10 Sourcing Complexities

booleanstrings Boolean 3 Comments

I have been asked to list the “Sourcing complexities and pain points” (especially  in IT recruiting, but not just). Here are the 10 points I came up with.

Add yours?

1. Job Descriptions Are Not Enough. Sourcing from a job description alone is difficult, because it never completely defines what to search for. In fact, job descriptions are written for candidates, not for recruiters or sourcers.

There are various unspoken assumptions, such as: “the hiring manager prefers graduates from top engineering schools”, or “for someone extremely good we will pay for their relocation”, or “these are the top target companies that we’d like to see the candidates coming from…” and “we cannot hire people from these other companies… because we have an agreement with them”. “We don’t want contractors”. “We don’t want job-hoppers”. The salary range is yet another point; neither job posts nor resumes mention the salaries in 99% of the cases. (With that in mind, here is what we use to define a starting point for a sourcing project: Brain Gain Recruiting Sourcing Checklist.)

Some interaction is required between the Sourcer – or the agency recruiter – and the corporate recruiter – or the hiring manager – depending on the arrangement. The first several submissions may be mostly for getting feedback, unless the assumptions have been cleared in the previous rounds of hiring for similar positions.

2. Keyword Challenges. When we start searching, we use keywords. The jobs with clear keywords, such as the technology names, are easier to source for. As an example, it is easier to look for a Websphere Developer than for a Project Manager, simply because the word websphere is unique and points to the potential pool of profiles. The jobs where keywords are non-unique (product, project managers, strategy consultants, etc.) are difficult to source for. Additionally, IT recruiters (and not just) need to understand the keyword soup. For example, we know that JavaScript is very much not like JavaC#is more like Java than Javascript; etc.

3. Title Challenges. While the job description has a job title, target candidates may have all sorts of current titles that are different, sometimes very different. To find them we need to be searching creatively. As an example, a Developer at Yahoo! may have the job title Senior Yahoo.

4. Location Challenges. While most systems would allow a search within a zip and a radius, this is not adequate in practice. As an example, I live in 10 miles from the San Francisco downtown, yet to drive in the morning across the Bay Bridge may take a good hour. With our very hot local IT market we need to know about all the subtleties of commuting.

5. Searching Challenges. Many recruiters are “people-oriented” and feel shy about using technologies, specifically, about Boolean searching. Unfortunately, searching can be made easier but it cannot be automated.

I have seen this over and over again: Good recruiters do know if a resume is good when they see one; it’s searching and finding the right profiles that seems difficult and frustrates many.

6. The Purple Squirrel. For some jobs it may be extremely difficult to find any one person with all of the must-have skills. A typical example would be a Software Engineer who is also a good Database Administrator. To find a purple squirrel, we need to vary keywords, drop some requirements and try to find at least partial matches, hoping that the rest of the skills are there and will be confirmed with additional research, or when we get in touch.

7. Large Volume. This is the opposite to the purple squirrel problem. We may need to hire in volumes; or perhaps, we get job applications in volumes; the latter is often the case when a managerial or a consultant position is posted online. Or, we may get too many search results that are hard to sort through. It’s often taking lots of screening time, unless the recruiter has good skills in searching and in processing the search results.

8. Everyone Is Trying to Hire the Same Person. For the straightforward keyword searches in resume databases or among LinkedIn profiles everyone gets the same search results. A potential candidate whose skills are in demand and who made herself “findable” by posting a recent full profile, is getting volumes of recruiter calls. This makes competing for the candidate extremely difficult and will annoy the candidate as well. It takes some art and some science to find other qualified potential candidates.  

9. Hidden Candidates. It’s not that “not everyone is on LinkedIn”. Many potential candidates do have profiles on LinkedIn, but without the right keywords; so they won’t be found. Some people have online resumes that they haven’t updated for a long time. The information, that would pre-qualify the person with a shallow or an outdated profile for a call, is spread across several sources. The Dream Software like the Dice Open Web collects pieces of info about the same person from different places and offers us to find people who cannot be found otherwise. An example would be a Software Architect with shallow general social media profiles but with a strong presence on Github or Stack Overflow.

