Q. What is the importance of building talent networks?

A. Recruitment has become tougher than ever before. The challenge for the recruiter has multiplied manifold on account of reach, interaction, engagement and time constraints. The lack of a strong brand support and squeezed recruitment budgets have also spoilt the broth. Add to this, a challenging talent pool, which has many amenities to reach out to competitive job openings across various geographies. Further, a recruiter is expected to wear many hats like drawing relevant applications, reducing the time lag for hiring, finding out the right talent and above all reducing the cost of hire.

Recruiters, over the last one or two decades, have been trying to innovate various means and methods to overcome the challenge and make their recruitment process not only efficient, but align the same with business objectives of their organization. However, with the changing market dynamics, especially the introduction of millennials, the challenge has become even tougher. In these times, it has become important to not only widely disseminate information about your requirements, but you will also need to make sure that you gradually build a steady talent pool with whom you can not only engage on a regular basis, but also have complete ownership of the same. The concept of talent networks or building talent pipelines is a recent one and many companies have started proactively investing in building their own talent networks, keeping not only their immediate goals in mind but also building talent pipelines for their medium- and long-term objectives.

Q. What is the popularity of talent communities among Indian companies?

A. The recruiters, including the placement agencies, knowingly or unknowingly have always maintained a talent pool around various job skills or functions etc. However, this purely has always remained as a manual process by filing hard copies of CVs or saving specific resumes on computers. Though in recent years, large firms have started thinking on these lines, there has been no relevant tool available in the market place for building a talent pipeline. Many pioneering companies in India are trying to establish their talent networks by leveraging job and candidate aggregators. By hosting a talent network through a job portal or aggregator, a company can get access to a large talent database and also the benefit of accessing the portal’s superior expertise in shortlisting, analytics, and campaigning developed and perfected over the years. Understandably, a vastly experienced global job portal not only provides a company with a platform to host a talent network community, but also provides intensive automated analytics to help a company shortlist candidates and create targeted campaign messages and schedules.

Q. How long does a talent network take before giving positive RoI?

A. Any talent network typically takes around two months of scoping, followed by another two months of development. Since this is driven using search engine optimization techniques on search engines, talent networks starts delivering results after four to six months which is the time to build a talent pipeline for a recruitment company and enabling its listing on search engines. A talent network needs to be perfected over a period of time by understanding the patterns and behaviours of the target talent pool.