Search Results - cash-counting machine

Blog Post: The Time I had to “Curb my Enthusiasm”: This is not my usual kind of post but I had to share it with someone so you, my recruiting friends.

This morning, December 31st, 2009 I had a total Larry David moment. I…; Added by Randy Levinson at 1:07pm on December 31, 2009

Topic: 02/14/11 - The Day IBM's Watson Tapped Out the Boolean Cash Cow: ssion forever as the Boolean Cash Cow was abruptly tapped out and fell over dead. Let me explain... If you tuned into Jeopardy! during the early evening hours, you watched as IBM's SuperComputer named "Watson" blew away Brad Rutter, Jeopardy!'s all-time biggest money winner, along with Ken Jennings, the show's record holder for longest championship streak. The formidable tandem stood no chance against Watson, which ended the game with $35,734 compared to Rutter's $10,400 and Jennings' $4,800. Here's the significance - Watson is a question-answering (i.e. "QA") computing system that, in the words of IBM, is "an application of advanced Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Machine Learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering" which is built on IBM's DeepQA technology for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring." If your eyes haven't yet glazed over and you're more interested, check out the latest TED Talk here. In layman's terms, this is what it comes down to: Watson took questions in Jeopardy! and parsed the keywords in the clue while looking for related terms as responses. Catch the operative word? It's related. Identifying related terms and concepts is something that pure Boolean searches cannot do - after all, Boolean searching is about looking for specific keywords (i.e. those included within the string itself). Further, the ability to identify related terms and concepts is akin to Semantic Search, which seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Here's where I'm going: Tools that leverage technologies such as PureDiscovery or IBM's DeepQA allow a Sourcer to move beyond basic keyword searching via a cryptic query such as those we've been taught to utilize today. Not only do these technologies make searching more natural and conversational, they also allow Organizations to hire Sourcers who don't need to know all the ins & outs of a related industry from a research perspective. As an example, only an experienced Forensic DNA Sourcer may know related terms that would show up in a resume, such as Mitochondria, mtDNA, Y-STR, CODIS, etc. However, Watson technology would immediately draw the linkage. This means the Sourcer will be able to spend more time proactively pooling talent through Social Media channels (you know, the "fun stuff" that involves actual human contact) and less time doing pure research. In the past, I've written about whether the Sourcing market would evolve; whether we'd allow it to. My concern has been that Boolean training is a tremendous Cash Cow, so innovation has been naturally resisted when it comes to searching. However, I think 02/14/11 was the day that Watson tapped out the Boolean Cash Cow for good. This means that we won't have to put up with mindless brainwashing that technologies like Semantic Search will never work for Candidate identification, or worse, ridiculous videos of supposed Academic Gurus suggesting that Watson is somehow dumber than a cockroach. Because if Watson is... that's certainly not good news for the rest of us! So let's all observe a brief moment of silence for the Boolean Cash Cow that has been grazing through the fields of Corporate America for a decade now. Done? Great. Because all the grass has been eaten (hence the contraction of Boolean training to begin with), and with Watson's domination on Jeopardy!, the jig is finally up. Thanks, IBM!!! P.S. Not only will Watson mark a consilience in thinking within our space when it comes to Candidate searching and identification, but IBM has much bigger plans. You can check them out at "Smarter Answers for a Smarter Planet." [Note: Originally posted at FistfulofTalent.com]…; Added by Joshua Letourneau at 12:44pm on March 4, 2011

Blog Post: Interview Prep- First Impressions: Leaving all the technical aspects aside there are some basic guidelines you should follow when you are looking for employment. These small, but valuable elements can take you a long…; Added by Samara Bowling at 10:48am on December 14, 2007

Blog Post: Chocolate Willpower, Decision Fatigue, and the Bottom Line

The world was recently introduced to the Chocolate Machine, a device created by German psychologists to exercise and improve self-control. The idea is…

Added by Jessica Lunk at 10:26am on May 30, 2012

Blog Post: Recruiting Vegas-Style: Metrics, Opportunities, and Determination: I am a big fan of METRICS. Year after year, they are the best way to gauge your performance & effort, and the ROI accompanying your output. Some recruiters drill down to…; Added by Todd Wilson at 12:55pm on July 24, 2012

Comment on: Topic 'Problem with a client.....would appreciate other recruiters take on situation': quit. I got a call from the CEO who needed a new VP. He signed a fee agreement (position specific) for 25%, and I started making some presentations. My contractor also interviewed. They ended up hiring him to be the new VP. The CEO (who was and is several different flavors of jerk) refused to pay a full fee fee on a guy that he had as a contract employee in another position. We talked about it. I offered to use the conversion terms from his development position that were part of the consulting contract as a compromise. He refused. He sent me a 4 page single spaced email talking about the depreciation of an employee's value. As if he was a copy machine. As if that had anything to do with this situation. What CEO has the time to type emails to me? Probably cost as much in his time as the fee. Craziness, Oi! It was an amazing lesson. Had I been inclined to fight him I think I might have won, but I had no extra cash. Hilarious. Only not. I settled on a 20K fee, licked my wounds and tried to wipe the jackboot impression off my face. Sometimes agreements are helpful - I often think of them as sales/educational tools. Sometimes, when a client is an ass, they are not useful. The disinclination to honor an agreement renders the paper representation less useful. Then one has a whole different set of choices. I've made several placements at that company since then and gotten paid. It no longer burns like it did, but I'll never forget it.…; Added by lisa rokusek at 5:42pm on September 1, 2011

