Building talent communities, Part I | What is a talent community?

Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod

According to the Seeking Cost Advantages in HR Technology and Service Delivery – 2009 HR Technology Trends Survey conducted by Towers Watson:

• Talent management has become a higher priority for one-third of companies due to the economic crisis.
• More than half of companies are planning more talent management technology in the next 24 months, with an emphasis on integration.
• Social networking, while extremely new, is already being used more than most other Web 2.0 tools.

The advent of social media has allowed employers to move from simply collecting resumes in a database to developing somewhat personal and meaningful relationships in and around the pool(s) of talent they want to attract.

What is the difference between an applicant database and a talent community?

Kevin Wheeler writes, “Databases suffer from two major problems when it comes to being effective recruiting tools:

Problem one. They tend to get old very quickly and the data about the people is not current and often not even useable. While no one I know of has done actual research on the quality of the data in corporate resume databases, I know from anecdotal conversation that it is poor. I would guess that over half the people in the typical database are either no longer interested in a position or cannot be contacted. (I, too, know this from experience!)

Problem two. The recruiter has a one-dimensional view of the candidates, generally only from the resume itself. There is no additional information, no personal observations, and no reference data. Because resumes have been added mostly through electronic and impersonal methods, the candidates are completely unknown to the recruiters. This means that the qualification and assessment of a candidate begins after the resume is retrieved and may take quite a bit of time, assuming the candidate can even be contacted. Candidate quality is often poor, and the time to find candidates can become very long, especially for hard-to-fill positions. Ask yourself how many positions are filled with people you find solely by searching in your ATS database.”

A talent community is so much more than a database (applicant tracking system) which, in many cases, quickly becomes a one-way, stagnant dumping ground.

A talent community is an opt-in, interactive forum where individuals with particular skill sets and interests can interact in a personal and meaningful way with corporate HR and company management in order to better understand – and be a part of – the firm and all that it has to offer from an employment perspective.

Joshua Kahn wrote a job description for a Talent Community Manager. You can read it here.

I think it’s an excellent start, though I would add to it elements of driving interest and traffic to the talent community itself via social media and face-to-face networking opportunities such as conferences, unconferences, etc.

In this series we will explore why and how companies should build talent communities.

We will also discuss the benefits of joining such communities for individuals — whether or not they are actively seeking employment at the time.

I’d love to hear from those of you who have built/are building talent communities for your own companies or firms. What’s working well for you and where do you aspire to go with this endeavor?

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