This is the title of a very good white paper written by Fara Rives at Allegis Global Solutions forThe Outsourcing Institute that you can download.
The paper starts with the right statement "Talent recruitment today is much more than posting jobs on a corporate website or even using specialized online job boards. Innovative organizations know that they must continuously build and expand talent communities in order to have the best opportunities to identify and hire employees—even before a job opening may be available."
In short, building a talent community is the basis for any proactive recruiting strategy. Do not wait to have jobs to look for candidates. Anticipate. Create and nurture your talent community.
Creating a talent community: This is the number 1 building block of any proactive recruiting strategy. From the get-go, Fara Rives mentions a post by Kevin Wheeler (Beyond Talent Pools: Building Dynamic Communities) to indicate what an actionable talent community is about: it powers "two-way interactions where the organization and the candidate exchange information." So forget about your low-end CRMs and simple mailing lists. When you have a two-way building community, you have a new powerful marketing tool. You can also go beyond the current generic employment branding that you have today, and offer personalized marketing, start to speak to your candidates (and not at candidates).
Setting up a new process: Modern talent acquisition is moving away from the more clerical approach of processing resumes. In a competitive job environment, it's not enough to offer a job. What makes you stand out is the ability to provide a high-quality environment: your talent community the perfect venue to deliver a preview of what your company is actually about.
As time goes, creating and nurturing talent communities will be less and less optional. The job market is more favorable to jobseekers and, even more importantly, the millennials will compose the majority of the workforce as early as next year. As a recent research sponsored by Elance-oDesk and Millennial Branding shows, "this generation is already chafing at today's traditional company structures." After interviewing working millennials and gen X hiring managers, they saw fundamental "'disjoints' in thinking between these two generations." The solution is to engage. In a one-way relationship, you ask candidates to interact with you and you assume that they will do it. They won't. The new generation of candidate relationship management must enable you to build a rapport with candidates, assess their potential, their ability, their desire to grow in the job, or their cultural fit within your company.
Will your department need help for the creation of your Employer Value Proposition (EVP)? Certainly. Lots of great organizations can help you. The Allegis Group understands this new trend and is one of them.
This white paper does not recommend any platform. As the CEO of TalentCircles, I am comfortable to mention that TalentCircles is precisely designed to accommodate all the needs related to proactive recruiting, network segmentation and focused marketing and offers the indispensable analytics that will help you fine-tune your engagement strategy with both active and passive candidates.