Creating Communities

Communities within the SmartRecruiters SmartCRM are a designed to promote proactive, long-term talent relationship management. They transform a passive candidate database into an engaged talent pipeline.

Creating communities allows you to organize and engage with prospects based on specific criteria, improving your sourcing efficiency and candidate engagement.

Using communities to manage prospect candidates offers these core benefits:

• Continuous Engagement and Nurturing: Communities ensure candidates remain connected to your employer brand, even when no relevant job is open. This maintains a warm relationship, making them more likely to apply when the right role emerges.
• Accelerated Sourcing: When a hiring need arises, recruiters have an immediate, pre-qualified, and engaged source of talent to draw from, significantly reducing time-to-hire compared to starting a search from scratch.

To successfully implement Talent Communities, it is important to first understand them as interactive, visible hubs rather than static, private talent pools. Before starting the technical configuration, consultants should guide clients through a strategic planning phase to ensure the system is used effectively.

1. Define the Strategy

   Start by asking the client key questions to establish a clear purpose:

   • Goals: What specifically does the customer want the CRM to achieve for their organization?
   • Success Metrics: On top of standard system defaults, what specific metrics will they use to measure success? It is vital to the business to measure what matters.
   • Priority: It is recommended to start with only one or two priority communities to focus the strategy.
2. Identify Entry Points

   Determine exactly where prospects will come from and where the community should appear. Common entry points include:

   • Career sites and company advertisements
   • Recruitment events
   • Silver Medalists: High-quality candidates who were rejected only at the final stage before an offer was made.
   • Speculative Applications: Communities are an excellent way to manage candidates who apply without a specific role in mind.
3. Operational Best Practices

   For the CRM to be successful, the organization must plan for its daily use:

   • Use Dedicated Resources: CRM is a proactive tool. If recruiters are asked to manage it as a side gig alongside their main duties, the adoption rate will likely be low.
   • Define User Interaction: Define how recruiters and users will interact with the community, such as the specific process for adding and searching for prospects.
4. Maturity and Engagement

   The ultimate goal of a talent community is talent relationship management, though the approach often evolves over time:

   • Initial Phase: Clients who are less mature in their strategy may initially use communities simply as candidate pools without using marketing features.
   • Advanced Phase: As they grow, clients should leverage the marketing side of the tool. This involves sending targeted and personalized content—such as newsletters and company updates—to strengthen the employer brand and keep warm leads engaged.

By following this proactive approach, organizations can successfully convert passive candidates into active applicants the moment a suitable position becomes available.

Watch this video for details on creating a community.

This video is for demonstration purposes. Any references made in this video to previous or later videos in this course (including titles, numbers, links, or sequence) may differ from the current course structure. Additionally, some functionalities shown may have evolved over time due to ongoing enhancements or business decisions.

Segments is a powerful tool that lets you group together prospects with similar skills or other characteristics that make them qualified candidates for similar positions, fulfilling specific hiring needs.

For example, if you have a Software Engineering community, you can create segments based on a characteristic, such as working seniority (Junior, Mid-senior, Senior, Managers) or preferred tech stack (Frontend, Backend, Full-stack).

Segments can also be used to deliver a campaign to a very targeted audience. For instance, you might want to segment a students' community by type of studies and use this information to target business students who live in a specific area and invite them to a hiring event.

To create a new segment in a community, you will select one or more prospects in a Community and use the Bulk Actions menu. From there, you can also add prospects to an existing segment.

Once created, segments will be available in the filters of the community, so the sourcing team can filter the prospect list by segments.

Segment is an attribute that belongs to a community. If a prospect is added to a community segment, this will not be reflected in other communities she or he is part of.

Only users assigned to a community as Sourcers can create segments, add prospects to segments, or remove prospects from them. Sourcers can also rename and delete segments.

Participants do not have permission to create or manage segments. However, they can still filter the prospect list by segment and view which segments a prospect belongs to.

On the Community page, the Community Pipeline displays the number of prospects in each status.

Each person within a community will be assigned a Community status status, which describes the status of a person as they move through the community’s pipeline.

The following table represents the statuses available in the Community Pipeline and how it is used to track a prospects activity within a community.

• Communities within SmartRecruiters SmartCRM are designed for proactive, long-term talent relationship management.
• Creating communities allows you to organize and engage with prospects based on specific criteria, improving sourcing efficiency and candidate engagement.
• Communities ensure candidates remain connected to your employer brand, even when no relevant job is open.
• When a hiring need arises, recruiters have an immediate, pre-qualified, and engaged source of talent to draw from.