1) The whole “passive” vs” active” dichotomy is false, and should be replaced by the concept of an “Interest Spectrum” where you consider how interested a given person is in what you have to offer, or a “Speed Spectrum” where you measure how quickly someone would come to work for you.

2) ISTM that the premise that “there are huge numbers of ideal potential candidates out there who haven’t posted their resumes anyplace you can easily get their background and contact information and they’re just waiting happily employed where they are for you to entice them wit hyour even better opportunity” is also false, because THAT’S NOT THE REAL PROBLEM. I’ll tell you what I think IS the real problem:

Let’s do a thought experiment: You (and all other recruiters) are able to completely/perfectly analyze the backgrounds and instantly/directly contact any of the 7.1 billion people in the world about your job, and with your “Big Data and Big Eyeballs” System which combines AI and hum-int, you can come up with a short-list of ideal potential candidates for your hiring managers to choose from. Would your recruiting troubles be over? No, because IMHO, the real problem isn’t with finding/contacting the right people (which will become increasingly easier if they WANT to be found [and it will become increasingly difficult for people to hide if they don't]]), it’s setting up sufficiently realistic expectations at both the applicant and the company sides so that there’s a good match between what you/they want and what you/they can get. While both Big Data and hum-int can help with these, we need to remember the old saying: “Against stupidity, the gods themselves avail in vain”.

Cheers,

Keith “Hope I’m Not Too Stupid” Halperin

Jobs2Web pointed out that on average it takes nearly 800 prospects to convert to 1 hires. The primary reason for the this big number is our reliance on an advertising model of sourcing talent. While I am encouraged about the eQuest and GoogleNow, I would be more excited if we build solutions for passive candidate recruitment.

The one thing I hope we accept in 2013 is that passive prospects (by definition) do not notice of job ads, that creating more advertising channels for active candidates will somehow reach that passive prospect who is not reading our ad in the first place.

It seems to me that active and passive candidate behavior should be the first step of our strategy.

Meanwhile I’m reading an interesting book by Nate Silver of the NY Times and the 538 blog:
The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don’t
He says that Big Data is likely to be very useful, but that it won’t be a panacea allowing perfect predictions. He also says that to be most effective (when dealing with people), we need to combine objective with subjective data for the best prediction. (He did this on his 538 election-predicting blog, and he said smart baseball teams do this when they combine heavy stat analysis and scout reports.)

Cheers,

Keith “Hey, the Mayan Calendar Turned Over!” Halperin

Recruitment advertising needs to be treated more like regular advertising. You should constantly be testing advertising venues (ie Job Boards, Search Engines, Staffing Agencies, Job Search Engines, Newspapers)for cost effectiveness.

Ad copy should be constantly test against each other for cost effectiveness.

And figure out what the action is that makes the most sense to measure – whether it be cost per applicant, cost per hire, cost per click, etc.

The data is there to be taken advantage of. Don’t be complacent and use old sources that don’t work. Measure your results, test them against new initiatives and make yourself accountable for driving positive change!