Big Answers from Big Data

I was fortunate to attend HCI’s Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference in Boston last week.  The 3-day schedule was full of great sessions covering many topics and trends in the areas of human capital acquisition.  Among them; Steven van Aperen, “The Human Lie Detector” informed the crowd on the subtle art of reading facial expressions to gain insight into the behavioral psyche of interviewees.  Dr. John Sullivan demonstrated how the giants of Silicon Valley have created a culture of sustained employee engagement through aggressive recruitment.  Other interesting keynotes were the panels on hiring veterans and older IT workers. 

The common thread through many of the presentations was the presence of Big Data in the field of talent acquisition.  One speaker referenced that human capital doesn’t need Big Data so much as it needs big answers.  Leveraging technology to make strategic hires allows for smarter and more effective decisions.  One example of this can be found through automated reference checks, which will be detailed in one of our webcasts.

As a former Operations Manager I can attest to the fact that prospective job candidates are often so eager to get that second interview that they will fail to mention some questionable event that occurred in their past.  To have good intelligence on a candidate before the first interview can save so much time and money.  Without technology, and more importantly, the ability to make sense of the data, the machinations of the manual process continue to grind on, and bog down those caught in its gears.