Building Engaged Talent Communities: A Complete Guide

Building talent communities involves proactively sourcing candidates and creating a database that will be available for your future hiring needs. A talent community, also known as a talent pool, is a target set of candidates classified into different segments based on their skills, educational qualifications, location, background, etc. Creating talent communities is an ongoing process so you can have a pipeline of passive potential candidates that will meet current and future business needs.

With the recruitment industry growing faster than ever amidst a talent shortage, having talent communities puts the right profiles of active and passive candidates at a recruiter’s fingertips at any time. This lets them pull out candidates from the pool directly without having to go to job boards and outsource.

When job-seekers apply for a job, they immediately become a part of the community whether or not they get hired. Once a talent pool is created, it needs to be constantly updated and engaged with high-value content that shares a glimpse of the company. 

Benefits of Building a Talent Community

1. Reduced Time to Hire. The recruitment process requires a lot of time. A long list of tasks start with the creation of a job requirement and continues with content creation, marketing the job to the right audience, sourcing candidates, scheduling interviews, releasing offer letters, onboarding, etc. Historically, this has been a long-drawn-out process. But, with a pool of quality candidates, recruiters can greatly reduce the time to hire. 
2. Lower Cost Per Hire. When matching candidates are already identified in the community, dependency on expensive job boards is reduced. This also minimizes the spend on marketing jobs, and in turn, cost-per-hire is lowered at each level of the recruitment process. 
3. Higher Conversion Rates. In a talent community, there is constant engagement with candidates through emails, newsletters, and events. These candidates are familiar with the employer’s culture, organizational values and brand. Periodic interactions with candidates generate higher interest from applicants and deliver higher conversion rates. 
4. Employer Branding. Talent Communities are splendid ways for paving the way for employer branding. These communities provide an excellent way for applicants to get a glimpse of the company’s culture and create a positive candidate perception. 
5. Diverse Talent Pool. While a quality hire is the main goal of building talent communities, this process also provides a great opportunity to create a diverse talent pool by strategically encouraging inclusivity of all minorities, genders, and cultures to support a dynamic workforce. 

Best Practices To Build a Talent Container

• Creating a database of candidates
• Segmentation
• Candidate Engagement

Creating a Database of Candidates

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) enables organizations to source both active and passive candidates across job boards and social media sites. An advanced ATS allows the management of huge databases of applicant profiles to build your required talent containers. Sourcing candidates for talent communities can happen in various ways: 

• Career Landing Pages
• Email Subscriptions
• Career Fairs
• Employee Referrals
• Rejected Candidates
• University Graduates
• Social Platforms

Segmentation

Candidates can be added to applicant groups based on various parameters such as:

• Location 
• Educational qualifications
• Employment Type- Permanent, Temporary, Contractual
• Skills- Java, Oracle, PHP, SQL
• Industry- IT, Retail, Pharmaceutical, FMCG, Automobile, BFSI

Candidate Engagement

Talent communities are forged with the goal to strengthen the candidate experience and increase the hiring rate. Once the segmentation of the candidates is complete and talent containers are built, it is time to engage with the candidates. Companies with strong branding strategies stand out by creating a quality, diverse candidate pool and launching multi-fold initiatives to keep the applicants engaged. 

You can learn more about creating lasting candidate engagement strategies here: Key Strategies to Boost your Candidate Engagement Process

Managing Talent Communities with the Help of ATS

An AI-powered Applicant Tracking System provides a robust space to build talent containers, automate communication processes, and integrate with native CRMs to achieve the goal of attracting and retaining talent. 70% of candidates are passive. ATSs help track the best profiles from all forums and bridge the gap between candidates and recruiters.  Developing talent communities can seem daunting, but the key to success is to constantly update your pipeline and consistently engage with your talent community to drive higher conversion rates.