Chris Bogh |

How would you describe your talent pool? An ocean? A great lake? Or merely a puddle? In some respects the very name ‘talent pool’ is misleading, since it is not merely its expansiveness that helps us to achieve our recruitment goals.

Ensuring you always have the right talent in the right place at the right time requires a well-stocked and enthusiastically engaged talent pool of qualified candidates. Keeping your talent pool up to date and by regularly adding and refreshing it can be a challenge for many in-house recruitment teams.

Your talent pool is a central part of your recruiting strategy, so the following tactics for increasing its breadth are often key to your success.

1. Make it easy to join your Talent Pool

Your careers site should make it easy for new registrants to join your talent pool, even if they don't want to apply for a specific job in the first instance. It should be possible for candidates to create their profile and upload their CV – even better if the CV is automatically converted to their profile. Your candidates can then update their profile at any time, ensuring that you always have a record of their latest achievements, skills and experience. Why have separate talent pool and applicant tracking systems when a modern recruitment platform should give you the synergies of both?

2. Segment and organise your Talent Pool

Your talent pool is only as effective as your ability to search within it and organise your talent. When you need to respond to urgent needs, you can rapidly identify, engage and recruit from a rich seam of qualified people. A good starting point is segmenting, or grouping, your talent pool based on an organised hierarchy of relevant skills and preferred locations. The more data you can gather about your talent pool members, the more refined and targeted your future campaign can be.

3. Engage and enthuse your talent community

If you have a well organised and segmented talent pool, you should find it easier to engage with targeted messages and campaigns. These can be:
  • Rules based – e.g. contact all talent pool members every six months, inviting them to update their skills and experience. This is also a good way to ensure that you communicate your privacy and data collection policies
  • Needs based – e.g. when new jobs become available, promote them to candidates via their preferred means (email, SMS, social media)
  • Preference based – e.g. candidates are able to sign up for targeted job alerts, so that only relevant opportunities are promoted directly to them.

4. Turn your careers site into a talent hub

Where does your careers site end? Quite often we find that many companies’ careers sites cease to be relevant to the candidate once an application has been processed. This is a shame, since so much time and effort is put into employer branding to attract new candidates. Modern careers sites can do so much more. Every member of your pool can access their own secure area, upload their CV, update their skills and experience, sign up for relevant job alerts, and communicate directly with you.

5. Give recruiters the tools to become expert talent-spotters

The modern recruiter is required to wear many hats; it’s become a real cross-discipline role, part HR, marketing – and in a data-driven age – part IT. Of course, it’s unreasonable to expect recruiters to be experts in the wonders of Boolean logic, so it’s vital that they have easy to use tools that help them to search and sift through the talent pool to pinpoint the most suitable candidates to engage.

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