If Pokemon Go can be used to entice talent then perhaps the use of town criers and cloning isn’t such a stretch for the imagination.

With jobseekers becoming increasingly disengaged by traditional job searching, lengthy applications and drawn out interview processes, recruiters have taken to more inventive methods to secure talent.

A shortage of bell-ringers in Oxford recently led one church to erect a bell-fry in the town centre in a quest to recruit the next campanologist.

Parents on the Isle of Muck, which makes your average hamlet look like the big city, turned to a viral social media campaign to find a replacement for the island’s sole departing teacher.

Just look at the changes that LinkedIn are undertaking. If anyone was wondering what was in the pipeline after Microsoft’s $26bn acquisition, perhaps they should look to candidate cloning.

Think less Molly the sheep and more a game of candidate Mahjong. Instead of revealing matching tiles, LinkedIn has developed an algorithm to unearth similar candidate credentials.

‘Ideal Candidates’ is the latest feature which helps find your career doppelganger and could provide an insight into LinkedIn’s future in candidate sourcing.

You’re unlikely to find another Richard Branson or Steve Jobs on there, but, that might lay in their rarity rather than the software itself, which is surprisingly accurate.

It shows the intention to move away from primitive boolean searches which restricted criteria based on “and” or “not” filters.

While searching for a candidate clone might be in its formative stages, it does offer the potential to shortlist potential fits from the 400m database at LinkedIn’s disposal.

via Sonovate (www.sonovate.com)