CWS 3.0: July 23, 2014

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Talent communities are emerging. Take advantage.

In a very real sense, talent communities may very well be the next big thing, if in fact we aren’t already there. Take a look at your professional social media profile and those of your colleagues. Whom do you connect with professionally? Via sites like LinkedIn, we can easily find and connect with people who are similar to us in terms of work interest, sphere of influence, industry experience or skills. What if the next step is pods of talent that are connected at the skills level and that help one another grow? Recruiters already mine LinkedIn for potential candidates. But they don’t have to be the only ones. These online professional profiles can be created for various skills both by candidates and others.

Take Zappos. It has created a career portal that enables those who are interested in a career there to introduce themselves and begin a relationship. Presented as a “membership,” a relationship can be developed without a job necessarily being immediately available. This is an interesting and innovative approach, it creates a community that is interested in the product and want a relationship with the company. But staffing firms and job boards could take this several steps further. They are already one step ahead; they have access to historical and real-time candidate and job information that gives them a leg up on pioneering and creating talent communities, not specific to any one product or firm. The core competencies involved in finding great candidates and understanding companies and their talent needs is a specialty in itself and companies that excel in this field will create even more sophisticated and agile talent communities.

These types of communities could not only nurture the company-to-candidate relationship, but will result in a huge influx of skill, salary, geographical and tenure data. The big question is who will win the race to engage the talent the right way thereby capturing  critical data and provide meaningful output to all members of the ecosystem: buyers, staffing firms, job boards — and of course , the talent itself. Online talent communities and talent profiles that are managed smartly could result in more accurate skills documentation, higher degrees of specialization, greater visibility to candidates, transparency in terms of compensation parameters and more. The speed of technological advancements will push talent communities to be the next frontier. This is turn will increase the value and appeal of contingent work. Are you ready?