2013 Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference Part 4: Novo Nordisk and Taming Big Data

With today’s hyper-connected world, data is created, examined and applied from numerous sources on a daily basis.  How are talent acquisition professionals supposed to understand and process all of this big data?  Michael Hakeem, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Novo Nordisk shared the story of how his firm harnessed big data to drive value for recruiting in a breakout session today at the 2013 Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference.

“People, processes, and technology all have to go hand in hand,” stated Hakeem.  There are lots of sources for candidates.  Data in general is an extraordinary challenge for anyone in the industry and there is a lot of noise to work through to find the data that works.  Hakeem furthered that, “It is both a big data and a small data problem.”  Firms may need to process data on a dozen applicants for one highly specialized position or 500 applicants for an entry level sales position.

“Boolean sucks!” exclaimed Hakeem at one point, “Recruiters should be recruiting not figuring out how to pull people of out their databases.”  He shared a technology solution utilized by Novo Nordisk that allowed 3 recruiters to process through 5554 candidates for 727 openings hiring 127 people in just 2 weeks. 

By setting up the right infrastructure on both the front end and the back end and following Hakeem’s mantra of ‘the right people, process, and technology,’ Novo Nordisk was able to develop micro strategies specific to each community and not necessarily the specific job and pipeline their talent acquisition efforts.

We have one more day of great keynotes and breakout sessions coming up tomorrow at STA 2013 and for members who were unable to attend, feel free to follow us on twitter (@Human_Capital) and watch for tweets with the hashtag #hcievents.