Peter Kazanjy will be participating in a panel about big data at SourceCon Fall 2013 this October. We recently caught up with him to discuss the panel, and to get his thoughts about the sourcing industry in general.
Tell us about your background, how you became a sourcing professional, and what you do currently.
Well, though I’m not technically a “sourcing professional”, I do have the good fortune to spend lots of time helping Sourcers and Recruiters do what they do best, better, faster, and stronger!
I became involved in the recruiting industry by founding TalentBin with my cofounder Jason Heidema, having previously been hiring managers at VMware (me) and eBay (him) after we were frustrated with some of the inefficiencies around hiring in organizations.
Currently, I’m cofounder of TalentBin, an awesome open web talent search and recruiting CRM tool that helps recruiters and sourcers find unfindable talent, where I spend most of my time helping out sales, marketing, and business development efforts!
Tell us about the presentation you have planned for SourceCon. What takeaways should attendees expect?
I’m going to be participating in Jeremy “Jer” Langhans ‘ panel on “Big Data” and talent search, which I think is going to be AWESOME.
Sourcers are the part of HR / talent acquisition who have been the most intimate with the concept of “big data” for the longest, in that they’re the ones who are constantly interrogating and manipulating large data sets to unearth the folks that we need to recruit.
But even with that, the amount of candidate-specific data that’s being created these days is breathtaking, and offer absolutely crazy amounts of opportunity for sourcers to be more efficient at finding awesome candidates that are perfect fits for open roles.
This panel will be all about what the current state of the art is, and where this is going, and how it can help make sourcers even better talent sorcerers now, and how it will continue to do so in the future.
Why would it be unwise for someone to miss your session?
The rise of “implicit professional profile”, as driven by the emergence of the masses of machine-readable professionally relevant data , and the associated searching of these implicit profiles, is going to transform talent discovery and search in as meaningful a way as the rise of LinkedIn and the “public resume database.” It will be massive.
So if you want to know why this impacts you now, and will in the future, it would definitely be a bummer to skip it!
Have you been to SourceCon in the past? What are you most excited about?
I have! Honestly, the thing I like the most is dorking out with sourcers who have been thinking hard about this stuff for a long time. Like I said at top, I’m not really a “sourcing professional”, but I get to hang out and listen to them. And when I do that, they end up telling the things that would make their lives easier, their candidates happier, and so on. And then we get to build it for them!
How do you feel about the future of sourcing?
I think sourcing is becoming more and more important in talent acquisition as more and more “jobs look for people”, as opposed to “people looking for jobs.”
That means that more full cycle recruiters are going to need to get knee deep in sourcing, and that sourcing will start being looked at more and more as a standalone, critical, part of the recruiting cycle and funnel, the same way that marketing has in the sales/marketing world.
What new tools are you experimenting with that you find interesting?
Open web talent search, obviously! ; )
Tell us something interesting about yourself that has nothing to do with what you do professionally.
I’ve always been really into sports and competition, from surfing growing up in Southern california, to playing baseball up through high school, academic decathlon and quiz bowl teams in high school, before then transitioning to ultimate frisbee and the ski racing team in college.
I don’t have as much time to pursue these sort of things now, but I’d like to think that what I do, day to day, at TalentBin is kind of like sport and academic competitions rolled up into one!