For every recruitment marketing campaign you run, you need to have ways for candidates to add themselves to your Talent Network.  Whether it’s dual purpose job ads, opt-in forms on your Career Site or your company’s social recruiting profiles, you need a way for candidates to interact with your employer brand and more importantly, ways for your company to engage with passive candidates who are not ready to apply today but will be valuable for future job campaigns.

Once you build your Talent Network, the key to making it valuable is to engage with the most qualified candidates in it.  But how do you do this?

Here are a few ways to engage with candidates to keep your organization top of mind when it comes to new job positions:

Content Creation: Share your employer brand with qualified candidates.  Have employees create blog articles on their jobs, their industry and cool innovations they are working on.  Create slick videos on your office environment and the perks of working for your company.

Create this content and most importantly share it with the qualified candidates in your Talent Network. You need to reach candidates when they are ready to look at new opportunities and consistent great content is a great way to do so.

Share Industry News: In your social recruiting profiles and on your Career Site, share important industry news with candidates.  Try and be the best source for candidates to find out information about their industry and their careers.  If you are helpful in keeping candidates up to date, they will value your company that much more.

Provide Certification / Training: How better to get qualified candidates into your Talent Network and test their qualifications then by providing free or cost efficient training for their disciplines.  This can be anything from informal presentations by subject matter experts to speak on a particular topic to state or federal certification courses run by your company.

Targeted Job Updates: Providing job updates via email or mobile recruiting is a great way to get your job position in front of opt-in candidates.  The key is to not send every new job that you are recruiting for but only send the jobs that are fit the skills and interests of the candidates.

Nothing is worse than clicking a link to a job opening and finding out you are unqualified for the position or constantly receiving job opportunities that don’t fit your skill-set or interests.  This can be easy to set up in most Recruiting CRM.

Sync with Social Profiles: By syncing your internal Talent Network contact information with social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, you can make sure that your database is up to date.  This can enable you to see when qualified candidates in your system change jobs, get promotions and potentially are ready for a new opportunity.  It’s at these points that you can target and reach out to the best candidates about new opportunities.

Finding the right qualified candidate for a job can result in promoting the right job opportunity at a time when the candidate is looking for new opportunities.  In order to ensure this happens more often, keep engaged with your Talent Network and keep top of mind with your best candidates.

At some point in the near future, these candidates will look for better opportunities and how helpful you are to these candidates can determine if they become an employee at your company.  Run some of the campaigns above and measure how effective they are via recruiting metrics.  Use the best performing to consistently engage and improve your recruiting ROI.