Recruiting for Hidden Talent Within Your Existing Candidate Communities

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

One of my favorite bloggers and thought leaders in this space hands down is Naomi Bloom. She has a wealth of resources, knowledge and stories that can’t all be explained by a single resume, a 30-minute meeting and certainly not on one LinkedIn profile.

That’s exactly what Naomi talks about in one of her most recent blog posts about how to find the hidden talent within your existing communities. She writes about how she discovers some of her own talents through a fundraiser event. Special talents that are best shared through experiences in person.

This is a great story that can teach us as recruiters to look beyond the flat screen when it comes to talent search. Why do we as recruiters allow ourselves to keep running around working and re-working sourcing, hunting and searching for job seekers who we already are engaged with or even interviewed in the past for the available jobs at our company?

You have conversations with colleagues already within your reach that can help you realize untapped talents. Questions like:

-       If you could do anything, regardless if it made you any money for a living, what would it be?

-       What is a secret talent you have that no one knows?

-       If you were to perform in a talent show, what would you do?

-       If you were on Survivor, what would be the skill that your team would keep you on the island?

-       As a child, what did you love doing?

-       What is your favorite thing to do on vacation?

-       What is the number one attribute that your classmates remember about you in college?

-       If you were to have trophies to symbolize your achievements, what would they look like?

-       Where is the most exotic place you’d like to travel, why?

The main piece of wisdom here is not what questions you need to ask as a recruiter, the real solution is in whom you need to ask. For example, consider the candidates you’ve met from the job fairs in the past 3 months. What about the candidates you’ve interviewed in the past 6 months? Or the past 12 months? Or, what about that one candidate who impressed you from two years ago?

The solution to our existing recruiting woes starts with the hidden talent within the pools we’ve already been fulfilling, sourcing and managing. It means reaching out to your existing candidate population. There is a wealth of hidden talent available within your own network. To help you with this approach, I seriously recommend that you have a talent network system to help you manage it all.

Talent networks serve as a CRM allowing you to engage your existing relationship, add notes and schedule customized follow up to truly tap into the hidden talents within your existing candidate pipelines and databases whether it be your current employee population, alumni networks, past applicants or the other job seekers you’ve engaged along the way. TalentCircles includes this feature.

I hope you found this helpful. If you are already engaging within your own network, what kind of management system are you using to organize the information?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell.