When you are starting to build your Talent Community (or Talent Network), it’s extremely important to think about this question.  In understanding why candidates want to be part of your Talent Community, you can start creating communities & messaging that better appeal to your best target candidates.

So the question remains, when a candidate opts into your Recruiting CRM via your apply process, begins following your account on Twitter or signs up for email updates on your Career Site, what are the main reasons that they have decided to do so.  And most importantly, what is their expectation on the value that they will receive from adding themselves to your community?

Here are three reasons why a candidate may join your Talent Community (and a few ideas on how you can provide value in this area):

1. To Get a Job: Candidates that are signing up for job updates / RSS feeds, most likely are interested in getting a new job.  For these individuals it is most important to receive relevant job opportunities via the channel they chose whether that is email, social networks, etc.

What you can do:  In order to cater these individuals, make sure that you are only sending them job opportunities that fit their skill-set and discipline so they don’t have to sort through the clutter to find opportunities suited for them.  As long as you provide valuable opportunities in this regard, these candidates will continuously review the opportunities you send.  It’s when you start sending them irrelevant jobs that they will start to tune out your opportunities.

2. To Learn about your Company:  Many (passive) candidates will join your communities in order to learn more about your company, your employees and the benefits of working there.  They want to gauge if your organization would be a good fit for them and most importantly a sound career move.

What to do: Candidates that opt-in to your Talent community represent a tremendous opportunity to enhance your employer brand.  That means not just sending candidates targeted job opportunities but also sharing useful information about your company.  Share info on how it is to work for your organization, awards and cool things that your company is currently doing as well as get your employees involved in creating great recruitment messaging.  If you can sell them on your company, it just takes the right position to get them to apply.

3. For education: When I say education, I mean providing candidates access to new ideas, processes and knowledge as well as build skills that will help a candidates career.  Top candidates are always trying to stay up to date on hot topics within the industry and can see your Talent community as a place to acquire this information & take with them as they progress in their career.

What to do: Provide as much helpful information as possible.  This can include industry news, educational opportunities, skill workshops, blog articles, twitter chats and links to other helpful content.  If candidates view your organization as a go to & trusted source for industry information & skill development, you can bet they will view your organization as a potential place of employment when they start thinking about their next career move.

As you are building out your Opt-In and Talent community channels, it’s very important to put yourself in candidate’s shoes.  Understand where candidates see value in your current recruitment marketing messaging & communities and begin to improve these areas with this knowledge in mind.