Of course, the argument is that a really great recruiter should have access to lots of old resumés 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 Somehow, using old, outdated information is supposed to delight a recruiter.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 resumé 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 garbage output of current databases as a gateway to real-time data flows.