Why Data Enrichment is Your Most Boring and Important Task Right Now

Within one year, you can expect roughly 25% of your executive talent network to be on the move, which means 25% of your data will suddenly be out of date. 
  

It takes 23 months, on average, for executives to switch roles, based on Thrive data for time spent in seat across all functions. The top quartile moves within one year, while the 75th percentile moves every four years. 

The consequence: Dirty talent data leads to missed connection opportunities. 

Here’s what you can do to fix this.

Methods of Keeping Talent Data Enriched

Data enrichment, the process of maintaining up-to-date records within your talent CRM (or other contact-tracking system), is a huge challenge for many talent teams. Typically, the biggest constraint is team size and capacity–if you’re a single talent partner supporting 200 portfolio companies, keeping data clean is likely low on your priority list. For in-house teams, you may not have the headcount to support data best practices among executive recruiters and sourcers. 

In either case, here are a few approaches we’ve heard work well for cleaning talent data.

If your team has capacity:

1. Schedule your enrichment on an ongoing basis. You can set up best practices to import contacts where all team members follow the same practices (more on how to do that here) or you can set up a recurring bi-weekly or monthly invite where the team tackles data cleanup together in a group setting. 

If you have no capacity: 

1. Hire someone on your team to fulfill this operations role. If your database is big enough, it may make the most sense for you to hire someone to manage and enrich talent data for prioritized companies and contact records. 
2. Outsource enrichment to a data entry provider. There are numerous companies and contractors out there available to take on data enrichment projects for an hourly rate. Services range from simple data entry and scraping, to cleanup, and analysis. 
3. Leverage Search Essentials. Our team of executive researchers, sourcers, and data analysts have the expertise to update your executive network data in record time. Enrich your entire database, or simply the specific areas you care about most.

Need Data Enrichment? Check Out Search Essentials → 

Monitoring: The Actionable Part of Enrichment

If you’re lucky enough to have recruiters on your team, what do they do with the information they find throughout the course of their research? Maybe they are searching for candidates with specific sales skills and encounter five contacts who have recently changed jobs in the past month. Do they update the contact profile and call it a day? Or do they share that movement with the rest of the team? 

The same goes for a data entry provider—are they simply executing the task at hand, or are they compiling a summary of their work for you to leverage?  Information on data changes holds potential action. 

Using the insight above, 25% of your executive talent network will move one year after landing a new gig, they could set a reminder to reach out in 9 months to see how the role is going. Or, they could engage in strategic outreach now, to congratulate the executive on their next opportunity and begin to build a relationship. 

What comes out of that could be a future board member, advisor, or go-to confidant who can answer questions about sales searches in the future. Alternatively, they might need support in their new position to build out a sales team beneath them. 

If all you’re doing is enriching data profiles without a way to surface next steps, you’re missing an opportunity to connect.

Get Outreach Support → 

Capitalize on Talent Intelligence to Connect

Once you’re confident in your ability to enrich data regularly, understand who has moved, and how to circulate and act on that intelligence, you’ve super-charged your ability to act as a strategic talent leader within your organization.  

You can craft messages confidently without wasting time verifying every company and contact detail on Linkedin or Pitchbook–and expect better response rates as a result of your intelligence.  

You can also be proactive in filling potential talent gaps. Armed with this intel, you can complete mapping projects for roles where you anticipate movement to ensure you have a robust, updated pipeline ready to share with the team at a moment’s notice. You can pull a list of updated contacts quickly to respond to an investor question with full confidence it’s accurate. 

Conclusion

Data is boring, but the benefits of enriching data are numerous, which makes it a worthwhile task. If you don’t have the time to get started on implementing clean data import and movement monitoring practices (or simply don’t want to), Search Essentials can help. As an executive talent leader, you are invaluable to the growth trajectory of your organization, and growing and maintaining your talent network is critical for success.