Creating and Leveraging Talent Communities for Advanced Recruitment Results

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

This is the title of a very good white paper written by Fara Rives at Allegis Global Solutions for The Outsourcing Institute that you can download.

The paper starts with the right statement "Talent recruitment today is much more than posting jobs on a corporate website or even using specialized online job boards. Innovative organizations know that they must continuously build and expand talent communities in order to have the best opportunities to identify and hire employees—even before a job opening may be available."

In short, building a talent community is the basis for any proactive recruiting strategy. Do not wait to have jobs to look for candidates. Anticipate. Create and nurture your talent community.

Creating a talent community: This is the number 1 building block of any proactive recruiting strategy. From the get-go, Fara Rives mentions a post by Kevin Wheeler (Beyond Talent Pools: Building Dynamic Communities) to indicate what an actionable talent community is about: it powers "two-way interactions where the organization and the candidate exchange information." So forget about your low-end CRMs and simple mailing lists. When you have a two-way building community, you have a new powerful marketing tool. You can also go beyond the current generic employment branding that you have today, and offer personalized marketing, start to speak to your candidates (and not at candidates).

Setting up a new process: Modern talent acquisition is moving away from the more clerical approach of processing resumes. In a competitive job environment, it's not enough to offer a job. What makes you stand out is the ability to provide a high-quality environment: your talent community the perfect venue to deliver a preview of what your company is actually about.  

As time goes, creating and nurturing talent communities will be less and less optional. The job market is more favorable to jobseekers and, even more importantly, the millennials will compose the majority of the workforce as early as next year. As a recent research sponsored by Elance-oDesk and Millennial Branding shows, "this generation is already chafing at today's traditional company structures." After interviewing working millennials and gen X hiring managers, they saw fundamental "'disjoints' in thinking between these two generations." The solution is to engage. In a one-way relationship, you ask candidates to interact with you and you assume that they will do it.  They won't. The new generation of candidate relationship management must enable you to build a rapport with candidates, assess their potential, their ability, their desire to grow in the job, or their cultural fit within your company.

Will your department need help for the creation of your Employer Value Proposition (EVP)? Certainly. Lots of great organizations can help you. The Allegis Group understands this new trend and is one of them.

This white paper does not recommend any platform. As the CEO of TalentCircles, I am comfortable to mention that TalentCircles is precisely designed to accommodate all the needs related to proactive recruiting, network segmentation and focused marketing and offers the indispensable analytics that will help you fine-tune your engagement strategy with both active and passive candidates.

The art and science of diversity recruiting

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Diversity management is fairly straightforward once people are employees. Diversity reports show how successful (or unsuccessful) companies are. Most are only moderately successful at best, not because they do not want diversity, but simply because they use tools that prevent them to recruit for diversity. The current talent acquisition process is a transactional playing field designed to process resumes and not to hire people. And diversity hiring is all about people!

Building up a consistent diversity initiative requires the ability to create live talent pools that enables you to:

• Decouple candidate attraction and engagement from specific jobs.
• Design diversity circles that provide candidates with the ability to declare themselves as members of a given group (or multiple groups).
• Dialogue with your talent community.

Decouple candidate attraction and engagement from specific jobs

This is what proactive recruiting is about. Do not wait to have job openings to look for candidates! We all know how ineffective reactive recruiting can be... It's a catastrophe as far as diversity is concerned. Build your talent pool through your branding efforts and invite candidates to join your talent network. You will deal with human beings and not simply with resumes. This is the starting point to get any insight on the populations you attract versus the groups you would like to attract. Once you have attracted candidates, you can search your talent pool to identify the best matches for your needs.

