Google Search Plus Your World trims results effectiveness

John Sumser, Principal Analyst, HRxAnalysts

Who in the world named Google’s Search Plus Your World, SPYW? The acronym gives a creepy tone to the fact that the search engine, once famous for independent objective results, has thrown in the towel. With SPYW, Google shifts the game to personalized results that are self-referential within the Googleplex.

Now, it’s all Google, all the time. From here forward, when you visit Google, you should expect that the company will be trying to keep you within their offerings. As advertising revenue declines, the company will be more and more reluctant to give you reasons to go elsewhere. If you’re trying to get work with your Google profile, it’s an interesting opportunity to rise to the top of your own search results. If you’re looking for people, it’s a different story.

That’s the opposite of what search engines are supposed to do (and the story of how Yahoo lost its way).

There is a profound shift going on in the world of sourcing. As personal data becomes omnipresent and the various data platforms (Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn) begin to make their worlds insular, the underlying techniques and tactics of sourcing are beginning to shift. Here are the major forces that are reshaping the sourcer’s world:

• Data Overload Obscures the Candidate
  With data pouring in from an ever-growing supply of sources, it gets harder and harder to tell who the candidate actually is. Digging under the data to discover the nuggets of truth that matter will take increasing amounts of time and wisdom. In short, the data explosion will drive the cost of recruiting up significantly. Conservative companies will start to want to know everything about a potential employee lest they miss something and incur liability.
• Aggregation Services
  Not only does it appear that about 200 data aggregators are conspiring to build ‘social graph dossiers’ out of all of the available content by and about a candidate, they want to score, sift, sort, and mix and match the data. There’s one teeny tiny thing missing from the algorithm driven madness – any evidence of common sense or recruiting experience. In the end, the social media content aggregators are going to make sure that sourcers have to consume all of the available info about a potential employee. Again, this drives costs up.
• Personalization
  As the various social platforms increase the inherent narcissism of their offerings, personalization will actually make it harder to find people through conventional methods. Since finding and targeting people is becoming the core of platform business models, it’s likely that what was once free will become very difficult. The easy answers will come from pay per play services.
• Search Engine Revenue at Odds with Sourcing Effectiveness
  Sourcers have always been at the forefront of Web technology. The very core of most sourcing operations is the idea that the actual data is available for free from the various search engines. Since every marketer on the planet will be looking for the same thing that sourcers are after, you can imagine that the cost of access will have to go up.

In short, Google’s move to put its own social media results at the top of its search engine output signals a serious change for recruiters. The net will be an increase in costs, a decrease in effectiveness, and a lengthening of the time to hire.

And, if you want to stop Google from personalizing your results (for the time being),

1. Sign into your Google account and navigate over to Google search.
2. Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner.
3. Click “Search settings.”
4. Scroll to the section marked “Personal results.”
5. Click “Do not use personal results.”
6. Click save and you should see impersonal results going forward.