If you go to an HR conference this year, you’ll almost certainly hear the words “talent community” or “talent pipeline” or “talent network” or “talent pools.” In our minds, these terms are mostly interchangeable. Regardless of what you call it, we wanted to give a definition of a Talent Community.

From the Candidate’s Perspective

When a job seeker goes to your careers site, they are going to research your company to figure out if they want to work there or not. For the people that you convince, they can apply into the ATS. But, some of these people don’t have a resume. Maybe they’re students, or have been at the same job for 5 years.

These people who are interested but not ready to apply can leave their name, email, etc in your talent community.

From Talent Acquisition’s Perspective

For your recruiting team, a talent community is a new source of candidates who are interested but not ready to apply. If you’re using talent community software, then you are getting these new leads directly into your inbox and automatically dropping them into nurture campaigns.

Your new leads will go into nurture campaigns, but individual recruiters should definitely reach out to them proactively as well. They may not have applied, but neither did the person you cold Inmailed yesterday. This is a much warmer lead, and the persona of someone who signs up for a Talent Community (thinking about the next 6-18 months of their career) is very high quality.

Talent Communities In a Nutshell

There you have it. Talent Communities are a new way for interested job seekers to engage with employers, and a new way for recruiters to engage with passive candidates. Overall, it’s a win-win

Here’s the video version:

The post What is a Talent Community? appeared first on NextWave Hire Blog.