Design circles of interest enabling self-declaration

You cannot ask personal questions, but you can offer people the ability to tell you who they are! Using TalentCircles you can segment your community into branded groups of interest like "Veterans", "Students," "Flex-time," "LGBT," "Women in STEM," etc... Then, it's up to the candidates to subscribe to one or several of these groups. Each time you will post an event, any information, a blog post or a job in these groups, your candidates will be automatically notified and thus, continuously be engaged. It is the opportunity for your company to also showcase what it is like for your diverse employees to work in your organization, associate them effectively to your diversity efforts — and give a new breadth and depth to your initiative. Employees are your best spokespeople. Diverse employees who are happy with your diversity management efforts will be your most amazing evangelists.

 Diversity recruiting using TalentCircles

Dialogue with your talent community

So you decouple candidate attraction from any specific job, you offer candidates to declare themselves and now you are in the perfect situation to interact with people: via live video conversations with one or several members of your talent community, invite them to webinars, invite them to write blog posts for you, invite them to in-person events, etc... Building up diversity is all about getting to know people, conversing with them... and proactive recruiting is all about the artistry of looking at people for both aptitude and attitude.

So, just stop saying you care about hiring diversily while show unconvincing results year after year, just do it. It's truly only a matter of selecting a technology that makes it possible and easy!

Your talent pool is never be too large if you have the right tools to manage it!

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

A few weeks ago, a participant to the Bersin/Deloitte Impact Conference wondered how she could make sure that her talent pool would only include qualified passive candidates? TalentCircles helps you to address this question optimally and define what's best for you.

Think twice about what a "qualified" passive candidate might be.

If the candidate is passive, this means that you may not have a job for her right away. Consequently also, it may be difficult to say whether or not this candidate is "qualified." So you may not want to apply to passive candidates the same criteria you apply to candidates who actively apply for a job.

If you want to attract passive candidates, remain open-minded. As a rule, an exclusionary strategy may make you miss lots of people with potentially interesting skills in a variety of business units and you will fall into the same predicament as what you experience today with too few passive candidates!

So the question becomes: how to make sure not to be overwhelmed by a large talent pool. TalentCircles gives you the ability to evaluate your talent pool along multiple filtering criteria, including:

• Job matching
• Questionnaires, which can be public or private
• Circles, which can be public, private or confidential
• Mass and individual tagging

Job matching

This feature is extremely powerful. Whether or not you have segmented your talent pool in circles, tagged candidates or selected them through questionnaires, the job matching capabilities will tell you immediately who in your candidate pool has a profile corresponding to the job you are trying to fill with the match percentage. You can also adjust the job matching criteria at your convenience on the fly.

Mass and individual tagging

You can tag any individual candidate, as well as bulk-tag candidates. All the candidates you have tagged will show in any search using that tag. You can connect and engage with these candidates at your convenience (alert them on any type of news, event, invite them for video interviews, webinars, etc.)

Questionnaires

Questionnaires, sometimes called pre-recorded interviews, allow you to filter out the candidates you attract. These questionnaires can contain as many questions as you wish and these questions can call for video responses, text only or multi-choices (with one or several valid choices). You can score all the responses. Questionnaires can be posted on public social networks, sent to a selection of candidates or posted in circles. In the event that questionnaires are posted in public, do not worry if you get hundreds of responses: TalentCircles allows you to sort candidates by scores.

Circles

When candidates opt into your network, they can subscribe to one or several public circles of interest that you have defined and where you engage people on topics that are of interest to them. For example, a candidate can belong to both a military circle and a sales circle. Each time, you will post a job, a blog post, an event, questionnaires or new documents related to this circles these candidates will be notified automatically.

Not all the candidates in public circles will be equally interesting to you. So you can run a search on candidates that are of special interest to you and invite them into a private circle that only these candidates will see.

There may be candidates that are of very special interest to you and whom you want to particularly pamper without letting them know how valuable they may be to you. You can make a search and assign these candidates into your confidential circle.

Of course, if you want to reduce the size of your talent pool, you can also decide to accept people upon invitation only.

Managing a large talent pool is easy when your talent acquisition platform is designed to do so!

Why Job Descriptions Are Not Enough in Hiring

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

The problem: job descriptions are legal (not marketing documents) created for the purposes of protecting not promoting the employer in the role described. Yet, employers must take a marketing and employment branding approach when developing job descriptions, job postings and employment information to attract and engage a candidate that they hope may become an employee.

