I believe in less than 5 years, everyone’s contact information will be accessible to anyone. If it isn’t sites like social sites like Facebook pushing everyone to share everything or hackers stealing and leaking everything, it will be irresistible new apps that convince us to opt-in and share our data. This is going to happen, but what will it change?

As a recruiter working today, having a variety of accurate contact information for candidates is key to competing. It’s a hugely valuable asset. Email, Phone, Skype, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, G+, Snapchat, WhatsApp. You never know what communication mode a person will ignore and what he or she will respond to. Recruiters spend inordinate amounts of time finding and curating information about people. More is better, but what if you had it all?

My team just released a free tool we call Prophet. It started as an experiment to see how quickly we could build something that could predict a person’s email address based on social data. It will also dig up additional social data. It works pretty well. Go to a social profile, and Prophet will try to figure out that person’s email address. In a recent test we used Prophet to guess the email addresses of all HR Tech attendees. We generated good emails for over 76% of the 2600 attendees on the official attendee list (which includes name and company but no contact info). It works surprisingly well.

If everyone’s contact information is in the phonebook and everyone has access to that phonebook, then the advantage goes to those with the best communication approach. The phone is powerful. But it’s what you say when the other person picks up that makes all the difference. The same can be said for any communication medium. The message is key. I believe technology will soon provide an advantage here too.

We tell the web where we are and what we are doing. We tell it what we like and don’t like. What we don’t tell the web directly can be inferred by tracking our phones. It knows our daily routines: 8am, run out of the house! Pause, then pass the cute café selling Blue Bottle Coffee (the line is too long) and enter one of the 4 Starbucks nearby to quickly inject caffeine before jumping on the Google commuter bus for the hour-long ride to the mothership.

By analyzing the digital breadcrumbs we all leave behind, it’s becoming possible to predict what approach will work better with a given target. I see a not-to-distant future where recruiting systems will make predictions and suggestions about what a person will respond to. Not only which communication method, but also what message will motivate the person: “How about a 5 minute commute and a fresh Blue Bottle coffee waiting for you”.

It’s going to be interesting in the next few years. I’m excited to be a part of it. I’ll be discussing The Future of Sourcing this week at HIREconf along with the founders of TalentBin and Entelo. Come say hello if you’re there!

Shon Burton
Founder
HiringSolved