As recruiting becomes more and more competitive across industries, it's becoming more important than ever to begin capturing qualified candidates and building your Talent Network.  Having your own Talent Network can help your organization improve your recruiting results and provides the following potential benefits:

• Fill positions faster: Once you have a Talent Network in place, you should be able to fill some of your positions utilizing these candidates.  Once you receive a job requisition, you should first ping your Talent Network to see what qualified candidates are interested in the position.
• Increase your ROI: With most recruiting channels, you are able to easily build your Talent Network with opt-in forms alongside your need to find a qualified candidate to hire.  Every recruiting contact you get from these campaigns is extra ROI that you weren't seeing before.  Make sure to track the sources that provide the most qualified contacts with recruiting metrics.
• Less Reliance on other channels: With every job campaign you run fueling your Talent Network, your organization will have to rely less and less on job boards and other recruiting channels to find qualified candidates.  In a perfect recruiting world, you would build a Talent Network so large and qualified that you wouldn't have to use another channel at all.

If you don't have a Talent Network in place currently, it can seem daunting to start building one.  But don't fret, as there are some easy ways to start building a Talent Network from recruiting activities & campaigns that you already do.

Here are some sourcing methods to use to build your Talent Network:

Consolidation of Past Recruiting Contacts: First and foremost, use the candidates you've already engaged with and collected.  Whether it's in your ATS, excel spreadsheets or your recruiters own documents, centralize the recruiting contacts into your own CRM or database to provide access to your entire recruiting team.

Dual Purpose Job Ads: Job boards can still an important recruiting channel for most organizations not only to find potential hires but to also simultaneously build your Talent Network as well.  For every job distribution campaign you run, it's important to start collecting contacts that don't end up applying for the job.  A simple opt-in form embedded in the apply process can do the trick, enabling to easily add candidates to your database with little to no interruption in them applying for the job.

Opt-In Channels: But why stop there?  Make it as easy as possible for any candidate that is interested in working for your company to opt-in to your Talent Network.  Whether it's your Career Site, social recruiting profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), recruiting blog, corporate website, YouTube Channel, recruiter's personal blogs or any other recruiting portal, make it easy for your recruiters to add opt-in forms to all these channels.

Secondly, make sure that the links to these forms are prominent on these channels.  A link that is in the bottom right hand corner of your Career Site, won't build the Talent Network you should be striving for.

Mobile Recruiting / Events: Every event represents an opportunity to build a list of interested job seekers.  The question is how do you capture the information?  Well, you can always go the old fashioned rout of having a sign in page at your booth or on hand.  You could get a little more high-tech and have a computer spreadsheet on your laptop as well.  Lastly, mobile recruiting provides an interesting option.  With nearly every candidate having a mobile phone with SMS, have candidates text their information to a dedicated phone number that you own.  The candidate information will flow into your database and a follow up email for more information will be sent to the candidate.

The key to building a useful Talent Network is to integrate your sourcing efforts into your recruiting process.  Make it easy to capture candidates in the apply process and on the recruiting portals in which they interact with your organization.  The more accessible you make your organization, the larger your Talent Network will grow and the more useful it will be.

Most importantly, make sure that your Talent Network is centralized so that it can be leveraged across your organization.  Any recruiter that is recruiting for a position at your organization should be using these candidates as one of the recruiting channels in their recruitment marketing campaign.