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- Stephen Blackmore
Increased number of companies have invested in big data technologies in 2013, leading Gartner to call it the ‘year of big data’. But how can recruitment businesses turn big data into insight that they can use? Stephen Blackmore explains
The current surge in interest in big data is fuelled by two key trends: recognition that there is a mass of information now publicly available on the internet, and the maturity and accessibility of the supporting technologies.
Certainly the ability to search the internet, capture and analyse vast amounts of unstructured data is enabling opportunities for new recruitment processes. Big data analytics is already being used to understand ‘vacancy scraping’ – assessing vacancy information to identify areas in which a requirement for particular skills quickly appears. It is also enabling organisations to search across geographic areas to identify candidates.
Strategic value
However, while this mass of social data can provide additional insight to recruiters, its long term value may be questionable. Individuals – especially those who are highly skilled and in demand – are increasingly restricting access to online information.
In the medium term, and certainly in the case of corporate in-house talent teams, there are likely to be more strategic benefits to be derived from the analysis of existing internal data.
Using analytics to explore internal data can not only identify gaps in the current skills landscape, but also predict potential shortfalls in talent required to service a company’s business objectives in the medium term. Once corporate talent departments have established where their gaps are, they can explore and exploit the new options for locating, attracting, training and communicating with candidates.
Data verification
Once the correct tools have been put in place companies have to find robust processes for extracting and analysing external data. These data sources are valuable, but their value is unverified and unsubstantiated – unlike the internal database of candidates that most organisations have invested heavily in creating. Organisations cannot risk compromising internal data in the race to explore the depths of external information.
For example, organisations must ensure that internal existing candidates and the sourced external candidate is the same person – current technology should be comparing multiple record fields to guarantee an accurate match before records are merged to ensure the candidate information remains robust, resilient and clean.
Furthermore, big data can only deliver great insight when used in conjunction with a workable analytical tool. Any technology must have the ability to turn vast amounts of retrievable data into something that is commercially useful and operationally relevant.
Big data is compelling, although there is unlikely to be a solution to deploying it which fits all organisations. The process of adopting a big data solution is likely to be bespoke and will demand an understanding of its impact on day-to-day processes.
Stephen Blackmore is head of sales at DaXtra Technologies
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