Mining the Hiring Pool: How Big Data Helps Hiring Practices

Traditional employment recruiters often look for particular factors that might indicate an applicant’s future performance.

There’s no doubt that traditional employment recruiters often look for particular factors that might indicate an applicant’s future performance.

Some of these include things like college degrees or a recommendation from a trusted reference.

However, one company called Gild is harnessing the power of big data technology in hopes of making it easier to find employees that might otherwise be overlooked.

Workforce Science

The practice of using big data to mine the hiring pool is called workforce science, and it’s just getting started. Companies like Gild believe that as technology continues to develop, it’ll be a great way to land talented employees, even if those people lack some of the characteristics that generally speak loudest to recruiters.

Using big data technology to find and hire the best employees is different than what most recruiters can do because it offers the ability to evaluate hundreds of thousands or even millions of employees at once.

Gild focuses on finding coders and programmers, but instead of targeting places where recruiters traditionally locate prospects, such as job boards, the program finds potential applicants at websites where people in the computer programming industry habitually spend their free time. Gild developers believe that examining social trends can make it easier to find untapped talent.

Hiring is Constantly Challenging

Say your company is trying to find an air conditioning technician to work on your building’s cooling and energy efficiency.

There is a lot of legwork involved in this process: you must locate and screen a number of candidates before you settle on the right one, and even then they might just not turn out to work well in the position.

Or if you go the contractor route, you will be paying a premium to skip this process. What Gild hopes to do is extend their social hiring practices to every industry, making it easier to find qualified and interested candidates from the get go, and evaluate them against thousands of others so you can truly find the right guy for the job.

Although Gild is currently specific to the technology industry, it makes sense that using big data to guide hiring decisions could soon occur in other sectors. The Gild website even mentions that its goal is to bring metrics to all industries, and staff members are already looking forward to bringing their technology to other markets. Over time, if other industries get on board, it could mean that hiring obstacles of the past don’t define the future.

Factors That Come Into Play on Gild

Gild uses big data technology and patent-pending measurement methods to examine the quality of publicly available code, plus coders’ professional insights about relevant topics on social media websites and message boards. Data even looks at candidates who aren’t actively seeking work, which could make it possible for employers to find concealed superstars.

Although Gild hasn’t been on the playing field for long, it has already been profiled in publications like the New York Times as a potentially crucial way to change hiring practices. Clearly, the future is now and it looks bright, thanks to the power of big data evaluation practices.