Every job distribution campaign you run is a great opportunity not only to make a hire but to build your Talent Network so you can make more hires (more quickly) in the future.

However, having a large Talent Network is not the goal unto itself.  It’s having a Talent Network that you are able to leverage and utilize your Talent Network to hire future employees that is the end goal.  In order to do that, you need to make sure that the candidates in your network are engaged with your organization and are listening to your employment messaging.  If they are ignoring this messaging then they don’t provide value to your recruitment marketing organization.

Here are 3 ways to make sure prospective candidates don’t ignore you:

Share Helpful Content: Not every message that you send to your network needs to be a job position but you can also provide value to the network by sharing great content.  This content can be industry news, educational opportunities, helpful webinars and other great content that you find and create.

Most importantly, track what content gets the most positive responses with recruiting metrics and share more of it!

Only send applicable jobs:  When candidates add themselves to your Talent Network, you need to ask them for information on the jobs that they would like to hear about.  With this information, make sure to push out only jobs that make sense for their discipline, experience and location.  You’ll get a lot of opt-outs early on if you keep sending engineering jobs to a marketing person.  Or entry level jobs to a senior VP.

Set Expectations: When a candidate signs up let them know what to expect from your organization.  How many emails will they get in a week?  What types of emails will they get?  Answer these questions and candidates are more likely to interact with these emails and less likely to opt-out of your network.

These are three simple ways that can help get your candidates engaged with your employer brand.  By doing this, you will be able to make your Talent Network work better for you in terms of the ultimate goal of any recruiting effort: hire a new employee at your company.