Being good at building search strings doesn’t make you good at finding talent.
The key to uncovering candidates can’t be found in just any set of carefully pieced together words and punctuation marks. If your hunt for talent is a one way street – plug in search strings, find candidates, repeat – you’re overlooking a significant number of qualified people.
Cue Shally Steckerl, President of The Sourcing Institute, who tells all about common recruiter mistakes using the foundational Boolean search method. Are you guilty? Read on for a teaser of what's to come in our upcoming webinar with The Sourcing Institute, The Recruiter's Guide to Boolean Basics and Natural Language Searches.
Traditionally, sourcers and recruiters have been told being good at building Boolean search strings is a key skill to have to be able to find candidates. Is this still true? Do you agree?
Building Boolean search strings is still very much a necessary, key skill all recruiters should have, but it’s not portrayed accurately. Recruiters are told they need to have certain skills to find certain candidates, which worked when the talent network on the internet was much smaller. The approach recruiters should take to the Boolean search needs to promote isolating information to find who you need. The trick isn’t learning a bunch of complex syntax to build complex strings – it’s about being able to apply Boolean in a smart way.
Someone I worked with knew a sourcer who had experience onboarding people, but wasn't good at finding fit candidates. Only one in four resumes were useful and these people were pulled by accident using a complex Boolean search. He worked backwards to get to the bottom of the problem and pulled up a search string based on the resumes that did work, used it to search for candidates and ended up finding better people for the open positions. Simply, it was a matter of getting the right keywords.
In Boolean, it’s not about getting right commands or the right search strings. It’s about, first, learning what information to look for. Boolean is easy to do. It’s math – once you know that, what comes next is learning how to identify the keywords you need to find the right people.
Keep in mind keywords on a requisition can be wrong. Recruiters, start with making sure your hiring managers are giving the information about a candidate and role to help you find what you need and verify the candidates’ fit upfront. Are these people close to what hiring managers are looking for or not?
You're president of the Sourcing Institute and wrote the handbook on sourcing and recruiting – the only one of its kind. How have you seen the hiring space change over time? Why is it becoming more difficult to find qualified people?
I’ve been doing this for close to 20 years now, and a lot might have seemed to change, but quite frankly, that’s not true. The industry is the same its’s been when I got in. What’s different now is the abundance of information on people – there’s almost too much. It’s information overload. In the past, there were only pieces of information on the internet that only applied to technology and IT engineers, and they hung out online and Google groups.
These days, everyone is online, but the internet today makes it easier to find people. The problem is first knowing where to find candidates, then being able to sift through these people. It’s looking for a needle in a stack of needles. Social activities online reflect social proclivities, so recruiters need to learn how to narrow down all the information online to find exactly what you’re looking for.
Today it’s a different platform. Recruiters aren’t working over the phone so much. They need to be comfortable interacting with people online while sticking to their roots of building relationships and knowing how to approach people in a humane way. That’s Recruiting 101!
You've mentioned some recruiters rely too heavily on being good at building Boolean search strings to find people. What's wrong with that? How can this slow down their hunt for talent?
Overreliance is dangerous because recruiters could very easily be eliminating good results. Using the Boolean search method to find people can go one of two ways – you either hone in and find exactly who you’re looking for or end up excluding a large group of qualified people. Boolean indicators work to include and eliminate. The disconnect lies in the way people talk about what they do.
When a search engine is told to eliminate specific previous roles, bad and good fit candidates are removed from the results. Oftentimes people talk about what they do in an informal way. A resume might have a few lines talking about what someone does now, but read further down and you’ll find several paragraphs discussing in depth what they used to do. A lot of people aren’t online the way you think they are in person. When you meet someone in person, you meet the present version of themselves. People online are a manifestation of their past and present experiences and skills. People are interested and skilled in a variety of things and leave behind pieces of their backgrounds.
What are recruiters doing wrong today? What's to blame for the disconnect between talent and recruiters?
Recruiters need to use multiple segments of candidates’ backgrounds to find the right person for the job. Sourcing today isn’t about getting rid of useless results. It’s about searching inclusively to leave in stuff you want, instead of leaving out the stuff you don’t want. Recruiters need to understand how to use Boolean to pinpoint candidates versus eliminating people.
Who should check out our webinar, The Recruiter's Guide to Boolean Basics and Natural Language Searches?
Anybody who’s frustrated with the candidate results they’re finding or not finding, anyone who’s getting false positives in their results, anyone who wants to learn how to identify people from any network.
The natural language search is the best kept sourcing secret to search through any database. By having a grasp on how to build the right search phrases, recruiters can find the profiles of people who may have never been contacted before because they’re using the wrong keywords.
Want more? Register for the webinar here and in the meantime, be sure to check out our Boolean 101 eBook!
