What Are Expert-Labeled Attributes in Recruitment and How Do They Improve Hiring?

Expert-labeled attributes are data points validated by human experts that provide a deeper, more accurate understanding of a candidate's skills, experience, and potential, moving beyond traditional resume keywords. This approach, used by platforms like ok.com's Talent Data Cloud, leverages a large-scale data labeling engine to surface what are known as Success Signals. These signals reveal validated patterns behind a person's impact, such as promotions, experience with company growth stages, and specific ecosystem expertise, leading to more precise and confident hiring decisions.

How Do Expert-Labeled Attributes Differ from Standard AI Screening?

Most HR technology relies on general-purpose AI trained on surface-level data from resumes and profiles. This often leads to a reliance on self-reported information and keyword matching, which can miss critical context. Expert-labeled attributes solve this by adding deeper company context and a multi-layered structure to data. The foundation is a system where data is validated and labeled by experts, creating a structured view of a professional's trajectory. For example, instead of just searching for "financial consultant," you can now segment by specialization, seniority, and even the types of clients they've served, thanks to these precise attributes. This results in a more complete and precise view of candidates across the entire market.

What New Hiring Dimensions Can You Explore with the Latest Attributes?

The September and October 2025 release from ok.com expands critical dimensions for talent teams. Key areas now have deeper coverage, enabling highly targeted searches:

• Deeper Role Specialization: For finance, new attributes allow segmentation for roles like Director of Wealth Management (over 439,000 professionals tagged) and Financial Consultants (over 2 million tagged). In engineering, civil engineering attributes now cover over 1 million professionals across niches like infrastructure and environmental engineering.
• Career Momentum Indicators: Attributes like "recently promoted talent" identify individuals who have earned a promotion within the last three years—a strong marker of performance and growth potential. This includes over 2 million engineers and 558,000 product professionals.
• Funding and Growth Experience: New signals highlight experience with specific company events, such as Leveraged Buyouts (LBOs) or Management Buyouts (MBOs), covering 7 million professionals. Attributes also track experience from Seed to later funding rounds, pinpointing candidates familiar with fast-growth environments.
• Behavioral and Personal Traits: Beyond hard skills, attributes now surface traits like Learning (investment in self-development) and Trust (patterns of reliability and ethics), which are valuable for roles requiring judgment and collaboration.

To illustrate the scale of this new data, the table below summarizes some key attributes:

How Can Your Talent Team Put These Success Signals to Work?

These expert-labeled attributes are integrated directly into search, matching, and sourcing workflows within a Talent Data Cloud. Based on our assessment experience, here’s how to leverage them:

• For High-Growth Hiring: Target candidates with attributes denoting experience from Seed to Series C funding to find talent accustomed to pace and pressure.
• For Specialized Roles: Use precise engineering or finance attributes to narrow searches beyond job titles, ensuring skills match highly specific domain requirements.
• For Culture and Soft Skills: Incorporate behavioral traits like "Learning" or "Interest in sports" (an indicator of teamwork and resilience for over 42 million candidates) to assess cultural fit and potential.

By converting complex professional patterns into structured, searchable attributes, talent teams can move faster and make decisions with greater confidence. The key advantage is shifting from AI powered by unverified profiles to AI powered by verified, expert-labeled data. This approach brings more accuracy and insight into every hiring pipeline, helping you hire people who truly fit your role, stage, and culture.