developer
• Vignette Portal Architect (100K
users)
• DRSN engineers
• Exchange Engineer (500K+ users)

Sourcing will always be necessary
Source: LinkedIn & Lou Adler

Unprecedented access
Today, recruiting organizations have access to unprecedented
volumes of human capital data.
- Conventional: ATS + online resume databases
- Social: The entire rapidly expanding social media universe
- Deep web: several orders of magnitude larger than the surface web
225M+ users
500M+ users
1B+ users
500M+ users

With so much data…
Why isn't it any easier to find
talent?

The current state of sourcing
• Heavy focus on and interest in sourcing tips, tricks and hacks rather
than methodologies
• Many ATS's still offer (extremely) poor search capability
• Sentiment that sourcing LinkedIn is "easy" and concern over heavy
reliance
• Sourcers seek answers rather than learning the how & why
• Few purpose-built sourcing tools (structured, deep human capital)
• Search providers continue to "dummy down" search interfaces and
functionality, promise to do the "thinking" for you
• Candidate messaging not significantly different than 10 years ago

What do you think?
Is sourcing today 10 years more
sophisticated than 2003?
Has there been any significant shift
in sourcer/ recruiter behavior?
Have we significantly reduced time
to fill or increased quality of hire?

Access ≠ competitive advantage
Source: John Zappe, SourceCon blog
And?

Source: Suzanne Chadwick, The Social Recruiter blog
Good question, but lazy
recruiters create lazy
recruiting, regardless of
source. Most sourcers and
recruiters use perhaps 20-
30% of the available talent
on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn
opportunity is largely
untapped by the average
recruiter.

All searches "work."
Everyone's a winner!

As LinkedIn grows, finding
the right people, and all of
the best people becomes
more challenging –
separating the signal from
ever increasing "noise."

Sourcing on LinkedIn is like fishing the Pacific Ocean

Glen Cathey / Future of Sourcing Beinecke Library, Yale University
What is the value of data/information?
If you can't find what you need when you need it, it's worthless

"Has it really?"
Glen Cathey

…has it really?
Source: YouTube: Google Analytics In Real Life - Site Search

In reality…
No system or database will ever "know" what you want or
need, nor can they determine "relevance"
"With most existing online systems, a user makes an
information request in a couple of words, and the search
engine returns a list of documents ranked by relevance.
Search technologists are busily working on relevance-
ranking algorithms and question-answering systems so
that they can read as much as possible into a query
without asking any more of the user. But information-
retrieval researchers suggest that these approaches
have reached a point of diminishing returns. A search
engine cannot reliably surmise the user's intent from a
single query."
Daniel Tunkelang
• Head of Query Understanding at LinkedIn
• Former Tech Lead at Google, Chief Scientist
at Endeca

HCIR
Human–computer information retrieval (HCIR) is the
study of information retrieval techniques that bring human
intelligence into the search process.
This term human–computer information retrieval was coined
by Gary Marchionini in a series of lectures delivered between
2004 and 2006.[4] Marchionini’s main thesis is that "HCIR
aims to empower people to explore large-scale information
bases but demands that people also take responsibility for
this control by expending cognitive and physical energy."
Source: Wikipedia

“Society has reached the point where one can push a button and be
immediately deluged with…information. This is all very convenient, of
course, but if one is not careful there is a danger of losing the ability to
think. We must remember that in the end it is the individual human
being who must solve the problems.”
Eiji Toyoda
• Former President and Chairman of
Toyota Motor Corporation
• Major contributor to the development
of Kaizen and the Toyota Way
• Probably would have pwned
sourcing/recruiting

“There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked
solutions. Nothing pains people more than having to think."
Martin Luther King Jr.
• American clergyman, activist, and
leader in the African-American Civil
Rights Movement.
• He is best known for his role in the
advancement of civil rights using
nonviolent civil disobedience
• Nobel Peace Prize winner
• Born in Atlanta (sorry S7!)

“The flood of data means more noise (i.e., irrelevant/useless
information) but not necessarily more signal (i.e., relevant results)”
Often we expect too much of computers and not enough of ourselves.
People blame systems “ when they should be asking better questions.”
Nate Silver
• Principal, FiveThirtyEight
• Author, The Signal and the Noise:
Why So Many Predictions Fail-but
Some Don't
• Correctly predicted 50 out of 50 states
in the 2012 presidential election

Beyond Boolean & Google
Sourcing is so much more than Internet
search via Boolean strings - it's about
information retrieval.
Information Retrieval is the science of
searching for documents, information
within documents, and searching
relational databases and the Internet.
An information retrieval process begins
when a user enters a query into a
system.
Queries are formal statements of
information needs.

When it comes to sourcing…
What's your need?

Your real sourcing needs…
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
DegreeofPredictiveControl
Critical Candidate Variables
Job Posting Data-Based Sourcing
That's a lot to ask to
accomplish in a Boolean
search string! However, it
can be accomplished with
high ROI resources –
highly searchable systems
leveraging deep human
capital data.
Sourcing via human
capital data yields a
significantly higher degree
of predictive control over
more critical candidate
qualification and matching
variables than job posting.

Search ROI – prioritize appropriately!
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
0 2 4 6 8 10
DataDepth
Searchability
Average
ATS
Internet
(Resumes)
Job Board
Resume
Databases
LinkedIn Recruiter
Internet (non-
resume)
Facebook
(Graph Search)
Twitter
Talent Warehouse

SOCIAL & BIG DATA SOLUTIONS

LinkedIn Recruiter
LinkedIn has the opportunity to
evolve into a full-blown CRM
solution.
LIR already has the capability of
uploading CV's and offers
increasingly searchable candidate
metadata.
A more robust candidate
communication platform could be
all that is necessary to establish LIR
as *the* CRM of choice.

