The field of recruitment research (firms) is evolving and Reveal Global Intelligence is proud to be altering the DNA in an effort to push this field forward, deepen its roots in the field of recruiting, and issue the challenge of embedding intelligence in any recruitment research that is delivered to a client.
Putting Intelligence in Research
After launching and running one of the first, largest corporate talent sourcing functions in the world, I soon became responsible for the centralized purchase of recruitment research from an array of independent firms. We purchased roughly $500K per year at the fourth largest bank in the country. To put things in perspective, the bank had about 5,000 jobs open at any given time, we filled about 32,000 positions per year and our headcount was about 140,000. So, the research purchased by my sourcing team augmented the results of the 55 sourcers we had on staff. In summary, I enjoyed the great benefit of learning the keys to delight vs. disappointment when purchasing external research.
Given the experience as a corporate SVP responsible for a large sourcing team and, now, the founder and managing principal of Reveal, I’d like to offer the following view of the different strata and flavors of recruitment research (as well as some guidance on how to ensure your purchase of research is smart and well-informed).
Here’s my (biased) view of the different flavors of recruitment research:
Name Generation– this is a tired term that still, however, is accurate for some firms and their primary product – names, titles, and phone numbers. When I received this as a customer, it was flat data and it was often full of clutter (people no long at the target company or in the role, wrong phone numbers, etc).
Identification– ahhh, more specific, more refined, and I’ll advocate that it should be defined as “telephone identification”. At Reveal, we leverage just a bit of technology in order to amplify the precision and speed of our telephone identification results. We do not “ruse”, “pretext” , “gambit” (aka tell lies to get information) in our telephone identification efforts. We are quite elusive – but not deceptive.
Talent Mapping– to Reveal’s clients, this means, “I want the entire org chart of a specific group/company…find them all.”
Candidate Development– approaching the candidates that have been Identified or Talent Mapped to convert passive interest to active interest and ensure full qualifications are met and that the candidates are also “sourced” for additional intelligence and prospects to pursue. (BTW, ask me about “Inverted Candidate Development” sometime… I guarantee it will change your recruiting and sourcing world!)
Yes, there are many other topics and terms we could explore such as Resume Response/Benchclearing, Secondary Research (we call it PreSearch™), Primary Research, Pipelining, Talent Networks, etc. However, the focal point of this article is Recruitment Intelligence.
