Guest post from Ashfaq Ahmed.
Continuing from my previous post – Death of LinkedIn X-Ray, What next?
Before talking about Bigdata concepts, let me demystify a common sourcing myth that is widely prevalent in the industry:
“There is no one approach to sourcing. Everyone can have their own strategies/approaches.”
If you’d be interested in why such a thought process is prevalent in the industry, read my linkedin post (to keep this blog short, I’ll jump onto Bigdata concepts).
Bigdata concept is nothing but a structured approach to organizing your data sets and addressing them as small & unique data slices, one at a time.
Your candidate data is scattered in so many forms & shapes, because of which we think & believe there isn’t one sourcing approach. However, the reality is that there is some structure/shape to how candidates’ data is presented.
For example, assume you are getting a Software Engineer role with C#, Asp.net, SQL, Rest as skills.
Below is a visual representation of how candidates would have presented themselves on a platform like Linkedin. It is a probabilistic view of their representation; some would have written all 4 skills, some 3, etc.
Note : Red means they don’t have that skill on their profile but have the rest.
When some anchor skills aren’t present, like “asp.net,” the data becomes noisy, meaning it can bring irrelevant profiles. The data noise increases further when more than one anchor could be missing in a profile, like the below image
So, this is how data slices can be built based on how candidates write. For data-abundant roles on a platform like LinkedIn, one can build 100+ unique searches to spot candidates in different forms & shapes.
Sourcing does have a structure, form and shape. It’s about understanding your Persona of the role, how your data is presented & chalking out data-slicing strategies.
For the last 8+ years, I’ve been training these to tech recruiters & have been actively writing about this on my LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions or if you’d like to know more.