A Branded Talent Community is a connected digital network of people who are exclusive members of an organization’s private community of talent. Each member has direct access to the Branded Talent Community platform and can engage in real-time with the organization’s dedicated team or with other members. All members share a common interest in that they want to work for you or refer their network to you. They are loyal to your brand and have opted into your community.

Branded Talent Communities improve an organization’s competitive advantage, brand recognition, candidate experience and overall hiring process while achieving unprecedented savings. Implemented well, they will deliver improved talent access, quality and speed; talent visibility and real-time inventory; cost savings; brand awareness and recognition; experience creation; and reporting and analytics.

Healthy and effective talent communities require a cyclical, organic process of building, nurturing, growing and then repeating. Here’s how the process works.

1. Create your Branded Talent Community. Begin with your brand and tailored brand experience, including colors, logos, messaging and more. Choose a technology partner who will work with you to bring your brand to life, which will help supercharge your recruiting process. Look at solutions that have web-optimized, mobile-first experiences. Technologies that leverage AI and conversational bots allow you to be involved in every aspect of the candidate’s journey while creating operational efficiencies in-house. Also, consider offerings that include a holistic referral solution, as referrals are a source of high quality candidates at low cost. To complement all of this, a dedicated services team staffed by humans is critical in ensuring the success of the overall solution.
2. Populate and confirm your Branded Talent Community membership. Determine your initial seed population by leveraging your organization’s candidate database – specifically, all those candidates who have come to your business in the past 18 months through job boards, social media and your website. Include them as inactive so they will have to opt-in. Then, invite them by sending a letter from a corporate executive explaining why you want to invite them to your exclusive talent community, and include instructions on how to opt-in. Leverage solutions such as AI-driven conversational bots that assist with profile creation, and establish a curation team to contact each new member upon entry and confirm that membership is complete.
3. Dynamically segment and nurture the talent community. Now that you have all your talent who have opted in, your curation team can welcome them with a call or orientation to let them know what to expect from the community and how to optimize their profiles. You then can segment the groups to create many different talent pools that come together to create your overall talent community. Dynamically segment your talent based on your organization’s specifications (e.g., requirements, skills, expertise, geography, retirees, interns, etc.). Importantly, members of your talent community can be part of multiple talent pools. Your recruiting team matches candidates to jobs by leveraging tech features to stack rank the top candidates that match new requisitions. Marketing ensures the talent community is known to the marketplace by creating content to your brand standards.Look to solutions that help you automate marketing initiatives by delivering tailored engagements with your different talent pools. You can automate those engagements and remove burden from teams that need to operate at scale. Consider solutions with a forum capability that keeps community members active and engaged with each other. And, consider how you can leverage conversational bots so interactions can be more human. Remember that automation is meant to create time and space for people on the team to focus more on nurturing.
4. Grow your talent community. The keys to growing your Branded Talent Community are quality content and referral programs. Start by designing standards and a cadence of marketing campaigns targeted to your members. Then, establish or automate your existing referral program into the platform. Referred candidates are higher quality, less costly to hire, and faster to hire. They are more likely to receive and accept an offer and stay at the job longer.From a technology standpoint, there are two core pieces to consider: marketing and referrals. Use solutions that help automate marketing initiatives and give you visibility into every aspect of the program. Simultaneously, you want to look at solutions that make it easy for people who are referring to swipe and refer others while also giving you complete visibility into where referrals are in the process. A solution with crowdsourcing capabilities can increase efficiencies. Finally, a conversational bot ensures the referred person starts interacting with your brand and provides additional information that can be packaged up and sent to recruiters.

While direct sourcing solutions such as Branded Talent Communities can act as standalone solutions, most corporations who are interested in them have MSP and/or VMS solutions in place. Your direct sourcing solution – in this case, the Branded Talent Community – can be bolted directly onto your MSP as a Tier 0 supplier and integrated directly with your existing VMS. This means that each requisition, when opened in your VMS, will be posted out to your Branded Talent Community via integration to determine if there is a candidate match. If not matched within a defined timeframe (i.e., 24-48 hours), it would be posted to  Tier 1 suppliers, followed by Tier 2 suppliers. You can configure these timers into your VMS technology to minimize human intervention and maintain the integrity of your program.