Talent Community Innovation on @BraveNewTalent

I have often shared my thoughts often on what a Talent Community is.

Now at BraveNewTalent we're inviting anyone interested to join the conversation on how to leverage online communities to attract, engage and develop the current and future workplace.

So click here to join the Talent Community Innovation topic on BraveNewTalent. As we say in the introduction:

This online community is dedicated to promoting the growth of and dialogue around the organizational use of talent communities to attract, influence, develop and engage the current and next generation workforce.
Our goal in launching this community is to provide a place where thought leaders and best practices experts from within the human capital management and marketing professions could unite the fragmented conversations about talent communities across our industry and amass a knowledge library unrivaled about this topic.

See you there :)

Some changes and some things constant

Apologies for the lack of content for some time on this blog. I have been caught up with various things. I'm however been curating a lot of stuff over at BraveNewTalent. If you are looking for your fix of HR, Management and Social Media content you should follow me there.

After 10 months in Bangalore, I have decided to move back to Delhi, because of family reasons.

I will continue to work with BraveNewTalent as a platform evangelist but since most of the clients are in Bangalore, I would move to a retainer role with BraveNewTalent and therefore would also look at working with other firms.

Some of the things that are in pipeline are :

1. Assisting an IT product company in helping them leverage social media in HR
2. Working with a group of HR leaders to deliver education to HR professionals in the area of social media.
3. Internal collaboration project at a large diverse conglomerate.
4. Helping HR tech firms market themselves to HR buyers and influencers.
5. Keynote speaking at an IT firm's internal event.

So if you know of companies who would be interested in engaging me as a retainer and consultant, do tell them to reach out to me at gautam dot ghosh at gmail dot com

Why Share Your Expertise ?

Image via Wikipedia

A lot of times people ask me why I blog, tweet, share stuff online. They think I am wasting my time. But its is because of such sharing that I have discovered and learned more than other people who look forward to learning as a formal "event" that they or their employer has to pay for.

Online sharing of ideas and opinions are like a dialog and often helps in helping you think about an issue in more clarity after the discussion than you had before. Connecting around learning online also leads you to discover content in various types from text, to documents, to slides and videos.

Hyperlinking makes online content dependent on what the user needs rather than what an author or trainer wants to convey. It gives the adult learners an option of going deep into a subject or to keep it at a surface level.

When you share your skill you also ensure that others look at you as an authority, if they find your content compelling. People can vote with their feet and leave when the value of that content falls, when better people start sharing their content too!

My colleague Charlie has shared a detailed list of 8 reasons to participate in Skill Communities at the BraveNewTalent Blog. Go read it, too

The Talent Series event report

From left: Lucian Tarnowski, Madan Padaki, Pratik Kumar and Krishna Prasad

As you know we had planned a gathering of business and HR folks in Bangalore on 6th January to have a conversation about Talent and Technology and specifically about the Future of Talent in India.

There were some fascinating points and experiences shared about what employability means, the future of training and teaching and how technology is transforming organizations.

Read the full report here

Members of the audience

Photos via Dheeraj Prasad

Related articles

• Future of Talent in India - Panel Discussion by BraveNewTalent on 6th January (gautamblogs.com)

The difference between a Talent Pool and a Talent Community

My colleagues at BraveNewTalent have made a nice infographic that summarises what the difference is between a talent pool and a talent community

You can create a Free Talent Community for your organization too. To start go here

Conducting a Webinar on using Social Media for Recruitment - Social Hiring #socialrecruiting

Image via WikipediaHi, if you are a Senior Executive and have an hour available next Wednesday - would love you to join me and Ranjan Sinha on the "Social Hiring - What every Executive Needs to Stay Competitive" webinar being organized by PeopleMatters, India's leading Leadership and People related content provider.

The details are here, so go register

It's for an hour
It's FREE




It's at 11 am (India time) 
Audience: If you are a business leader, HR leader or Manager - This is focused on what you need to know
Only 100 people can attend the webinar, so register soon and be online next Wednesday 30 mins before the start time


While Ranjan would talk on leveraging social networks for referral hiring, I would be speaking on building Talent Communities to find job seekers relevant and interested to work for you and the focus on using external talent to build your employment brand

There will be 15 min Q&A too.. so looking forward to connecting with you at the webinar!

What Recruiting Needs to Learn from Social Media Marketing

I have long believed that HR and Marketing are different sides of the same coin - which have not learned much from each other :)

Where recruiting can learn from Social Media Marketing is to start building talent communities to engage in conversation with people interested in their firm. Take a look at the following diagram

In traditional recruiting the focus has been to chase the orange circle – and spam them. Even in the current model of “social recruiting” these remain the focus. However, in a talent community the organization actually focuses on first attracting the blue circle, and then identify the overlap in the two groups to focus on the people who are really relevant as well as pre-disposed positively towards the company. Hence the way an organization would build its Talent Community would be very similar to its Social Media Marketing efforts.

It would consist of

1. Identify and Attract – Organizations have two approaches to build this – firstly rely on their own databases to ask candidates to join their talent community. They can leverage email, careers website, twitter updates and Facebook page updates to do so. Then they can use campaigns on search advertising and social advertising to attract new talent to their community 
2. Content – Companies are publishing a lot of content, from blog posts, to Press Releases to video uploads, to tweets and job postings. On a talent community platform (that BraveNewTalent provides) it is possible to integrate all this content to present a wholistic view of the organization) 
3. Community Engagement and Facilitation – This would consist of building conversations between external talent and internal experts, answering questions of talent and triggering discussions. 
4. Development – The focus of the engagement should not be just to focus on the people in the talent community who have the skills, but to build the overall skill levels of all people in the talent community, by sharing resources with them as well as helping them learn from each other and from subject matter experts in the organization. 

The prerequisites for making Talent Communities a success

1. To really benefit from Talent Communities they have to be sponsored by the business leadership of the organization that is innovative and willing to be open and transparent. 
2. The role of recruitment needs to be focused on attraction of talent and building a relationship with them rather than being reactive and chasing candidates. 
3. The organization has got to be willing to lift the firewall and letting real employees connect with job-seekers without trying to control the conversation. 
4. A willingness to be vulnerable and deal with tough questions and not be defensive. If a company is willing to try these, they will move the conversation to things that really matter like the work, culture and nature of the job from the one large aspect that is currently the focus these days – the salary.

Update: Based on a conversation with my colleague James Mayes - I came up with this diagram to explain talent communities

Related articles

• Some thoughts on Talent Communities (gautamblogs.com)