Talent pooling is an effective tactic for businesses that want to build a wide network of candidates to fill future vacancies in their client companies and in their own firms. This can help your hiring efforts become more efficient.
If you are looking to broaden your reach and explore talent pools for staffing firms, here are some strategies you can leverage.
The Advantages of Talent Pooling
Recruit faster through talent pools. A report by Gartner found that hiring professionals who spend more time on engaging candidates and less on decision-making saw a 17 percent shorter time to fill vacancies and a 10 percent increase in top candidates.¹
A talent pool is a group of candidates that have the potential to meet a company’s needs in a short-term or long-term setup. This pool of talents may include past candidates, old employees, and other individuals whose skills you are more familiar with.²
Internal Pools: These are the existing employees within your business who are looking to advance or shift careers.
External Pools: These are individuals you got in touch with before from previous applications, employment, or referrals.
Let’s go over why building talent pools is important to your recruiting strategy.
1. Shortens your hiring time
Having the details of your candidates on hand and familiarizing yourself with them can shorten the interview time and hiring procedure. Most of your questions can focus on confirming the details you have gathered previously and assessing their soft skills.
Ask them about previous projects, their method of taking charge of projects, and how they prioritize multiple deadlines. These questions and more can help you see if they can adapt to a company and specific work environment.
2. Reduces hiring costs
Having your talent pool ready can help reduce the costs of job ads, both online and printed. This is because all you must do is contact the talent which you think has the best potential, screen them, and then interview them.
Instead of looking for people to reach out to, you can skip this step to focus on engaging already connected people.
3. Improves candidate diversity
Having your own talent pool that you can maximize and customize improves your chance of hiring diverse candidates. This is because you can gather your candidate details from various sources.
This gives you the freedom to ignore age and generation, gender, race, geographic location, and other factors that may influence your decision.
4. Provides a better candidate experience
Having candidates in a pool means you don’t have to reject them if they don’t pass your qualifications. Instead, you can let them know that you’ll be in touch for future opportunities. As they have not been rejected, being part of your talent pool allows them to still consider you as an option for future employment.
5. Allows you to tap passive candidates
Passive candidates are usually busy with other employment but having them in your pool means you have a guaranteed talent to reach out to. You can have them work for you part-time or have them employed full-time if you have a position they’re interested in.
For example, if you are looking for a motion graphics animator who has experience in web designing and they happen to be involved with a web designing business, you can get in touch with them for their related services.
Strategies to Master for Developing Your Own Talent Pool
1. Gather information through your career pages and websites.
Gather candidate details through career pages and websites. These are the online spaces where people can provide you with their contact information, employment background, and education details.
You can also get in touch with them in real time through social media platforms, such as LinkedIn. You can use this feature to build relationships with them through timely updates and invitations to apply for your openings.
Through your website, you can add a form where they can submit their contact details and application necessities so that you can easily get in touch with them when you have to.
2. Create an employee referral program.
A candidate referral program will excite your employees and candidates to bring you closer to trusted people. This will require you to allot a budget for rewards such as cash or small items they can use at work.
A study by Harvard Business Review reported that call centers generated 70 percent more for every 100 sourced candidates through referrals compared to non-referrals.
Your talent pool recruitment is being helped by the right hands through referrals because people who recommend other candidates already have an idea of how these people work. They can provide you with good feedback on how they think a person can fit in with your team.
3. Create a candidate database including old employees and fresh graduates.
Including fresh graduates, old employees, and even internal talent in your talent pool can help broaden your reach. Old employees can easily adjust to your needs because they are already familiar with their old work environment.
Meanwhile, fresh graduates will provide you with the latest technical skills in the industry. They will surely have learned a different set of skills from an employee who’s been in the industry for ten years. These newly graduated individuals will always bring new insights.
4. Invest in database tools for your candidates.
Investing in the right technology can help you gather the right details from your candidates. This may include easy-to-navigate databases where you can input their qualifications, resumes, and portfolios. You can also look into talent management software programs that may assist you in keeping track of employee and candidate progress and status.
5. Categorize your database.
Categorizing your database helps you find people you need quickly. You may sort their details through their skills, software knowledge, or specific industries.
Through these categories, you can also ideate what types of teams you can form. For example, you can form a team that can handle web development, which may include UI/UX designers, Shopify experts, quality assurance engineers, and more.
6. Offer training, especially for internal candidates.
Having training programs ready means you are ready to work on the skill sets of fresh graduates and people within your team who are looking to reskill.
This can improve your members’ motivation to work harder and your business can be more productive. Investing in them also means you will have the skills you will need later on, future-proofing your company better.³
7. Collate feedback from candidates and current employees.
Employer branding is also a key factor in attracting workers. Gathering feedback from people you’ve already screened or worked with is essential to knowing how you can connect with other candidates. Send out surveys to help determine where most people hear about you. It could be through referrals, career pages, blog posts, or social media.
They may also give you feedback on what their first impression of your company was. Whether these are positive or negative, learn from them and see how you can improve your talent acquisition with this information.
Improve your hiring process with an accessible talent network.
Hire more comfortably by getting in touch with people from your effective talent pool. Make sure that you have their updated candidate profiles so that you can match them to your changing needs.
BROADEN YOUR CANDIDATE REACH WITH THE HELP OF ALLIED INSIGHT.
Open your doors to more qualified candidates that were previously beyond your reach. Allied Insight, a Full Stack Marketing Agency, can help your brand be more relevant in the eyes of job seekers through Complete Competitive Analysis, MarCom & Content Audit, Website Performance Review, and more of our services.
References:
1 Rogers, Sierra. “Recruiting Is Easier With Talent Pools—Here’s How To Build Your Own.” Software Advice, 19 Dec. 2022, www.softwareadvice.com/resources/talent-pools/.
2 Thakkar, Rinku. “The Benefits of Talent Pooling.” LinkedIn, 7 Sept. 2022, www.linkedin.com/pulse/benefits-talent-pooling-rinku-thakkar/?trk=pulse-article_more-articles_related-content-card.
3 “What Is Talent Pooling? (With Benefits, How-To Guide and Tips).” Indeed, Updated 24 Jun. 2022, www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/talent-pooling.
