Big Data Brings Big Changes to Recruiting

It’s no secret that companies — particularly small businesses and startups — face challenges when it comes to finding and hiring the best possible talent. While it’s true that the age of the internet has made a wealth of information available on potential candidates, wading through all that data can be a considerable time (and money) suck. It’s enough to make you miss the good old days when referrals were the only way to find employees. (In fact, referrals are still an important factor, but more on that later.)

What’s certain is that big data is the future of job recruiting and development, and understanding how to make sense of it will be critical to a company’s success. These days, big data is helping fast growing companies find their perfect engineers, developers and executives. And everyone can say they have access to big data with LinkedIn, G+ and other profiles on the web. However, you can’t just “data mine” your way to the right candidate; you need the right tools to analyze it, and the right people who can provide meaningful insight.

There’s no shortage of workforce analytics and applicant tracking systems designed for recruiting purposes, and many are great at gathering and aggregating “transactional information.” But the trick isn’t merely in collecting the data–it’s in interpreting it, and understanding the importance (or lack thereof of) each data point. Systems like Hadoop are great at gathering large amounts of data, but there’s still a fundamental problem, because people don’t know what they don’t know.

Today, recruiters need to be able to understand big data, which boils down to discovery, visualization and insight. The best recruiting teams will use technology that bubbles up the right candidates, and know how to weight the data points to provide the best possible fits for a position. Also, remember that personal interaction and communication provide perhaps more important data than massive amounts of publicly available data. Did a candidate respond to an email? Show up for an interview? And of course there are the personal referrals and references, which should carry a lot of weight in a matching algorithm.

In other words, recruiting is moving toward an E2E transaction model, which is already in full-effect with companies like Redfin and Airbnb — both technology companies that heavily invest in people on both the front- and back-ends. The goal with the end-to-end model is to deliver the best service and experience, thereby helping people and companies reach their full potential.

And isn’t that exactly where recruiting should be focused?

At the end of the day, big data — when used properly — is a good thing for everyone involved. Recruiters can save time, companies will get positions filled by the right candidates more quickly, and candidates will be matched with the jobs of their dreams.