Take a Community First Approach to Engage Your Job Seeker Community - Part 1

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

If you think about anything lasting, enjoyable or worthwhile in your life, from your work to fun vacations to your favorite hobby, it probably involves other people. Whatever the activity or pastime that comes to mind, I’ll almost bet that what you really got out of it was community. Whether it’s family and friends that you’ve developed deep relationships with, co-workers that encourage you, maybe a fitness buddy that pushes you, people make our lives better.

Community is a powerful thing, both in our personal lives and in our jobs as recruiters. Gathering with people who are like-minded or with whom you have something in common is comforting, encouraging and helpful. In recruiting, we can use this reality to our advantage by creating community among job seekers and recruiters.

Recruiting and Selection Taking a Community Garden Approach

Think about your candidate community like a community garden. The goal is not just to produce a great crop but to network, build relationships and to learn as well as grow together. This is the basis of the future of recruiting and selection. This is the power to engaging your job seeker community.

The power of community

The community first approach is powerful and worth focusing on. The perfect example of just how powerful a community can be in the virtual world is Reddit’s very vibrant, passionate and eclectic group of members who, for better or for worse, are engaged and involved in the organization. These members care so much about the online community that they drive the success of or can even create conflict in the organization. As individuals, they are simply people sitting at a computer feeling passionate about particular issues that shape the company, but united, they have the power to actually guide the company’s decisions. That’s what you call a powerful community.

As recruiters, we’d be well served to think about how to take a community first approach in our own recruitment and candidate attraction strategies. Imagine a community of job seekers, recruiters and hiring managers that is proactive, involved and responsive. It could save your team time and help develop deeper connections than ever before. Of course community is important, but in recruiting what’s even more important is what that sense of community creates, such as a tie to your organization, a desire to be a part of it and a connection that makes the job acceptance decision an easy one.

How community happens

The key to a great community is to give your members a reason to be there. You can do this by providing a service, platform or resources that are truly unique. This could mean simply being available and responsive in answering candidate questions. Trust me when I say that even this could make your organization stand out. You can also provide resources that help candidates understand your company using a talent network like TalentCircles. 

However, I believe there’s an enormous opportunity to foster community beyond showing candidates what your company does and stands for, so consider carving out a bit of time and developing ways you can also help their overall job search. Candidates want information, resources and most important options. You could do this by providing resume and cover letter templates, salary negotiation tips, ongoing engagement and best practices for reaching out to a recruiter for an interview with your company, as well as other companies. It might seem risky to help them in this way but the reality is that they are going to get those resources somewhere, so you might as well be the place they go.

You’re not only showing them you’re invested in their success but also enabling them to be proactive, which ultimately aids you in your search and benefits you in your recruitment and selection efforts.

Be sure to check out part 2 of our community job seeker series.

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

5 Things I Want From My Talent Community

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Talent communities provide a unique value to recruiters and candidates. They give both the opportunity to get to know each other without taking the plunge. Essentially, talent communities make relationship building easier and provide more opportunities for interaction than any other type of platform. It’s perfect for building relationships with job seekers for the long term.

Recruiters can invite potential candidates to join your company-branded community, then both parties can get to know one another. When the time is right, both the candidate and recruiter will decide if they want to make things more official and consider each other as an employer or an employee. It’s one of the most powerful tools a recruiter has, but not all talent communities are the same. The formats, platforms, services and functionality can differ greatly, so it’s important to understand the product and find what’s right for your company and candidates.

Here are my must-haves when it comes to a stellar talent community:

Focuses on engagement

Relationships are a two-way street with conversation that flows both ways. If I wanted to sign up for a simple jobs broadcast, I would do so in the form of a simple text or email service. What I’m looking for in a talent community is something that supports and even encourages two-way conversations, because those conversations can lead to so much more.

Multiple mediums

Just like social networks, talent communities come in all shapes and sizes. I want a talent community that takes on many different shapes, giving me the ability to engage using chat, email, video, blog posts and document sharing. It’s all about choosing a platform that supports all the mediums and methods that work for you.