For the job seeker there really hasn’t been a place where they can go and interact with recruiters in an organization. They used to submit a resume and cover letter based on the job description and then they were placed in a purgatory type environment and would rarely hear back because of the volume of applicants for a given position. However, as HR departments become more like skeleton crews it’s important that they better utilize their time when dealing with potential employees.

Relying on job postings to communicate to a job seeker the benefits of working for your company does not work any longer. The candidate experience is becoming increasingly important in the job seeker lifecycle and companies can’t ignore the fact that good talent comes from delivering a good experience. In order to hire the best candidates, you must focus the process around the job seeker. If developed properly, the candidate experience can be one of the best tools out there to attract and the best candidates.

If you’re company is struggling with finding ways to improve the candidate experience within your organization, here are a few things that you can easily do:

Create a Talent Community: Talent Communities not only benefit the recruiter but also they give the candidate a place to go after submitting an application. After applying for a job, the candidate doesn’t know where their application goes or if a recruiter is even paying attention to them. Talent communities create a sense of belonging. Whether they get the job they initially applied for or not, you’ll keep attracting good candidates.

Engage with the Job Seeker: Engaging with the job seeker doesn’t necessarily have to be through a Talent Community (although strongly encouraged). When an applicant submits a resume, don’t leave them hanging in the black hole of resumes, but take time to respond and give direction if they were selected for the job. This could prove difficult if you received hundreds of resumes, that’s why the best tool for the candidate experience is Talent Circle’s Talent Community platform.

Focus on Employment Branding: Part of the candidate experience ties into how your company is branding itself. When companies are able to highlight the perks and benefits of working for their specific company, as well as its real culture, job seekers will be more interested in working for said company. Use employment branding to elevate your brand to the next level and engage candidates in a positive environment.

If your company is struggling with improving the candidate experience following these few guidelines will help your organization develop a stronger relationship with the job seeker and the overall process. What has your company done to position themselves as an employer of choice?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

Job Candidate Experience: Treating people well is excellent business

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

How many times have HR Professionals heard Gerry Crispin discuss the importance of providing an outstanding candidate experience? How many companies truly act on his recommendations? Not enough. To evaluate how your company fares, check one of Gerry Crispin's presentations or make sure to catch one of his talks. If you believe that your company is ahead of the curve, apply for the Candidate Experience Award.

The HR Copernican Revolution: Caring about Candidate Experience is not just "nice to do." It's mission-critical for all of a company's departments. Look at it as a mandatory HR Copernican Revolution: Your company is no longer the center of the universe — candidates are. While companies may still believe that it's a privilege to "offer" a job to a candidate and that candidates should abide by whatever rules companies decide to set, Gerry Crispin opportunely reminds that "candidate experience is what THEY say it is, not how you think you've designed it."

Many companies still have the mindset that people should just be happy to get a job, especially at times of significant unemployment. Sure, unemployed persons will see the opportunity to land a job as a godsend. Will a positive result make them necessarily forget about their painful experience to get it? Unlikely. They may just leave for another company at the first opportunity, simply because they never had the personal feeling of being truly valued and desired in the first place: companies spend fortunes hiring, but the costs of talent churn are outrageous!

Candidate Experience is even more important for candidates that do not have the right profile for the job at a given time. It's key to send a courteous rejection letter; however, not all companies do. That's a huge oversight:

• Over 50% of job applicants are unlikely to buy from or recommend a company that mistreated them.
• Even more importantly, candidates have all the capabilities to tell their stories, and not all of them are just disgruntled creeps. They are human beings, and may become the talent that will make your competitors shine.

