A Recruitment technology Puddle

Next week I will be at TruLondon and have the pleasure of leading two tracks, The Talent Puddle and Technology Shopping List.

My co-track-leader, Alan Whitford developed the concept of 'The Talent Puddle'. As I understand it, Alan believes that recruiters should focus their attention on a small group of candidates, the puddle, rather than trying to spread themselves too thinly to cover the whole talent pool.

I agree with this in that I think it's a good idea to segment candidates to better understand them, communicate with them and meet their needs. Unfortunately this is not actually what I see happening in practise. What I see happening is that recruiters are swamped with too many unplaceable candidates and end up ignoring large numbers of them simply so that they can cope with a more manageable number.

This, in my mind, is entirely due to poor information management. If recruiters can manage their information in a way that they feel in control and can get simple visibility of what’s going on, then the problem is solved.

With clever recruitment software and information management a recruiter can choose the most appropriate group of candidates to communicate with for any one assignment. This group is not a static puddle but rather a dynamic splash. Easily and instantly created for a single purpose. So by focusing attention on one part of the talent pool and creating a splash, ripples will be sent in all directions and the best candidates will rise to the surface.

My second track is with Steve Boese and Sarah White talking about a ‘Technology Shopping List’.

Given my work in Intelligence Software it may be slightly contradictory but I’m actually quite a technophobic technologist. That is I really don’t get that excited about new technology but I do get excited about new ideas and new ways of using technology to work smarter. It’s not the technology, its what you do with it that counts.
This is the reason why, when I receive calls from people wanting of buy our software, I’m quite disappointed. Do they not realize, Intelligence Software doesn’t sell Software, we sell Intelligence!

Some people will approach us with very set ideas about exactly the software features they want but with little understanding about what they are trying to achieve. This is as strange as if I went to them to recruit a candidate, tell them where to advertise and how to head hunt but not understand the reason I wanted to fill the job or what the candidate was being employed to do.

The idea therefore of a Technology Shopping List has again missed the mark. So next week I will be there doing my best to promote a ‘Working Smarter’ shopping list and a ‘Making More Placements’ shopping list. If I can get just one person to sign up to this idea then they might just be interested in buying our software.

I have made two short videos talking about these tracks available here. See you at truLondon.

Shane McCusker

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Comment by Peter Gold on February 10, 2010 at 12:04pm: Shane

Some great points and I'll be on your bench with this one! See you next week.

Peter

Comment by Shane McCusker on February 10, 2010 at 1:09pm: Thanks Peter, Look forward to seeing you there.
Shane

Comment by Alan Whitford on February 16, 2010 at 12:22pm: I am looking forward to expanding this topic with Shane as one of the 4 tracks I lead over the two days. The Talent Puddle evolved as a way of seeing how you can get value from the Talent Pool - which in today's market is actually itself a subset of the Talent Ocean. And Shane will describe how he believes we really are looking at the dynamic puddle, or the Talent Splash. Peter will actually add some real value to the debate - and we look forward to plenty of comments.