• 
• Training
• Consulting
• Resources
• Store
• About Us

• » Articles
• › The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent
• › Newsletters

Hot Tip #21 - Talent Hubs, Mashups, and Widgets

By Lou Adler, July 17, 2007

The fundamental sourcing strategy for any major corporation should be the building of the biggest proprietary database of resumes, contacts, and leads as possible. From this database candidates should then be culled and contacted based on specific job needs. Building the database and keeping it warm are two separate tasks. For this article, let's address the building of the database.

Read more articles by this author.

Related Topics:

Recruiter Hot Tips, Recruiting, Sourcing

Related Articles:

Hot Tip #29 - Humongous Techniques to Boost Your Recruitment Advertising Efforts

Hot Tip #28 - The Anatomy of a Great Ad

Hot Tip #27 - Double Your Placement Rate in Half the Time

To start, it's far better to fill this database with prospects who have expressed an interest in learning about generic opportunities with your company, rather than applicants who've applied for a specific job. There are two big reasons for this. First, it's far easier to attract top people very quickly using some of the latest technology available. Second, you don't have to report on prospects for OFCCP purposes while you do for applicants.

Talent hubs are micro career sites that are designed to attract people to a class of jobs, such as marketing, rather than a specific job, such as a senior product manager. These are warm-up pages. Their purpose is to get people to consider opportunities with the company. If designed properly using SEO (search engine optimized) techniques they are far easier to find using a standard Google, Yahoo, or Live search. From these sites candidates are then driven to specific jobs or to sign up to hear about future opportunities. For example, Vanguard has a great looking talent hub for entry-level financial services positions. Microsoft has also done a fine job of building talent hubs for all of their major positions. However, neither of these sites have been optimized to be found. Unless you put in the company name you won't find them. Also, in the case of Microsoft, it's very difficult to get from the talent hub to a specific job. Neither company made it easy to be contacted for other opportunities. It's at this point where my mantra of "Find Jobs for People, Not People for Jobs" comes into play.

Why not just forget about posting job descriptions completely? Instead, have people come to a talent hub and from there quickly register their level of interest and join your community of prospects. If they want they should be able to quickly upload a resume. Once the resume is parsed and "read" by the systems, technology is now available to automatically generate the list of appropriate and available opportunities. Pushing opportunities to candidates this way is far better than having them hunt for jobs using the antiquated technology of pull-down menus. I estimate that the hit rate when pushing jobs to candidates rather than having them hunt and peck would increase the apply rate by five to ten times. This is a type of impact a "finding jobs for people" strategy could have.

A mashup is a web site that is quickly developed by combining content from a variety of sources. Getting a talent hub up and running should take no more than a few weeks. This is a new form of web design that you'll be hearing a lot about in the near future. For example, Microsoft's Popfly is a new site designed to help novice users build these sites quickly. If you add widgets to your website you can quickly tap into social networks like Ning, MySpace, Facebook, and Hi5. Widgets are small applications like calendars, ToDo lists, and timers that can quickly be added to websites and desktops. By adding a job notification or a salary comparison widget into your talent hub you'll start attracting more people, keep them on the site longer, and get them to send them to their friends and associates. Yahoo has a neat way to add these widgets to your desktop, so you should check this out to get a feel for how they work.

If you join our Sourcing Strategies network you'll see an example of a countdown widget. Building professional networks like this one is another feature you'll want to add to your talent hub. This is one way to keep prospects involved in your site.

Here are three of the five major points made in this article. Email the missing points to me once you find them. If you can identify them you'll also be uncovering some new ways of finding more top prospects before the week is out.

1. Find Jobs for People, Not People for Jobs.
2. The war for talent can be won by leading, not following.
3. Recruitment advertising is quickly adopting consumer marketing techniques.

Not everything I mention will work as predicted, but if you wait to find out, it will be too late.