When I think about engaging your Talent Community, I like to think of it in two main categories: the Push and the Pull.

For the push, this is all the content you create and push out to your Talent Network of recruiting contacts.  From email & SMS blasts to video & blogging content to pod-casts to job opportunities, your a conducting one way communication with these specific groups of contacts.  While this is not ideal, these methods are still extremely valuable in terms of getting your employment message across and keeping you top of mind with potential candidates.

Other key benefits to push strategy include:

• Being able to communicate with a larger group of candidates.
• Candidates can choose when they engage with this content.
• All your content is indexed and the more it's viewed, the more likely it will be found by others.
• The resources and time required is readily apparent.

For the Pull, this is creating places for candidates to engage with your recruiters and employees.  It is through these activities that you get a true two-way communication with candidates and enable them to have a voice in the recruitment marketing process.

While this requires more effort in terms of keeping candidates and the community engaged and making your company available to candidates, it can provide some great potential benefits including:

• Better communication with candidates that should increase employer brand and provide ideas for ways to improve process.
• More data and information about candidates who are potential fits for your company.
• The ability to engage with both active and passive job seekers.

The Pull method enables your organization to engage and most importantly communicate with potential candidates.

3 Ways to begin communication with candidates

With the influx of social technology, there are a number of ways to begin communicating with candidates and providing platforms for candidates to reach out to your company.

Here are three that may work for your organization:

IM Help Chat: One of the most frustrating parts of being a job seeker is having something go wrong with your application or the recruiting process.  Having a IM Chat on your Career Site or in the application process, can be a great way to ensure a better apply process for candidates and also provide a great outlet for candidates to reach out to you with questions.

Another great benefit is the great qualitative data you'll receive from candidates on your recruiting process.  This can help you improve it for future candidates.

Twitter Chats:There are already a number of great Twitter Chats out there (#TChat, #HFChat, #JobHuntChat, #CareerChat to name a few) but you can easily start one as an easy way to engage with candidates via Twitter.  For those that don't know, a Twitter chat is a simple Hashtag (#) that everyone part of the chat uses to contribute to the conversation.  The main chat usually happens at the same time each week but the conversation continues through the week with users using the hashtag.

In order for a Twitter Chat to be successful, you should probably already have some presence on Twitter.  If you are new to Twitter, I suggest tuning into one of the Twitter chats above to not only see how it works but also connect with other like minded Twitter users.

Subject Matter Communities:This is the holy grail of Talent Communities.  A place where top talent in the industry interact and engage not only with your employees but other candidates as well.   These communities aren't job or recruiting specific but focus on issues concerning the industry and topics that matter for these potential candidates.

In the best case, you are able to create a place that top talent lives when it comes to industry networking & knowledge.  Your company then achieves positive branding impact for being the administrator for these interactions.  You also would have access to engage with all these potential candidates.

By setting up ways for candidates to initiate communication with your company, you are providing access for more engagement and deeper relationships with potential candidates.  Just like other recruiting initiatives, however, you need to make sure to track & analyze key recruitment metricsto determine the success of each initiative.

The push and pull methods are both integral to getting out your employment message and engaging with candidates and should be used in concert to form an overall branding strategy.