Recruitment has been a highly competitive area of work for a few decades and it’s only going to get more so. Just having recruitment processes and referrals may prove enough for some very top companies, but most others need to improvise to be able to get the best people for the job.
With the given context, talent acquisition specialists need access to the latent talent pool to truly make the best hiring decisions. One great way of achieving that is tapping into talent communities, and segmenting talent.
Here’s more on how you can go about it and gain access to the hidden gems of talent out there.
What is a Talent Community?
A Talent Community is a social recruiting method that helps recruiters build a pipeline of candidates who, even though interested in your company, are not yet ready to apply for a job.
It enables you to share job openings, educate candidates about the match between their employment needs and your business needs.
What’s more, you can even ensure that the community members are well informed about the company’s values, practices and policies and you can develop this into a situation when the passive candidate is ready to apply for a job at your company.
Why is a Talent Community Important?
Think of a talent community as what a lead nurturing strategy is to sales. A networking avenue that empowers you to build that credibility with the candidates.
Looking at it from a candidate’s point of view, especially if you are well qualified and know that you are a hot cake in the job market. Would you really want to straightaway apply for every company you might find interesting? Surely, you would want to know much more about the prospective employer before investing your time and energy in the job application and interview process.
Not just that, even in cases where a passive candidate might be interested, there might not be the kind of job opening at the recruiter’s company for her to apply. A talent community will help the recruiter keep such candidates engaged and not lose the motivation to apply whenever a well-matching job opportunity does arise.
Here are a five top ways to ensure that your talent community runs like a charm and delivers great results:
Invest in a good recruitment software
A talent acquisition cloud (ATS) will help you manage the recruiting process from end to end, and you can easily integrate your talent community management efforts into this kind of a platform.
Use automated communications to candidates
Whether it is an email or text message, whether it is information about a new job opening or a periodic newsletter, whether educational content about your company or global market trends, the best way to save time and keep it efficient is automation.
Build sub-communities using segmenting
You need to organize the data available in your talent community into various segments, such as based on years of experience, skills and academic qualification, job preferences of candidates such as city or work or even preference to working remotely, expected salary range, and most importantly your company’s objectives.
Putting in that extra effort to segment the candidate information in this way will save you loads of time. Especially when you need to hire many candidates in a short span of time, you will be glad you have a segmented database to refer to, which will help you quickly map the candidate’s profile to the job description.
A word of caution though: Make sure that you are not segmenting in any way that would count as biased.
Engage with current employees better
A lot of employees know a lot of potential employees. Make sure that you don’t miss out on prospecting in this goldmine. Use referral programs or just keep in regular touch with existing employees, and you will be amazed with how many good potential candidates you will discover using this method.
Tap into the ex-employee database
If the ex-employees have separated on amicable terms with your organization, there is a high probability that they will be happy to refer their friends and acquaintances to your company. After all, the ex-employees would also remember the good experience they have had working with your company and will only be glad to help their friends derive the same positive experience.
How does segmenting talent help you drive better results?
Segmenting talent within the talent community database is not just about savings and efficiency. In addition to the primary benefits of saving time and energy, there are quite a few other benefits from it as well, and here we have enlisted the three most impactful ones:
Know how your candidates are similar to each
Segmenting your talent community data will help you discover how densely or sparsely clustered the talent community database is with candidates of a certain qualification and skill. Depending on this you can decide the stringency with which you want to shortlist or filter out candidate profiles.
If the segment is very densely populated, then you can afford to be more strict and conventional. But if the talent segment is sparsely populated, then you need to look beyond just the traditional criteria to reject candidates.
Identify how the candidates differ from each other
Not all candidate profiles are the same, but are all of them so different from each other? If you have invested time in identifying the differences, such as inclination to prefer working remotely or even the quoted reason for applying for the job at your company, you will be able to tell which candidates are likely to do well if hired and which of them will not.
Come up with great ways to attract and engage the candidates
The recruitment is just beginning at the time you are segmenting the talent pool. Based on how well you have segmented, which again depends on how well you have captured the data from the talent community database, you will be able to come up with innovative ways to attract passive candidates and make them active ones.
And once you have succeeded in creating that pipeline of active potential candidates, you are on the right track to proceeding further with the next steps in the recruitment process. But knowing these techniques is just the beginning, because when all is read and practiced, it is you the talent acquisition specialist that stands to win it all and make great hiring decisions. Happy winning!
