Stop building talent newsletters. Start with talent communities.

Photo by Cherrydeck on Unsplash

While attracting talent, there is only one goal that we are constantly aiming for—how to convert them into a hire? There isn’t any interest in investing time into building a community or inviting them into nurturing conversations that may or may not lead to immediate conversions. The goal largely in recruitment marketing is to broadcast one way through a newsletter and not really think about having a two-way conversation.

We can learn a thing or two from the successful case studies in marketing (article source below) from consumer brands who figured this out a while ago. M.M. LaFleur built a community and didn’t focus only on getting their newsletter out. Over 80,000 people on Substack who come back because the brand gives them something worth reading, not something worth buying. 

Talent communities should work the same way. We are not there yet.

1. We are solving for the wrong thing.

I see this pattern everywhere. Talent teams either use the talent communities to just harvest for CVs or launch a one-way newsletter with one goal in mind: fill the pipeline and convert into applications. 

In reality this doesn't work. 

If your candidates are passive (in more cases of niche skills and senior professionals are likely to be passive), they can sense a recruitment agenda from a mile away. They'll skip past your job postings, ignore your career page, and stay skeptical about any HR communications. But show them a space where real conversations happen about work and growth and your industry? That's where they stop and pay attention. 

We should be thinking of building trust first when it comes to interacting with people. The brands that built the strongest communities didn't optimize for sales. They optimized for belonging, and sales came as a byproduct. 

2. You need a POV. 

To build elevated conversations, you don’t need just pieces of content but a Point of view (POV). 

Maria Costa from M.M.LaFleur said, "If your community feels like listicles and roundups and paid content disguised as insight, people lose trust." Full stop. The styling guides got higher open rates than the promotional material. The stories landed better than the sales messages. 

Your talent community needs the same clarity. What does your organization actually believe about … How careers should develop? What teams need to thrive? These are perspectives. 

It is not easy to get this right. Because POV means you need to be selective about what you share. You have to say no to things that don't fit. You will have to take a stance, and that’s not easy but quite risky in corporate setups. This selectiveness is exactly what will make you stand out from the content mills. 

3. Authenticity beats polish every time 

I know "authenticity" is an overdone word in the world of employer branding. But when it comes to people, being authentic and real will set you apart.

Shopify's storytelling lead talked about the problem with over-optimized content in an era of AI slop. She said it quite plainly: human voice is what separates you from the noise.

In the world of talent and talent communities, where everything tends to get sanitized somewhere between the HR review and the publish button, it is not an easy feat to achieve. 

Real employee stories land differently than polished testimonials. A senior engineer talking about a failed project and what they learned appeals close to heart. A founder admitting where they got it wrong builds more trust than a perfectly curated culture video. 

The messier parts of your organization are your assets. Because all of us know every company has complicated pieces, and if you show the glossy ones, anyone can identify it as ‘too good to be true.' The ones willing to be honest about your reality are the ones people are drawn to consider. 

4. Interaction and engagement is the whole point.

While I’ve constantly tried to change the one-way newsletter in my field, it’s been a struggle. But building community is not a one-way delivery of a newsletter, and you are measuring the impressions or downloads. It is built through two-way conversations.

This means you may need moderation and have to engage with people in real time; you need someone to respond to comments; and you will need discussion spaces where there is interaction and candidates are not just listening to you.

Shopify ran a 96-hour live blog during the holidays. Not a campaign, but participation. They created ‘energy’ because the brand was actually present in the conversation. 

Bring back energy into your talent community. Have live conversations with leaders and create comment threads with hiring managers. Have discussions moderated for depth and not just for brand safety. Here is where a community actually forms. 

5. The real measure is ‘belonging’ and not just applications. 

I remember what The RealReal said about their community. They didn't start it to drive sales but to build a community, and the revenue was a surprise. Later the sales came because they stayed focused on that mission. 

This is the shift we need in talent attraction. 

Your talent community should exist because people in your industry want to be part of it. Then when some eventually apply, it is a measure of success of your byproduct. 

This shift will change how you visualize, what you publish, who will lead it, and how you ultimately measure success. You will have to start tracking trust and engagement instead of just applications. And trust will act like a gravity that continues to pull people again. The organizations with successful communities are going to win the war to top talent. But you need to start it sooner to get ahead in the game. 

The questions you need to be asking now. 

If you are starting to build a talent community now, stop thinking about candidate pipeline volume and start working with your business leaders to find out …What conversation does our industry need that we are uniquely positioned to start? 

Once you have this answer, your community becomes real, and talent will follow.

That's the question that changes everything. Because once you have a real answer, the community becomes real. The content becomes necessary. The authenticity becomes possible.

This isn't soft thinking. This is the real strategy to actually win in a competitive talent market. Organizations that do this well don't have to chase candidates anymore. You will have built enough goodwill that candidates will choose you. 

Source: Inspired best practices from Marketing brew.