How to build talent pools

There's constant pressure on recruiter time, there are always more candidates to find and more reqs to fill. It might be hard to see how your team can even fit talent pooling into their workday.

Talent pools are designed for - saving your team time and providing a database of candidates that are there to "dip into" when you have open roles.

Many of the tactics that you can use to build talent pools leverage candidate relationships you already have, not new candidates (i.e. they're quick wins).

Here are a few ways you can get started:

Sourcing in today's market is changing pretty rapidly. It's no longer finding candidates that's the hard part, instead, it's what happens next - how do you engage top candidates and manage the relationships effectively?

The management and engagement of sourcing prospects is often pretty sporadic. This gets messy fast. Instead, add every candidate that you find to your talent pool.

This is important for a couple of different reasons:

Firstly, it makes your entire sourcing process far cleaner and efficient.

With candidate data spread across different spreadsheets, email inboxes and hand written notes, it can get pretty hard to get visibility into your sourcing process and understand what's actually going on!

Remember, the candidates that you're sourcing haven't applied, so it can get hard to work out what stage of the pre-screening process they're at...

Have you spoken to them before? Do you need to follow up? Are they someone that has already turned you down?

Bringing all of this data together into talent pools makes it easy for everyone to see the status of the candidates that you're speaking to, and where they are in your process - this helps you avoid data duplication, forgetting to follow up or contacting the same candidate multiple times.

Secondly, many of the people that you contact won't reply - this is sadly just part of the sourcing grind. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're not interested though, it just means that at that time, your role wasn't right for them.

By keeping these unresponsive candidates in your talent pool, as opposed to abandoning them, you make it easy for your team to contact them again a few months down the line when they might be more likely to respond.

Finally - your first choice candidate often falls through, so having a backup in your talent pipeline can make a big difference.