Talent Community or Talent Network?

It’s been a while since I posted and in that time I’ve been busy talking to companies about building groups of people they can communicate with about jobs.  For those of us old timers, this was called a pipeline and it usually resided in an excel spreadsheet.

Today however, these groups are living, interacting mechanisms and require much more attention than our old spreadsheets.

First of all, we need to delineate the terms “community” and “network”.  I see many vendors and companies using the term “community” and after we define both, you may want to rethink which term you are using.

Community; a community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals (key word here is interact)

Network; a social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes”, which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. (key words here are common interest)

The key differentiators are that in a “community” there is “interaction” and in a “network” there is simply shared “common interest”.  This is key to setting up your situation for one reason:

EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT

One of the things that I think all recruiting leaders can agree on is that we do a really poor job of setting the expectation in the job seeker/candidate/prospects mind.  This is the whole reason for the discontent of job seekers with applying to your company – they EXPECT that they are now going to be treated as a candidate for the  job they applied to – whether they are qualified OR NOT!!

Today, it is an emerging best practice to set up a group situation OUTSIDE your ATS for prospects to be visible to your company.  The danger to the recruiting department, the employer brand and the company brand is that if you set the expectation that these people are joining a community they are going to expect interaction. Are you prepared to interact with your community?  Allow them to interact with each other?  OR – do you want to simply connect them around the shared common interest of working for your company by forming a Talent Network?

In a previous post, I mentioned that WORDS COUNT – be assured that they are counting in your candidates’/prospects’ minds when they think they are joining something.