Fresh From the Roost: Taking the (Talent) Community Approach to Hiring

Since 2020 employers have been on what one can only equate to Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride when it comes to pandemic challenges, social justice movements, hiring shortages, and more. It’s safe to say that the talent acquisition landscape has been in constant flux, making it incredibly challenging to predict what’s next and prepare for recruitment challenges altogether. While many employers have paused hiring efforts, and are just beginning to ramp up activities, others have taken careful time to reassess their employment brand, recruitment marketing efforts, and fill the gaps that exist in their processes. One tool offered by our Recruit Rooster team is helping to fill those talent gaps and ensure a continued flow of interested candidates – the new Talent Community. Let’s dive in and look at how various future-focused employers are using these fully customizable instances to build their talent pipeline and reduce time to hire – and even in some use-cases, add automation to their processes! 

Alaska Airlines

As a long-time customer, Alaska Airlines was an early adopter of the Talent Community. Even with a talent community already part of their ATS, Alaska saw the value in creating an additional talent pipeline for high-demand positions, like pilots and other high-profile jobs. To build their candidate pool and use the Job Alerts feature of the Talent Community, Alaska implemented this feature on their career site at the beginning of April 2022. Since that time, they’ve seen around 1,200 candidates join the Talent Community using the Saved Search feature. Additionally, Alaska Airlines has seen 711 visits, resulting in 176 apply clicks and a 24.75% candidate conversion rate, meaning one out of every four candidates interacting with the job listing have applied in the ATS after receiving the saved search. Alaska continues to see tremendous growth in their pipeline from the saved search job alert emails and already has plans to expand their instance based on the continuous candidate flow. 

Indiana Farm Bureau

Indiana Farm Bureau may not have the nationwide recognition that Alaska Air has, but its results are certainly something to crow about. With a smaller local reach, this company’s goal was to expand their candidate pool and digital footprint, allowing recruiters to cultivate talent over time. To promote the new Talent Community on their site, they choose to offer two points of entry. The first of which is just a general entry route, located at the top of their career site, giving candidates the ability to enter their information and some general areas of interest they may have. The second option can be found as the candidate browses available jobs and offers them the ability to have job alerts emailed to them, and for recruiters to stay in touch. In the case of Indiana Farm Bureau, they’ve added a field for phone numbers so recruiters can further campaign and connect with candidates via SMS messages. As a result of recently implementing Talent Community, Indiana Farm Bureau has had 60 saved searches. Additionally, from those saved searches, 75 visits from passive candidates have been recorded, which resulted in 17 apply clicks translating to a little over a 22% conversion rate. While Indiana Farm Bureau’s efforts are more localized, the Talent Community continues to expand its ability to interact with passive candidates and grow visibility and interest in their open opportunities.

Service Corporation International (SCI)

For SCI, the funeral home and mortuary business is not for the faint of heart, and careful hiring for crucial roles, like funeral directors, is always top of mind. For their instance of Talent Community, they chose to focus on building a candidate pool around this critical role. Therefore, when candidates navigate to those specific roles, job seekers will be prompted to join the Talent Community. SCI also included a custom pre-screening question, “Do you have a funeral director license?” as additional candidate information to collect. Since adding Talent Community, SCI has collected information for over 2,000 candidates interested in Funeral Director positions. This additional information allows the recruiter to properly engage with the candidate based on their qualifications. Even if candidates do not have an active license, they are also targeted as potential candidates for training programs and financial assistance/stipend for training participation.  

Kindred at Home

When products are developed, a particular use case typically applies. However, like all Recruit Rooster solutions and tools, Talent Community offers the inherent flexibility to fit the company’s intended use. In the case of Kindred at Home, they were able to reimagine the use case and customize it based on their needs. They were unhappy with their previous service provider and needed a way to seamlessly transition over 30,000 candidates out of the platform and into Recruit Rooster’s Talent Community instance. In addition, they also wanted to test out automating their referral program, which was a very manual process. Recruit Rooster designed and developed a referral page that contained information about the referral program, gift cards that employees could win for referring candidates, and a short form. After running a campaign through March 31, 2022, Kindred at Home realized their current employees were a great supplement to their recruitment efforts! The campaign had roughly 1,200 referred candidates and resulted in 250 hires, which greatly complements their existing referral program.