The paper resume has evolved into an online social profile. At the same time, the resume “filing” system is undergoing substantial change.
A new kind of system needed to manage today's "resume"
Applicant tracking systems (ATSs), which were initially invented to house digital resumes and track requisition pipelines, have not kept pace with the increasing information and new business models available to recruiters today. The ATS is deemed stale, narrow, and requisition-focused. Meanwhile, the ideal candidate management system has the following qualities:
- Fresh data
- Broad reach (passive and active candidates)
- People-focused management
- Proprietary pools and tracking information
- Tied to internal talent systems
The recruiting community is calling for a “living database” to fulfill the requirements above. The end game is a tool or set of tools that can pull all of these things together. For now, the ecosystem is fragmented, but evolving rapidly. Examples include:
Innovations in a Fragmented Recruiting Ecosystem
Find.ly enables candidates to opt-in to a talent community via LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace data. Once the candidates opt-in to the “hive,” recruiters have a live connection to their data and can perform searches, manage communications and route job opportunities. Find.ly is a stand-alone offering with plans to connect to back-end ATS based on customer demand.
AvatureCRM approaches recruiting from a candidate relationship perspective. Candidates are brought into the community and tracked separate from a particular requisition. In addition to more traditional candidate acquisition methods, Avature provides candidates with an opportunity to opt-in with a social profile. In addition to saving the candidate time on application entry, the recruiter has a direct link to the live social profile. Avature works in conjunction with ATS providers (such as Taleo).
TheSocialCV.com provides a comprehensive view of an individual’s online activities. This includes not just LinkedIn and Facebook, but Twitter, Foursquare, Google, Youtube and more. The information found in TheSocialCV is “public” in that it can be found through internet search (if you know what to look for), but, by accessing it in a unified and searchable way, recruiters can save substantial time. TheSocialCV is entirely stand-alone and based on the tentative reaction to this kind of information access (see the Recruiting Innovations conference session discussion – video is now up!), it will be a few years before it will hook into a back-end “official” system.
LinkedIn Recruiter provides not only searchable access to passive candidate (live) data and communication mechanisms, but also alerts to profile changes, such as titles, expertise, and location. These updates provide recruiters with the latest information on the talent community as well as indication of trends and intentions.
Bullhorn has a new offering in beta – Bullhorn Reach – that includes “radar.” Radar is a specially formulated algorithm that identifies patterns in online profile updates indicative of changing sentiments – namely, intention to move from passive to active candidate. For now, the algorithm detects just profile updates, but such a valuable predictive mechanism is likely to include activity patterns in the future.
Screenshots of the above examples can be found here:
Today, there is no clear candidate management “hub.” The recruiting ecosystem is fragmented across social network tools, talent communities, aggregrators, candidate relationship systems and ATSs. To achieve the ideal state (fresh, broad, people-focused, proprietary, internally connected), recruiters must piece together multiple sources, maintain dual or triple entry, and/or find ways to integrate data.
However, each of the technology types is evolving rapidly to address the opportunity of a living database that is both fresh and broad in reach, as well as proprietary and connected to the recruiter’s business.
What technology will be the hub 2 years from now? Please share your POV.
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Nice article and presentation at Recruiting Innovation, Amy!
The Living database is becoming the future of companies building and maintaining their Talent Networks (or Talent Communities). Your database of qualified candidates is only as valuable if it’s up to date and social profiles enable you to keep your candidate information current.
I think the key then is the ability for these technologies to source, segment and engage with the candidates in your network. With sourcing, it will come down to how well these technologies enable you to collect opt-in candidates at all your recruiting touch-points (dual-purpose job ads, on your career site, on social profiles, at career fairs / events, integration with your ATS, etc.)
Lastly, once candidates are in your Talent Network, companies will need to focus on how they can best search and put candidates into targeted groups and then focus on engaging with these candidates (whether that’s through email, SMS, RSS, social profiles, etc.).
The technology will need to focus on all three phases of this process (sourcing, segmenting and engaging) for companies to be successful.
Hello Amy.
Thanks for the survey of new resources within the recruiting ecosystem. Clearly, a more diverse range of information will add vitality and relevance to the existing data-oriented tools and methods. But the limitations that apply to requisitions and resume-scans can also apply to socially-sourced facts and figures, which can be (intentionally or not) quite misleading when it comes to the crucial performance metric of ‘teaming’ quality.
Fortunately, it will be a simple matter to identify top-quality team players by adding a person’s Coherence and Role (obtained via Role-Based Assessment) to the mix .
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Recruiting is a powerful area for mixing people, technology, and organizational process. Your post reminds me that I need to help my students (working MBAs) think about their whole “portfolio” including bios on the various sites and their own web presence. It isn’t just about hiding what’s on Facebook, but rather presenting the best information across the whole web. Thanks for the reminder.