Automated Skills Analytics and Talent Matching with a Human in Command

“How big is your database?”

This is a question people actually used to ask all the time in the recruiting community. Before we had access to millions of data points at a moment’s notice, it was all about the Rolodex, Excel sheets, and folders of your best people - the people who, at a moment’s notice, would take your call about a job. Relationships were a currency and business cards were gold.?

Then came the Internet. As we started to collect free data, recruiters eventually caught on. A few people started to figure out how to scrape and that was a game-changer. Access to a person’s information wasn’t a premium anymore, but the platform was.

Enter the next phase: tools. Most recruiters are still very much in this phase. In fact, I don’t know if it’ll ever really die off. People are actively showing off how many Chrome extensions they use. They want to know your scraper for this, your index for that, and the search console you built for their most difficult-to-find roles.

There are a lot of active conversations about it every day, most of which spin in circles with vendors interjecting their “feature this” and “sort that” to try to scrape buyers off the very sites they scrape. The irony here is endless.?

Millions of Data Points

Don’t get me wrong, I love cool products and features. But I think we’ve got it all wrong in recruiting if we’re the proud owners of a million data points and the first step in your recruiting process is to rely on LinkedIn, your network, or searching on Google. We forget that most, if not all of us, are sitting on potential relationships by ignoring our database and the records from past unhired applicants and previously-sourced talent.

Ok, maybe we don’t forget. It’s more like since we can’t efficiently analyze, match, and filter pre-existing or new resumes and profiles in a centralized or automated way, we don’t even try. That means people who already said they were interested in working at the company, or with your staffing firm, are promptly ignored.

In any other field, inbound leads like these would be your obvious sweet spot, but for some reason, we have a collective appetite for new and next, when now is the real trigger. When we’re living in an economy where joblessness is below 4%, the real magic to recruiting is that you find someone now - not just that you’ve found them.

The “now” part of the equation only happens when you have recruiters working alongside a machine to filter decisions - what I envision as the next phase of this recruiting evolution. Our team has been working on this problem since long before AI and Machine Learning were buzzwords.?

We call it Skills Analytics and Talent Matching with a Human in Command - and that’s the difference we’ve built into TalentBrowser powered by DataScava. Our software works alone or with your existing solutions to get the most out of your resumes and profiles, delivering precise results you can control and measure.

TalentBrowser helps you:

• Unlock your talent pools, database, job board, or ATS “black hole."
• Search, filter, rank and match all people across all jobs 24/7.
• Gain valuable insight into the people and skills you already have and need to hire.
• Increase efficiency and save time.

Skills Analytics, Domain-Specific Search and Talent Matching

In today’s world, marketers have sold business people on the notion that AI’s advanced algorithms magically analyze information in a black box and then spit out reliable insights. How? They just do. But really, machines only work when humans review their work and teach them how to provide better results. At its best implementation, AI is a rookie on your team and presents problems with accuracy, accountability, and a significant amount of ambiguity.

While the tool guys are focused on features, we’re focused on that human-in-command approach to sorting and streamlining, prioritizing the mass of data you already have, and performing “what-if” analysis on your available talent pool, thus informing your search and merging it with the data you can find online. This prioritization happens in three ways that address so many of the roadblocks recruiters have faced to date: through automated Skills Analytics, Domain-Specific Search and Talent Matching.

How We Do It

Our Skills Analytics?and?Domain-Specific Search?algorithms index, mine and measure the raw contents on individual resumes and professional profiles to generate millions of weighted topic scores and other metadata real-time — about each person’s skills, experience, education, and more — for use in?talent and business intelligence tools.

We started with Skills Analytics because search isn’t foolproof. People don’t talk about themselves with only one vocabulary. Tailored Topics Taxonomies facilitate the creation, selection, definition and ongoing refinement of company and domain-specific topics and associated key terms to capture how you think about your operations, technology, products, brand and more. They provide a universal language you control and fine-tune over time.

Then, we developed a Domain-Specific Search engine that uses our proprietary Domain-Specific Language Processing (DSLP) algorithms to index the raw content on resumes and profiles and patented Weighted Topic Scoring (WTS) which allows users to set minimum “required” and “nice-to-have” topic score thresholds to be met in each defined topic to home in on the right fit.

If you’ve ever used an ATS, you know most search isn’t good enough to accurately determine role suitability and depth of experience or skills. Our proprietary search can do precisely that. Instead of 1-1 matching based on verbatim keywords, fuzzy logic or AI, our search is user-defined, topic-based and tailor-made for your specialized jobs. It’s a tool that can be adjusted by a recruiter or hiring manager or business analyst to search and measure any set of skills or other topics of interest.

Finally, with Talent Matching, we bring Skills Analytics and Domain-Specific Search to work together for you on the talent you never considered or want to learn more about. They help you evaluate each person on their own and also against all available positions, not just those they applied to, using Weighted Topic Scoring, which can be adjusted on-the-fly.

Before expending effort on a new search, it just makes sense to first search your existing talent pipelines and previously-sourced talent for the ideal fit - right?

A White-Box Approach

All of this adds up to one of the most critical elements of recruiting: time. In a world where so many are struggling to make enough time to write a tailored email (let alone source), it’s overdue that hiring teams and recruiters start working with technology that can search, sort, and select the best person with constant and never-ending improvement using:

• Machine training, not machine learning;
• Human intelligence, not AI;
• Domain-specific information, not NLP and generalized semantic libraries;
• A white-box approach you can see, control and measure.

It’s the best of all possible worlds and your competitive advantage.