CareerBuilder unveils a new service today for harried recruiters who know they should have a talent network, but just haven’t found the time to organize things the way they want.
CareerBuilder’s new Talent Network does it for you. It’s pretty much a turn-key service that takes your branding, your look and feel, your jobs, and creates a site, optimizes jobs, and provides a versatile link that invites jobseekers to join your network and start getting personalized job posts. Recruiters get a searchable pool of candidates, and a way of keeping in touch with them, and with all those other candidates now languishing in your ATS.
If this sounds like something you could do for yourself, it is. And if you have already done all the heavy-lifting to make it happen, pat yourself on the back. But from my conversations with recruiters and vendors, doing it yourself — from the planning to the ATS customization, to implementing it in a way that automates all the routine work — is so much effort that making it happen is far down the priority list for most employers.
Which is one reason Hope Gurion, CareerBuilder’s chief development officer, says the new service can be a “game-changer” for many employers. “A talent network,” she explained during a quick demo of the new service, “helps you capture active and passive candidates from multiple sources.”
Here’s how: A potential candidate spots an interesting opportunity on your Facebook page. Or maybe she hears about it from a friend who forwards a post, or… You get the idea. If she’s not ready to apply just yet, she can join your talent network simply by clicking the button and answering a few (a very few) questions. (Gurion calls it “lightweight registration.”)
Your prospect can choose to upload a resume or not. Gurion says that during the beta testing no fewer than 60 percent of the registrants do. Even if your candidate doesn’t, CareerBuilder can use her name or email address to search its own resume database for a match, finding one 30-50 percent of the time.
Using the resume and learning her job interests by seeing what kinds of jobs she clicks into, CareerBuilder’s Talent Network now sends your newly enrolled prospect customized job opportunities.
Because so many millions of seekers already have resumes uploaded to CareerBuilder and are cookied, Gurion says that during the testing period something like 40 percent of the visitors to beta client’s Sunrise Senior Living site found job listings already personalized to them. To get the alerts and notifications, these visitors would still have to opt-in to the talent network. Many do.
What’s more, you can upload all the candidates in your ATS to the talent network, giving a second life to all those resumes you promised to “keep on file.” You can search your talent network for candidates fitting certain particulars, creating a pool to which you can send customized emails.
The talent network service doesn’t replace a corporate career site. It works with it, though it appears the job listings could supplant that part. While jobs are personalized to the individual site visitor, they can still search the entire inventory. Plus, CareerBuilder automatically extracts some key elements adding them to the header, improving their positioning on search engines.
Gurion also pointed out the added value of the analytics. Besides the usual data on source of visitors, and the conversion rate for the talent network, the Talent Network has the ability to segment visitors by the types of jobs they seek, their geography, and some other relevant demographics. That’s useful information if, like Sunrise, you hire people for a variety of jobs in different parts of the country. Spotting an imbalance in your pipeline lets you make adjustments to your advertising and marketing program in time to avoid problems.
The service doesn’t come cheap. Figure on $100,000 to $150,000 in the first year for set-up, licensing and so on.