Boolean – Just the Basics, Please!
Posted on Thu, May 17, 2012
I recently started teaching a refresher course for Pinstripe – Boolean Basics. Providing this training has given me some great insight to the experience of other recruiters and I have realized a few things about my own experience with Boolean searching, continued learning and how much a recruiters’ ability to grow his/her skill set impacts a company’s bottom line.
In college I was first exposed to Boolean search methodology for a research course I was taking. I had no idea that only three years later I would land a job in the recruiting industry. More interestingly, I spent the first two years of my recruiting career “posting and praying” that the right person would apply or that I would be able to pillage my network for the ideal candidate. I spent those years not knowing that I could use the Boolean search methodology I learned in my college research course to source candidates!
I am sure that some of you are reading this and thinking, “Duh, Tegan! What did you think recruiting was?” What a great question! Don’t you wonder how many talented people are out there in recruiting roles and are not being taught the basics of sourcing? Sometimes, in your organization, you just need to take it back to the basics.
Recruiters are fantastic people in my opinion (but I could be biased). Good recruiters are creative, self-directed, hungry to learn and eager to please. Most of us are notoriously Type “A” perfectionists and we really hate to find out that we don’t know everything. Here at Pinstripe, we refer to ourselves as Type "P." The challenge for a driven recruiting professional is taking the time to keep learning in the midst of filling requisitions and being a good partner to hiring managers.
There is a second key piece here though; does the organization the recruiter works for foster an environment of learning and promote the sharing of ideas and best practices? Is there a leader who is keeping a pulse on recruiting trends and tools and cascading that information down? Or is the organization focused only on metrics and the bottom line?
The math is simple here (and this is my favorite kind of math). If a recruiter isn’t given the basics and offered a chance to keep up with changing trends and educated on new tools, they fall behind in their goals. When a recruiter doesn’t hit his/her goals, seats stay open, productivity lags, employees across departments work double-time (triple in the current economic climate) and the bottom line suffers. Your recruiter’s productivity and skill directly impacts your organization’s profitability.
How did I spend the first two years of my career not knowing that Boolean is a valuable piece of my job? I, along with everyone else in the company, was focused on the bottom line. We were building a business and focused on key pieces of what it took to get there; land clients, find candidates, fill jobs, repeat. We didn’t take the time to look at the factors that fall in between.
Human Resources Leaders, as you look inside your recruiting department or at the recruiting strengths of your RPO partner, are the employees being offered training and development? Are they plugged into what is going on outside of your company’s needs? Can they tell you about a new trend, trick or tool they’ve heard about or used in the past six months?
Recruiters, are you taking at least an hour a week to read up on industry publications, joining professional associations, combing LinkedIn or Twitter for interesting bits of knowledge?
Do tell: how do you stay on top of the ever-changing trends and technologies to ensure that you keep learning?
Post contributed by Tegan Trovato
Follow me on Twitter @TeganTrovato or connect with me on LinkedIn