Embrace the universe! Keep your candidates informed at all times in the process and go even further, welcome the universe onto your own planet! Welcome candidates into your "TalentCircles." The candidates for whom you don't have a position today may be people you need tomorrow. Why "re-source" them when a little bit of forward-looking thinking might drive your time-to-hire to almost nothing down the road. Candidates that you will never hire are valuable: they can still admire your company and refer people that are more useful to you! Even at a time when everybody is high on "big data," the world is actually small if you look at it from a network standpoint.

Candidates are people. Just as customers expect a good experience when a company cannot accommodate an immediate need, candidates demand a good experience even when they don’t land the job. A rejection letter is great. Giving the opportunity to a "rejected" candidate to remain in your circles and still help you is even better: candidates will forget about the disappointment and, instead, feel empowered with a purpose. They can become your ambassadors and eventually find you better people than who they are without feeling belittled. They may even be enchanted: as Guy Kawasaki likes to say "nobodies are the new somebodies."

In fact, treating people well is not just good business, it’s often excellent business!

Strategic choice: Create and nurture nimble talent networks

By Kevin W. Grossman

How refreshing it was to hear it. Not that I disparage LinkedIn as a valuable sourcing service; it is used by more recruiters than any other online network. But for the first time of late I heard a recruiter at a decent-sized company lauding the use of Quora to source and network, not LinkedIn. Quora is an expert network where questions are posed and answers are given about a variety of topics from a variety of industries.

That’s one of the biggest wins when it comes to recruiting these days – being flexible, nimble and opportunistic. Finding where your target talent is and going to them. Then creating talent networks and nurturing them, on their own ground as well as yours, whether you hire them or not.

This is a critical key to hiring and retention and one of many valuable takeaways from the recent San Francisco event War For Talent, Winning the War for Startup Talent. And what an appropriate place to have the event, since San Francisco is the center of the startup universe these days (and the past few years).

Blech. War for talent? I know it’s a highly competitive marketplace for the highly specialized skills needed today, especially those needed for technology startups. According to economists quoted in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, “Job growth since the end of the recession has been clustered in high-skill fields inaccessible to workers without advanced degrees or in low-paying industries.”

As I wrote recently, it’s not really a war; it’s a mobilization of innovation and motivated minds — the leaders, the builders, the doers, all the combined skills that make up the “startup” and of course the money that make it all happen, with barriers to business entry lower than they’ve ever been.

Take the opening keynote speaker at the War For Talent event, Ron Conway, co-founder of SV Angel. Ron talked about how recruiting and hiring should be the number #1 priority for startups, that these firms are the job creation engines.

He emphasized that anyone can be recruited at any time and referenced his time advising Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Early on Zuckerberg spent hours a day recruiting (still does) and was quoted as saying, “If you're not fatigued from recruiting, you're not doing your job. You should always be replacing yourself.”

In fact, a lot of companies are fatiguing their recruiting teams left and right, trying before they buy in today’s market (and trying to find before they buy). For example, developing internship programs and then sourcing whom they should really hire over time. Remember, many highly specialized skills are a rarity in hot markets like the Bay Area.

But even if you've got a great product and your growth trajectory is vertical, those are only table stakes in Silicon Valley and other markets. People want their minds blown to join a company – they want the emotional connection with everyone they’d be working with and for.

Recruiting industry thought leader Kevin Wheeler referenced this week in an ERE.net article that 2.1 million people resigned their jobs in February, the most in any month since the start of the Great Recession. He goes on to write:

“This is startling given that the economy is not strong and that millions are out of work. The natural inclination would seem to me to be to hunker down and hang on to the job you have, no matter how bad it is. That is what happened in previous recessions. Yet these were disgruntled, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled people who voluntarily, many without other positions or jobs lined up, chose to leave.”

Again, it’s the mobilization of innovation and motivated minds and the companies that are winning are creating and nurturing flexible, nimble and opportunistic talent networks.

Go ahead. Blow their minds.

People make it happen, not the resume

By Kevin W. Grossman

So, if you’re a vendor or consultant and you make this pitch, “Make sure your resume is ATS ready today,” I’m going to tell all the job seekers to run away, and fast.

