The Electronic Recruiting News - Daily News For Recruiting Professionals

IBN: Defining Excellence in Electronic Recruiting

interbiznet.com

Electronic Recruiting
News

Our Rate Card

Click OK to subscribe to our free print and email Newsletters

(New Offer) Prepublication Offer for the 2002 Electronic Recruiting Index. Order Today!

2002 ERI ATS Buyers' Survey Executive Summary (requires Acrobat),

Read the interbiznet Bugler or sign-up now and have it delivered to your mailbox.

Interested in Advertising? Contact Us

Databases As Gateways

(January 17, 2002) An Excerpt from the 2002 Electronic Recruiting Index

Information has a short half-life. As resume databases grow in size, their relative utility declines. The bigger the lousier should be the database valuation methodology but Wall Street (currently) sees it differently.

Ask any recruiter whether they'd rather have five fresh leads or fifty stale ones and the answer will become obvious. This simple dynamic will become the focus of many customer satisfaction initiatives around the industry.

Of course, the argument is that a really great recruiter should have access to lots of old resumes because they are more likely to represent "passive" candidates. Somehow, using old, outdated information is supposed to delight a recruiter. We guess that the prospect of chasing down dead end phone numbers and email addresses is like dreaming about dancing sugar plum fairies in the minds of the proponents of the arguments.

Databases should be self-renewing. That is, if the post office can provide updated addressing for direct mail companies (and it does), there is no reason that resume databases should ever get particularly stale. This level of maintenance, however, is rarely acquired. Like homeless people digging through dumpsters, recruiters are required to digest mounds of waste on the way to a good hire.

This is where the concept of a "Talent Pool" should really make sense. Some subset of the data a recruiter consumes is important enough to place in a pile for the investment in freshness of the data. We anticipate the emergence of vendors who treat the crap output of current databases as a gateway to real-time data flows.

- John Sumser

New interbiznet Briefs

interbiznet is now offering single topic reports for the Industry.
The first offerings are:
   The 21st Century Advertising Agency
   Recruitment Branding Part I
   Recruitment Branding Part II - The Mechanics
Email Colleen Gildea for your copy in PDF Format.
View Table of Contents at http://www.interbiznet.com/briefs/.
Order Today. Only $24.95.