I came across this recent blog post from Boolean Blackbelt Glen Cathey. Glen is an expert in formulating Boolean Logic queries, no doubt. He receives a lot of credit from the community about his advice.  Since he is viewed by the community as an expert I am holding him to a higher standard. That's why I am writing my critique here.

If you believe his assertions you could think a computer is magical. I assume that most recruiters have never written a computer program that tries to identify sections in a text (i.e. resume or job posting) and compare it to what the user entered (i.e. keywords) in order to find something. This means you may rely on experts for advice about what a computer can do when you query databases to find candidates.

At the bottom of the section "Sourcing isn’t about Boolean Search Strings" it he writes in his recent blog post:

"The hard part of creating queries is intelligently selecting a combination of words and phrases, and in some cases strategically excluding some words and phrases, that will return highly relevant results – people who are not only likely to be qualified for the position being sourced for, but also highly likely to be interested in the opportunity (i.e., “recruitable”)."

This suggests that it is possible to construct a query where the computer can read from the resume and other social media which candidates are qualified. Through this magic query the computer also figures out whether the candidate is "highly likely interested in the opportunity".

It sounds to me like "great" candidates use a secret code of explicitly using or withholding specific words and phrases and if you can figure that out you can construct a query to find them.

At face value this is plain nonsense!

No computer can or will be able to do this. Whether a candidate is qualified is in the eye of the beholder (the person who makes the hiring decision). Any candidate can look great on paper until you pick up the phone. If you find a candidate in the database who turns out at the end to be qualified then it was NOT your database query that did the magic.

Whether the candidate is interested in the opportunity is up to that person and you can only figure this out by communicating directly with that person. No computer query will do this for you.

At the end of his post he writes:

"the real “magic” and work of sourcing talent is the iterative, intelligent, and cognitively challenging process of selecting a combination of words and phrases, and in some cases strategically excluding others, analyzing the results returned, making changes to the query based on observed relevance, and repeating the process until an acceptable quantity of highly qualified and matched candidates are identified."

No, wrong. "The real "magic" of work sourcing talent" is NOT about a combination of words and phrases. The real magic lies in all the soft issues that a computer cannot capture: Interviewing people and the  recruiter's understanding which candidates would fit the culture of the employer. Then presenting the right candidates. The soft issues are actually the hard part.

All a computer can do is compare data (keywords, semantic search, boolean operators), count things and perform mathematical calculations all of which has NOTHING to do whether a candidate is qualified or likely be interested in a position. There is no magic or secrets in resumes and job postings. There is no magic or secrets in database queries either. 

But there is a lot of overselling a computer's abilities when it comes to talent sourcing.