Because making sure their resume is ATS ready today means you’re making sure it’s black hole ready. Today. And everyday like it always is when applying to jobs solely via career sites that go directly into applicant tracking systems.

That comment may get some calls, but hear me out. We’ve had this conversation before. Although I want the resume to die a horrible death, I understand that there’s still a huge part of the career management industry keeping them alive, making it better and making it work for you, the job seeker. To all my friends in this industry, please forgive me, as well as those in the talent acquisition space, as I also understand it’s probably not going anywhere for years to come.

But I still want the painfully ubiquitous resume to die a horrible death.

Why? Because it’s a self-serving piece of inconsistently formatted and fudged professional drivel that really doesn’t help me hire true quality of fit; it doesn’t help me make an emotional connection with my potential employees.

Knowing folks that already work here, and/or meeting and getting to know other applicants, employees, hiring managers, recruiters, HR pros and management in an online and/or offline setting – these are what make for stronger connections when looking for employment.

Resumes – or better yet, online profiles – are necessary when it comes to getting your skills and experience noticed, but as I wrote in my last article, it takes a community to retain an employee and it takes talent circles to create relationship-based hiring. And it does.

According to recent social media recruiting research from my friends at The A-List (which you can download here), employees hired via personal referral connections that include friends, family and across all social networks, have a much lower turnover rate than those who are hired through other sources. And social networking hires trend to higher job satisfaction and feel better informed about the opportunity prior to accepting a job.

Last week I was at the HRO Today Forum, and during the opening keynote panel, Where do Jobs Come From: The Birds & Bees of Labor Flows & Job Creation, one of the panelists – Scott Case of Startup America Partnership – enlightened the crowd with this bit of wisdom:

"It's people making this sh$t happen."

What he was primarily referring to was startups driving job growth, but I’ll take it a step further and say it’s people in talent networks and circles that make it happen for job seekers, not the resumes.

It takes a community and relationship-based hiring indeed.

Seeding Career Clubs in Talent Network Coffee Shops

By Kevin W. Grossman

I don’t even like coffee, but I will drink a chai latte or a fruit smoothie when frequenting a coffee shop for business or pleasure. Don’t judge; I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t like coffee.

But that’s just a means to an end reason to frequent those establishments in the first place. The real reasons we go are to work, read, relax or meet like-minded people to discuss life, love and industry. Intimate, small groups that prefer face time and who might even start a career club of sorts at their favorite coffee shop to mentor one another about the world of work.

Brain freeze from the fruit smoothie I just downed – I read an article the other day titled Our Most Effective Source of Hire, and in it the author had conducted a quality-of-hire analysis in his company based on the following:

Quality of hire is defined as the percent of new hires who pass their one-year anniversary and score at least “meets expectations” on their first review. For example, we grouped together all the new hires from the first quarter of 2010. We then ran a report dating to the last day of the quarter a year later, 2011. We determined what percent of those hires were still employed and were not on performance improvement plans, etc. We did this on a quarterly basis.

What they found were the top 6 quality-of-hire rankings:

1. Former employees
2. Passive candidates
3. Employee referrals
4. Staffing agency hires
5. Contractor conversions
6. Job boards 

What’s interesting is that there was a 10% variance between staffing agencies and former employees, but a 20%-25% variance between contractor conversions and job boards and the top ranking of former employees. Not too surprising for those who’ve been in the hiring game for any length of time.

This also aligns nicely with where the value of talent networks come in – a place where former employees, passive candidates and employee referrals can come together, share a latte or an espresso (or a fruit smoothie) and talk career shop and find employment.

However, these networks just don’t happen. Someone’s got to take the lead and launch something somewhere in order to attract like-minded others for like-minded activities to then nurture this new type of network. Call it manufactured organic; you’ve got to seed it to breed it. Networks have formed since the beginning of time and there’s always someone or some entity forming them, leading them and nurturing them.

