Growing an Employer Brand by Building

Talent Communities
Organizations face two big challenges in the context of two ever-changing realities - key talent is hard to
find and job seekers look to peers and the collective wisdom of the social web to decide on what firm to
join.

The two objectives organizations will need to start thinking about are:
1. How to Build an employment brand that is relevant to the needs of the key talented people and
to monitor the conversations on the social web to understand how to join in the conversation
2. Understand where these talented prospective employees are, what they talk about and how to
engage them to attract them to consider you an employer.

Organizations will need to move away from building their presence from social networks and integrate
them to build online communities for their talent pool.

When a person joins a talent community owned/ stewarded by an organization - he or she gives
permission to the organization to have a conversation with him/her - and it is up to the organization to
either mess it up by "pushing" its message or to take it to the next level by active engagement.

As this becomes more and more common - recruiters and hiring managers will move more and more
into "community manager" roles and need to build and take on newer skills to augment their existing
skill sets. The ability that will count will not be to tell their own stories, but encouraging participants to
tell their stories.
 Talent Communities

Content and conversations

between candidates, employees,
recruiters and hiring managers

Tomorrow’s organization needs to tap into the talent pool will need to move from step 1 to 5:

1.Listening & interpreting what your prospective talent desires –

1. So, Listen & participate in relevant conversations

2. What do your prospective employees really look for in their ideal workplace ?
3. What’s the perception in the market about your company and it’s culture?
4. What’s the perception about your competitors?
5. using tools like Alterian SM2, Buzzstream. This will identify the social places where they “hang
out”. Which will lead to step 2.

2. Find & attract good talent. Monitoring content that they create and queries they answer. Holding
talent contests around the content they are looking in prospective candidates is a great way to finding
talented people. If the organization builds virality in the contest it’s a great way to spread the word and
engage a larger talent pool

3. Engage with active prospects. Engaging needs to be done in two places – the niche social networks
they converse in – and the organization’s own branded social community – which could be a blog or a
full fledged social network. It can be used to showcase organizational culture, with rich multimedia
content like photographs, videos. Firms should encourage employees to participate in such forums –
specially employees who are considered experts in their field. Both the employees and the organization
benefit as both brands get built.

1. Content can be curated on the corporate site from the social web around different axes :
product, market, industry.
2. Content can be created by the organizational employees on the organizational site too.
 3. Prospective employees could also be invited to contribute content and showcased in a
leaderboard.
4. Employee/ Team blogs serve two purposes specially for large organization – they act as
communication vehicles with the media as well as engaging niche talent.
5. HR and recruitment focused community platform like Microsoft’s
http://www.microspotting.com/ also help give tips and tricks to prospective employees

4.Onboarding new recruits – While this is done offline, I feel a part of making initial connection could be
done virtually even before people “sign up” and strengthen bonds between future employees.

5. Alumni connect – Today’s employees can be tomorrow’s ambassadors if an alumni program is

managed well and alumni see value being a part of the community.

In Conclusion

The vast majority of organizations and job seekers are stuck at the “salary” discussions as they don't
think about the desire of an individual to make a difference and meaning to others. And unless you can
connect with that innately human desire which are discoverable and engaged via social technologies -
recruiters and organizations will continue to judge a person by their current and future salary levels and
they in turn will treat each firm as a mercenary would.

It’s about time organizations and job seekers got to know the human side of each other.

About the author:

Gautam Ghosh is a Social Media Enthusiast and a HR professional. He blogs at

http://www.gautamblogs.com and you can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/gautamghosh