As any good recruiter will tell you, finding the right talent isn’t as easy as sending out a job ad and hoping a future superstar walks through the office doors. Much of recruitment takes proactive planning and cultivating key relationships to effectively support a business when they need a new team member.
Whether you’re in full-time recruitment or in charge of a small in-house HR team, having a talent pool of potential candidates is a great way to create those strong relationships.
We’re here to break down what a talent pool is, how you can form and maintain one, and how digital tools can make all the difference.
What is a talent pool in recruitment?
A talent pool is a database of potential job candidates for an organisation.
For savvy recruiters, having a talent pool of both high quality active and passive candidates gives them a head start in filling vacancies that come up in the business. After all, no one wants to start from scratch every time!
The pool could be made up of people who have applied for a job at your company previously, people who have expressed interest in upcoming roles previously, or even former employees who have left on good terms.
What is the difference between a talent pipeline and a talent pool?
A talent pool is a broad group of candidates who have all been selected as potentially suitable for an organisation.
A talent pipeline funnels out these candidates towards certain teams or roles in the organisation. For example, some of the talent pool could be suitable for an IT team talent pipeline, whereas others in the talent pool might be better suited to the sales pipeline.
The key to having a strong talent pipeline lies with the source – the talent pool. If you have a good range of candidates to start with, it gives you plenty of options when it comes to filling a particular role.
What recruitment challenges are employers currently facing?
Of course, it’s difficult to summarise the state of recruitment globally. However, for many countries, the impact of Covid, ageing populations and the changing nature of work in our digital age has led to significant challenges in finding new talent.
It’s getting so critical that the words ‘global talent shortage’ have been mentioned more than a few times in significant studies of the last couple of years.
A survey by the ManpowerGroup in 2021 showed that 69% of companies globally reported talent shortages in 2021. Compare that to 2013, when just 35% of companies reported the same.
This isn’t going away anytime soon either. A Korn Ferry study found that despite our increasing global population and a trepidation about how AI could affect employment, there could be a human talent shortage of more than 85 million people by 2023. That’s more than three times the population of Australia.
With that in mind, it’s time businesses got serious about securing top talent and retaining them– wherever in the world they happen to be. That’s where a talent pool comes in.
What are the benefits of having a talent pool?
There are a number of benefits that come with building a talent pool of potential candidates for your organisation.
It saves recruiters time (and money)
One of the top benefits of having a talent pool is that it can reduce the time and cost of recruiting. When a company has a position to fill, they can begin with a search in their talent pool for candidates who have already expressed interest in the company or a similar role.
This can speed up the hiring process if one of them proves to be successful, and businesses can save money on advertising and recruiting costs.
If any candidates in the talent pool are there because they’ve previously expressed interest in the company, they’re also likely to be more engaged and interested if offered a role.
You’re less likely to lose potential talent
Think of every role you’ve hired for. The chances are pretty high that on at least a few occasions, you had to make a tough choice between a select few candidates. All might have been potential superstars, but you could only choose one.
Instead of wondering what could’ve been with the other near-misses, a great way to stay in touch with them is to keep them in your talent pool. That way, if a suitable role for them comes up in the future, you’ve already got an established relationship with your future top hire.
Maintaining a talent pool means that you don’t lose these candidates entirely, and you’ll have a record that you can return to if you think they’d be great for a future role.
An opportunity to make a great impression
There’s a reason Glassdoor encourages users to rate interview experiences with companies, regardless of whether they got the job.
How a business treats their prospective employees is arguably just as important as how they treat existing employees.
Did you know that 72% of job seekers report sharing their negative candidate experiences online? 55% of job seekers report avoiding certain companies after reading those negative reviews. Manners maketh man. It’s no surprise you have to treat candidates well to attract the best talent.
A key strength of talent pools is the opportunity to follow on from a positive initial candidacy stage, even if they weren’t successful this time around. If you show you value a candidate’s skills and haven’t merely written them off entirely, they’re likely to have a positive view of your business.
It can encourage diverse and inclusive hiring
If a recruiter starts a talent search from scratch with every vacancy, they might find that they’re searching through narrow margins. However, keeping and growing talent pools of diverse, varied candidates can empower you to be intentionally inclusive.
This is something that Harvard Business Review has described as a ‘get two in the pool effect’, where you deliberately ensure that your talent pool represents a wide segment of society. According to their research, it can make a huge difference towards overcoming unconscious bias in hiring, as it sets a fairer playing field when candidates are up for a role.
Why is talent pool management important during the hiring process?
Talent pool management should be an ongoing task for recruiters, regardless of whether they’re actively hiring or not. But, the hiring process is a good opportunity to grow a talent pool further, as you add additional candidates to your database.
Keeping accurate records of interviews, how far a candidate got in the hiring process and whether they’re interested in staying connected should be part of your basic admin tasks, if it isn’t already. After all, you don’t want to float a potential role to a previously unsuccessful candidate a few months down the line and realise you have no memory of what you previously talked to them about!
Our top tip? Use the hiring process as an opportunity to plan for both the present and the future. If you see growth in the business’ future, it pays to maintain and grow that talent pool for future opportunities too.
