Talent Pooling – How and Why You Should Do It

“The task of recruiting has moved from the reactive filling of requisitions to proactively courting high-quality talent.”

Josh Bersin, Ten Top Actionable Talent Acquisition Trends

With all your different attraction activities and channels, how will you turn ‘I may apply’ into actual applicants? You need to enable potential candidates to learn more about you, and build a talent pool.

Talent pools help minimise loss of productivity, which is one of the largest indirect costs of employee turnover. For example, with an existing talent pool, you shorten the time to hire and thus, maximise the offer-to-acceptance ratio.

Why do you need it?

Early talent hiring numbers may be up for some or down for others, but numbers of potential applicants discovering your business is likely to be significant. Should vacancies grow later in the year, this could mean more attraction spend to respond to that, sending cost of hiring higher.

Consequently, you want your pool of potential candidates to be engaged because if you begin reaching out in a few months time, you may find that candidate database will now be disengaged and uninspired. Securing a talent pool now and keeping them engaged is a great way to establish high quality candidates both faster, and more cost-effectively.

How to build a talent pool

• Create a landing page on your career site that serves as an invitation to join your talent pool. You can then direct any potential candidates you meet through digital events, social media, and work experience to the platform. Give them a clear outcome of what they will get from joining, and instructions for becoming a member of your talent community.
• Make it easy by capturing the minimum information at first, and then ask them to submit more details as they access more information and move further along in the process.
• Keep the event sign ups in one place, so you can consistently build your talent pool.

Maximising your database of candidates

• Segmentation –will enable you to deliver relevant content to different groups.
• Manage expectations –be clear what they get from signing up and how their data will be used.
• Engage and communicate –provide regular communications and bite-sized chunks of content delivered in a variety of formats. Utilise text, video and more, to support different learning styles, and ensure each module facilitates new skills where they are learning.
• Build a community –invite them to more events, forums or chat rooms to engage with your employees and other candidates.
• Update them –provide updates on new roles, news, and additional learning content.
• Measure –use the data to measure engagement as a whole and by groups, and continue to ask for feedback

Results

From leveraging talent pools, we have already seen the below results. What will you see?

• 80% sign up from all potential students.
• Renege rates cut by 30% – 70%.
• 40% more new female employees.
• Induction time reduced by a third.

Find out how Connectr can deliver talent pooling with a difference for your future talent.