Just weeks after I wrote a piece for ERE.net about talent communities, something happened on the Internet that excited much of the tech blogs and was acknowledged by many traditional press outlets; President Barack Obama held a 30-minute “ask-me-anything” session on the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet” reddit.com. There is an important take away here for professional recruiters.

First things first.

Closer to the election, a day before in fact, the President took some time to once again drop in on redditors to ask for their votes. Contender Mitt Romney’s reddit.com appearances? Exactly two less than Mr. Obama’s.

The President invested some of his campaign time into a site like reddit because of its demographics.  Google’s Double Click Ad Planner reports that reddit traffic is overwhelmingly dominated by people under the age of 35. In addition to reddit, Team Obama also spent a lot of effort on getting content broadcast on Tumblr, another social site that hosts far more under-thirty-somethings than overs. And while it is not possible to determine specifically whether or not Mr. Obama’s reddit.com investment paid off, election results sure do look like the strategy of going where the youth vote was more than likely paid off.

Not only did the President dominate the youth vote nationally (see the graphic below, click to enlarge), more importantly in critical swing states he actually improved upon his 2008 performance in the youth vote (also see the figure below), something he was unable to do nationally.

The evidence suggests that the President’s investment to meet the key youth demographic where they were digitally clearly paid off.

Now to what it means to you. keep reading…

Recently I came across a post on a blog that I visit from time to time, Inside Talent Management Technology, entitled “Talent Communities Are a Big Farce.” The premise of the post was that the majority of so-called “talent communities” are simply fronts for a company to capture the name and contact information of active candidates. There was, in the author’s opinion, no community at all.

Sadly, the majority of self-defined talent communities exist for the sole purpose of building a recruiting team’s list of possible candidates. Compounding this problem is the fact that there are some cases in which a job posting is placed not because there is a specific opportunity open at that very moment, but that there may be an opportunity open that is similar to what is in the job posting in the foreseeable future. This basically allows recruiters to begin to passively source candidates ahead of an anticipated demand.

The term talent community seems to have gained much traction in the latter half of the 2000s and has gained much momentum as recruiting moves in a decidedly social direction. What has not matured along with the term, however, is the understanding of what a talent community must be.

List building and mining active candidates is a necessity, but it is certainly not something which could be called communal. So the question for recruiting professionals is really twofold. One, what is the proper definition of a talent community? And, two, how is a talent community developed? keep reading…