This is Part 1 of our two-part series, “How to Effectively Engage Modern Tech Candidates.” Read Part 2: Best Engagement Practices with Tech Candidates.
Protecting the Quality of Your Candidate Database
Fake profiles are frustrating. Regardless of the reasons or intent of those responsible for creating them, nothing good comes from a situation where a person or company misrepresents themselves. Sourcing is a taxing exercise, and these profiles add static to a process where everyone:
- Wants to connect with the right candidates as quickly as possible
- Needs to ensure those candidates are real and accurately representing themselves
- Strives to focus more on hiring and less on sourcing each day
When a newly dedicated Dice Candidate Quality team formed in early 2019, this is exactly the problem we set out to solve, and it was clear all of the players in the industry were taking a beating. As we would later learn, LinkedIn acted on 21.6 million fake accounts between January and June 2019.
A New Approach
We knew we needed more focus and better tools for identifying and purging this data, and we needed to ensure we could continue delivering the highest quality experience for our clients.
While Dice has always responded to reports of profiles that violate our terms and conditions, we recognized the need to improve our strategy. Quickly responding to client reports was no longer enough; we needed a proactive way to find these profiles before our clients did.
In 2019, we made the following investments:
- Dedicated teams focused on quality, including a Compliance team that investigates every complaint about data or candidate quality
- Better tools for identifying and purging fake profiles, using world-class fraud detection software that augments our ability to find, review, and act
- Instituting powerful automation and AI strategies to evaluate the behavior of an account and assess the risk of allowing them into our search results
- Flexibility for our clients to decide whether to consider recruiter-represented candidates in searches and applications
The Importance of Accountability
After much hard work and focus, Dice hired an independent third party to review a sample of the visible candidates in our database. We achieved outstanding results that certified very low fake or misclassified profiles. Here are the highlights of their review:
- Assessed a statistically significant percentage of our active candidate profiles
- Validated that we’re delivering real-time, behavior-driven fraud scoring
- More than 97% of our visible, self-represented profiles who have been active in the past 90 days are verified as legitimate tech candidates
Evolving Over Time
We know that being a leader in candidate quality requires continual investment and focus. As part of our ongoing commitment to delivering the highest quality candidates for our clients, we plan to:
- Conduct regular third-party evaluation of a larger dataset of our database
- Decrease the +/- 2% margin of error
- Continue to work closely with our clients and candidates to tune our strategy
We are very excited about our success thus far, and will continue to focus on providing the industry-leading database of quality, responsive tech candidates.
Interested in learning more about Dice’s Candidate Quality efforts? Please call us at 1-800-979-DICE (3423).
