Subtle as it may seem, there is Grand Canyon of difference between a database of prospective candidates and a community of talented prospective candidates.

Recruiters frequently tell me they have a talent community, when further investigation reveals that they have a huge database of people they do not know at all. These databases have been built up using impersonal methods including the career website, profiles gathered through the  applicant tracking system, and perhaps  referrals from other employees.

Databases suffer from two major problems when it comes to being effective recruiting tools.
First of all they tend to get old very quickly, and the data about the people is frequently not current and often not even usable at all. While no one that I know of has done actual research on the quality of the data in corporate resume databases, I know from experience and from working with many clients that it is poor.

The second problem databases have is that they tell you very little. All a recruiter knows about the candidate is whatever is in the resume/profile itself. There is no additional information, no personal observations, and seldom any useful reference data. Because the resumes have been added mostly through impersonal methods, the candidates are unknown to the recruiters. This means that the qualification and assessment of a candidate begins after the resume is retrieved (assuming it is retrieved, which is very seldom) and may take quite a bit of time, assuming the candidate can even be contacted. Candidate quality is often poor, and the time to find candidates can become very long, especially for hard-to-fill positions.

Most recruiters do not really actively use their talent databases and instead turn to Internet search, cold calling, or hire a sourcer or a third-party recruiter. In effect, a talent database is a legal storehouse, suitable for printing reports and showing compliance, but of little practical value in hiring — especially the hard-to-find candidates.

You might make the case that a good recruiter should know this and develop his own community of candidates. It might be possible to maintain data on and build relationships with 50 to 100 potential candidates, but doing that would be a full-time job.

What makes the talent community I am talking about different is its ability to take advantage of technology to achieve levels of personalization that could not be achieved without it.

There are three distinctive features of corporate talent communities that make them more valuable than databases.

1. They can serve as initial screeners
2. They are much more personal and dynamic
3. They are far more flexible

Kevin Wheeler, www.ere.net, May 2009
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