10. Getting the Candidate’s Attention. Sending an initial message that would catch the potential candidate’s attention is a challenge, especially if the job market is hot. Technical people do not like to be interrupted by phone calls. They are picky. They may react to well written messages, to known brands, and to technologies that are in fashion. 

Thanks in advance for your feedback and additional thoughts! 🙂

Irina

P.S. Don’t forget to add your response to the Sourcing Tools Survey, if you haven’t, to get the complete survey data. The closing date is April 2, 2013.

Share with your peers: http://sourcingcertification.com/survey_intro

To support the survey, I offer 2-for-1 discounts on the Training Library materials.

The Sourcing Tools Survey

booleanstrings Boolean Leave a Comment

March 25, 2013.
Dear All:
We encourage everyone in the industry to take 5-7 minutes of your time and checkmark the specific tools you use.

I am excited about the survey and am looking to hear from many people in our industry. This is an opportunity for all of us to learn from each other and share the tools we use and love most.

Disclaimer: as always, I am not affiliated with any particular tools vendor.

This is an independent survey, targeted at getting an objective picture and statistics of the popular tools in the industry. This is the first time ever a project like this has launched.

We expect a very large volume of responses. We may not be able to answer your emails about this survey individually. If you experience technical problems submitting a response please let us know or try using a newer version of Chrome / Firefox / Safari / Internet Explorer.

This Survey will stay open until Tuesday, April 2.

 We will be sharing the full survey results with everyone who participates. You should expect to hear from us within one week after the survey is closed. (We will not be sharing the names of people who respond, the contact info, or the company names.)

 We are providing a two-for-one special on everything in the People Sourcing Training Library for everyone who completes the survey. That includes the prerecorded Webinars and the People Sourcing Certification Materials.

Looking forward to hearing from you!
Thanks,
Irina Shamaeva

 

Find People on Google-Plus

booleanstrings Boolean Leave a Comment

I’ve always felt that Google-Plus has a great future, since it was announced. Adding Communities was a big and positive change. A recent shift in its User Interface tells me that Google-Plus continues moving in the right direction.

Did you notice the “new” Find People function?

When selected, it provides the ability to:

  • Check your gmail address book against your circles 
  • Search “for coworkers” and “for classmates”, that, in fact, offers to look for people from any workplace and from any school. This is faceted search
  • Import contacts from an address book (a CSV file)
Did you know that all of this people searching functionality has been there a while? The only new (visual) add-on I have noticed is graphically pointing to the number of (sort-of) friends in common; I’ve highlighted on the screenshot above.
The user interface shift doesn’t affect the explained concepts in my recorded Google-Plus presentation available  at the Training Library. This people search functionality was previously buried under “finding people to include in your circles”; we explored it in-depth at the webinar. When I present the Google-Plus again, for now, I will only have to re-do the screenshots. What a fast moving target it is, Social Networks and People Search!
I am glad that this better People Search is now clearly visible. Check it out if you haven’t.
Compare this with the “old” search that has been easily visible all along:
The “old” search only offers using keywords and narrowing down to “people and pages”. (The location facet is there, but I haven’t seen it working properly.) The search weakness is a shame, since Google-Plus has well structured information about its members in the About pages, including employment, skills, places, education, and valuable for the People Sourcers links to other social profiles and sites. That, and given that the amount of information in Google-Plus is tiny, compared with the whole surface web that Google search indexes, should let Google-Plus Engineers easily provide us with multi-faceted people search. (Why has it been taking it so long?) The third party site that implemented multi-faceted search early on, FindPeopleOnPlus, it seems, ran out of steam over a year ago, and now covers only a small % of the total network population. Hopefully, the described shift in the User Interface is a sign that Google-Plus is working on solid people search functionality. Let’s keep an eye on it.
Unfortunately, selecting several people and “rolling” them to a circle is no longer available on the new page, while it’s still available on the “old” circles page. Hopefully this inconsistency in the user interface will be cleaned up soon. I prefer the way it used to be.
That’s really minor though. Google-Plus has a big and bright future.
– Irina

People Sourcing Tools Suggestions

booleanstrings Boolean 3 Comments

I have posted a draft list for the People Sourcing Tools Survey that I plan to run to run on my sourcing- and social recruiting-related groups and the Ning network. By no means am I trying to create an exhaustive list of tools, but I didn’t want to miss anything “major”.

