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When Brands & Humans Meet: #TChat Video

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Want to read the RECAP of this week’s events? See #TChat Recap: Face-to-Face with Brand Humanization

The more we use social media, the more our personal interactions are crossing over into the workplace. While it makes sense to be authentic in the digital realm, this new level of transparency can touch some major pain points in your corporate culture, and challenge processes that don’t accommodate this new type of open communication.

What does it all mean for organizations as well as individuals? These are the issues we’ll address this week in the TalentCulture community.

To kick-off the conversation, I spoke with Jamie Notter, co-author of the book, Humanize (How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World). Jamie will be a featured guest on #TChat Radio, Tuesday Feb 19 at 7:30pmET, and he’ll join #TChat Twitter Chat as a moderator on Wednesday Feb 20, at 7pm ET.

Here’s a quick look at how Jamie defines brand humanization – and why he feels it’s important for everyone to understand it better:

Google+ Hangout Video - TalentCulture Community Manager Tim McDonald interviews Jamie Notter, co-author of "Humanize"
Click to watch “Humanize” co-author Jamie Notter in this #TChat sneak peek interview

HOW TO: Build & Maintain A Talent Community

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What is a talent community?

According to Wikipedia:

A talent community is a collection of social cliques (or talent networks) of people that are part of the job seeking process. These people may be seeking a job themselves, offering career advice to others, recruitment professionals, college campus recruiters, sourcers, and friends seeking jobs or advice. Talent communities inherently provide 2-way interaction between the individuals.

A talent community is not a list of candidates on a web page or in a spreadsheet; it is an environment consisting of people who can share ideas for the purpose of career networking or social recruiting of candidates.

Employers can interact and communicate with prospective employees as well as inform candidates about employment opportunities, receive referrals, and handpick qualified individuals from inside the group. A talent community can include prospective candidates, past applicants, current employees, and past employees. Talent Communities are managed by recruiters and/or hiring managers.

The benefits of building a talent community

  • Qualified candidates at your fingertips
  • Less dependence on expensive, ineffective job boards
  • Less money spent on job advertisements
  • Increased interaction with potential candidates in order to help them understand what your organization does
  • Better quality of applicants to job openings
  • Creates a talent pipeline for future job openings
  • Attracts passive candidates

How to build your talent community

Turn your “careers” page into a central hub for past (“alumni”) employees, interested candidates, recruiters, hiring managers and current employees. Incorporate tools for communication and interaction to drive conversations in your talent community. Provide an exclusive look into your organization, its employees and the culture behind the company. Use video, multimedia, photos, testimonials, etc.

Create smaller talent “networks” within your talent community to target specific audiences.

Social recruiting solutions (such as Cachinko) provide separate plugins or an overall solution for managing talent.

Maintaining your talent community

When you start engaging candidates through a talent community, it’s important to continue to provide value on a regular basis. There are a variety of ways to do so, such as sending updates or an e-newsletter, providing additional information on new job openings and internship programs, creating contests, writing blog posts, or connecting via social media.

ERE.net author Kevin Wheeler said in an article about talent communities, “Communities of candidates are powerful and reduce the need for special sourcing or the use of outside recruiters. They can increase the number of positions a single recruiter can handle and provide higher quality candidates in a shorter time. They always trump databases.”

What do you think? Ready to start building your talent community today?