Many of us in the recruitment industry talk about consolidating talent data within our organisations. Sure, that may sound like a buzz phrase. But nothing is more important than bridging both, internal and external data, in today’s web-driven recruiting environment.
In essence, such data consolidation allows recruiters to establish seamless ad hoc links between candidate data on any given website and the in-house talent database, and fuse them into a single and easy-to-navigate information pool.
Why is data consolidation of crucial importance for recruiters?
Because it empowers them to find, track and organise information across a wide range of sources, especially when it comes to tapping into a very desirable group of professionals – passive candidates.
Unlike applicants submitting their CVs directly to recruiters, passive candidates are much harder to find: they are the professionals that may be a perfect fit for a role, but are not necessarily in the market for a job, and are likely happy and valued where they are. These candidates are lurking on thousands of different websites.
Where can passive candidates be found?
How about the ‘Our Team’ section of a company’s website? Or on a conference brochure listing the biographies of high-profile speakers and moderators? Or on numerous social and professional networks? Professionals found in this manner are often among the best in their fields, and they are the people that hiring managers often want access to. But until these passive candidates are ‘processed’ through an in-house recruitment system, they are just morsels of information ‘out there,’ and they are not really useful to recruiters.
And that’s where we find the usual bottleneck in recruitment today: Many talent managers simply don’t have enough handling capacity to deal with such high volumes of data processing.
What tools can recruiters employ to effectively bring in and reference external candidates against their internal databases?
At Daxtra, we have a new product called Magnet, a Chrome browser extension that allows recruiters to literally ‘clip’ any professional profile from any website or even an offline document or email signature and match it against the in-house database.
Let’s say you are a headhunter researching competitors’ websites, looking to fill a senior position. Using Magnet, you can instantly check any compelling bio found on a competitor’s website against your database. If the person is already on the database, Magnet will instantly display past history, contact details and interview notes. It will also allow you to add this person to a list against a job opening and make notes on the in-house recruitment system straight from the Magnet interface without having to switch windows. And if no match is found on the database, creating a new record is only a mouse click away.
Tools like Magnet empower recruiters to avoid the source limitations that constrain virtually any search aggregator solution. Any profile from any source, anywhere and at anytime can be pulled from the Internet into the talent database, reducing administrative burdens significantly and building a well of actionable intelligence to draw from.
Of course, the technology powering such tools must be able to operate within multiple styles of websites. This is crucial; otherwise recruiters will spend all of their time verifying and organising a jumbled mess of data into appropriate fields. To address this challenge, Magnet works according to the rules of the natural language in which the content of the website is written, which means that it extracts and sorts the information not within a vacuum but intelligently, according to the relevant context.
With tools like Magnet recruiters can finally bring relevant information inside their organisations on demand, find candidates faster, and in turn, treat their recruitment database and the Internet as one large and consolidated information pool. And that, of course, means faster and more successful placements.
Author bio: Sergei Makhmodov is one of the original founders of Daxtra Technologies and has been in the talent technology space for over 15 years. He now runs Daxtra’s Asia and Pacific operations out of Hong Kong.