I have also shared the draft with the active, well-run Google+ Community “Social Recruiting” moderated by the Wise Man Say Hun Lee and by Oscar Mager and got some great suggestions there.

Thanks a lot for all the suggestions! This feels like an exciting project, and a way for many of us to compare notes and to learn about tools that we haven’t investigated yet.

I feel that it might be useful to go over the extra suggestions I got up till now. Of course, this reflects my own subjective views; I am happy to hear alternative views and more suggestions. I am also interested to hear more about some tools I am not as familiar with.

1. Thanks for your suggestions! I am adding these tools for sure:

Some of the tools suggested are excellent tools and I absolutely plan to include them. Those are:

Other suggestions:
  • Followerwonk, a Twitter tool; I do not have much experience but since several colleagues suggested it, let’s include. (I hang out on Twitter quite a bit, but I don’t think Twitter is a top tool for finding target professionals.)
  • More than one person has mentioned Plaxo; I am not sure how widely it is used these days.
  • A note on theSocialCV suggestion: it is now the Dice Open Web and is included.

2. Sorry, I am not including these tools. They do not work:

These sites were suggested to be included in the survey… but are they about matching profiles against jobs? Have a job opening, auto-find profiles? Sorry folks, this cannot work. I can write a blog post explaining, why. But briefly, it just doesn’t. (If there are some other features of interest than auto-matching, please let me know. I might have missed something.)

(LinkedIn also offers “matching” profiles for job posts. Ha!)

I am not including any tools that auto-construct searches, as their main purpose, either:

  • Recruitin
  • Recruiting Bar
These could be good educational sites if they maintain good example searches, but not sourcing sites.

3. I am probably not including these tools; some are rare and some may require to write code:

I plan to survey the mainstream tools, and not necessarily everything there is.

Search Engines. There are several other wonderful general search engines, in addition to Google and Bing. But they have indexed much smaller territories. In everyday practice, I think, we would do better if we ignore DuckDuckGo and Blekko on most days and just use Google and common sense. (Anyone has a story about placing a person found on DuckDuckGo?)

APIs such as Talentdrive/Talentfilter. These sound interesting, but don’t think an API can be considered a sourcing tool. If there’s an app using the APIs, with no need to write code, please let me know.

Andy Headworth has brought this site to everyone’s attention: Mention.net. I’d like to mention it here;  Andy says it is a much better alert system than Google alerts. I have some doubts about its wide usage.

4. I don’t know enough about these tools suggested to me; are these people sourcing tools? Can you look for target professionals using these?

5. These are membership sites, not people sourcing tools: Github; Stackoverflow; IEEE; etc.
Thanks to all the great suggestions so far! If I have missed some suggestions that you feel are important  please let me know.

 

Where Is Waldo on LinkedIn?

booleanstrings Boolean 3 Comments

We can still send messages to fellow group members on LinkedIn without using the precious InMail count. But here’s what I just noticed, while sourcing for a new opening. If you did a people search, restricted it to fellow group members only, and viewed the results, you used to be clearly notified which group(s) you have in common with the members listed in the results. (There were even times, long ago, when the send message link was visible on the profiles in the search results.)  You would then have to go to that group in common with the person, search for the same person, finally see the send message button, and send the message. (That is, if you didn’t know of a shortcut.) You can still do that, in theory. But which group do you have in common? That will now take some extra man-hours to locate, if you continue to using the feature on a regular basis. 

