We toss the word community around a lot in recruiting, but most of us do not have a very clear definition of what makes it different from a database or a talent pool.
A talent pool typically is a group of people who have been screened at least a little. They are people roughly qualified for a position or to work in an organization, but we really don’t have any relationship with them.
A talent pool is the equivalent of an annotated and sorted filing cabinet, but it only contains static and most likely out-of-date information about the potential candidate. They are hard to search and the data we have about a candidate rarely give us much insight into what a person is really like. And most talent pools do not allow the candidate to engage with the recruiter or others in the pool.
A community is entirely different. First of all it is two-way: both you and the candidate exchange information and both of you give and get. But a community also has several other distinguishing features:
Collaboration and Sharing
People in a community share information and often work together to solve problems or come up with new ideas. They are organic and alive with conversation and sharing of opinions and thoughts. True recruiting communities would include your employees as well as potential candidates talking about the organization, what it does, how it does it, and who does it. This give-and-take process is the best way to personalize the company and provide candidate with information about what is is like to work there. It saves you the need to tailor responses or have lots of facts at your fingertips – the employees and perhaps even other candidates will provide what you need.
Feeling included
Being part of something is also a key ingredient in a community. By being with others of similar interests and through sharing ideas, people come to feel part of the team. Good communities make recruiting much easier because candidates already feel like they know people and relate to them. When candidates actually get hired and start work, they have people to talk with that they already have met on line and have shared with.
Similar values
No one is forced to join or stay in a community. Unlike a database, I can remove myself from the community and move on. Therefore, people who stay in a community and engage in conversation are most likely to have the same values as the people in the organization. This means that cultural compatibility is much higher and it become easy to spot those who aren’t really comfortable in the culture your organization has.
Openness
People are looking for authenticity from organizations and it is within communities that so much can be explained and made available. Employees may bring up issues and discuss how they were resolved while candidates may also contribute their ideas. Member of communities are much more likely to share their feelings and express their true opinions about issues. Potential employees feel that the organization is open and honest in its communication.
Engagement
And finally, those in an active community are truly engaged and interested. Here is a statement from Richard Long, Deliotte New Zealand’s Manager of Talent Acquisition, about their recently developed Facebook community aimed at university students and graduates:
“Our strategy is to create dialogue and conversation with students and engage with them – all the while further developing the page with their feedback in mind – quite an organic process. All through our page we have given students the opportunity to tell us what they want to see and hear. The content of our page is provided by our own Deloitte Graduates and Summer Interns, and the fans themselves. My team really only administrates and develops the site to allow more conversation to happen between the fans and Deloitte Grads and Interns they are interested in hearing from. The result is we have built a community of students engaged with the Deloitte NZ brand, who are talking to us and have a sense of our culture and how we can support their career aspirations.”
This nicely sums up my major points and gives solid evidence that taking your social network to the next dimension – that of turning it into a true community of engaged and energetic people you can tap into whenever you have an opening – is the right way to go.
[...] open to hear about your company’s job openings and career opportunities. The problem is that a talent pool, of any substantial size and lifespan, simply doesn’t exist. Pools in themselves are small yet [...]
Amazing what interesting dialogue occurs when we work with a common language. Nice definitions Kevin.
For me the voice that is consistently missing is the voice of the prospect and candidate. It is their FEEDBACK about inclusion (to mention just one of the characteristics discussed) that differentiates a database from a relationship.
Few firms who claim ‘community’ even bother to ask the central stakeholder in this discussion about their experience in relation to their goals and expectations. The definitions we pose are too employer-centric. i would emphasize that how firms ask for feedback and actively listen and respond to it is fundamental to the discussion of a community.
Thanks Kevin. Great post. What you describe is Talent Community utopia. We will get there but right now we are at the beginning. At BraveNewTalent we are seeing some of this happen and working hard to create a platform that fosters pretty much what you describe.
I also see Skills Exchange or Knowledge Exchange as a huge opportunity for employers to do more than have a recruiting community. My guess is that within the next 5 years new technologies and networks will create a better way for us to map, measure, engage, develop, utilize and recruit talent. Ultimately one of the greatest applications of technology will be to better utilize the worlds workforce seeing as people right now are the world’s most wasted resource.
Our terminology comes back to haunt us once again…whatever it is called Community, Neighborhood or Cul de Sac – the point remains people want to engage and interact and we now have the tools to do so. Regardless of the platform, career consumers who want to grow and expand their work life possibilities have more to choose from than hanging around the coffee urn at the back of the monthly Industry Organization chapter meeting or Annual Conference. Let’s not forget that this is the key break through in career management. Whether its Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or dozens of other business focused “social” settings – the choices for interacting about careers have NEVER been easier.
I continually see HR and Recruiting people lament the benefit or interest that people may or may not have in group based career activity. Whether a person is job needy or merely kicking the tires of potential companies in their geography and industry – it matters little. People are people and the value of these interactions will be realized or the visitor won’t come back. Pretty simple, but if you are a company that just sends out job openings to a group – this will dictate the type of group it becomes. if a company engages with a sharing of ideas, motivations and interests – the group attracted will evolve into something much different.
Personally, I agree that people don’t want to chat about their career everyday like they do on Facebook about their personal lives, so I am more focused on event building to engage people about career, company or industry concepts. Whatever is chosen, if its interesting or fun to engage – a Community (ahem…) will form.
Max, I think you and I are moving our comments from the Facebook post to this one (Well I am anyway!)
The objection I have with a ‘Talent Community’ is prefixing the word Talent. For there to warrant individuals wanting to join and wanting to commnicate, share with each other, there has to be a vested interest – which is why niche communities which might focus round a particular job vertical or skill set appeal more. I agree, people are reluctant to join a group that they are aware is a thinly veiled construct to keep their detais and get job alerts. But if it is an environment where they can learn, communicate with one another, have access to RELEVANT content/events then that is a community. Meeting others in the community may be competition, but pople are exposed to their peers in other organisations all the time.
The issue as you are aware, being that many organisations are loathe to invest in something that doesn’t bear immediate results. So instead we see sophisticated databases and mailing lists with the tag ‘Talent Community’ where size of database equates success. Euggh.
Hello Kevin. Thank you for the thoughtful and – respectfully – leading post. The fact is: talent pools, by name, are hard-to-maintain repositories of CV’s that can develop nasty algae if not enough chlorine is poured regularly (e.g. DM, outbound calls, campaigns).
The virtue – read efficiency – of communities whether they are made up of transient job seekers, life-time brand/company admirers, etc. is that they are driven by each members self interest to share, be noticed, get a job, get a freebie, etc. I don’t edit my Li profile because it’s good for my employer, but for my personal brand online. In short, this environment needs less chlorine as it self-cleanses.
There are communities that work and some others that don’t, in my view. The ones that work have these traits:
- they are not driving by pushing message but promoting connectivity along common themes
- they dedicate 80% of their resource to produce content that has a significance to a potential brand advocate/job seekers and 20% to post actual job opportunities.
- they are grown where the target audience lives but they are also prepared to match the experience on an online network with complementary bespoke services/function on their own websites/offices, etc. (kindly see my post on this at http://bit.ly/i2WUVZ)
Kev, it’s going to come down to which applicant group provides you with the ‘best’ employee, won’t it? Very valuable point from one of the comments above: let’s develop open/public communities of employees as well, let’s mix employees, suppliers, potentials, customers; and let’s watch.
Hope to see you in Sydney next time you are here.
Jorge
Kevin
Some good points and I agree that we use the terms sometimes out of context. A key point of difference from my perspective is that with a community it involves all stakeholders and everyone in the community benefits. This requires a company to think beyond their own objective and how they can contribute value to the stakeholders in the community without always receiving a benefit. A pool on the other hand is linear and typically only exists to provide a benefit to the organization. It does not necessarily have to be static if managed well however it does only provide a point in time perspective.
What about the candidate perspective? Do candidates really want to opt into groups/pools/communities so that employers can market jobs at them? I don’t think so. And I don’t buy that it can be engagement not marketing. Almost everyone who already has a job could think of a better way to spend their time. Active job seekers are only interested in the 1 or 2 jobs they are qualified for and don’t want to see the rest, much less spend time reading about what a great place to work a firm is. This is not fertile ground for engagement.
Max – absolutely, a spot on point.
It’s the way you make the `community` that matters. Yes, active job seekers, let alone passive ones – do not want to discuss job opportunities and company culture, for a company they don’t even work for. That I get.
Good Talent Community management is a business model, and yes – it is marketing. Creating zones of interaction, through content and common interest – and infiltrating opportunity.
Talent Communities should not have to be an `opt in` – they should be already active zones we people WANT to be, not forced to be.
Hi Kevin, some great points here. My views on talent communities are well documented. We are using the term community way too loosely and especially in recruitment.
Communities need context. Job seeking is an event, not an interest. Also, if you want to tap into a community of talent, then you need to go where they are. Go where the marketers are talking about marketing, engineers about engineering. Creating a community around a careers site will at best give you a collection of people interested in your company for a job. At some point they will get a job and then what? It is fantasy to think that they will keep coming back to talk careers in your ‘talent community’.
That is not to say that implementing community type tools into the career site experience – its not. Its a great idea. But organisations have to be clear about what they are getting into – as per my latest blog, there is no black hole in community! To your point, they need to abide by all your points above.
finally i come back to an organisations existing employees – remember them folks? Your existing talent. Want to know where the best marketers hang out? Bet you five bucks your existing marketers know.
If organisations want to try and build a ‘talent community’ around their career site then go right ahead, but dont kid yourself that its a community of talent, especially if you have created no other barrier to entry beyond “register if you want to explore a career here”.
Great post Kevin – with terrific insight into the differentiation, that clearly exists.
However – the term `Community` has evolved. It can no longer be solely attributed to the collaborative structure of a `village collective`, for example.
Community developed long before us recruiters got using it. Online Forum management has been entitled Community Management for years. Bringing lots of like minded people with a similar place where a brand exists as the hub – like Facebook, has been happening for a while – they rarely interact – but this has been entitled community engagement for a few years now.
The challenge for the recruiter is that yes – frankly – what once was a Database, soon became a Talent Pool, and now an online driven Talent Pool is called now labelled a Talent Community.
The reason? – because GOOD Talent Community Management creates content and discussion with a chosen and attracted audience – and the opportunity for that audience to interact exists – because we are borrowing other people’s formats (twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) to manage and cajole our community, and thereby enhancing it’s numbers and potency by multiplication and sharing of the information, content and conversation we generate.
Old school Databases, Pipelines and Talent Pools could never achieve that. It’s a Social Media thing. It’s got a shiny new name.
Steve
I completely agree. Just want to add that I believe members of a so-called talent pool are just trying to stay visible for any possible opportunity that might come there way. Members of a talent community are utilizing all available resources to succeed in their profession. More importantly to an employer, if a talent community is associated with a specific company, then most likely the candidate aspires to one day work for that company and will maintain a line of interactivity and communication throughout their career.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for those great definitions. Some of my favorite HR people and vendors toss around the phrase “talent community” when it is anything but. No ability for the candidate to initiate a conversation with HR and never an ability for one candidate to communicate with another. They’re talent pools, folks, not talent communities.