Your Talent Database: A Coal Mine or a Gold Mine?

Would you consider your candidate database a coal mine or a gold mine? Are you missing out on candidates when you search your database?  Have you lost a placement to a competitor because the candidate did not appear in your search results?  Have you learned the hard way by spending way too much time creating and then deleting a record after you’ve found it to be a duplicate record?

The lifeblood of all recruiting organizations are the hundreds and thousands of recruiters that spend their workdays (and off-days) scouring the earth for exceptional talent. So, it would make perfect sense that the very database where they mine for talent is chock-full of accurate and well organized data.  This unfortunately, is not the case in some staffing companies.  In fact, some of the issues that recruiters face affect the recruiting process in unproductive and costly ways:

1.  Duplicate Records.

In recruiter speak:  “There are so many dupes, we couldn’t take it anymore.The amount of time and money we wasted scrubbing the database was excruciating.”

This is an unfortunate waste of time and can be easily remedied with an intuitive system that identifies key duplicate words names that may appear differently in the system.  Duplicate detection rules coded in an Applicant Tracking System make it much easier to identify “dupes”.

2.  Fields with No Data.

In recruiter speak: “I missed this candidate since the field was not populated.”

This is usually a user error. Applicant Tracking Systems have become very good about importing and mapping text to appropriate fields so that searching and analytics become easy and targeted.  When primary fields are not populated due to a user, a helpful tool in a database is historical and chronological  activity tracking.  That way, recruiters are held accountable for taking responsibility for maintaining data as gold.  Many times, no data is just as frustrating and “bad data”.

3.  Lack of Intuitive and Accurate Data Searching and Matching.

In recruiter speak:  “I didn’t find this candidate until the search was over. The client hired this very same candidate from our competitor.  BTW… s/he was perfect for that job.”

If a candidate database does not help to identify talent pools specific to search criteria, you may as well be driving to work in a chuck wagon too.  Automatic skills searching and matching is available so that you can literally shave off hours of the search process.  It is also possible to rank candidates in a competitive situation…and all assignments are competitive, unless you are part of a retained search organization.

4.  Helpful Data that could make or break a placement (usually not represented in a resume)

In recruiter speak:  “Had I known that Candidate X interviewed so poorly, I would have spent  more time coaching him/her on successful interviewing skills.”

Knowledge is power.  Yes, there are “open’ fields in many databases where you can add your own  personal comments and feedback from both hiring managers and candidates regarding an interview.  But, if you take it a step further, storing and analyzing employment data that comes directly from hiring managers could  be far more useful to creating more successful placements, interview processes and hiring scenarios in the future. Protocol within the staffing organization for maintaining copious notes and data entry regarding skills that are typically not included on a resume like communication skills, written skills and disposition of a candidate and hiring manager should be documented thoroughly and accurately so that the entire organization may benefit.

Companies that mine for talent in a coal mine are making the process of recruiting so much more difficult.  Consider a system of protocols and solutions that eliminate these scenarios and you’ll find yourself sitting on top of a gold mine.