Recruiters that still view sourcing as a numbers game or that have grown too fond of the “spray & stick” method of recruiting will see the concept of building communities as too time consuming.

I agree with David this is the future; community building isn’t about about filling the job fast, or even finding the most “qualified” candidates, it’s about best-fit and hiring for retention.

The legal hurdles will be mostly about Diversity, discrimination and adverse impacts of relying too heavily on social networks to identify candidates, however these are solvable problems if an organization takes steps to reach out to minority groups and can demonstrate a level playing field.

The best thing about this site is the expertise in written communication. It does not compare to average blogs and articles.

To start with, even if hundreds of ‘talent communities’ where launched by every major employer, candidates aren’t going to join every one of them, and keep their information up to date. The good one’s don’t have free time to work on fuzzy projects at other companies career/community sites, just for fun.

Also, companies are hyper-sensitive to controlling the recruiting conversation with any prospective candidates – no matter how cumbersome or inefficient it is, because if you turn the lights on inside within any candidate database and allow everyone to start talking with each other (future/past candidates, current/past employees, etc.) the conversation turns bad fast, which doesn?t help recruiting.

Unfortunately, there are 100 people who will say bad things about any company for every 1 that will speak up because complaining is a key virtue of ?community oriented? websites, and this aspect alone will largely prevent companies from launching any type of ‘community’ element to their online strategy mix.

Again, I do agree strongly with most of Kevin?s thoughts about modifying the companies website, make it easy for candidates (especially visitors/passive candidates) to subscribe to a companies website ? and provide basic information without having to apply, and of course to have companies optimize their career sites so the millions of job seekers using Google/Yahoo can find any companies jobs directly, versus through the job boards, and utilizing their applicant data better, so that they can re-recruit past applicants whether by using agents/matching technology, email marketing, or good old fashion phone calls.

However, I can almost visualize how cross-eyed and confused hiring managers, low-level recruiters, and anyone else in the staffing supply chain would be when a well intentioned champion tries to sell them on integrating a ’social networking community’ into their recruiting strategy, when they can’t even get the look and feel of their corporate career site where they want it to be.