Cheezhead

Advorto’s Recruitment 2.0 blog first put Talent Cloud, a social network in the U.K. for the recruiting space, on my radar.

Blogger Susanna Cesar-Morton said of the site, “Social networking guru Peter Gold created Talent Cloud on Ning and is actively growing the network . . . Peter has put a lot of thought into growing the network, and it is one of the best options.”

I spoke with Gold about why he created Talent Cloud, his vision for the site, and why apathy is his biggest competitor.

Peter, what’s your background?

I have worked in recruitment since 1987 and started with online in 1998. I built a recruitment software company offering job postings followed by an ATS. The company sold in 2002. I set up Hire Strategies in 2003 as a technology independent consulting business to advise organizations on their internet recruitment strategy and relevant technologies.

In the last 12 months we have focused on how social media in the workplace is changing the way companies communicate with their employees and how internal blogs and internal social networks can underpin their overall talent management strategy.

Talk about Talent Cloud, your target audience, and why it was created.

We set up TC to learn first hand about running a social network but also to get HR engaged with the concept. The network is aimed at HR and Talent Management professionals who want to improve their knowledge about technology for recruiting and talent management and debate various issues around the use of, for example, external social networks such as Facebook.

The site has only been externally marketed since August and has over 300 members, although we do not aim to get this above 1,000, as we want to stay very focused and uncluttered. We are not into adding the latest widgets as the user base is at the moment still getting used to what I would consider the basics.

Who are your biggest competitors?

These range from the likes of RecruitingBlogs.com [created by Jason Davis] to HR Space and many more. Staying power and relevancy will of course be key and those that survive will remain niche rather than large, although there will no doubt be large industry-specific networks as well. Who knows how big the HR-type networks will become. I think the biggest competitor for corporate HR social networks will be apathy and time.

What are your future plans for the site?

Any new concepts or features will be tested elsewhere first on our web site or blog. Going forward we will probably add a jobs section, but other than that I don’t see any major additions to the site. The focus will be on improving user engagement by adding more content to generate discussions.

I think network owners can become too focused on number of members and forget about getting their site to work for their members rather than make members work for the site. Based on site stats we have plenty of returning visitors who respond to site updates, download reports, etc. which suggests we have an approach that is working.

Over the next 12 months we want to see the site achieve the anticipated membership level of 1,000 or so with good quality regularly updated content and a constant stream of jobs. In turn we want to be the leading talent technology focused business network for the UK: niche, focused, and relevant.