To illustrate the change here are a couple of screenshots.

Here’s a target candidate that I have just found using advanced people search. He and I have a group in common.

Here’s the groups section, expanded, on the potential candidate’s profile:

I can see now, which group we have in common! Can you? This is where sourcing skills make a real difference. (Just kidding.)

To be fair, I need to mention one more hint to how to locate the group in common. It is presented in a graphical form: those groups are listed if you look on the right side of the profile and click on the “groups” in the “in common” section. Then, to go to the group, you would need to retype its name while searching for it.

Given how much effort there is in order to send free messages, some recruiters might now start sending InMails instead. Some recruiters may start using other sources more than before as well.

To use the above shortcut, add the member ID and press Enter. It still works. By the way this shortcut has been used almost 3,000 times since I created it.

LinkedIn Errors

booleanstrings Boolean 11 Comments

My LinkedIn account is having multiple problems with the functionality. It’s happening for the second time in the past few months. I can’t use my RPS account (it is a variation of LinkedIn Recruiter). I hope they will fix it again.

The nice LinkedIn managers, who support my RPS account, point out that I am a power user and am likelier to break a software system than an average user. I suppose, they have a point.

The LinkedIn Support suggests that my problems are created by my large number of connections. Now, that is not true (or so I hope!) , since there are hundreds of people with many more connections than I have. The Support people have also told me to clean the cookies

Yeah…

Anyway, being locked out of my account – and feeling like I may have put too much pressure on LinkedIn’s functionality by pressing too many buttons – has prompted me to run an exploration of LinkedIn as a user who joins today and simply follows prompts to add connections.

I had created a test account for a non-existing person by the name of Barbara Nelson in order to go through this exploration. What to do, I couldn’t stay away from LinkedIn for several days in a row; I am used to using it all the time! Given that thousands of non-existing people are members of LinkedIn I didn’t feel too guilty.

You know what? In the first hour of being a new LinkedIn user Barbara could see a problem or two as well. Here is a brief report.

Per LinkedIn’s suggestions, Barbara uploaded some contacts. Not to bug LinkedIn members who may not know her, she uploaded some contacts of “open networkers” who are happy to accept invitations, into her Imported Contacts folder, and pressed “invite”.  She got redirected to her Inbox as the result, with no invitations being sent out. This was confusing but she persisted.

She then repeatedly ran into this screen while trying to invite connections and while trying to delete some of the uploaded contacts whom she had already invited:

Needless to say, cookies were enabled and repeatedly cleaned, with no luck.

Finally she succeeded and got the first few connections in. I’ve long been unable to export my connections; Barbara was able to do that! However, look what she got in the export; these are the last names of connections reduced to the first letter where they shouldn’t be. Some were OK; some were not.

Now, the next Barbara’s experience was something even Irina had never seen before! Look how the connection Randy was previewed in the list of connections:

 

Huh? You see what’s happening? Instead of Randy’s profile preview there’s a window with some pale-colored error report, that looks very out of place.

…The next thing Barbara did was trying out a people search on LinkedIn. She knows from Irina, and from just slightly wrong LinkedIn’s own Tip Sheet, that it’s possible to exclude terms by putting the word NOT in front of a term.

Alas, the LinkedIn Boolean people search was broken for Barbara. Take a look at this example. This is a search for recruiter NOT manager NOT contract (within a geographical area). The results show the second excluded term being not only included but in bold:

 

What would the Boolean Black Belt Glen Cathey say about this? This seems to be a bug that affects both Irina and Barbara and, my guess is, the rest of the members.

This is five (5) major bugs, found by gentle, suggested use of LinkedIn by a new user, within one hour. If I were managing the LinkedIn Quality Assurance department (I imagine they must have a QA department?) I would never allow a release to go live with these. Would you?

