Thought Leaders in Big Data: David Bernstein, Vice President of eQuest’s Big Data Division (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s discuss what kind of big data–related work you are doing.

Dave Bernstein: Probably you are looking to know more about where big data is born – the concept of the transaction itself and the residual information. The transaction it creates has become a core base of a lot of the big data. This is the genesis of our big data. We are bringing together the information from the transaction, the results of the transaction, and the residue or the “data exhaust,” as it is often referred to. Everything that is left behind from the transaction [and] data from external sources, which include our customers, IT tech sources, IP reverse look-ups and ZIP codes, government data, etc. [is blended together]. When we bring these data together in our core system, we extract core insights into our customer’s recruitment marketing and recruitment campaign effectiveness. Our core value proposition is giving our customers big data insights at their fingertips. That is, they have ability to access and understand behavior response patterns as they then plan their campaign recruitment marketing throughout the year.  They can thus measure the effectiveness of these campaigns as they go.

In short, we are able to help our customers move from a retroactive or historical model to a proactive forecasting model and more real-time analysis. We are trying to front-load and assist HR customers in moving from a historical-based methodology to analytical forecasting, which is going to increase the likelihood of candidate flow. We work with our customers to understand their talent needs, what they need, when they need it, where they need it, and then build a forecast[for] where would be the best recruitment marketing outlets for them on which to post.

That step begins the process. During the forecasts, we take them down a path where we gauge the job board sources which are most effective for them. In addition, we are able to ascertain the relative difficulty of being able to find the talent in the market they are recruiting in. We help them forecast what volume of candidate flow they should be able to anticipate over what period. Many customers also entrust us to be their media consultants, so we are able to create an accurate recruitment marketing forecast budget for them, which they can use for the beginning of their campaign year.

SM: I would like to talk about a couple of use cases. Could you describe the use cases from the customer’s perspective? Could you then turn it around and explain what it means from your perspective as the vendor? I would like to know what happens the back end for such a use case to be delivered.

DB: I was on the phone today with a global hospitality company that has hotel chains around the world. They have a small recruitment team all over their large company, and they need to be more productive and effective about how they deploy their recruitment resources. Their challenge has been that they are not able to apply 100% attention to each job at the time they have it. It was a bit of a show game, where the recruiters were running around trying to give as much attention to anyone at a given moment. That is a bit reactive. We are working with them to set up a plan that not only helps them understand what the effective resources toward their candidate flow are going to be, but also enables them to understand what type of job functions are going to be easier to recruit for from active seeking candidates across the boards, compared to the positions would likely to be harder to fill.

They don’t need to apply the same “one size fits all” sourcing strategy to every position; rather, they are able to create a sourcing plan that says, “Up front, we know that these five jobs will be harder to fill. We know which boards we should be using when we will advertise for those jobs. With that said we also know we should be dialing up our other sourcing strategies from the outset or in advance to facilitate the development of the candidate pipelines.” This way they can be more proactive about spending time on job fairs or databases that are more in line with passive candidates. They can start doing their marketing in a tandem way or in advance rather than posting on the board, seeing if they get the candidates to send the information, and then being behind the curve and trying to play catch-up.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: David Bernstein, Vice President of eQuest’s Big Data Division
1 2 3 4 5 6