Ah, but what’s in a name? Naming and labeling have always changed the perception of what something is and the why of it. If we called it a “career club,” then that could imply a non-threatening collective of people helping people find, land and retain employment, as well as adapting and advancing. If we called it the “working for the man club,” that would change the perception even further — but it would still a self-contained and self-promoted ecosystem of people seeking and giving career advice (or venting about their crappy jobs and bosses).

If we called it a talent community, however, then the “talent” in talent community would actually dilute community, because it would be labeling its participants in a way that most wouldn’t label themselves as. “Community” itself can also be misleading as being to “touchy-feely,” incorporating group hugs, rainbows and unicorns. Plus, talent is for Hollywood, right? Not for us working stiffs. That’s why for those of us who created this career club, I bet we would never call it a talent community.

In fact, I bet most who join an in-person or online “community” primarily want to socialize, but only a few would join talent communities to do the same. Most of those people only want a job, pure and simple. And that’s okay, because that’s why we’ve been seeding and growing talent networks for decades.

But again, there would be a minority who would want to collaborate and commiserate with the like-minded about life, love and industry. A minority that includes former employees, passive candidates and employee referrals, and those are the folks your company wants to source and hire.

I say seed the career clubs inside talent network coffee shops. Just make sure to serve smoothies. Mixed berry with banana preferably.

5 New Dolphin Dance Steps that Lead to Talent Networks

By Kevin W. Grossman

The didgeridoo wails, the wood blocks clomp together in hypnotic rhythm and the painted dancers move together in synch, smacking their spears and knives on the water, calling to the sea and the dolphins of the deep to drive all the edible fish to shore.

It’s called the Dolphin Dance. It’s a traditional Aboriginal dance of a specific tribe living on the Western coast of Australian. I got to experience it yesterday in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. In fact, I’ve had the privilege of being here all week for an amazing new recruiting conference called the Recruiters’ Hub Conference (RHUB), the brainchild of Phillip Tusing, founder of RecTec. (You can find highlights from day one here and day two here.)

Besides opening the conference, I also had the unique opportunity to give the closing presentation – a high-level talk on Talent Networks – and that is where the Dolphin Dance connection comes in.

Over 12 years ago I entered the HR and recruiting tech marketplace with a company called Tapestry.net. We touted talent communities and our own proprietary candidate matching algorithm that we called IQA – interested qualified applicants. Our talent communities (as we called them) consisted of databases of software developers, IT pros and bilingual Japanese professionals (which was the primary origin of the company). But they weren’t really communities because there was only one-way communication with them – meaning we sent them job postings from our paying employers, some applied, we screened and presented the short lists to our clients.

This is what most talent acquisition sourcing and recruiting platforms have been doing for ages – dancing on the water’s edge to draw the fish to shore (to eat some and throw many more back – what a waste – but not encouraging the fish to play and spawn and stay active). Those are only talent pools, what we’ve been sourcing in for a long time, as old as recruiting itself and predating the internet by decades, if not thousands of years.

Then came the rise of social networks and social recruiting was born, although again that is misleading, since we’ve been sourcing online pools since before the internet was public and before all things social. Queue other online origins pre-internet like IBM’s SHARE and UNIX networks, Compuserve, AOL and Yahoo User Groups. Also, I worked at San Jose State University in the late 80’s and early 90’s and we were already online using email, checking out other university websites, and the human resource department was sourcing from internal pools throughout the entire state system.

I had the honor of meeting and listening to Greg Savage, founder and CEO of Firebrand Talent Ignition in Australia, and I was pleasantly surprised to be echoing what he’s been evangelizing for the past two years.

Social recruiting strategies are the precursors to true talent communities, and whether companies are using the very social backbones of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others to transform pools to networks and communities, or whether they’re using new “middleware” talent network platforms to do it, the talent return is greatest when the following new Dolphin Dance stops are added.

New Dolphin Dance Step #1 – Network Members Don’t Have to Apply for Jobs to Belong

Because you want like-minded folk to aggregate around your brand, you need to allow them come together around other topics relevant to them, whether they apply for a job today, tomorrow or next year.