 

 

 

 

Mapping Out the New Generation Sourcing Tools

booleanstrings Boolean 3 Comments

The Dream Software, that was the subject of my talk at SourceCon, is the new generation of sourcing software tools. Please check out my conference presentation slides at this link:

SourceCon-Atlanta-PPT-Irina

The blog post below continues to map out the architecture and the functionality of the future-generation tools. This post is “conceptual”. What I mean to say is, if you are a recruiter planning your budget for the next year, please do not expect to jump to a quick decision which tool(s) to purchase, based on the post.

I have recently written “a proposal” of a new Dream Software design – not as much with the idea of implementing it (am too busy already!), but mainly to name some of the challenges in building this type of software. The point being, collecting and correctly matching the pieces of the same profile from different online sources is not easy – and is worth quite a bit! Somehow, every vendor provides some extra features, but as far as I am concerned as a user, additional functionality is optional. As an example, as a recruiter, when I am already viewing a profile, I don’t need extra intelligence that helps me to assess the profile. As another example, I am not looking for social media tracking done for me, to guess that a person might be ready to make a move; the LinkedIn Signal is plenty. As a  third example, I don’t need to be told which developer writes good or bad code. As my business partner Julia says, “Bad developers write bad resumes”.

There is, however, a valuable and a “natural” potential extension of these systems that seems to be right at the creators’ fingertips, as they collect distributed profiles…

There’s an extremely clever add-on to LinkedIn, called Talent Pipeline, that is exactly that type of extension I’m thinking of – in this case, to the LinkedIn members profile database. Talent Pipeline allows recruiters to upload their own sources of data, such as resumes and Excel files with lists of professionals, and attach this data to the system already in place; then access all of the data, both users’ and LinkedIn’s in the same manner. In Talent Pipeline the uploaded data is cross-referenced against LinkedIn profiles (using the most reliable way). If there’s no matching LinkedIn profile for an uploaded record, a LinkedIn-profiles-look-alike is added, marked as “not linked”.

 

Let’s apply this concept to the Dream Software systems: if I could add my own data and create or update the existing profiles in the system, that would be a delight! What could be a better starting point for a new profile creation than the data from my ATS, or the data I have sourced with my target profiles in mind!

At this point I feel a need of a new term. Shall we call it the Deep Web add-on to the Dream Software systems?

Last week I got a call from yet another up-and-coming Dream Software vendor SwoopTalent that has this Deep Web add-on concept in mind. They have many other extra pieces of functionality planned, but I’d say, if they concentrated on this feature alone, it would be worth while.

Dice.com holds a special place in regards of putting a Deep Web add-on in place. They have already cross-referenced the existing ~2 MLN resume data with theSocialCV’s collection of ~130 MLN profiles, as part of introducing the new Dice Open Web add-on. Hey, the term Deep Web would match nicely with that!

My impression is that they weren’t creating new profiles in the system and refreshing the existing profiles while cross-referencing with resumes in Dice.com. Hopefully they will do that soon, if they haven’t yet. At the same time the brilliant minds behind theSocialCV are planning the Fresh-Up system that would refresh user’s own data, such as a collection of resumes in an ATS and send the results back to the user. So, Dice is in an excellent position to get all of the dream features work together. Of course, Dice Holdings‘ base of acquired job boards and software is very diverse, so it’s not the easiest logistical task to merge it all into one integrated dream system, and what the order of the integration steps might be.

As for LinkedIn’s Talent Pipeline, a better market positioning (not as an ATS replacement) and cleaning up the user interface would give this part of Recruiter functionality the visibility it deserves. I guess LinkedIn is already doing very well as a company! It’s just if you have Recruiter access, don’t miss the Talent Pipeline.

Sourcing is Dead

booleanstrings Boolean 8 Comments

 

 

The End of Sourcing Is Near … is a post by Dr. John Sullivan on ERE that is drawing lots of attention. I am not going to argue with this point. Let’s just try to read the article carefully.

Dr. John Sullivan writes: “Finding top talent among professionals is now becoming painless to the point where almost any firm can do it successfully.” The posts says that the only reason there still may be some minor need in sourcing [“phone” sourcing, perhaps?? – IS], is not everyone being online yet.

