…ideas from Jeffery Giesener – SourceMob.com – CEO
What is a Talent Community?
It is a group (or segments) of both active and passive job candidates that need to be captured, engaged with, nurtured, and converted into applies and hires. Of course, this all starts with a communication strategy that defines your different candidate segments.
Do you have a Talent Community(s)?
If not, you need to put the building of candidate communities on your radar screen today. This blog will help you start!
How do you build Talent Communities? One way is to use third-party solutions to help you accomplish not only the build of these communities, but also the communication engines that drive engagement success.
If you already have a Talent Community:
- How effective is it in converting candidates to applies/hires?
- How active are your communities?
- What else are you doing to keep community engagement going?
- How effective are your key candidates moving through your talent acquisition pipeline?
Driving Talent Community Conversion…
Let’s take a moment and look at a parallel from the world of ecommerce… How do etailers build customer pipelines and convert these consumers into buyers?
eCommerce brands know how to find, nurture and convert consumers into buyers.
- They focus on their analytics and key performing metrics to understand what works and what doesn’t from the marketing plans.
- They know how to maximize consumer-to-buyer conversion.
- They know how to gain repeat purchases through micro-targeting.
Following the lessons of eCommerce companies provides all of us in the talent acquisition space tools that can be used to locate and turn candidates into applies and hires.
More Lessons from eCommerce Brands…
As a consumer, I understand that you get a great deal of catalogs and emailed offers from the brands that you follow and buy from. How did this relationship get started? It most likely it started with you opting into the relationship. Perhaps you opted in to get a sale offer, email, catalog, or coupon. This led to lead nurturing and at a certain percent, into buyer conversion. Is it a coincidence that the more you buy, the more engagement communications you receive? Of course not!
So how does this happen? Well, you are in a specific segment of their prospect or buying community and they have put together a communication strategy to reach each segment in a slightly different, but highly relevant, way.
How do you know? Here is a case in point: If you wear petites, you probably would not want to see a sale on plus sizes. That would create prospect defection and be a total waste of ad capital. In order to maximize their prospect and buyer communities, these companies have determined their consumer segments.
Your Talent Community should have segments such as:
- Candidates who have viewed your job postings
- Candidates who are following your jobs on social and mobile networks
- Candidates who have applied previously
- Candidates who have entered your ATS, but defected
- Candidates who have applied but did not get hired, etc.
Like eCommerce, the idea is to drive your communications with these multiple candidate audiences and learn their respective behaviors. The next step is to drive relevant communications to these separate audiences.
- Before we go further, ask yourself if you have an HRIS solution that can place and position candidates into micro-targeted segments.
- Does your HRIS drive messaging through email, mobile and print media?
- Are you forced to have multiple databases where the information is contained? If so, you need to fix this.
Remember that your HRIS solution needs to be different than what your sales or market teams use. You need to have your very own Talent Community and CRM solutions that can drive micro-targeting for talent acquisition. Do not let marketing or IT persuade you into joining their IT solutions. They will not work for you short to long term.
Candidate segmentation and communication campaign implementation around micro-targeting is the holy grail for maximizing the significant investment that you have in talent acquisition.
You are most likely spending too much of your job budget on advertising (job ads, LinkedIn Recruiter seats, etc.). Why would you not want to have a solid strategy for candidate capture, nurturing, following up and 2-way engagement wherever candidates are online?
The future of Talent Communities is Mobile
Having said the above, your Talent Communities must also be mobile enabled and allow candidates to have a mobile apply experience. Your career pages must also be mobile ready.
Now is the time to step up to the plate and determine your 2014 Talent Community strategy (one that includes social and mobile) and help you win the race for the top passive candidates
There is still time in 2013 to let SourceMob build your own opt-in centralized talent community that enables you to capture more active and passive candidates, exponentially grow your employee referrals, and automatically enable your top candidates to follow your jobs wherever they are online – on the web, social media, mobile or email.
Interested in finding our more? SourceMob can help you improve your recruiting excellence, lead capture, and engagement using Talent Community solutions and still have it delivered in 2013. Email me at Jeff@sourcemob.com or call 612-349-2740 and learn how we can provide you with a better candidate experience while dramatically lowering your recruiting costs.
Best,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO/Founder
SourceMob.com
612-349-2740
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyjeffgiesener