Bea Dominguez is the Talent Community Manager at BrightRoll. She is a storyteller, community builder and technology enthusiast. Bea builds programs that inspire, educate and empower software engineers. Sometimes wishing she was an engineer herself, she works hard to increase diversity in technology and change the male to female ratio in STEM careers and education.
Talent is at the heart of every successful company. Prioritizing talent strategies around recruiting, empowering, and developing key employees helps companies succeed. But attracting top talent is not easy.
Much has been written of late about the “future of recruiting.” Phrases like “talent brand,” “social recruiting” and “talent community” dominate the conversation. Today, talent professionals recognize that rapidly growing companies need more than job postings to attract top talent.
Two years ago, we built our own “talent community” into our recruiting strategy. For us, talent community was about bringing marketing practices like branding, events, and content creation into recruiting. By building a strong talent brand, we were able to the tell the story of who we are as a company. It also helped us build authentic and long-lasting relationships that strengthen our candidate pipeline.
Our talent community has proven to be a differentiating factor, growing our pool of applicants and elevating our talent brand. Here is what we did, and tips for how you can build your own talent community.
Build Your Talent Brand
Potential talent is constantly engaging with your brand. People apply for your jobs, look at your company and career website pages, and follow your company on different social media channels. They want to know what is like to work for you. According to LinkedIn’s 2014 Talent Trends Report, 80% of the workforce in the world is passive. Passive candidates are not actively looking for jobs. That means that if you don’t continuously interact with them, they won’t think of you.
First, ensure that your content is “on brand.” At BrightRoll, we made sure that all recruitment communications highlighted our transparency and authenticity. We audited our candidate emails and job postings, making sure our diction would appeal to a diverse community. We developed new content for our careers page and forward-facing sites, making sure our tone was friendly and open. Building the BrightRoll talent brand was all about making sure our internal voice translated externally. We also wanted to create opportunities for authentic relationships with each applicant.
Next, think about your team. Recruiters are natural connectors and relationship builders, and they are the first point of contact between your company and each candidate. But our community isn’t just about our talent team — every BrightRoller is an ambassador for our brand. For example, our interview process is designed to ensure the best possible candidate experience. The talent team preps each interviewer, from the greet to the close. Every interaction is an opportunity to sell BrightRoll and our culture.
Go Social
Building community is all about connecting with people. Online, you might connect through social media and content channels. Offline, you can connect through events and opportunities for deeper engagement.
At BrightRoll, we built our engagement strategy around our goals. We asked ourselves what kind of talent we needed to attract. We saw that engineering and product are our primary areas of growth, and that we are committed to increasing diversity in those areas. Based on those assessments, we built our Data Driven Women speaker series, aimed at elevating female voices in tech.
Attendees of Data Driven Women (and other BrightRoll events) can come check out our space, meet other BrightRollers, and connect with BrightRoll around a topic we are all passionate about: data.
Going social means finding the right touch points with potential candidates. Think about how you want to engage them, and how they want to be engaged. Do they want to engage online or offline? What topics or interests unite them?
Start them Young
College recruiting is a huge part of BrightRoll’s talent community strategy. Building a brand at the college level engages people who are about to enter the workforce.
College recruitment at BrightRoll is focused on finding technical talent, so we need to show that our technology and our technologists are a force to be reckoned with. For that reason, we choose our representatives carefully, and we train them to tell BrightRoll’s story in a powerful and positive way. We also prepare them to answer tough questions, both technical and cultural.
Our college candidates go through the same recruiting experience as senior candidates, which not only validates us technically, but shows younger students that they can expect to be challenged at BrightRoll. We also decided to communicate with every single candidate. Yes, that is right, we email every single candidate we meet.
Even if your team is not responsible for college recruiting, you may want to make college a part of your talent strategy. Remember that every interaction counts, even those with “inexperienced” candidates.
Be Prepared to Invest
Building a talent community is a long-term play. It took us two years to see results, but it has been absolutely worth it. We now see more qualified candidates at our fingertips (better pipeline), have less dependence on ineffective job boards, spend less money on job advertisements, and generally see a better quality of applicants.
So what are you waiting for? If you have any questions about building a talent community, or want to find out more about BrightRoll’s strategy, tweet us @BrightRoll.