Is Your Talent Community Capturing the Right Information?

The purpose of your talent community is to attract a pipeline of qualified talent. But how do you really gauge potential by asking someone for their name, physical address, email contact, and so on?

And more importantly, is that where your talent community stops in the engagement process?

Let’s say you’re a company that’s 100,000 employees strong and hiring. A company with that many employees is bound to have a large number of opportunities available at any given time.

In terms of sheer volume, that’s a lot of potential hires to sift through.

But what exactly do your recruiters gain by seeing a name, an address, and a phone number? How does that information measure an individual’s talent and how in the world do you place someone appropriately with so little information?

Of course, you can make an educated guess by looking at job notification preferences. But even these preferences relate very little information about a person’s qualifications.

The answer is to go deeper, to put candidates in a position where they can volunteer as much information as possible in a way that creates measurable interaction. This way, recruiters get data that enable them to make sound recruiting decisions.

Keeping in mind that these are mostly passive candidates in your talent pipeline and they aren’t really looking for a job, the level of engagement needs to be significant to maintain engagement.

Many talent communities send candidates off site to social networks where interaction is more likely to occur with others inside the company. There’s nothing wrong with this approach except that you really want to keep them on your site as long as possible to gain as much measurable data as you can.

And that’s really the key here: data. While it’s all well and good that you want to provide a community for these candidates somewhere else, the more a candidate interacts with your own site, the more data you obtain about that individual’s potential and the better equipped you are when it comes time to engage them.

Some of the things we’ve learned in our decade-plus experience in building recruiting tools is to provide passive candidates with a real reason to sign up to your talent community.

Things like:

1. Secure areas that let them manage personal information and change it when it needs to be updated.
2. Mobile access that lets them manage their profiles and find your jobs and job applications from any device.
3. The ability to save job searches for times when there just is no time to go through each job listing.
4. The ability to save individual job listings for a richly tailored job hunt experience.
5. A way to share job offers with friends or family or other colleagues.
6. Email notifications with adjustable delivery times so there isn’t a constant bombardment to their inbox.
7. Separate email notifications that deliver specific offers in a job class, location or facility, instead bundling everything in one notice.
8. RSS feeds that offer a non-intrusive way of being notified about available opportunities in an area of interest.

These are the most requested features we’ve encountered, but really it could go on and on. Whatever bit of data you think would help you identify and recruit top talent can be turned into an interactive tool in your talent community.

The goal is to identify where your talent community breaks down in data collection and open it up in a way that keeps candidates on your site as long as possible.