This is the second post in a series on Talent Networks.  You can view the first post here, “What is a Talent Network?“.

In our last post, we set the stage for what a Talent Network is and the value it can provide to employers and candidates.  In today’s post, I’d like to take a deeper look at what you need to think about as you are developing your Talent Network strategy.

Developing your Talent Network strategy

The first step when creating a successful Talent Network is to develop your strategy and start thinking about process.  Without a process in place to guide recruiters, your organization more than likely will not get as much out of the Talent Network as they can.

When you begin to develop your strategy, it’s important to start thinking about a few main areas.

Growing your Talent Network: This mainly focuses on how you actually get candidates into your Talent Network.  Encompassed are decisions on the recruiting destinations you want candidates to be able to opt-in from, how and the type of candidates your team proactively sources and how you set expectations for the value you provide Talent Network members.

Targeting Candidate Populations: Once candidates enter your system, it’s important to be able to segment and create targeted candidate populations.  Whether it’s based on skill set, job type or another criteria, you need to figure out how to effectively create talent pipelines from the candidates you engage with.  This will allow for better more targeted engagement and communication opportunities.

Campaigning and Engagement: This part of the strategy may differ bases on the way that the candidates enter your Talent Network or might be the same for all candidates.  The key here is being able to get beyond the job spam and to make the campaigns you run to Talent Network candidates valuable to them.  This means using a system that enables more targeted engagement and a content strategy that provides different types of helpful and relevant content to share with candidates.

Keeping candidate information fresh: One of the biggest flaws of many Talent Network strategies is over-looking the need to keep all candidate information up to date.  Candidate records that are 7 months old are much less useful for targeted engagement than ones that have been updated in the last month.  The key here is using social recruiting profiles and simple trigger campaigns to keep apprised with candidates careers.

Measuring Success: Like everything else you do from a recruitment marketing perspective, it’s integral that you measure the success of your Talent Network strategy with key recruitment metrics.  You should use these metrics to compare and contrast success of your Talent Network vs. all the other campaigns and initiatives you do from a recruiting perspective, so you can make better decisions on where to best use your existing resources.

Leveraging Technology: I’ll touch upon this briefly here but in order to successfully build and engage with your Talent Network, you’ll need a system to manage this candidate information and communications. Once you determine, what you want with all the above areas, it’s time to find a CRM or other system that enables you to accomplish it all.

What’s Next?

This post is supposed to set the stage for the next series of posts that will go more deeply into each of these areas.  Once you have the strategy in place, it’s all about execution and best deploying resources to make sure you are getting the most value you can out of your Talent Network.

Check back in to the SmashFly Blog over the next few months to see the next posts in this series.