How to Engage, Identity, and Secure Talent Faster and More Efficiently

If you need to build a transformative workforce then you need deep and varied talent pools and there’s more to consider than just a candidate’s areas of interest, years of experience, job level etc. Modern pipelines are purpose-built to include traditional, timely, and tactical talent pools.

In this article, you’ll learn how to dig deeper pools to find candidates who are already interested in working for you, some right inside your company.

Table of contents

Why Deeper Talent Pools Make A Difference
Using Talent Pools to Strengthen Your Hiring Strategy
Actionable steps to bolster your talent pools
Grow Your Pools Organically
Recruiting Event Management
Use these CRM Features to Make the Most of Your Talent Pools
Remove Barriers to Deepen Your Talent Pools
Employee Pools
Be More Efficient, Inclusive, and Prepared for Rapid Change

It takes sifting through countless resumes to match the right person to the right job. You don’t have time for that. But what if there was a better way? What if you could organize your talent pools to segment them in various ways (like segmentation to align to your high priority roles)? That way you could know exactly where to match and rank top candidates, quickly.

Strengthen the differentiation of your talent pools by implementing a robust CRM that works with your team. That means sourcing new talent that may not have previously applied to your organization, or who may not have been considered an ideal candidate in the past due to limited availability.

As a TA/HR leader, you have the opportunity (and the need) to revamp your candidate engagement strategies and truly make your tech work in ways that are more intelligent, inclusive, and productive.

Why Deeper Talent Pools Make A Difference

• Today the half-life of a learned skill is 5 years, even shorter for technical skills. In perspective, college degree “book learning” can be obsolete within a year of graduation – your talent pools need to be forward-looking.
• When your industry’s technologies evolve rapidly consider sourcing from vocational, certification, badging, and apprenticeship environments for of-the-minute skills (for example, 15% of one iCIMS developer team was sourced from hacker school).
• Internal talent pools boost morale and decrease attrition from employees who feel “overlooked.” Reskilling is more efficient and cost-effective than re-hiring because it leverages employees that know your customer and your business.

Using Talent Pools to Strengthen Your Hiring Strategy

Instead of operating in reaction mode, recruitment marketing software allows your recruiters to be proactive and stay ahead of talent needs. Building talent pools is an effective way to ensure a constant flow of candidates are available.

Actionable steps to bolster your talent pools

Assess Strengths and Weaknesses

What you don’t know can hurt you when it comes to developing robust talent pipelines. Before building and organizing your talent pools ask yourself the following questions to guide how you source:

• What critical positions and skills are needed at my company?
• What is my average time to ¬fill?
• What is my company’s talent makeup?
• What is my company’s projected growth?
• How diverse are my sources and are they providing quality candidates?
• Do you consider non-traditional hires such as vocationally skilled, remotely located or contingent workers?

Build Fit-For-Purpose Talent Pools

Now you’re ready to segment your talent pools based on your current and future talent needs. Strongly segmented talent pools ensure your company always has a pipeline of talented and qualified candidates to select from when a job becomes available. To get the most out of talent pools, recruiters must group candidates together based on similarities and continue to communicate with these connections through personalized content.

Examples of how to organize your talent pools include tagging by:

• Education level
• Work experience
• Interested role or department
• Location
• Skills

Engage with Relevance

Sending automated personalized, branded communications based on your defined talent segments makes candidates more likely to think of you when they are ready to apply to a job. Make the application process even simpler by integrating text message capabilities.

Here are a few examples of marketing content that your organization can send to connect candidates to your brand:

• Employment newsletters that include spotlighted jobs
• Automatic alerts for new job postings
• Employee spotlights including pictures or videos of top performers
• Social media links to events, press releases, and need-to-knows
• Professional development programs at your organization
• Information on new products, expansion, growth, or social/civic activity

Grow Your Pools Organically

To have a sufficient pool of candidates from which you can draw, you will want to drive as much talent to your inbound hiring flows as possible. One way to drive traffic to your brand is to incorporate an attention-grabbing, graphical link that invites candidates to sign up to receive notifications from your company and join your talent pools. (The graphical link can be added to your career page, or if you leverage text recruiting, the link can be on posters or promos). This type of link should appear consistently across your recruitment marketing materials, career pages, corporate social media sites, and make it easier to apply via a text.

70% of employers Say Finding talent is their biggest challenge

Recruiting Event Management

Engage Talent Remotely with Virtual Career Fairs

Continue to connect with candidates through virtual recruiting experiences. Our chat-based online events provide employers with a powerful and cost-effective way to reach job seekers when in-person recruiting events are not possible or practical.

Grow Your Talent Pools with Online and Offline Events

Take charge of events with digital tools that let you worry less about logistics and focus more on relationship building. Manage events from start to finish with the ability to drive registration, electronically receive resumes on-site, and send follow up communications.

Use these CRM Features to Make the Most of Your Talent Pools

To get the most out of your talent pools you tap into the power of your CRM.

Fill open positions faster by creating an engaged pipeline of candidates

To build a quality talent pipeline, source from job seekers who have already expressed interest in your company, previous silver-medalist candidates, and applicants you’ve met at recruiting events or found through networking platforms.