Let me present the same logic applied to a slightly different field: mining precious metals. Please read carefully:

[1] [Fact.] By now there’s a variety of machinery that can identify, whether there are precious metals underneath the ground below any specific point (longitude, latitude), anywhere in Alaska.

[2] [Conclusion.] Because of [1], locating precious metals in Alaska is a simple matter of using this machinery. Anybody can do this.

[3] [Final Conclusion.] The only remaining problem is how to use those metals in manufacturing.

That’s the same logic. Does it work? There seems to be a logical gap somewhere there.

What about a practical example?

Dear Dr. John Sullivan:

I would challenge you to demonstrate how the wealth of social info makes sourcing easy, specifically in application to this sourcing task posted on another ERE-owned site, SourceCon. I know for a fact, that, using your words, “everyone [in this task – IS] can be found through their “footprint” on some combination of electronic sites.” 

Let me know what you find!

Thanks; Irina Shamaeva

I agree that the selling side of recruiting needs improvement, stressed in the article, but that’s not the point.

The large number of re-tweets and shares of the “the Death of Sourcing” article makes me wonder why the death of sourcing  is such a welcome message – while nothing can be further away from the reality. I’d be curious to hear everyone’s thoughts.

A “Dream Software” Design Proposal

booleanstrings Boolean 4 Comments

Disclaimer. This post is somewhat technical and doesn’t contain specific sourcing tips. It is relevant to my SourceCon Presentation, where I go over a specific kind of sourcing tools. Those tools are apparently gaining attention among recruiters. I am going to post detailed reviews of the tools – listed at the bottom of this post for your reference – here on the blog over the next few weeks.

Here’s a “Dream Software” Design Proposal. Both the most challenging and the key piece for the dream software is connecting the parts of a distributed profile. End-users of the dream software don’t appreciate the challenge! For a human, the connection between two online profiles can be clear, while for the computer it is not as easy, since all of the informal clues need to be formally coded.

If the dream software vendor is reasonably careful and tries not to glue profiles together unless it’s very clear that they should be, the end-user will complain about duplicates. If the vendor is boldly making guesses, then profiles from different individuals will be incorrectly collected as one record, which is, in fact, even worse. (My coworker David Galley tests out the software using his own name; if you are one of the vendors, I recommend to try it out using your tool.)

In the proposed design we solve the “matching profiles from different sites” challenge upfront, by only working with unique identifiers, such as an email address, either work or private, a phone number, a combination of a person’s name and a company name that fits only one person, or an image.  If a company uses an email format, then for not-very-common first-and-last names we can reliably construct the work email address that can be verified (using the logic like this) in the process of creating a record. An excellent identifier is a person’s photo that is often the same across different social profiles.

We start building the database with those identifiers. There’s a variety of ways to collect those from the open web. As an example, we could start with recent resumes posted online and get email addresses from them as the IDs. That would collect a very large number of those IDs. (Remember our sourcing challenge asking “How many resumes are there on the Internet?”) There are also sites that list attendees, members, etc. – as we teach each other in people sourcing discussions and classes. There are lists of professionals with contact info in excel and PDF files. If that’s not enough, there are obscured email addresses across email list archives and the like.

From the unique IDs we go to various social networks and blogs to pick additional information by cross-referencing. We know that an email address identifies the member on all major networks, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and more. If we can be friends with Rapportive/LinkedIn, or just with LinkedIn, we get a head start on cross-referencing. In fact, having an agreement with LinkedIn is especially important; worst case, if this is not accomplished, a public LinkedIn profile can be picked dynamically.

For any social profile that lists other profiles – that often happens on Google+, but not only – we add those profiles to the person’s record as well. Mind you, we are still confident that it’s the same person’s social profiles.

