Human Capital Intelligence: Mapping Orgs with Resumes

Did you know you likely have a goldmime of organizational intelligence in that stack of resumes sitting on your desk, in your inbox, in your candidate tracking system, or on the internet? Resumes give you an intimate look inside target companies for which a candidate may be working at the time: the names of business divisions, departments, internal teams, the size and locations of those units, the products, the job titles along with experience that maps to those titles, and other unique nomenclature.

Don't simply mine the Internet for resumes, take the added step of mining the resumes.

Mining resumes can be used to find more people on the same product teams (using product keywords), in the same business units (unique department names and acronym keywords), at the same locations (zip code and area code key words, phone number range keywords).

The key to mapping is, well, mapping. You have to get organized and figure out who and what goes where.  It's a matter of sorting and building out a kind of organizational jigsaw puzzle. And like working on a jigsaw, you start at the corners and edges which are easiest to identify (the top leadership) and then list people, products, and business units under each C-level executive, building out organizational branches as you go.

If you notice that a branch seems under-developed, go in with phone ID to build it out, leveraging the information contained in the resumes. And for those that assume every VP is readily available online or in social networks, that is so very wrong.  Almost an equal number are not. So you do need to do primary research (not Internet related) to ID great candidates that simply are off-radar (all the better -- less competition from other recruiters.)

So before you toss those resumes because the candidate wasn't available or the timing wasn't right, stop and get your brain on. The perfect candidate may be hiding within. 

Comments

[Daren John]

Its a great tip. Another one is to ask your candidates for an updated directory. Most directories are PDFs that can be emailed.

My questions for you: with all of the candidates you uncover, what are you using as your database? I'll assume that is it an ASP. Any hints? Most dont have an 'org chart' feature. Now wouldnt that be a nice function?