Talent Networks or as they are sometimes called Talent Communities (we explain the difference here) are an important trend developing in the recruitment marketing space.  The ability to capture candidates via opt-in and direct sourcing and internally build your own talent pools and pipelines is a game changer for many organizations.  This is because having populations of talent at your fingertips instead of having to start the recruiting process from scratch for every new job opening enables the organization to save precious budget as well get access to talent more quickly.

In speaking with customers and prospects, pretty much all understand the value of creating these talent pools but where many have questions in how to keep engaged with candidates in their Talent Network.  When you create this Talent Network it’s important to keep engaged on a regular basis with candidates not only to keep your organization top of mind as candidates think about their next opportunities but to make sure they take action when the right position comes from your organization.

But what types of communications should you be sending them?  When I start with this discussion I usually begin with talking about using email or SMS to communicate with candidates.  These mediums are ideal as they enable you to mass communicate and track candidate interactions with recruitment metrics. Social recruiting channels can also be included in this but I see the most value if you have dedicated resources that can respond quickly to candidate engagement (which many organizations don’t currently have in place today).

For this post, I’m going to focus on email & SMS, however, many of the communication strategies can be leveraged in social as well.  When using email and SMS, there are a number of communication types that you can use to stay engaged with candidates in your Talent Network.  Here are a few to consider:

Targeted Job Listings:  If a candidate opts in to your Talent Network, more often than not they probably want to hear about your job opportunities.  But they don’t want to hear about ALL your opportunities but moreso what opportunities fit their interest and skill-set.  When you send your job communications make sure to make them valuable to the candidates you send it to.

All your candidate populations should receive targeted job opportunities that fit how they came into the system.  Your marketing talent pipelines should receive only marketing related jobs while your sales candidates should receive sales opportunities.  This is important because if you just do a generic job opportunity email to all candidates, candidates may opt out as they don’t see value in the communications.

Employer Branding Content: On your Career Site, you probably already have a lot of great content that you can re-purpose to engage with candidates.  From videos on your company & employees to articles on cool things your company and workforce are doing, you have a lot of content that can help candidates learn more about your company and what they should want to work there.

Thought Leadership Content:  This is content that can help candidates develop their skills.  Be helpful with blog articles or vidoes you create on the recruiting process (interviewing tips, resume reviews, etc.) as well as provide helpful industry information to your targeted candidate populations (for example, interesting articles on Google’s semantic search impact on SEO would be a great communication to Marketing professionals.)

The key here is to mix into your own content with outside or 3rd party content you find valuable.  If you can make your organization a valued source of information candidates will be more likely to open your emails and hopefully apply for your job opportunities.

In terms of frequency of email campaigns, I typically recommend sending at least one email communication a month to candidates with the optimal being once a week to once every two weeks.   You want to toe the happy medium between continually communication and spamming their inbox.

Keeping engaged with your Talent Network requires some up front work from your recruiting organization from setting up email templates to creating the content needed to share with your candidate audiences.  However, once you have the process set up and understand the communications you want to send, it will become easier to continually engage with candidates in your Talent Network.