What is a talent audience?
How do I decide on our talent audiences?
Why is it important to me to understand who our talent audiences are?
What is a talent audience?
When we talk about talent audiences, we mean groups of people who we hope to listen to our messages about us as organizations, as places of work and as a potential place for you to build a career at.
Our talent audiences are:
- Our current employees, be it full-time, part-time, permanent or temporary
- Our former employees
- Our current job candidates and applicants, including and especially those we plan not to hire or even to interview
- Talents we would love to see as our job candidates and our future employees
- The friends and families of our direct talent audiences who perceive and may evaluate us as employers instead of businesses
- Other members of the public who perceive and evaluate us as employers and place of work
Before social media, our talent audiences were much more narrow than today. Do you remember in the early days of social media, when we talked about how every one in social media has about 80 people in their social media network? And if you add up together your first level network and all of their networks you get the idea how far you can actually extend your messages.
Many years later, the size of the combined reach has many more zeros at the end.
A talent audience of a company are all of those people together who evaluate us, perceive us, follow us, hear about us and want to learn about us as an employer instead of as a business.
Everyone in our talent audience does not belong to our target audience
Target audience is different than the talent audience. For our talent marketing, be it employer branding or recruitment marketing, to be effective and efficient, we need to be more specific about who are our target talent audiences.
Therefore, a target audience is a group of people we want to reach with our messages. The better we target and tailor our message to make sense and mean something to the target audience, the more likely we are to get it through.
Marketing costs money. Even if you did it yourself. It’s still time your employer pays for. If you spend it on tasks that are not valuable to your employer, you are wasting the resources your employer has available. We all are responsible to make these decisions on a daily basis.
Why do we need to be more specific about our target talent audiences?
Our messages will make more sense and impact the recipient in the ways we hope them to, expect them to and need them to, when we speak their language.
We need talent audiences for our recruitment messages and employer branding messages. We need our internal talent audiences to pay attention to our instructions, news, requests, expectations and so on. You know it from yourself how many commercial messages addressed to you are ignored by you, because they made no sense to you or were not relevant to you.
Someone created those messages, spent money directly or indirectly to get those in front of you, but you did not react. Time and money wasted.
Being more specific about our target audiences, learning about who they are, what matters to them and how you can win their attention are critical to make our time and money worth.
Sometimes I hear companies complaining about the lack of good candidates in their recruitment processes, or the lack of applicants altogether, or how their employees are evaluating their internal communications as weak. Well, if the message does not get across the intended way, it’s probably on the sender, not on the recipient.
Understanding who your target talents are and what makes them tick are paramount in the success of your talent marketing efforts.
Interested in learning more about recruitment marketing? Check out this blog post >>
The accompanying podcast-episode
In this episode #15 of Building a Modern Employer Brand, we talk about what is a talent audience (in employer branding and recruitment marketing) and why should we be interested.
Episode-length: 30:09 min
Listen to this episode on Soundcloud >>
Listen to this episode on Spotify >>
Episode content:
- What is a talent audience?
- Keeping taps on talent insight
- The various talent audiences organizations have
- How the activeness / passiveness impacts our ability to deliver results in our talent marketing efforts?
About Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast
Building a Modern Employer Brand-podcast is a weekly podcast bringing you a modern breath of air into HR marketing and employer branding.
This podcast is dedicated to all modern growth companies and modern employer branding practitioners who want to really influence their talent audiences and add measurable value to growing and scaling modern businesses with HR marketing and employer branding.
The Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast is sponsored by Employee Experience Agency Emine and scripted & hosted by Susanna Rantanen.
Find this podcast currently on Soundcloud and Spotify.