Candidate notes

Within a talent community, members might spend months engaging and interacting with an employer before the time is right and they want to get serious about working at my company. I want a place to record notes, information and details of those interactions, activities and engagements. Your talent community needs to operate like a CRM as most recruiters are working on many different job openings at a time and need a centralized place to keep it all straight.

Custom experiences for candidates

An employment brand is absolutely invaluable, so my talent network has to be a branded environment that my team and I can customize to meet our functionality needs and fit our brand. When candidates visit or join a talent community, there should be no recognition that it’s segmented from the company’s careers page, other than the functionality.

Provide analytics and reporting

My talent network needs to provide analytics and reporting that tell a story. It must go beyond the standard number of members and look at activity, engagement, visitors and potentially, how interested in my company are the people in my talent pool.

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

HR’s Evolution from Cost Center to Revenue Generator

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

The role of HR and recruiting has done a complete 180 degree turn from where it once began. Many years ago, HR was born out of the need for companies to be in compliance, complete paperwork and develop processes and controls. This area of the business was seen as a necessary expense, and certainly not one that boosted the company’s bottom line. HR teams grew as business leaders realized that the organization was in need of essentials like an employee handbook, onboarding and orientation for our new hires and consistent interview processes. HR professionals spent years working as the administrative arm of the company, meeting the needs of the organization but not considering their revenue.

As we all know, however, things change as time goes by, and the human resources industry is a perfect example of just how that happens. We’ve gone from everyone hating us and misunderstanding us to business leaders prioritizing talent, and have earned our role in the executive ranks due to our specialty, which is the human capital that propels the success of companies.

Today, HR’s effect on the business extends far beyond the initial hire. Talent management leaders are responsible for many facets of the business that make a significant impact on the organization and its people.

Beyond talent acquisition

It is true that the HR department and recruiters are expected to be more innovative in their talent acquisition than ever before, but there is so much more to building a workforce than recruiting and onboarding. HR professionals are also expected to deliver when it comes to developing and engaging our current and future organizational talent. This means that we are constantly honing our talent acquisition strategy to bring in the best and brightest, as well as cultivating leaders within our own organizations. Today, we know that our jobs don’t just start when we receive an application and they don’t end after the employee’s first day. Our role is more long term than it has ever been before. We’ve gone from executives simply looking at recruitment costs to understanding how a long-term approach increases retention and saves a significant amount of money.

Leading the technology front

A relatively new aspect of HR that we are seeing is being tasked with selecting technologies to help us engage our workforces focused on the future of our company. From talent networks to interactive training and the many other areas of technology we cover, the decisions we make have a huge impact on our employees. The technology we choose for our candidates and employees help them engage and grow while also helping us do our jobs effectively and efficiently.

Focusing on the future

There may have been a time when HR was simply focused on the next hire or the next employee promotion, but we are no longer there. The ability of a company’s HR department to be forward focused is one of the most significant ways we bring value – real monetary value – to our organizations. As an industry, we’re future focused, data driven and developing talent strategies that compliment instead of compete with the business and market projections at our company. We’ve earned a seat at the table, which allows us to see and hear firsthand what the organization’s goals are and make sure ours help to accomplish what the company seeks to achieve. 

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

4 Keys to Recruiting The Passive Job Seeker to Join Your Talent Community

By Jessica Miller-Merrell  

It’s simply no longer enough to publish and post your job posting to the masses or to tweet out that single job. Candidates have choices and by publishing a job posting for 30 days during which time you are hiring, you are limiting yourself to a community of active not passive candidates. You are also missing out reaching those passive candidates the remaining 435 days of the year when you don’t have an active job posting. 

Passive candidates are more likely those purple squirrels or productivity unicorns who careful dip their toes into the job search waters extremely careful of the job, company and role they select. They don’t publicly promote their interest in exploring their options. They keep their search extremely private.

These passive purple squirrels are extremely rare and its likely hard for you to identify them by simply viewing a job application, resume or LinkedIn profile alone.  This, in my mind is one of the most attractive reasons to building a talent community versus the old way of spray and pray recruiting.

