We've recently received some questions about talent communities, readers want to know what talent communities are, how to find them, and how best to utilize these communities in the hiring process.

A Few Simple Facts About Talent Communities

A talent community is a place, sometimes online, where qualified individuals can communicate with company representatives.

These talent communities can then work as a talent pipeline where companies can find great candidates for open positions.

These talent communities center around a specific industry or skill set.

Individuals that are part of the talent community reach out to other members for content sharing, opportunities and professional development.

Talent communities are a great way for companies to find individuals to put into the talent pipeline for opportunities within the company. Seeking out or developing talent communities is a great way to nurture top talent and shorten the recruiting process. Well-developed talent communities can help recruiters cut down on the time they spend sourcing candidates or weeding through applications. This allows them to focus on interviewing and hiring the best.

How to Find Talent Communities

There are plenty of places on the social web to find already established communities full of talented potential hires. Talent communities exist anywhere people gather to share information and discuss your industry.

This could mean your talent community is a LinkedIn group where members share content and discuss issues or it could be a Twitter chat where members connect and communicate about the pressing issues of the day. All you really need for a talent community is a group of qualified individuals getting together to discuss your industry or company.

How to Engage With a Talent Community

As mentioned, talent communities are great places to develop a pipeline of talent. The question is how best to utilize, engage and grow these communities. First of all, remember on the Internet that content is king. If you have great, share-worthy content you will be on your way to developing a talent community interested in the topics you cover.

It is also important to pay attention to the etiquette of the community at large. If your talent community is less active, do not post a comment or start a discussion on a daily basis. This could make it appear as if you are dominating the conversation in your community. Instead, take the temperature of the space, then share and discuss when appropriate.

Another important aspect to developing your talent community is to form connections. A talent community is just a group of people like any other if you do not take advantage of the opportunity to reach out to potential hires. Thanks to the power of social media and other social recruiting tools, you can easily engage with great candidates and form relationships.

Building and Growing Your Own Talent Community with Simplicant

With Simplicant, you have the means to capture interest from all those candidates, active or passive, who find your open jobs through various sources and visit your Simplicant-powered careers site.

Since you have already shared your open jobs through targeted channels social-media using Simplicant, chances are that most of the visitors on your careers site are either referred candidates or high quality mix of passive and active candidates. Whether these people find an open position on your careers site or not, they always have the option of logging their interest by filling out a general application.

As candidates apply or sign up for notifications, you are essentially building a talent community that you can easily reach out to via Simplicant the next time you have an open position for which you want to find a great candidate. Keeping appropriate and relevant communication going with your talent community is a key part of building a healthy relationship with your growing pool of quality candidates which you can engage with as needed for your new open positions of for their expertise, opinion and even referrals.

Building relationships is the cornerstone of social recruiting, and it is also what makes talent communities so useful. If you find and engage with your talent communities, you will have taken steps that can help cut down on your recruiting time in the future.

What do you think? How do you utilize your talent communities?

About Sajjad Masud
Sajjad Masud is Co-founder & CEO of Simplicant, a cloud-based recruiting platform transforming the talent acquisition market and making enterprise-level recruiting technology accessible to companies of all sizes. Simplicant's collaborative platform includes social recruiting and redefined candidate relationship management to help organizations optimize their cost and time per hire.

This article was originally published on July 23, 2012 at http://blog.simplicant.com/simplicant-solutions-how-can-i-tap-into-talent-communities at Simplicant - www.simplicant.com