Imagine you are a sales agent and are required to close a deal in the next two weeks. Certainly, you would have your leads by now, right?
The same applies to recruitment.
Competition for talent is increasing across the globe, and it is a daunting task to find the best talent suitable for the job opening.
So, why risk losing excellent talent simply because they didn’t make the cut this time for this specific role? Instead, why not cultivate a relationship with them and keep them interested?
How? By building and managing a talent community!
What Is a Talent Community?
A “talent community” is a database containing the names of candidates who could potentially work for your organization in the future. It consists of candidates who have previously applied for a job at your organization, candidates whom you have sourced, and candidates who have been referred by others.
A talent community can include:
- Sourced candidates
- Referral candidates
- Passive candidates
- Candidate profiles on social media and networking sites
- Leads from offline and virtual career fairs
- Unsuccessful applicants who may be suited to a different role
Why Is a Talent Community Important?
With the increasing cost per hire and time to hire, it is important to have a solid starting point for your sourcing efforts before starting the end-to-end recruitment process. Also, it’s good to have a safety net in case one of your employees quits without warning. In this case, that safety net is your pool of good people.
Having a rich talent community offers several benefits, like:
1. Reduces the Cost of Hiring
Having a candidate pool significantly reduces the cost of recruitment because your firm will no longer need to conduct recruitment drives or advertise open positions. If you already have a database of candidates, your organization will not have to spend on reviewing resumes or advertising job openings on expensive job boards.
2. Reduces the Time to Hire
As HR professionals are aware, sourcing applicants can consume a significant amount of time during the recruitment process. And sifting through the database of resumes that aren’t tailored to your exact requirements might take days, if not weeks. That is why having an up-to-date database of candidates whose resumes have already been pre-screened and reviewed will significantly reduce the time it takes to hire the right person. You can use applicant tracking system software for this purpose.
3. Improves the Quality of Recruitment
A talent community can assist you in identifying top talent even before a position in the organization has opened. It also enables HR managers to continually source top talent while diversifying the talent required by the firm to achieve its objectives.
How to Build a Talent Community?
Let’s discuss some tips for building a rich talent community to attract and engage the best candidates:
1. Add Former Candidates
As HR professionals, you must have come across individuals who did not quite fit a position but were impressive enough to put their information on hold for future consideration. Those are the first people you can contact to see if they want to be part of your talent community platform.
2. Connect with Sourced Candidates
This is probably the simplest way to get candidates into your talent community. During your sourcing process, whenever you come across interesting people who don’t fit any of your current open roles, just add them to your talent community.
3. Use Referrals
According to research, the company’s current employees are an excellent source of referrals for independent talent. Those referred candidates usually maintain a positive working relationship with the firm. This tactic has proven to be both efficient and cost-effective, while also being the main source of a company’s longest-tenured resources.
4. Leverage Social Media
People who interact with your posts on social media are actively demonstrating an interest in your firm without having to apply for a job. Take down their contact details. Engage with them. Maintain their interest. Ask if they would like to join your online talent community. Make sure your career site has a form that sends their contact information directly to your CRM.
5. Employ Recruitment Marketing
Recruitment marketing refers to how a firm establishes and communicates its employer brand and employee value proposition.
Your business can attract and nurture top talent by publicly marketing to candidates and encouraging them to join your talent pool. Inbound recruiting can take the form of a company blog, social media advertising, or attending a career fair.
6. Share Relevant Content
Sharing relevant content about your company or industry is a great way to get your talent community involved. Sending out emails about company news an d milestones, as well as job alerts, will give interested candidates a look inside your company and give them a lot of reasons to come back to the community. You should also share interesting articles about trends in your industry and encourage people to talk about and share their ideas.
Conclusion
Finding the right talent is tough these days. So, try to engage and nurture candidates who were promising, even though they did not fit the bill for your immediate requirements. Instead of losing touch with them, have them join your talent pool to maintain their interest in your firm. You can follow the six steps outlined in this article to start building and maintaining a talent community.