We build a talent community to not just recruit those purple squirrels, but establish a brand and build a long-term relationship. Regardless of your role at an organization whether its senior leadership, hiring manager, HR or recruiter, turnover should be something you all own and be concerned with. Each of us is involved in one aspect or another of the employee life cycle. They are all intertwined in some capacity.

This talent community is one that is important as the global war for talent is becoming more competitive by the day. Engaging passive talent becomes more important as the competition and noise increases. It’s hard for good candidates to search among the cluttered and overwhelming job market today.

·      Relevant & Engaging Conversations. The focus is on them. Solving a solution to a problem with the future goal of having that purple squirrel apply and interview for a job opening at your company. (Great idea: create an online open house.

·      Relevant & Engaging Content. Great content starts with understand the needs of your target audience. What answers do you have at your disposal to the questions they seek. (Great idea: Offer a Silicon Valley Salary Negotiation Guide.)

·      Trust. A community where job seekers feel like they are getting access to the people, information and resources. Candidates regardless of their skill and experience are treated with respect and are valued. We live in the Yelp economy now. (Great idea: TalentCircles platform allows recruiters to leave extensive notes in the system regardless of which recruiter is engaging the candidate.)

·      Respect. Of a candidate’s time contribution and the potential resoures and information they bring. It can be a simple follow up and thank via email. (Great idea: simple workflow document or inforgraphic that provides the job seeker the hiring process and expectations.)

It’s the little things that really capture the attention of any job seeker but especially those passive purple squirrel ones. By focusing on going the extra mile now, you can really set yourself apart from the competition for your best and most qualified passive candidate and future employee. 

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.   

Press Release: TalentCircles Talent Community Selected For ResCare Workforce Services

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (June 12, 2014) – ResCare Workforce Services - America’s leading provider of workforce services - has established a working relationship with TalentCircles that will improve the way employers and job seekers are matched together in more than 300 Career Centers throughout the nation.

The recently formed business partnership will leverage a new ResCare Talent Market technology that will assist veterans, adult and dislocated workers, people with disabilities, welfare-to-work participants and America’s youth in developing career profiles that are perfectly aligned with thousands of online job postings from large and small businesses.

“Our staff is constantly searching for alternatives to improve the way we connect businesses with the talent needed to strengthen their bottom lines,” said Mike Hough, Executive Vice President and Operations Officer for ResCare Workforce Services.  “Our new relationship with TalentCircles provides us a unique tool that greatly enhances our ability to ensure job seekers and businesses are appropriately matched in the hundreds of Career Centers we manage across the country.”

ResCare Workforce Services provides training, education and employment assistance to more than a million job seekers every year.  The company will use the entire month of June to launch youth programs that utilize the TalentCircles platform.

TalentCircles provides ResCare staff with powerful capabilities such as email campaigns, webinars, job matching, video interviews, etc. in a coherent platform that enables ResCare to manage the end-to-end process from intake to placement.

 “It is very easy and gratifying to work with a client whose commitment to social responsibilities is so closely aligned with our own values,” said Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, CEO of TalentCircles states. “It is an honor to help address one of the most important aspects of any person’s life, having a job. ResCare Talent Market combines the many features and functions of our platform with the exceptional experience of an organization that has over 45 years of helping the unemployed fill company needs.”

About ResCare                                                                                                                                                                          

ResCare Workforce Services is the nation’s leading workforce services provider with more than 45 years of experience in successfully matching job seekers with the needs of employers. With operations in more than 300 locations, their national footprint has allowed them to build an expansive staff of workforce experts who use the industry’s best practices to help reduce poverty, crime and unemployment in the communities they serve.    

About TalentCircles
TalentCircles, a technology firm based in the Silicon Valley offers a transformative approach to talent acquisition by enabling organizations to create and manage their private branded talent pools. Hiring is a huge problem for large, small and midsize businesses. TalentCircles solves it with a solution adapted to the needs, behaviors and expectations of the 21^st century. We offer an outstanding experience to potential candidates and we give recruiters the capability to proactively manage the needs of their organization.

For additional information, contact: 
DeVone Holt- DeVone.Holt@ResCare.com                                                                
or Susan Magrino- Susan@TalentCircles.com