HR Strategy

A key weapon in your long-term hiring strategy.

Everyone knows the benefits of talent pooling; it’s proactive and focused on the company’s future needs.

It provides the opportunity to quickly market to a warm pool of passive pre-screened candidates who already ‘know’ you to encourage them to apply.

So, what prevents us from being proactive with talent pooling? Let’s look at why talent pooling is always on the ‘to do’ list and get some ideas for where to start.

Talent pools defined
A talent pool is a database of candidate profiles interested in working for your organization. They could be limited to a specific area of expertise or focused on a broad grouping of individuals capable of performing various job tasks.

Reactive recruitment is not a sustainable or effective strategy
Usually, time is the most common reason for not actively talent pooling, and most recruitment is ‘Post & Pray’ and focused on the company’s immediate need. Does your recruitment strategy look like this:

Advertise a job > Hope enough candidates see it >
Hope enough candidates apply >
Hope enough candidates are suitable >
Hope they ‘buy-in’ to your employer brand >
Hope they accept your offer….

Or are you reaching out to pre-screened candidates who already ‘know’ you and encouraging them to apply?

Not everyone knows where to begin with talent pooling, and how to effectively execute content marketing (understanding your candidates’ needs and desires, then telling your story in a way they can relate to, be inspired by, and ultimately trigger their response).

Pinpointing talent
Having the tools to segment talent and drill down a talent pipeline of potentially suitable candidates for a specific role is vital.

Segmentation drills down a group of candidates based on broad criteria, for example, ‘Software Developers’. This precise segmentation of a talent pool is based on skills, experience, and qualifications that will help make better quality hires. A pipeline is a filtered list of candidates believed to be suitable for a specific position (for example, .Net software developers).

This then will give you ‘leads’ of individual candidates within a talent pipeline.

ATS & E-Recruitment tools
Utilizing your ATS to deliver effective talent pooling is the best place to start. Use this 12-point checklist:

1. Do you have a database of candidates?

2. Is it up to date?

3. Do you see it as a valuable recruitment channel?

4. Are you able to search for it?

5. Is the search flexible?

6. Do you have a good understanding of the skills your business is likely to need to recruit in the future?

7. Do you know the peaks and troughs of your seasonal recruitment?

8. Can you search your candidate database by skill?

9 If so, can you segment those candidates within the database?

10. Can you easily contact this group of candidates?

11. Do you have valuable, relevant content to share with them?

12. Can you measure and monitor your success at engaging with them?

Whether you use talent pooling for hard-to-fill roles, volume recruiting, or are looking to be proactive while saving costs or improving time to hire with a higher quality hire of candidates; talent pools are a key weapon in your long- term hiring strategy.

You can start small, working with your hiring managers and department heads to identify the roles that will most benefit from talent pooling and in turn reducing reliance on external sources for recruitment. Identify the skills and experience needed and use it to create talent personas to build your skills library to match candidates to vacancies. Before you know it, you will have a ready-made target audience for marketing communications to find yourself the employer of choice when candidates look to make their next move.