For a complete guide to finding suitable candidates through the hiring process, download our recruitment and onboarding guide today.
The ultimate recruitment and onboarding guide
How can you build and grow talent pools?
Even if you don’t already have a talent pool, there’s no time like the present to start. Don’t panic – it doesn’t have to take all of your weekly hours. It will require some organisation though.
Decide how you’ll record and manage your talent pool
Start by picking a central source of information, where you can keep and update data about each member of the talent pool. While you might be tempted to just keep it simple with a spreadsheet, this can easily become unwieldy and tricky to filter without a lot of admin.
Take just a pool of 100 people, with their qualifications, experience, contact details and their interactions with the company – that’s a lot of information. And you have the responsibility to keep that data safe too.
Don’t have time? Effective recruiters use digital tools to aid their talent pool management, which come set with secure systems and easy filtering options. Some talent pool software will also help you track the progress of employees and candidates as they develop their skills, and remind you when it’s time to reach out and keep the candidate relationship strong.
They can often automate a lot of standard tasks, such as downloading key information from CVs, tagging candidates for the relevant talent pipelines and creating profiles. They can also automatically send out emails notifying relevant candidates about a role that could interest them.
Be proactive with candidate relationships
So you’ve got a database of information. The worst thing you can do now is leave that database in a file or server somewhere, and never go near it until a role turns up.
Take a little time to engage them on a regular basis, with personalised communications featuring company news, industry trends, and of course, job openings. Chances are, if they had a good candidate experience before, they’re likely to receive communications well. All of this can build trust and familiarity with candidates, making them more likely to accept a job offer if one is extended.
‘What if they feel like we’re pestering them?’, we hear you say. We’ll go into how you can find the right communication frequency shortly.
Don’t forget to include internal talent
A talent pool isn’t just about searching for good candidates outside your company – you can benefit from an internal talent pool as well. This is particularly relevant in a larger company with a internal HR function.
Sometimes individuals at a company are looked over for a new role, either because their managers aren’t aware that they’d even be interested, or if the individual hadn’t even considered moving roles a possibility. Having an internal talent pool – and being open about it – encourages employees to feel like they’re valued and are empowered to take the next step in their career if they want it.
You might find there’s more interest internally in vacant roles than you expected. According to our Talent Insights Report, 36% of employees said that they’d like their next role to be a promotion or a lateral move in their existing company, rather than a move somewhere else.
How often should you engage with candidates in your talent pool?
Communicating with the candidates is a key step in building a strong relationship with them. However, it can be a delicate balance between keeping in touch and overdoing it to the point where they feel bombarded or pestered.
In the end, the frequency of the engagement will depend on individual business factors, such as the talent pool size, how much the business is growing and the hiring process. Recruiters and HR professionals should make sure that communications are helpful and interesting, rather than perfunctory. That could include news about the company, new job openings, or industry news.
As with any online business communications, you should always give candidates the opportunity to unsubscribe at any time, or to specify the type of communications they don’t want to receive.
How do you measure the success of your talent database?
We know that with any initiatives in business, you need to prove that you’re spending your time wisely. Luckily, there are some clear metrics that recruiters and HR specialists can measure to prove the value of their talent pool, and to see where the entire hiring process can be improved. Here are a few key metrics that companies can use:
1. Time-to-hire
Time-to-hire measures the length of time it takes to fill a job opening from the time it’s posted. If your time-to-hire is fairly short and you’ve used the talent pool in the process, that could indicate that your talent pool was helpful in getting qualified candidates through the door quickly. If it’s too long, the company may need to focus on sourcing more candidates with the right skills or improving their communication with candidates to keep them engaged.
2. Quality of hire
Quality of hire measures the success of a new addition to the business, taking in factors such as their job performance and cultural fit. By applying this metric to candidates sourced from the talent pool, it’s a good assessment of the quality of candidates as a whole.
3. Conversion rate
The conversion rate measures the percentage of people in the talent pool who are eventually hired. If that’s a fairly high number, that’s a good sign that your talent pool is made up of some great candidates.
4. Cost-per-hire
This metric calculates the cost of the recruitment process for each new hire. It can be helpful to compare the cost-per-hire of talent pool candidates, versus other recruitment methods, to get an idea of its value.
5. Candidate engagement
Candidate engagement can be measured through a variety of factors, such as direct responses to communications, company email opens or positive reviews. If all of these are pointing to a group of candidates who are engaging positively with the company, it shows that you have a high quality talent pool.
How can HR software help to improve your recruitment process?
An amazing talent pool needs an amazing space to be stored. Bringing in talent management and HR software is a great way to proactively manage your talent pool, and automate a ton of manual tasks at the same time. With online systems and cloud storage, it also saves you having to manage spreadsheets or worry about data security.
HR software Employment Hero has everything you need to organise a talent pool with our applicant tracking system, offering an easy-to-navigate database, shortlist features and a complete digital onboarding process, for when your top candidate is ready to sign on the dotted line.
Speak to us today to get your candidate database started and win the war on talent.
For more information on how HR software can support your business, download our guide.
Guide to Choosing The Best HR Software
