Remember the good ole days of recruiting?  If drinking and smoking at your desk with a rotary dial phone popped into your head, you are on the wrong site!  What I am trying to say is remember how much recruiting has evolved?

  • 30 years ago it was a phone, phone book and paper resumes mailed to the Personal Department
  • 15 years ago, the internet was starting (thanks Al Gore) and job boards were catching wildfire
  • 5 years ago LinkedIn and other social networks were popping up along with tons of Applicant Tracking Systems
  • 1 year ago, all about social – cultural changes in how and how much data people share

What is the purpose of all this data sharing if you are not doing anything with it?

The methods listed above are different in many ways, but share many commonalities – mainly they all involve data.  In each scenario recruiters gathered data on people.  Today we gather lots of data or “Big Data”.  Again I ask, what are you doing with all this data?  Dave Mendoza, a thought leader in recruiting, not only asked this question, he is doing phenomenal work in the field of Big Data to make our future more productive.  Welcome to the future, welcome to Futurecasting.

Google can predict my preferences and suggest articles, sites and videos around my search habits.  Amazon takes my buying habits and suggest items for purchase at the precise moments.  Futurecasting uses the abundant data we have within our systems (ATS, social networks etc…) and predicts talent outcomes.  Can this data be used in succession planning?  Best source of hires?  University and degree of most success in our organizations?  The answer is “yes”.

Although many companies house this data, most are not archiving in a “Talent Knowledge Library – TKL”.  The TKL (coined by Dave) establishes patterns to make sure objective decisions are reached based on data points.  Imagine, making talent decision based on data and objectivity!  This is not a hiring trend or fad, this is the future of talent acquisition and management.

I could go on and on about this topic, but recommend reading Dave Mendoza’s white paper “Futurecasting:  How the rise of Big Social Data is set to transform the business of recruiting“.  Dave has poured years of research, sweat and labor into this award-winning work.  If you still use a phone, phone book and paper resumes then this is not for you (come to think of it you may not be reading this post anyway).  If you want to be on the fore-front of recruiting, read this white paper and get ahead of the game!