I have a confession to make. I’m a digital hoarder. It’s bad—really bad. Multiple repositories hold my stash, photos to documents spreadsheets filled with candidates sourced over the years.
I was horrified, almost to the point of nausea the other day, when chatting with a vendor who told me most companies purge their resumes after a set period of time. Could be 6 months, could be a year, could be 4 years. I have just virtually high-fived my admin who uploaded her 20,000 profile to our ATS, what a milestone! And to think that would be squashed.
Those resumes… those old profiles scraped from the interwebs… they’re gold to me. What isn’t a perfect fit now might be a fit several months or a year from now. Conversations started shouldn’t be deleted with the click of a button. And they’re money if you think about it. Already found, already in our database. If I can quickly extract them, re-profile, and contact… why, why, why would I even think about deleting them to re-harvest later on? Perhaps reverse logic is in order… if you want to hire a Director of Marketing, look for those who were a Marketing Manager 2-4 years back. It’s a thought process of relying on what you have.
Time-consuming? Perhaps. Our biggest challenge right now is re-profiling candidates in our ATS that seem like the right fit. There may be an answer. It may be Restless Bandit. A fascinating company that will help you extract candidates successfully from your ATS via machine learning. Brilliant in concept, I upload a req and it searches everyone in our ATS without me entering a single keyword. Rediscovering talent (I’m paraphrasing their catch phrase).
Could it work? It might. I’m kind of surprised that none of the top-notch ATS systems out there have seized on to this technology, acquired it and integrated it into their offerings. Seems like it would offer a unique twist on current ATS offerings. A game changer, truly. But instead, Restless Bandit is marketing to companies, engaging them in purchasing what is a product overlay for your ATS, at about the cost of a 10-hour part time employee barely earning minimum wage. If the product saves 40-60 hours a month, and, more importantly, scores hires you might have missed, it could change your recruiting spend.
If you’re a digital hoarder like me, and purging resumes induces nausea, take the time to look at Restless Bandit.
Kelly is the Recruitment Manager for Westat, a leading social science research organization headquartered in Rockville, Maryland.