New Dolphin Dance Step #2 – Network Members Participate in Collaborative Activities

Whether problem-solving on virtual white boards, attending interactive webinars, playing world of work video games with each other, or just hanging out in a virtual chat session, encouraging collaboration among outside folk as well as inside creates community.

New Dolphin Dance Step #3 – Network Members Mentor One Another

With collaboration comes informal mentoring – current employees, recruiters and hiring managers may mentor referrals they know (or non-referrals they don’t), as well as other community members mentoring each other on career development and more.

New Dolphin Dance Step #4 – Network Members Learn of Inside Connections

This is already happening today with LinkedIn and Facebook and other social business networks, but talent network platforms also facilitate this back-door knowledge or whom I already know at companies I may be interested in, or may have friends who would be interested in.

New Dolphin Dance Step #5 – Network Members Learn More About Employer Brands and Jobs

Of course they do. I know many recruiting folk argue that the main reason why people check out companies is because they’re looking for jobs, not because they want to hang out and dance.

But it’s not about the numbers – it’s about the finding the right specialized talent in smaller networks who want to grow professionally and learn how to dance with peers, potential employers and colleagues better than they’ve ever danced before.

Queue the didgeridoo.

You can stuff a Potato Head, but you can’t fake community

By Kevin W. Grossman

It’s been on the market for decades and it’s barely evolved from its original state. Sure it’s added a myriad of enhanced accessories over the years, some more fun and attractive while others are more utility than anything, but fierce competition from more technologically advanced products threaten to extinguish its presence once and for all.

Mr. and Mrs. Potato head, time to ride off into the sunset.

Or is it? As parent of two little girls in a family of “Toy Story” fanatics – that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. In fact, these toys have lived revival after revival over the years.

Like the applicant tracking system (at least in their own unique short history). Wait, I know you’re thinking, “C’mon, Kevin. Really?”

Yes, really. Maybe you remember EZaccess, the software created for staffing firms way back in the mid-1990s. Or, maybe you remember when it became Personic and then Unicru and then to the many flavors of talent acquisition software on the market today.

Applicant tracking systems for the most part store candidates and candidate stuff; you can also store stuff in your Potato Heads. But the trend of late is to add features and enhancements to make the systems more seemingly social, to go beyond talent storage to talent networks via social recruiting activities – posting jobs on social networks and sourcing candidates from them. And there are a lot of quality talent acquisition systems out there scrambling to add social.

But that alone doesn’t make for talent networks and quality connections and engagement – facilitating communication and activities between candidates as well as employers and candidates, 3-way conversations do.

The key here being the interactive activities and the orchestration within. And it’s the people that make that happen, whether one-on-one or in groups. It’s the HR pros, the recruiters, the hiring managers, the candidates and those who are interested in the employment brand but haven’t actually applied for anything yet (and may never apply). The talent network then orchestrates how systems are used and in turn creates “community” of sorts.

It’s really dark inside the Potato Heads especially when all the appendages are attached, all the holes plugged. That’s what it’s like with the basic social functions of ATS’s today. Applicants are sourced, filtered and stored, but there’s no interaction inside, and only limited outside. Just cold and dark and lonely and the qualified applicants inside aren’t going to wait, just stagnate and move on to other talent networks.

The quality interaction that which engages is what happens outside of the cold, dark stasis. Potato Heads on their own aren’t connector networks, but where they’re played with, when the kids (the applicants) and the parents (the employers) conduct the orchestration between Potato Heads and one another, then the reason-to-stay fun begins.

It’s got to be a 3-way Potato play:

• Playing solo with all the interactive accessories (career management exercises, assessments, etc).
• Playing live in similar groups (“kids” with other “kids” – white boarding, mentoring, video chats)
• Playing live in mixed groups (“kids” with the “employer” – webinars, training, video chats)

You can stuff a Potato Head, but you can’t fake community. And basic ATS social just isn’t enough to drive the interactive engagement you need to stay competitive with the right talent.