Recruiting efficient staff invariably comes as a relief to any hiring departments, but it does no harm to keep a back-up plan up your sleeve when crises strike and your company are short of skilled personnel. That’s when the Talent Community enters the picture to save your day to ensure the headcount.

Here comes In this blog, Rakuna will share with you the fundamentals of a talent community so you can have a good grasp of it.

What is a Talent Community?

Technically, a Talent Community serves as a digital network that enables recruiters to keep in touch with prospective candidates. On some occasions, it describes a talent pool where those unable to join your company under present circumstances can gather and keep track of the availability of suitable new positions. Effectiveness taken into consideration, Talent Community has already been proven productive, according to the article called “The Remarkable Power of Talent Communities” by Tom Starner (2018) from Human Resource Executive. Specifically, the writer quoted West Monroe Partners (2017), a Chicago-based consulting firm, as evidence of 9 successful hires with the assistance of such Talent Communities as the Jumpstart program and Women in Business. The firm also witnessed 34% of their hires admitted via employee referrals. Another prime example cited, Power Home Remodeling, stressed that despite the low amount per month, staff recruited by referrals have better KPI performances than from other sources.

What are the Benefits of a Talent Community?

Provide a Proactive Talent Acquisition Method:

Instead of traditional methods where recruiters get in touch with active job-seeking candidates, Talent Communities allow those with appropriate potentials within sight of the hiring department. When opportunities come, recruiters can quickly get in touch and make connections.

Initiate a Two-way Interaction:

Talent Community platforms enable candidates to indicate their interests and keep updated with new opportunities at their interested organizations. It also applies the other way around as the recruiting department advertises their employer branding. Subsequently, both sides gain knowledge about each other in advance to make better preparations for possible in-person meetings.

Optimize Companies' Resources:

Resources hiring talent revolve around main things such as time- and money-efficiency. Talent Communities not only save time sourcing applicants with automated processes but also decrease the duration of establishing a talent pool and spend financial investments wisely.

How to Build a Talent Community that Attracts Candidates?

Pick the Suitable Talent Community Platform:

With the popularity of Internet-based environments, recruiters now have the good fortune to work with tons of Talent Community platforms accessible to the public. They can range from simple tools like Excel spreadsheets to collect candidates’ contact details to organized software, namely Rakuna. Candidate relationship management softwares are superior as they integrate tons of functions to save you time and effort when navigating candidates’ information and sending them automated notifications of your company. Below is the checklist of essential features that make a good Talent Community platform recruiters should consider:

Social Media Integration: Recruiters can make use of this feature to either spread the popularity of jobs openings across various social networks like Facebook, Twitter… or direct users to join your Talent Communities.

Privacy Control: Both hiring staff and candidates can benefit from this feature as they are allowed to update their privacy status and permission for jobs viewing and posting as they please. Since privacy is a sensitive and concerning topic, any reliable guarantees would be greatly appreciated.

Flexibility in customizing and accessing contents: Recruiters can arrange the content structure of their own volition with ease, which makes their work systematic and convenient.

Real-time Reporting and Analytics: The statistics on applicants’ activities will be meticulously tracked and documented so that recruiters can identify the trends and act accordingly.

Candidate Relationship Tracking: As Talent Communities usually part of a Candidate relationship management (CRM) system, recruiting team can search and view information on prospective candidates’ resumes and/or additional materials which match the predetermined criteria.

Come Up with Readable Contents to Attract Candidates:

Even when posts of job openings hold much appeal for applicants, they will soon lose their interests in repetitive contents flooding all over your community. It’s advisable to stay focused on developing employer branding and organization’s marketing strategies in building your posts to attract prospective candidates’ attention. Here comes certain ways of the essence to you:

Blog posts: With this feature, applicants can easily keep track of your company’s newsfeeds. You should follow the updated trends related to your industry or organization to structure your content to appeal to candidates.

Organizational culture: This is among the top priorities candidates would like to know before deciding to engage themselves in one organization over others. Suitable environments and cultures that promote their interests and performances in work would be ideal to both employers and employees for the purpose of operational optimization and satisfaction.

Company’s projects: Prospective candidates can directly gain some insights into the focus of your company through this information. Ideally, you can provide those interested with an overview of products, focus and events of your company.

Source Talents by All Means:

This way you can put the contents to good use - distributing them across many channels as you see fit. You should start off by looking at past interviewed candidates in your data system. Reasonably, you already have opportunities to talk to them and understand their credentials. Then, you can reach out by leaving means of contact so that interested candidates can learn about job opportunities within the company. The following channels might give you an idea for where to source talent:

Career workshop and networking events: Searching for prospective talent at school career fairs is always effective. They offer recruiters a good chance to not only communicate with candidates in person to understand their needs but also leave good impressions to candidates . Employee referrals: Your staff are no doubt a credible resource to ask for suggestions from your colleagues whose work is associated with the opening positions. They have a deep understanding about their department operation to direct you to the right person.

Social Media Channels: There lies an abundant talent pool who also express their wants to find a suitable job. You can locate them by search function with appropriate topics. For example, you can insert keywords associated with the position you are seeking candidates for, namely “Banking” or “Data Analyst”, and you will be directed towards results to your liking.

Figure Out Necessary Criteria to Decide Who’s Cut Out for the Standards on Potential Talent Members:

If you plan to recycle your candidates, you may want to inform unsuccessful candidates for certain positions that though at the time they might not be accepted for the position they have applied for, their files are impressive and will be stored in your database for future reference. State it with honesty so that they do not have the feelings you are being hypocritical and feel comfortable next time you reach out to them. It’s a good call to categorize prospective candidates based on different criteria such as roles, skills and experience, even the locations they currently reside in or have interest in. You can build focused Talent Communities and locate them in your database more conveniently.

Cases of a Good Talent Community:

Livehire:

With the aim of connecting organizations and prospective candidates, Livehire is among the most popular platforms for Talent Acquisition. They have already achieved considerable impact on hiring, increased productivity time being 62% faster and cost savings at the rate of 59%. Aside from applicant sourcing system and tracking solution to supplement the hiring process, the platform equips users with other complex functions, including demonstration available on request and listing of companies from all industries available for reference. Employing a quirky and creative theme, Livehire aims at originality but efficiency in expediting any hiring process.

Built In:

Opting for futuristic aesthetics, Built In’s organizers sets their mind on tech-centered hiring styles. The whole set of services fully displayed on the Home Page, ranging from Tech Articles to current job openings, Built In plans to leave detailed impressions on their visitors. On top of that, it creates Tech Hubs, a collection of US city-based Talent Communities. The platform brings residents in these areas a big advantage at job searching when featuring comprehensive overviews of every top Tech Metropolis in the US.

Wrapping Up

Under any circumstances, preparation is never insufficient in the era of employment competitiveness. Talent Community is undoubtedly a major advancement in any recruiters’ professional productivity development and organizational performance improvement.

This blog post is originally appear on Rakuna's blog