How to build a successful talent community

Are you facing a dry pipeline? Do you need a better active source of potential hires? The solution will take time to build, but once it's implemented, keeping it running is a breeze. Now is the time to build a talent community to drive your business's success.

Planning and starting a talent community

Job postings are reactive. You need to get in front of the right people earlier on. A talent community can mean easier access to passive candidates, faster time-to-hire (as they already want to work for you), better quality (you know a lot about them in advance) and less money spent on job postings.²

Strategize

Figure out your "why"

What will this community be about? Learning more about the company? Promoting hard-to-fill roles? Referrals? Maybe it could be a place for contractors/freelancers to show you their talents? Whatever your goals, you can create the community around them.

Decide where it will live

Ideally, your talent community will be embedded in your website and be directly connected to your CRM (candidate relationship management) system, but you can also foster community in areas such as groups on LinkedIn. The most important thing is that it has a specific home where candidates can find it, and that it attracts talent to your business. 

Determine point of entry opportunities

There are many ways to get talent interested in your brand, even if you aren't ready to hire them yet, including:

• Strategically placing opportunities to sign up for job alerts on your website.
• Adding opt-in opportunities post-apply.
• Asking freelancers to join personally.
• Having your employees refer candidates to the community all work well.

Consider content

What will you feature in your talent community? It should be more than jobs! Testimonials, company updates and career advice are some great options to keep your base engaged.

Create an exclusive experience

Exclusivity is an in with passive talent. Sending an early notification when you post a fresh job, even before they go public¹ via typical job alerts is a very real reason for people to want to join and stay active in your community. Another is behind-the-scenes content¹ that can help paint a fuller picture of what it's like to work for your business.

Write up a marketing strategy

Different strategies work for varied populations. For new or upcoming graduates, you can let them know about your community at events. For established talent, you can send representatives to professional events to raise awareness.

For the larger, more general job seeker audience, you can tie the community into your job application process (even into rejections), place it on your website in multiple areas that are easy to find⁴ and of course, share it frequently on social networks⁵ that people may already be watching.

Build

Go live

Your talent community needs to be robust and ready! Whether it's a part of your website powered by a CRM or a LinkedIn group, build it out solidly so people can immediately recognize value.

Add in personalization

"Organize members by skills, interests, location, engagement level or career stage to deliver tailored experiences."¹

You will be sending job alerts and other messages to potential hires. Make sure your data is clean, and your tokens and identifiers are correctly in place, so people receive the most relevant roles and information through naturally programmed segmentation. This is the way to start and maintain strong relationships.

Begin marketing

1. Schedule your social posts: Don't create them on-the-fly all the time. Pre-plan as much as possible, leaving room for trending ideas. This constant flow will help satisfy your audience.
2. Tell your employees: Your happy employees are the best people to promote your talent community. Harness the power of genuine engagement by letting them run with the ball.
3. Start formal promotions: Print it on flyers, ramp up employee advocacy, put paid media dollars behind it, run an organic campaign and put it on your website (you could even add a temporary launch banner). Do it all and reap the rewards.
4. Keep content fresh: Don't lean on what's already out there. Create something proprietary just for the community channel.

Roll out and innovate

Once you structure your talent community, it's time to release your first model. Take it to market, then set a date to review it so you can make informed updates based on the primary run's experience.

Track your engagement levels and look for other opportunities

This is made much easier with a strong CRM¹ system, but with help from your IT department or an outside consultant, integrations and metric tracking dashboards can be made to work independently.

Review your segments

If you are losing out on a certain type of talent based on what you're serving up for content, make adjustments. This means looking at specific lists of people who share qualities, seeking out patterns and adjusting based on reasonable hypotheses.

Determine metrics to watch

Upticks in community membership growth, email open/click rates, event participation, applicant conversion rates and referral activitywill work well as a base. Aiming for increases will let you know if you are succeeding.

Essential elements all talent communities need to earn success

The right structure

The most popular way to structure a talent community is by using software like a CRM, but you may also see the acronym TRM (Talent Relationship Management) across your travels. Determining the right one for you is a strong way to start a talent community. 

As mentioned previously, though, you can absolutely build a talent community without this technology. The primary reason to use one is if you would like your system to be ready faster or in a more out-of-the-box way.

Automated messaging and email campaigns

At some point, you will want to message candidates, so building templates and creating the system by which you segment is important. All of these could be considerations:

• Career skill matching
• Industry skill matching
• Job skill matching
• Schedule matching
• Location matching

Employee referrals

Get your existing team excited about bringing in talent! It's free (or will just cost you a small referral bonus) and motivating. And most importantly, provide a spot within your talent community for them to receive referral credit.

Two-way communication

This cannot be a black hole. Make it interactive and conversational! The more human feeling and well-thought-out your communication flow is, the better image you will be able to project.

Engaging content

Plan your content out and commit to continual production. Consistency and quality matter when it comes to a long-term recruitment strategy.

We hope you feel well on your way to creating your own winning talent community. However, if you need a hand, we're here.

Sources and inspiration

1. Talent Community Building: How to Create a Talent Pipeline Before You Need It
2. Building an Effective Talent Network
3. What Are Talent Networks? (With Benefits and Tips)
4. 3 Tips to Build and Improve a Talent Community
5. It Takes a Talent Community to Raise a Team

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