We don’t do much else. Rather, we carefully parse and collect the info obtained by cross-referencing into our database and provide reasonable faceted search for the end-user. Parsing can be specifically implemented for a few dozen social networks and forums (which we’ll need to watch for updates of the HTML formats). For online resumes we can rely on a resume parsing tool.

If there are other proven ways (not to guess but) to cross-reference more social profile data from the already-collected data in the records, we’d implement that as well.

While every People Sourcer and all the Dream Software tools do cross-referencing, we’ll need to be extremely careful about privacy issues and explore how to best address them.

If anyone is up for funding the proposal, just give me a ring, will you?

Thanks! and I will be reviewing the existing Dream Software tools in the upcoming blog posts. I will also be sharing an additional design idea for the existing tools that comes directly from experiencing the LinkedIn’s Talent Pipeline.

In the meantime, please take a look at some of the tools (repeating, just in case: I am not affiliated with any):

  1. TalentBin
  2. Dice Open Web
  3. TheSocialCV
  4. Entelo
  5. RemarkableHire
  6. Gild

Please stay in touch about your experiences!

 

My SourceCon Talk

booleanstrings Boolean 1 Comment

My first (fun!) experience with SourceCon was attending the conference in San Diego back in 2010, after I won the SourceCon challenge in 2009. The final challenge, won by Katharine @TheSourceress was an amazing explosion of creativity. Those were the days, my friend! 

I am coming back to SourceCon as a speaker at the upcoming SourceCon-2013 in Atlanta, GA. If you are also coming to the conference, let’s connect!

My talk will be focused on the “Dream Software” that has evolved quite a bit since the original post back in 2011 .  You can find the back-then descriptions of TalentBin (post on TB in 2011) and theSocialCV (post in 2011) as the pioneers in this type of tools.

Before I continue, let me clarify that:

  • I am not affiliated with any of the tool providers, job boards, or with LinkedIn
  • Views are my own

I have recently spoken with the founders of Talenbin, Entelo, Gild, and RemarkableHire – all of them representing “Dream Software” tools! Last week I spoke with the CEO of Dice Holdings Scot Melland about the new Dice’s Open Web product, that apparently continues theSocialCV development under the new name and the Dice’s brand.

The original outline for the upcoming SourceCon talk is below. I also plan to write several posts here on the blog, highlighting the Dream Software products’ functionality, as well as the general tendencies and challenges. If you use any of these products, I’d love to hear from you, here in the comments, or reach me out directly.

The Dream Software ( a New Generation of Sourcing Software Tools)

In the flood of new tools and sites for sourcing there’s the most important trend of a new generation sourcing software, which I called “the Dream Software” in a blog post back in November 2011. Since then, TalentBin and theSocialCV got a good number of competitors such as Entelo and RemarkableHire; Talentbin has significantly expanded its coverage beyond IT. More companies have joined the space in the recent months.

“The Dream Software” searches for “distributed profiles”. By a “distributed profile” I mean professional information about a person, collected from many sources, where she has some presence, such as the evidence of her skills, experience, location, current employer, certifications, education, contact info, or any other info. Note that it’s a new angle in sourcing, that information on the skills and experience can come not only from social profiles, but from the “big data”, i.e. posts, discussions, and tweets, that might showcase the author’s professional qualification.

The Dream Software needs to rank the search results. Does shared and “liked” content on a professional topic point to a stronger potential candidate? This is previously unexplored territory; these tools take a variety of approaches.

These are all paid tools, and they should be, because building a large index of profiles and identifying which pieces of a distributed profile are to be glued together is not easy. If the Dream Software is built well, and if your target candidates are among those that are indexed, the ROI can be high.

Interestingly, the new generation software is facing a rather unexpected competition from LinkedIn Pipeline, which is also paid and is part of LinkedIn Recruiter. This happens because the Pipeline tool allows you to import any external data you might have and glues it together with existing LinkedIn profiles, providing search across all of the combined data. The ROI can be also very high.

How these tools compare and why you should care will be my topic at SourceCon in Atlanta in February 2013.