The skill gap is becoming a major concern for organizations around the world. With right talent becoming scarce, HR departments are finding different ways to source and retain the good talent. In this endeavor, talent communities can play a major role as they consist of passive candidates who may have a potential to work with the company, but who are not yet looking out for opportunities with the company.
While HR departments stay in touch and nurture relationships with such candidates, the talent community also benefits because they get a glimpse into the company culture, and are aware about the happenings and job opportunities at the company. At the right time, the talent community provides a pool of engaged candidates who can be easily approached for new positions, and the chances of them accepting such offers may also be high.
According to Steve Tiufekchiev, Chief Evangelist at Yello, a recruiting software company, the following eight steps are required to implement an effective talent community:
1. Talent Relationship Management (TRM) software can be used to capture details about potential candidates. TRMs help HR departments manage, track and communicate with the talent community through automated email and text campaigns.
2. Communication: The talent community should keep getting regular updates about the company so that they are consistently engaged. These communications can include updates about the company, jobs, blogs and media coverage.
3. Audience: By organizing candidates in the talent community into different groups based on different criteria, HR departments can curate the content and audience so that the relevant content goes to the appropriate audience.
4. Current employees: HR departments should leverage the local and online social networks of current employees to find/ source and engage with potential candidates who can be added to their talent community.
5. Research: Researching how other similar companies are marketing positions and sourcing candidates will also help in fine-tuning the candidate sourcing programs. While conducting online searches, they can increase the results of their search by using Boolean strings with different job synonyms (e.g., engineer AND software developer), and keywords.
6. Career Fairs: Local and college career fairs are a good way to expand the network. HR departments can include freshmen and sophomore students in their talent community to keep them engaged through internship opportunities. By using a recruitment software HR departments can evaluate the ROI from such events, and can use this information to only attend events where the ROI is the greatest.
7. Past employees: By adding alumni to the talent community, HR departments can increase the reach of their network as the re-engaged alumni can act as a conduit for more potential candidates.
8. Silver medalist: When more than one candidate is found to be eligible for a job opening, the candidates who are not selected for the position can be added by the HR department to the talent community so that they are still engaged with the company till other similar positions open up.
Once the talent community is created, it is an ongoing process. The HR department has to proactively keep finding the right talent and keep adding them to their talent community. It is not enough, however, to just keep finding and adding potential candidates to the talent community. To ensure that the candidates in the talent community stay, HR departments should keep them consistently engaged.
One-to-one communication, regular communication on relevant touch points, keeping them aware about the non-monetary benefits the company offers and encouraging two-way communication are ways in which HR departments can keep their talent communities continuously engaged.