By building your own Talent Network, you provide your recruiting organization with a new and most importantly free recruiting channel that you can use to find the best candidates for future open positions. Building your Talent Network, however, is not just about throwing candidate information in a database but it is about improving your overall candidate sourcing and recruiting channels (to increase the number of qualified candidates in your Talent Network) and making sure these candidate contacts are easily actionable by your recruiters and hiring managers.

In order to make your Talent Network an important and integral part of your recruitment marketing strategy, you need to make sure that the necessary mechanisms are set up to make it as successful as possible.

Here are 5 things you absolutely need to make leveraging your Talent Network successful:

Easy Candidate Opt-In: Whether it’s in your job board campaigns, your Career Site or on your social recruiting profiles, you need to have portals that enable candidates to easily add themselves to your Talent Network so they can hear about other opportunities at your company.

An easy way to get started today is what we call dual purpose job ads.  For every job campaign you run to job boards include a static form that collects simple candidate information before they enter the application.  This will enable you to collect candidate contact info for candidates that don’t finish the apply process.

Centralized Database: Whether you keep your candidate contacts in a spreadsheet, database or Recruiting CRM, you need to make sure they are centrally available across your entire recruiting organization.  By having candidate contacts centrally located, you will enable your recruiters to leverage appropriate contacts for every future job campaign.

Actionable Sort & Search: A candidate contact database without an easily searchable interface is almost worthless.  You need to be able to sort candidates by location, discipline and your own rankings.  Most importantly, once you search your contacts you need to be able to connect with them either individually or as a targeted group via channels such as email, phone & SMS.

Rankings / Pipelines: As all your recruiters sift through your Talent Network, it is extremely important to track what candidates you’ve contacted and what ones are the most qualified.  Some sort of ranking system is needed in order to most successfully target the right candidates for the right positions.

Also important is the ability to take these rankings and form easy to use pipelines and groupings of the best candidates.  This will make it easy for your recruiters to manage communication with the best candidates in your Talent Network.

Information Updates: Your Talent Network is only as valuable as the candidate information in it.  Therefore, it’s very important to make sure all the candidate contact information you have is up to date.

You can do this in a variety of ways.  First, you can send an automatic email campaign to candidates asking them for updated information.  Second, you can utilize & associate social profiles such as LinkedIn to keep up to date with what your candidate contacts are doing in their professions.

Building a successful Talent Network requires some thought and planning.  You need to make sure that your organization makes it easy not only for candidates to opt-in and update their info in your Talent Network but easy for your recruiters to utilize and leverage your Talent Network in order to have an impact on your hiring strategy.