SOURCING TIP - Your reqs in the eyes of a sourcer
This next post was inspired by Glenn (”The Great One“) Gutmacher.
I can not tell you how many job descriptions I have looked over in my career. Suffice to say that I am merely reading it for keywords and phrases that will help me accomplish my goal. For the sake of speed and efficiency, I would often wish that there was a better way of processing a request than my manually reviewing each requisition. Today, I think I may have found such a way.ÂÂ
I recently disovered this online tool called - Tagcrowd. Here is a screenshot…
What Tagcrowd does is analyze an uploaded document (or pasted text) and create a tag cloud out of it. The more a word appears in a document, the larger that word appears in comparison to others. This is a good thing! At least, I think so. Why? Consider this…
1. This is a job description I found online (via JobCentral).
2. I enter the job description into Tagcrowd and choose the following options:
A. How many tags to show? 50
B. Show frequencies? No
C. Ignore words from a blacklist? No
D. Group similar words? Yes
E. Ignore common words? Yes
3. After doing that, I click the “Visualize” button. And here is the result.
So according to Tagcrowd, I have a visual map of what keywords (or phrases) are the most important by virtue of their repitition. So when I am sourcing people based on the job and this analysis, I know what terms I sould focus on the most. Impressed? Okay, in case you are not, let me suggest a few other possibilities. Imagine that you are working a series of reqs that are very similar, but differ in years of experience. You could add them all into a single word document,upload to Tagcrowd and get a visual on what terms matter most. Additionally, you could collect speeches and interviews of executives from your competition, analyze them all with Tagcrowd and (maybe) get some insight into what they are planning next. (If you remember, I suggested this type of strategy before.)
Just a thought! I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on the matter. Leave me a comment?
-Jim
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Comments
I love it. Great idea. Now if there were a tool that could actually re-write job descriptions into really cool and compelling ones, I would like to be first in line for that!
I also dig Matt Kerr’s idea…:-)))
Great use of TagCrowd, Jim. I’ve been really impressed how people have been using it lately. I can also see employers using it to quick-check a pile of resumes…
I’m pleased to have inspired you, but since I know the connection had nothing to do with finding a tag cloud generation tool, you get full credit for taking the idea in a whole new direction. This tool can be very useful in the way you described, and I hope more sourcers and recruiters jump on it!