Funnel Search

Last saturday I was imparting training to the sales team of naukri.com a well known job portal based out of NCR.

I taught them about their database product - which houses their resume database - which clients such as recruiters buy to search for potential candidates
....the pupils were new joinees and needed to undergo a knowledge cum practical training on the product so that they could sell it well enough.
Understanding all aspects of the product was imperative.

I found an interested audience who shared with me snippets about their clients.
One of them shared his frustration about a client who always told him that he never got the right kind of CV from the job portal - be it any kind of role
Whenever he asked the client as to how he "searched" the database the recruiter used to say that "i do put in all the details of the job description provided to me by the company"

And that my dear friends is at the heart of the mistake that most of us as recruiters make when trying to search for a certain type of cv

Just like we search google where in we first try a broad search and then narrow it based on the results that one get...naukri.com's resume database(its got 70lakhs resumes) needs to be searched using what i would call the funnel strategy...where in like a funnel we should write the broad skill sets and parameters and then narrow or refine the search

Of course funnel search can be modified depending on the nature of the search - generic versus niche. So if one is looking at generic roles (la sales manager or finance manager or Java engineer) then it makes sense to be relatively specific but in cases of niche roles such as a J2EE cum EJB then a broader search will elicit a larger database pool