Blog Post: Keeping it Real with Job Seekers: So you’ve lost your job because the economy tanked; now you’re beating the pavement in the clouds searching for work and discovering that the job search rules from way back in the 90’s have all…; Added by Ken Forrester at 12:36pm on April 27, 2012

Topic: Sourcing Innovation - Will We Evolve? Will the Market Allow Us To?: f different answers. The industry is marked by lots of opinions and very little consensus. Some people say Sourcing is only done over the phone by trying to uncover names and titles from a receptionist (or some other unknowing, unwitting employee) willing to hand over the goods. Others say that Sourcing is finding candidates through entering Boolean strings into search engines like Google or Yahoo. Each method is effective in its own right, depending on industry and sector. There is one thing we know for sure, however - more and more (and more) information is now online and the Internet is more a part of our lives than it's ever been. In North America, mobile is about to catch up to the rest of the world (as if we're not already connected enough as it is!) And in that vein, the bottom line is that the most effective and efficient Sourcing is today about finding information through technology (no pun intended, of course). At the same time, the last couple years in Sourcing have been sold as a race for the perfect Boolean string. Boolean training has become quite the cash cow, to say the least. Nearly ever Sourcing conference we can currently attend has more than its fair share of learning of how to type in a longer, stronger Boolean string (with better keywords, aka "Booleagra meets Booleialis"). And on that note, I'd like to offer a few thoughts about the evolution of Sourcing: When it comes to finding information on the Web, keyword searching (Boolean) is not the end of the road. It can't be - history tells us so. We'd be foolish to imagine Sourcing innovation to simply end with keyword searching. Frankly, it's surprising to see the level of debate this premise leads to - in fact, the better part of me has to admit feeling as if semantic (concept searching) is literally being resisted as the next evolution in finding information on talent. Is it possible we have regressed from an innovation standpoint? The first Sourcecon celebrated semantic search as the future - Dave Copps "Brilliant!" presentation was a high point of the event for many of us. This latest Sourcecon seemed somewhat closed off to semantic search, however - the keynote itself spoke to semantic search as it was 10 years ago, as if Sourcecon #1 never happened. In short, semantic search has come a long way since its "black box" days - PureDiscovery, for example, is able to search the entire open-web, real-time, identifying non-obvious relationships in seconds. Perhaps next year's Sourcecon event will have a more balanced agenda ("No Boolean taxation without Semantic representation!"). The majority of us active in social media "get it" that Semantic search is highly disruptive to the Boolean-training cash cow . . . but will the rest of the industry fall in, lock step, and also resist the value proposition of conceptual searching? If other industries have moved beyond keyword searching, why would Sourcing remain 10 years in the past? Or, could it be possible that our human psychology itself wants reassurance that a machine could never 'learn' the way that we could? Are we potentially clinging to our version of "guns and bibles"; the notion that "the machines will never take over", when we know deep within ourselves that we're really not discussing a robotic takeover, but moreover nothing more than tools to make us better Sourcers and Recruiters? The best justification I can think of is pretty simple: Would you rather our intelligence agencies utilize keyword searching or conceptual searching in an effort to protect us from terrorist attacks? I just can't imagine a CIA Intel Analyst, "Ok, Boss. We're safe -- 'Bin Laden' didn't show up in any keyword searches, so I'm leaving early for the day." Sourcing is about so much more than purely research. It's about intelligence. The best Sourcers I know are much more than researchers. Sourcers have an incredible ability to take in volumes of information from the open-web, in real-time, and point out nuggets of insight among the traffic spikes and ambient, non-discernible chatter. Some of this information is Talent Acquisition related, some of it isn't. The best of the best have a knack for identifying which of this information is valuable, at which point they pass it on to appropriate parties (be it Sales, Marketing, Product Development, Operations, etc.). In that way, Sourcing is not just backward-looking research (i.e. what candidates updated their LinkedIn profiles over the last few months), but also real-time analysis. Some information is worthless, but some is intelligence to be passed on. The best of the best Sourcers do this - in fact, it's fundamental to their relationship building with Hiring Managers. When you can provide intelligence beyond candidates, you're ahead of the curve. My question today is about more than innovation and evolution of Sourcing as a new field. It's about when Sourcing, from a pragmatic market standpoint, is going to catch up with what the best of the best are already doing right now. See, you can't keep super-performers in a silo for long - it's part of the reason why they're great . . . they break chains, they smash silos, they make (real) connections, they become indispensable, they move needles, they innovate, they evolve . . . and then they do it again.…; Added by Joshua Letourneau at 12:03pm on March 17, 2010

Blog Post: Reasons to Become a Certified Hadoop Data Scientist: The rate at which data science has been growing has made IT professionals take great interest in the concepts that fuel it for their own professional interests. Not only does it require a solid…; Added by Lucia Adams at 12:55am on December 27, 2018

Blog Post: Northern California Here I Come: I always thought it would be retirement that brought me to No Cal. And then I sold my business. And then my teenager told me that he wanted to go to school in Cali. And then I just so happened to be…; Added by Margaret Graziano at 12:28am on July 17, 2008