If you’ve ever tried to set up a date between two of your friends, you know that it’s not as simple as arbitrarily pairing two single people. When you know that your friend only likes romantic comedies, you’re unlikely to pair them up with a friend who only likes horror movies! Recruitment is a lot like matchmaking in its complexity, and the more specific the field, the harder it is to make good matches. But how can recruiters or companies know these intricate details that can make or break a career? The crucial component (in both cases) is familiarity.
AI…A Great Way to Start, but Finishing Requires Finesse
LinkedIn does a great job of gathering people, sending their profiles and even resumes when requested to companies and recruiters. Recruiters post their jobs for candidates to apply for, but everyone in the world can see them and therefore apply for them.
Despite this possibility, LinkedIn does not automatically show each job to every person on their site but instead works in a smart and efficient manner. Their outreach is not random but targeted to those people who are most likely going to respond. And LinkedIn’s powerful algorithm works really well. When you consider that every company has a slight twist on writing job descriptions, LinkedIn is quite efficient at providing a large pool of candidates.
While being such a good tool, a secondary review can only build upon the success that LinkedIn already has. Someone needs to go through that pool of responses, identify the qualified leads, and then further vet them for initial interviews. It can also be good to have someone review any candidates that LinkedIn may have disqualified a candidate due to a lack of direct skills. That’s the really hard work in recruiting – the work that most HR managers and executives don’t have the time or expertise for – combing through hundreds of candidates to find that one person who is best qualified to do the specified job.
Specialization is the Key to Successful Talent Acquisition
Our key differentiator at Trusted Talent is our long tenure of serving in just one industry: the market research industry. At Trusted Talent, we were all market researchers long before we formed a market research recruitment company. Our depth of knowledge of the industry comes from the broad tenure each of our recruiters has in the industry.
And these are just a few of our many talented recruiters. All our recruiters have previously worked in the industry, both from a perspective of doing the work and hiring/mentoring staff at all levels.
This experience allows us to subjectively consider candidate qualifications and look outside the box at the way their qualifications might fit together to fulfill position requirements and provide reliable talent. We’ve seen it happen time and time again: a candidate has marketing experience, end client experience, and agency experience – all of the experience surrounding a role – yet they don’t quite match the request. AI could possibly disqualify someone for a lack of direct experience. HR may even overlook them for the sake of time. But with our more tailored approach, we are able to see the potential, present them to our client, and deliver a successful placement.
Taking Advantage of the Matchmaking Ability
The best ways to “get around the algorithm” involve some work from you. Pay attention to who is posting a market research job listing – Trusted Talent posts our own listings on LinkedIn. If you see that the posting seems to come from a recruiter, feel free to reach out directly to that company either in conjunction with an application on LinkedIn or completely separately. A direct connection is always better than throwing your resume into a pile – ESPECIALLY when dealing with recruiters.
A Deep Bench
As we said, all of our team members at Trusted Talent have worked in market research positions – some for 20 years or more! Due to this experience, we understand what is required from both the company and individual job seeker viewpoints.
This is invaluable, especially when job titles in different companies don’t line up perfectly. To best understand our candidates, we need to break down the deeper meaning of that description to see what skills a certain candidate has and how they align with the job responsibilities in order to determine how qualified that candidate may be.
In the end, having knowledgeable recruiters with actual work experience in the market research industry – who also specialize only in that industry – is the clear pathway to matchmaking magic.
