Big Data has been talked about at length, but what is it and how can it help recruiters? Unfortunately, I fear that this is another one of these technical terms that have been corrupted by salespeople in an effort to confuse and further corrupted by the confused, of which there are very many.

Big Data is a technical term for data sets that are so complex that they create all sorts of problems for software engineers like myself. Luckily for me, it is only a very small number of organizations that have to manage these unmanageable data sets and so for the rest of us, the challenge remains that of doing something useful with all the ‘Small’ Data that we do have.

While I believe that Big Data is a buzz word that can happily be dismissed by the vast majority of recruiters, It has changed the world and all of us indirectly use it every day. For example, a simple Google search will access Google’s index of  30 trillion web pages and return a result in a fraction of a second. This is amazing but now so commonplace that this principle use of this is taken for granted.

Hopefully, the regular readers of my blog will know that there is more to Google Search than meets the eye and its use in Recruitment is very exciting. The excitement for me, however, is all about finding the needle rather than the size of the haystack.

If you are still in doubt about Big Data and its implications for recruiters, I highly recommend a fantastic blog written a number of years ago by Glen Cathey, but still very relevant. Big Data, Data Science and Moneyball Recruiting.