What Is a Talent Pool?
When evaluating many applicants, viewing the profile of each candidate, and examining the contact information of the applicants, managers create a list of their top candidates. Nevertheless, this database of highly qualified candidates doesn’t include only potential candidates who are actively looking for job offers and applying for job offers, that is active candidates. It also includes sourcing and passive candidates that recruiters found through active sourcing, as well as referred candidates and former candidates that didn’t win the job, but still could be a good fit to the company.
Building a Talent Pool of highly qualified potential candidates according to your recruitment criteria, who are additionally a cultural fit to the company, means significantly improving both the quality of hires and timing and the costs of the hiring process. Furthermore, managers can efficiently recruit an employee from a highly talented candidate database to fill a vacancy promptly.
When building a Talent pool, many companies avail of digital sourcing tools such as ATS and CRM to streamline the recruiting process. Using sourcing tools allows recruiters to save time in evaluating countless resumes and selecting qualified candidates to enlist in the talent pool database. Moreover, sourcing tools can help to stay in touch with the selected candidates, by for example sending automated emails.
What Are the Benefits of a Talent Pool?
Nowadays, Talent Pool is one of the best proactive, long-term recruitment strategies in response to the shortage of skilled workers, and it has to be taken into account in strategic workforce planning. Building, maintaining and staying in contact with your top talented candidates who can meet your company’s employing needs prevents current and future open positions from remaining unfilled because of the lack of a qualified and fitting workforce.
The many benefits of building a talent pool include:
Target the suitable workforce
When starting to build a talent pool, the first step to take is to analyze your current and future hiring needs and recognize the skills gaps your current employee can’t fill. Therefore, after identifying the missing roles, build your hiring criteria and approach to prospective candidates that can meet them.
Once you have identified your candidate persona and the open positions to fulfill, job descriptions, postings and ads can be tailored to prospective candidates according to your hiring requirements. These can include specific qualifications, personal interests and personal values that fit within your corporate culture.
Access to passive candidates
The talent pool is one of the best proactive approaches to establishing contact with passive candidates. Passive candidates term refers to those workers who would like to change their current position but are not actively seeking jobs nor replying to job offers. They qualify as the best existing and biggest workforce on the labour market, representing 70% of the global workforce.
The best way to reach out to them is through your employees’ referrals. Since your current employees often know qualified workers who are in the same industry and are unsatisfied with their current job positions, they can share the company’s job offers within their networks and make referrals of the most suitable candidates for open positions. As a result, your talent pool will expand up to 10 times thanks to employee referrals.
Reduced time and cost per hire
When a Talent Pool is built, it represents a starting point for hiring before publishing job ads. Drawing on pre-selected candidates from Talent Pool allows you to fill vacancies, avoiding disruptions to workflow promptly. Hiring employees from Talent Pool significantly reduces the timing and costs of the hiring process in the long run.
It also helps to reduce the length of the selection process. Many candidates give up when achieving the touchpoints of a candidate journey takes too long. This Robert Half’s research states that 57% of job seekers lose interest in the job if the hiring process is too long.
Strengthen the employer brand
The opportunity to market the business to prospective candidates within the talent pool is an excellent opportunity to improve the employer brand. The image that the company will convey throughout the candidate journey is crucial to the company’s reputation.
If your candidate’s journey is pleasant and engaging, your candidates will get a positive experience from the hiring process and therefore share their experience within their networks. As a result, you will have your employer brand speaking for itself when it comes to terms of good company culture, inclusive workplace and good working conditions. This will push other top talents to reach out to your company.
How to Build a Talent Pool?
Create a specific Landing Page with the application form
If you have built a strong employer brand, it will attract talented candidates even if your company doesn’t have unfilled vacancies for them at the moment. To quickly establish contact with those potential future employees, create a specific landing page where they can find more information about your community.
It should include a contact form, information about your company’s departments and, when available, job opportunities inside them. Moreover, it should contain a form where to submit applications easily. As a result, it can substantially increase the number of candidates who apply for job offers.
Add prospective candidates
When sourcing candidates, you may come across profiles that don’t match your current open positions but could be a good fit for your company. Adding them to your talent pool is the easiest way to expand it.
Your talent pool should also include unsuccessful candidates, that is those who didn’t obtain a job position they applied for but still could be a good fit for other unfulfilled vacancies.
Don’t forget to enlist in this database your former employees. If they enjoyed working for your company, they could still be interested in future working opportunities.
Don’t overlook your internal talent, namely your best-qualified workers that deserve promotions. Before posting a job ad for an unfulfilled senior role, you should consider promoting your current employees.
Since Talent Pool is long-term recruiting strategy, it should also contain future top talents: grad students or post-graduate students that you met during their internships in your company, at recruitment fairs, university events, and networking seminars and workshops.
Avail of employees’ referrals
Availing of employees’ referrals can help the company quickly create talent pools containing hundreds of profiles. When well implemented, the benefits of this recruiting strategy are several, such as improving the company’s brand and boosting employees’ motivation.
To incentivize the employees to provide referrals, companies usually offer monetary and non-monetary rewards. Moreover, non-monetary incentives, such as social recognition within the company, a vacation or a trip, can be much more effective in motivating employees to make referrals.
Promote job offers on social media
Most companies manage social media profiles that feature their mission and values, contact information, promotional codes, and much further information. A company’s page should also promote job offers that can reach out more easily to qualified candidates. It also helps your current employees share them within their internal networks, simplifying the referral procedure.
Actively promoting job offers on social media considerably reduces the efforts and costs of the hiring process and increases brand awareness.
Summary
Building a Talent Pool is crucial when it comes to long-term, strategic workforce planning. It reduces the time and the cost per hire and allows to fill current and future vacancies quickly.
The talent pool recruitment strategy helps as well to improve candidate-centred experience throughout the application and selection process. Once new employees are on board, they are motivated and stay longer, which improves the company’s retention rate.
Before You Go
Firstbird offers a cutting-edge employee referral program to support your company in recruiting talented applicants. On our company’s website, you can find information about the product, the webinars we offer, our case studies and A Buyer’s Guide to Employee Referral Programs we created to guide you through the Digital employee referral purchase process.
