March 15, 2023
Recruiters spend a lot of time building a strong talent pool with qualified candidates. But this strategy of passive hiring has one significant drawback. Talent pool means one-way communication, implying that the recruiters communicate and engage with candidates at their convenience. On the other hand, candidates might only get a reply or an update if they are fit for the job.
A talent community is another passive sourcing strategy that covers up all the loopholes of the talent pool and acts as a two-way communication channel between recruiters and candidates. Candidates have more freedom to discuss the company and their respective fields openly. There is more belonging and a better environment for collaboration.
But what is a talent community? In today’s blog, we will discuss what a talent community is, and how to build one to reap maximum benefits.
A talent community is a sourcing strategy to tap qualified talent and nurture them till a vacancy opens. Recruiters provide candidates with a platform to network and get valuable information while engaging with them as a form of passive recruitment.
But how does it help?
Recruiters communicate about company values and culture while building a self-feeding talent pool to attract top talent. They tap qualified talent through multiple channels like social media, newsletters, candidate portals, etc., to keep them engaged and interested in the company.
Recruiters spend a lot of time managing the hiring process and engaging with passive candidates. They have a lot of tasks like- forecasting needs, creating JDs, drafting SOPs and documents, providing an amiable work environment, etc. So, why will they spend extra time on building a talent community?
Recruiters believe that bringing all the passive candidates into a single group to share company updates and vacancies can serve as a talent community. This leaves hundreds of companies with an email list of people who aren't the top talent in the industry and serves no purpose.
Recruiters need to spend more time nurturing their community members and treat the community as a community pool. They need to plan their activities and use them to share company information and provide a networking platform. Hence, they often end up with a group of unqualified candidates who are not the perfect fit for the company.
Here is a 3-step process to create a valuable talent community that serves its members and your organization.
The first step is planning and understanding the business capacity. Recruiters shall analyze the resources available to them. This involves estimating the budget, forecasting business hiring needs, researching available CRMs and their suitability, and much more. This information allows recruiters to pick a platform that integrates seamlessly with their existing tech stack and brings together valuable community members.
The recruiter estimates the business hiring needs and their budget to invest in a dedicated CRM (candidate relationship management). A CRM helps the recruiters to manage the community efficiently by using automation for messages and following-up.
They will spend time engaging but need a platform that blends well with the remaining HR tools. It becomes the core hub for bringing potential and old qualified candidates to one place.
Some of the best platforms are Discord, Slack, Facebook Groups, Reddit, etc. Some of these provide valuable features in the paid version, making running and managing the community easier.
Once you decide on the platform, you must invite the desired target audience to join your community. However, now we have two questions to address:
Recruiters often skip this step and create a big pool of unqualified members who neither add value nor serve any purpose. They remain in the community to keep an eye on the vacancies but need to be the right fit for the role.
First step: Identifying the right audience!
Recruiters shall analyze business needs to forecast and map out the hiring requirements. This will give a starting point to choose the sourcing channels for the community members. Recruiters can set criteria and invite/ reach out to qualified candidates only.
For example, if the company is projecting future needs for more tech specialists, recruiters will spend more time capturing that audience. They wouldn’t want to bring in a pool of people from marketing or accounting.
Generally, each talent pool has people from various departments with varying experience. The recruiters have minimal control over the audience they reach. However, with a dedicated strategy, they will have a better chance to attract the industry’s top talents. They can create a community of:
Choosing the target audience gives clarity over the sourcing channels. For instance, recruiters who are looking for experienced candidates will have success through referral or networking platforms instead of career fairs. So, here are 9 sourcing platforms that will help you to find the best candidates to nurture the community.
Before the recruiters jump ahead on filling vacancies through the diverse pool of candidates created, they must spend some time segmenting the members to make their job easier. Finding the right candidate from a community of hundreds of thousands of members will be hard. Hence, it is important to choose some basis to define and segment the members.
Segmenting gives recruiters three benefits. First, they can better understand and cater to the needs and desires of the community members. This is critical to strengthen the employer brand and optimize the hiring process. Second, the content and message can be personalized to align with the members’ needs, leading to a better candidate experience. Third, it will be easy and quick for recruiters to match and find the right candidates, removing all the hassle.
But what basis can be used to segment the audience?
In addition to these three, recruiters can segment members based on prior history with the company or other bases based upon the business needs. But what matters is to provide relevant information and a pleasant experience to strengthen the employer brand and leverage the value of community. This requires the recruiters to engage and provide value to the members actively.
Among thousands or millions of communities, the most critical part is to engage with the members and not convert the community into a group of inactive members.
Recruiters need help to invest time in a talent community. However, it is critical to understand that just like a talent pool, they must dedicate themselves to this community to nurture each member and get real value from the community.
Recruiters have to focus on their messaging and how they cater to each member’s desires. Hence, they must spend extra time curating valuable content, communicating value, and using automation to engage with members efficiently. It isn’t possible to communicate with hundreds of members on your own without any assistance. Hence, there are 3 core areas to tap into to build an engaging community:
After all, recruiters must rely on something other than job vacancies to attract candidates. Moreover, it is impossible to have vacancies at all times.
Recruiters must offer valuable resources to the members to engage them and encourage them to stay active in the community. If the members don’t get any value, they leave the community or stop checking for updates. Hence, it is critical to provide curated content that helps the members. This could be in various formats and cover multiple arenas.
There are millions of communities out there. How will you make yours stand out? By building a strong employer brand. When the candidates know about your company and are genuinely interested, they will join the community willingly to stay updated.
It will help recruiters to stand out in the crowded labor market. Here are 3 ways to strengthen your employer brand.
Is it possible for a person to manage and moderate a community of thousands of members? It is advisable to opt for talent management software. It is tedious to manage a spreadsheet and emails via the existing tech stack as it is unsuitable for community management. Hence, recruiters must invest in a good talent management tool to enhance efficiency and extract maximum value from the community.
But is it crucial to get a CRM (candidate relationship management) tool for community building?
A dedicated tool helps to separate the community from the traditional talent pool. You do not want to mix these because if the members feel the community is not adding value, they will leave and switch the community. This will also affect the employer's brand. Also, it is easier in the community to sort and match potential candidates if segmentation is done correctly. Moreover, a CRM comes with reporting and analytics features. This helps to track sources of candidate networks and optimize the sourcing strategy.
The best way to choose a tool is by opting for a platform/ software that integrates with your current tech stack & eases the sourcing process. It should not be a hassle to add another tool. Instead, make sourcing candidates easy!
Talent communities can replace traditional talent pools and make finding the desired candidate easier for recruiters. With periodic reviews and active engagement, recruiters can build a self-feeding talent community to hire effortlessly. They can refer back to the community in case of vacancies with an assurance of finding qualified and interested candidates.
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Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.
Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.
Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.
From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:
While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.
A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.
As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.
To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.
Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.
Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.
Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.
Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.
Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..
A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.
Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.
Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.
Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.
Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.
Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:
Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.
Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?
You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.
Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.
Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.
As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.
Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.
Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:
Role
The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.
Responsibilities
Requirements
Soft Skills
Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.
Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:
Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.
Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.
Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.
Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.
Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.
Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.
Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?
Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.
Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:
