Revealing Jobbatical: talent sourcing secrets

At Jobbatical, we’re in the business of matching people to their dream jobs in inspiring locations. As anyone with recruitment or talent sourcing experience knows, that’s not always a simple task. Matches that look good on paper may not work out for a number of reasons.

A successful hire often comes down to the degree of cultural fit between talent and employer. In international hiring (our specialty), location can be a huge deciding factor. To make things more complicated for everyone, the best talent may not even be job hunting. Jobbatical has a database of tens of thousands of people, not all of them actively seeking jobs. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t leap at their dream opportunity if it came along.

With all of this to consider, how do we make sure the jobs on our platform reach the right people?

We’ve found that the best results are born from a combination of automated processes and good old-fashioned human effort. Data is a powerful tool that helps people do their jobs better, but it can’t fully replace those hardworking gray cells. There’s a knack to identifying good matches, and there’s more to it than keywords. So we’ve established a two-step process for making sure the jobs advertised on Jobbatical are seen by the people best suited to take them on.

First, the machines get the ball rolling.

Our data science team’s algorithm sorts and ranks potential candidates for each job, based on skills and keywords in their Jobbatical profile.

The humans take it from there.

Once the system has ranked the potential matches to the best of its ability, our talent sourcing team checks the results and weeds out any bad ones. This process gives feedback about the results, helping the algorithm to learn and improve. This, in turn, makes it easier for both man and machine to do the best matching in the future.

So what do the humans see that the machines don’t (yet)? They look out for signs of culture fit (or lack thereof), location preferences, and other relevant details that the system might have missed.

Once the talent sourcing in our database is completed, the team contacts the best fitting talent directly to tell them about awesome opportunities they’re likely to be interested in.

And the rest is up to the talent and employer.

The talent sends in their applications, and the magic happens! To read about some of the times the magic definitely happened, head on over to our testimonials page where we showcase the stories of companies that are using Jobbatical to build global teams.

Originally published at jobbatical.com on November 11, 2016.