Comments on: 5 Ways to Build a Better Talent Community

By: 5 Ways to Build a Better Talent Community | Recruiter It News

5 Ways to Build a Better Talent Community | Recruiter It News — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:55:42 +0000

[...] In every recruiting process, metrics are key. And the most measured are time and cost. But have you considered the most important business metric of all, top-line revenue? You only need to evaluate some of these critical stats to understand why accelerating top-line revenue is one of the only metrics with which senior executives are concerned. (more…) [...]

By: Marvin Smith

Marvin Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 14:42:14 +0000

Nice article, I particularly like your thinking around “Develop an Inclusive Community, Not An Exclusive One.” I assume in this context that you are building a talent community around a brand or a company. One of the lessons of my past 6 years of building online communities of talent is that if your attempt to limit the membership to just the “stars” or the “silver medalists” or some other method of exclusion, the communities never thrive. Thanks for sharing.

By: Keith Halperin

Keith Halperin — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:17:19 +0000

@ Edward: You COULD continue to personally respond to every call, email, tweet, etc. you receive, or you could hire a Virtual Candidate Care Specialist for $3.00/hr to handle every communication that you don’t want to immediately go forward with (either “Nos”, or “Not yet/I don’t knows”) and make sure they all have pleasant and professional candidate experiences. The goal would be to have the maximum number of people you don’t hire right now be so happy that they’d consider applying again and/or referring their friends, while at the same time allowing you to devote your time to your more value-added recruiting activities.

Cheers,
Keith

By: Edward Sussek

Edward Sussek — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:56:52 +0000

I think one of the simplest things to do is to talk to people. We send out emails to people through Linked In and only talk to the ones that interest. We send reject emails to candidates with no explanations as to why they were not considered.

I hear so many applicants complain that they can never connect with a real person. My suggestions to recruiters is to respond to ALL emails.

Some will say “I am so busy that I don’t have the time.” Nonsense, I am managing a req load of 25 engineering positions and I respond to every email inquiry. Make it a priority

By: Keith Halperin

Keith Halperin — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:00:36 +0000

Thank you, Lauren. Very well-written article, and I appreciate your citing the sources for your facts; an umber of our author colleagues seem to put their “facts” out of the air (or other places)….

I think that most recruiters and their managers agree that it’s a valuable idea to create talent communities/talent pipelines. However, it’s been my experience that few large companies, and even fewer SMBs are willing/able to commit their recruiting resources to doing this- we either drinking from firehoses or wondering how much longer they’ll keep us on during the slow-down, slowdown. It may come down the unwillingness of hirng someone whose responsibility is to develop relationships with candidates who may not be hired for 6 months, 12 months, or ever.

Besides organizations like your company which helps companies create talent communities (thank you again for not turning this article into an infomercial, as some of our author colleagues sometimes do), I know of at least two tools which can help with aspects of it- one is a tool primarily designed for managing the employee referral process, and another is primarily a sourcing tool which allows people to more freely and completely access, aggregate, and contact large sections of their social networks (like LI and FB) which are otherwise not directly accessible to them.

@ Everybody: DISCLAIMER- if I mention some recruiting product or service (as I did abovr), I’m probably hoping to make some money with it if I can; in these cases, I am NOT a disinterested party…

Cheers,

Keith