Mon
Sep
24
Database Searching -- not for beginners!
There has been a recent surge of ‘Virtual Assistants’ and other remote or offshore support for the recruiting industry. The idea is that recruiters can save money and time by delegating simple and routine tasks to offsite workers. These offsite workers are inexpensive because they are either living in a foreign country or are junior in the recruiting industry (often experts at admin support, but are not recruiters).There is a problem here.
Virtual assistance works great for simple and routine tasks… no denying that. The problem arises when the duties of the Virtual Assistant include searching candidate databases.
Searching databases is not simple. The technology interface leads us to believe that it is — all you need to do is put in the right criteria and the right results will come out, right? While that may be true (though not always because the technology itself can be quirky), what are the “right criteria”? That’s where experience and knowledge comes in.
Database sourcing is just like any other kind of research. It takes time, training, practice, and effort to be good at it. Imagine an attorney sending a high school student into a law library to research precedents for a case… that’s the equivalent of a junior person doing database research. Two people searching the same database with different skill levels will achieve radically different results.
Effective searching also requires a very firm grasp of American English. Why? Because resumes in the databases are usually written in American English. The searcher needs to understand what word is equivalent to another, what word radically changes its meaning when misspelled, what phrases are too common to be useful, etc.
There are entire industries devoted to information research; there are university degrees in library science. If you are spending money on an expensive American candidate database only to have it searched by someone who is either inexperienced or a non-fluent American English speaker, it’s like letting your 12-year old kid enter a race in your Ferrari. It’s a waste of money and resources, you will probably not get the results you want, and the whole project has a good chance of crashing and burning.