TalentMinded

Whether you’re the community manager of your company’s social media careers page, part of a team who handles overall recruitment marketing strategy or an employment brand strategist, a thriving talent community with high levels of engagement is dependent upon a constant influx of compelling, external content to supplement your original content.

The Problem?

The wealth of information available makes it a daunting task to sift through the bad to get to the good.

The Solution?

We’ll show you how to organize and curate content streams using Google Reader and Twitter Lists. While it’ll take some time to organize initially, these free tools can help you source content that engages top talent on your Facebook and Twitter career pages, your corporate careers site and your online talent community.

Getting Familiar with Google Reader

This all-encompassing tool allows you to organize and condense feeds from blogs, news sites and almost anything on the Web into one place.

Google Reader can be downloaded as an app on your smartphone or tablet or simply accessed on the Internet from your computer. As long as you’re logged in to your Google account, your feed will stay synced, keeping your read, unread, starred and shared items consistent on all of your devices.

For starters, we recommend adding basics like the New York Times home page, a couple of your favorites from Recruiting Blogs and the SHRM HR news feed, as well as sites like ERE, SmartBrief and respected publications in your industry that may interest your talent community.

As each site is updated or a new blog is added, they combine into one stream, and Voilà! – you have a personalized newspaper delivered to you each morning. You can even organize the feeds into categories like “News,” “HR” and “job seeking” so you’re only seeing blogs relevant to the topic you need.

Reexamining Twitter for Talent Community

If you’re not already active on Twitter, it can be an intimidating step – as is stepping into a room with thousands of conversations taking place at once. The key to a better experience is segmenting the conversations to help you find those that are most interesting to you and your network at a given time.

Twitter lists are one of the easiest ways to do this. They allow you to create a timeline which only listens to specific users, making it a breeze to switch from one conversation to the next using a single account.

Since you don’t need to be following someone for them to appear in your list, you can segment other accounts into meaningful lists without cluttering your main timeline. This is especially helpful if you use a personal Twitter account in your spare time but also want to keep current with industry trends. Simply create a few private lists like “HR News” and “Industry Experts” that you can access while sourcing.

Using a Filing System

As you come across articles to share with your talent community via Google Reader, Twitter and other sources, it’s critical to have a system for saving and finding these items for use at a later time. Whether it’s emailing them to yourself or using Google Reader and Twitter (which both have “favoriting” capabilities), be sure that you’re able to make a note of the article and its location from any device you’re using.

 

Sharing content is a great way to engage your talent community. If you use tools other than Google Reader and Twitter Lists, tell us about them and how they’ve improved your process!

 

Image: Alexandre Duret-Lutz/Flickr