Facebook Graph Search

Graph Search – suggested searches

"Big data" sourcing solutions

Dice Open Web – search interface

Dice Open Web – example results page

Dice Open Web – example result

Dice Open Web – straight to stack overflow

Dice Open Web – straight to Github

Entelo – search interface and results page

Entelo – example of single result

Entelo – candidate contact options

Entelo Button – easy social cross referencing

Entelo – Predictive Analytics Engine
Entelo sent out email alerts for approximately 400 professionals and monitored
their job activity over 90 days. At the end of that period, 24 percent had taken
a new job, compared to the 3.1 percent of the general population of passive
candidates who did in the same time frame.
Professionals identified by Entelo Sonar are seven times more likely than an
average job seeker to leave their existing position in the 90-day period
following a Sonar alert.

TalentBin – example search results

TalentBin – profile matching (similar to)

TalentBin – exploring interests (Gitub repos, stackoverflow activity, etc.)

TalentBin – free Chrome extension

Gild – Algorithmic Sourcing/Recruiting

Gild – example result & score

Gild – ranking/scoring and projects

Gild Source – Chrome extension - LinkedIn

Gild Source – Chrome extension - Gmail

THE FUTURE OF SOURCING

The future state of sourcing
• Heavy focus on and interest in sourcing methodologies and a
disciplined approach to the retrieval, analysis and action upon human
capital data
• Manual Internet mining disappears
• More purpose-built sourcing tools (structured, deep human capital)
• ATS's leveraging best-in-class search/retrieval (Lucene, dtSearch, etc.)
• Search providers "smart-up" search interfaces and functionality and
involve/communicate with users
• Human sourcers will not be replaced by matching algorithms (sorry vendors)
• Sourcing (finally!) matches marketing in segmentation and messaging

The Talent Acquisition Team of the Future

The value of data
"When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to
understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary
scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the
successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st
century, those who wield it well, the Samurai."
- Jonathan Rosenberg, former SVP of Product Management @ Google
"We have clearly entered an economy in which talent is considered a
critical and scarce commodity. When this happens, companies should get
smarter about every single talent decision. Enter the world of 'data-
driven people decision-making.'"
- Deloitte

What sourcers of the future will be doing…
"Text mining, also referred to as text
data mining, roughly equivalent to text
analytics, refers to the process of deriving
high-quality information from text."
Source: Wikipedia
"Information, in its most restricted technical
sense, is a sequence of symbols that can be
interpreted as a message."
"The most valuable commodity I know of is
information, wouldn't you agree?"
- Gordon Gekko

Sourcing & Big Data and Analytics
Insightful comment on the HBR article
from a data scientist with a Ph.D in
Machine Learning:
"I am not convinced that you can automate the
insight part. I work in a large corporation and we
have a very nice "big data" infrastructure (we
have had an analytics platform for years). The
biggest challenge is finding interesting questions
that we need answers for. As a Data Scientist
(background in machine learning, optimization,
data mining etc.), I am not a domain expert in
any of the business units that generated the
data. If I don't know what questions are, how
can an algorithm that I write get me insights? In
summary, we always need someone to generate
hypotheses and data will help us verify that
hypotheses."
The real power of "Big Data" isn't the data – it lies in
the discovery and communication of meaningful
patterns in data (aka analytics).
• Where do our best employees come from? (specific
schools, companies, industries, etc.)
• What is the “DNA” of our best employees? (degrees,
prior experience, backgrounds, demographics,
personality traits, interests, etc.)
• How can we more effectively and consistently find and
recruit our ideal employee profile?
• Who are our best managers?
• Do we really need to hire people with prior industry
experience?
• Should we biased against “job hoppers?”
• How can we leverage assessments to increase our
quality of hire?
• Does our interview process really “work?”
• Do reference checks actually have any value?
• Who should I be giving new challenges to/promoting?
• Who is likely to quit in the next 6 months?
• Where are our talent gaps today, and what will they be
in near future?
• What are our most effective sources of talent, and why?
Questions Recruiters Can & Should be Asking
Source: HBR Blog Network – "The Value of Big Data isn't the Data"

Analyzing massive data sets (30K – 100K
employees), Evolv has identified undervalued
characteristics and discovered non-intuitive
insights, such as:
• For hourly workers, people who fill out online
applications with 3rd party browsers (Firefox or
Chrome) rather than IE perform better and change
jobs less often
• For call center employees, people with a criminal
background actually perform a bit better than those
who do not, and "job hoppers" are no more likely to
quickly quit than those who have stayed in previous
jobs for long periods of time
• It is unnecessary to hire people with experience in a
similar role for some positions, because they found
the probability of survival at 180 days to be virtually
identical
Source: The Economist, Robot Hiring
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21575820-how-software-helps-
firms-hire-workers-more-efficiently-robot-recruiters
Non-Intuitive Insights

A large financial services firm believed that employees with good
grades who came from highly respected universities made good sales
performers.
Source: Forbes, Josh Bersin
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/02/17/bigdata-in-human-resources-talent-analytics-comes-of-age/
Sales productivity and
turnover analysis was
performed for new sales
employees over their
first 2 years of
employment and
correlated with total
performance and
retention against
various demographic
factors.
Challenging Conventional Wisdom

®Evolution in sourcing & recruiting
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing
opponents and making them see the light, but rather
because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation
grows up that is familiar with it."*
Max Plank
• German theoretical physicist
• Originated quantum theory
• Nobel prize winner
• Hung out with Albert Einstein
• Would have been an awesome tech
recruiter
* Translation: Evolve or die and
be replaced by the sourcers and
recruiters of the future

Questions?

Talent42 Keynote: The Current and Future State of Talent Sourcing

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