Keep candidates informed and engaged in your talent pools until the right job becomes available with automated campaigns

Recruiters and recruitment marketers keep their talent pipeline actively engaged with personalized, branded email campaigns on their side. Many CRMs include templates that make this process easier, but recruiters should use campaign variables to keep candidates interested in your organization and informed about topics relevant to their career aspirations. Impactful campaigns include company updates, new job openings, images, links, videos, and prompt information.

You can review candidate information within the CRM, invite candidates to apply for open roles, and add candidates to talent pools for future engagement via email campaigns.

Find the highest-quality candidates with search, recommendations, and reports

Quickly prioritize your top prospects with filters for role type and skills, and searches by keyword and location help to narrow your talent pool to the top candidates, reducing time to source and hire.

The iCIMS CRM uses machine learning (ML) algorithms powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to surface your most qualified candidates instantly. AI and ML algorithms search your CRM talent pool through the use of keywords as broad as a job description or as granular as education level.

That means you can now sort 100% of resumes automatically and eliminate potential subjective bias from manual initial reviews. This frees up recruiters to focus on accelerating great candidates through the hiring process.

Calculate talent spend with data

Pull data that helps you determine where to spend your recruitment marketing dollars by following your candidate flow from your CRM and into your ATS. Organizations that report on source effectiveness to reveal unique insights into how candidates discover both your organization and your open roles. This insight can help your teams calculate what types of talent pools are needed and where gaps exist. Source analytics gives a transparent view of where candidates come from to aid in advertising and sourcing, helping you save money.

Remove Barriers to Deepen Your Talent Pools

To help you remove barriers that may be keeping talent pools shallow, we’ve compiled examples of each type of pool you should consider at your company.

Previously, organizations focused on a narrow array of talent pools (based on qualifications, location, etc.) but remote work and the ability to reskill/educate employees are now an opportunity to appeal to deeper pools of talent.

Candidate Pools:

External talent pools are high-level talent pools and cover broad topics, such as department or location. Since candidates will opt into these pools themselves, the topics should be more interest-based than qualification-based, and they should encourage new candidates to connect with your organization.

Traditional talent pools: Candidates typically self-select areas of professional interest and are automatically entered into an aligned talent pool. Examples include:

• Position category or department: Enables candidates to express general interest in various divisions.
• Location: Useful for organizations who hire across multiple locations. Locations can be specific, such as a store or office location, or more general, such as a state or region.
• Position level: Used to narrow down talent pools, it cuts down on time spent reviewing underqualified or overqualified candidates for open roles.

Timely talent pools: When sudden disruptions affect your sourcing plans and current workforce, it’s important to address them head-on. Challenges from economic downturns, pandemics, or other unforeseen circumstances fall in this category. Examples of talent pools to address workforce volatility include:

• Re-entry: Re-entry pools can be used for furloughed or laid-off employees to help keep them engaged and potentially bring back to the organization when they time is right.
• Reengagement: Re-engaged talent pools are great for those candidates who were silver medalists for another position, accepted a job elsewhere but are not happy with the role, or for those who haven’t applied in a while and want to throw their name back in the ring.
• New location: Talent pools for new locations are useful when offices must close or open in new locations that you have not previously sourced talent for.
• Remote work opportunities: These are essential as work becomes location agnostic. Your goal is to find the best talent possible, and location need not be a limiting factor.
• Gig workers: Talent and staff are among the most important resources that keep your business running, but you need your staffing teams to allocate the right resources when and where they are needed most. Spreading the costs and risks associated with FTE commitments across contingent staff can get more done, with less.
• Seasonal workers: When your hiring spikes for seasonal rushes you need to have a pool of seasonal workers who are ready and eager to work for your brand. Reduce time and cost to fill by dedicating pools for these seasonal spikes.

Tactical talent pools: For new initiatives and growth opportunities—like diversity and inclusion initiatives (sex, race, orientation, etc.) but also other hiring strategies like appealing to new collar jobs (work level, experience, etc.). Examples of tactical talent pools include:

• Growth opportunity pools: Shift the hiring criteria from candidates’ formal education to jobs-to-be-done or teams to be built—to meet your immediate and future business needs.
• Specialized pools for specific groups: Create talent pools for areas of the business lacking specific populations or areas that candidates and/or employees have expressed interest in. For example, growing women in tech.
• Diversity and inclusion pools: Ensure that everyone feels welcome to join one of your organization’s talent pools.

Employee Pools

Internal talent pools for current employees help to address skills gaps, turnover, employee satisfaction, career pathing, and professional growth opportunities. By generating internal talent pools, you offer your employees the chance to grow their careers (and their job satisfaction) while also improving the retention of your best talent.

Talent pools based on job function or skill set help fine-tune your pipeline and make it easier to find candidates with relevant experience for future open positions. Consider the types of roles for which your organization recruits and create pools for the different desired job titles or skills. Creating talent pools of this category cuts down on time spent reviewing candidates for open positions by pre-sorting them by the type of roles for which they may be a good fit.

• Examples: Project Management, Functional Training, Technical Support
• Tip: This category of the talent pool can be combined with many other segments, such as location, department, or role level, to create pools that match your organization’s recruitment strategy. Examples include Sales – Functional Training or Technical Support – Management.

Be More Efficient, Inclusive, and Prepared for Rapid Change

The job market can easily change due to shifts in the economy or unforeseen emergencies. With proper tools in place to maintain an active and healthy talent pipeline regardless of what may come your way, you’re meeting hiring goals and avoiding the risk of slowing down the growth of your organization.

Source: iCIMS