Recruitment is a rapidly evolving landscape that requires immediate access to candidates via a talent pool. Having a pool of candidates can streamline your recruiting processes, improve hiring times and enhance the candidate experience.
This blog will highlight the importance of a talent pool, the benefits it will bring to your recruitment agency and, most importantly, how to build one. By understanding and implementing talent pools, you’ll be able to successfully navigate the recruitment landscape and ensure that you remain competitive within the industry.
What is a talent pool?
When recruiting employees for any recruitment agency, starting from scratch can be time-consuming and costly. A talent pool is a collection of ‘warm’ candidates who have the potential to slot into place swiftly, with less interruption and cost. The talent pool database allows recruiters to align advertised job positions with the skills and attributes of potential candidates to streamline the recruitment process.
Creating a talent pool relies on having systems to constantly attract and screen potential employees to find the qualifications, experience and other attributes you need. Talent pool recruitment strategies can be ideal for recruitment agencies engaged in talent mapping or workforce planning. Putting into place streamlined systems and contacts to fill emerging labour and skill requirements underpins agility and profitable growth.
Often, talent pools are managed by an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which can automate aligning suitable candidates with the roles being recruited. Getting this right with effective talent pool management relies on understanding the advantages of an ATS for data-driven recruitment and building effective candidate databases.
Why it’s important for your staffing agency to build a talent pool
For staffing agencies, the talent pool meaning is subtly different. Agencies must build up a talent pool that dovetails with the needs and business goals of all their clients. Your database of prospective employees and temporary staff becomes like a virtual waiting room of candidates you can offer to organisations in your chosen specialism.
In reality, clients use your services because you have a relevant talent pool database they can dip into as a first port of call. It is a resource they are unable or willing to replicate.
Talent pool management ensures that you can provide your clients with ample warm leads, and swift ways to match posts to their ideal candidates. This provides you with the following benefits:
- Saving time: If you have to search for candidates with the correct qualifications and other required attributes, the recruitment process could involve a considerable investment of your time.
- Reducing hiring costs: Having a healthy database of relevant candidates can also save money for staffing agencies – you don’t have to negotiate with other recruitment agencies or pay above the odds to meet client expectations and avoid ‘gaps’.
- Enhancing reputation: If your agency can’t provide the candidates needed in a timely and efficient manner, it could undermine your brand.
- Faster onboarding: You have pre-screened applicants with the correct attributes to slot into place with the confidence that they will ‘hit the ground running’.
- Happier clients: All of the above adds value to your agency and ensures that you can meet client expectations and needs.
How to build & maintain your talent pool
When you build a talent pool, your competitive advantage is gained from the quality as well as the quantity of candidates you collate. It can also pivot on your recruitment systems being sophisticated enough to nurture candidates in an agile and innovative way. The talent pool meaning then extends to ‘growing’ the staff your clients will need in the future.
Step 1: Define objectives & skill requirements
Let’s further consider the question, what is a talent pool? The emphasis is on relevant candidates, not an extensive database of eager staff who could prove inappropriate or unavailable.
The best talent pools are based on clear aims and objectives. First, you need to define what you hope this talent pool will achieve, whether it is from a business or personable client-recruiter relationship approach, or a mixture of the two. Is it to increase profits, ease the recruiting process, or ensure that clients get the best candidates possible?
The foundation is to have clear business intelligence on your marketplace and to match your talent pool to that seamlessly. In effect, you need to talent map your existing and potential clients.
What attributes are they currently looking for, and what emerging skill requirements are they likely to have? How will you find and track potential candidates for them? What framework will you use to define a ‘high-quality candidate’?
Your recruitment software needs to enable this in a structured and sustained way.
Step 2: Attract & source candidates
Once you know who should be in your talent pool, the trick is to find the best channels of communication to attract staff to engage with your agency.
This depends very much on the type of candidate your clients are most likely to need. Traditional methods, such as job advertisements, can prove successful. However, some more outside-of-the-box methods can source the high-quality candidates you are looking for.
For instance, students and other seasonal workers may be best recruited from social media and online job boards, whereas talent in hard-to-fill employment sectors may need to be approached by email and telephone calls.
Creating an executive talent pool may also involve a deeper dive into market segmentation, networking and contact creation through attending specific industry seminars and events.
Step 3: Engage & nurture talent
Managing the expectations of candidates joining your talent pool helps to engage them quickly and keep them connected. This can be as simple as a welcoming, personalised email to explain what happens next. A friendly virtual chat or phone call can help answer any questions and demonstrate your agency’s competence and warmth.
The better the candidate’s experience, the more chance there is that they will continue to be part of your relevant talent pool. There could be occasions when offering e-training and similar support nurtures candidates, adds to their value, and prepares them for future posts.
Step 4: Maintain & optimise the talent pool
Once your talent pool’s been created, you can’t consider this ‘job done’. Ensuring that you have candidates suitable for your clients is a journey, not a destination. Communication is vital to talent pool management. This involves regularly reconnecting with applicants and keeping their interest and engagement ‘warm’.
Optimising a talent pool also involves analysing data effectively, and sourcing and onboarding new candidates as a continuous process. These tasks can be carried out by the best recruitment analytics software, which will ensure that you have a valid and ‘live’ database of potential staff for your agency.
Vincere’s core offering of CRM and ATS systems can help recruitment agencies understand and optimise their performance within the industry with automated and bespoke software systems. Use Vincere’s intelligent ATS to build your talent pool.
Examples of different talent pools
As previously mentioned, the talent pool meaning varies slightly according to the category of staffing agency.An example of a talent pool would be IT professionals at the threshold of senior positions who you monitor and nurture. Imagine having someone ready to sign a contract within days of a client approaching you with a hard-to-fill job post.
Another example is a student talent pool, especially those who are soon to be graduates. By interacting with local universities through career fairs, workshops or webinars, you can engage with potential candidates before they are set to enter the job market. You can work out their skills and potential in preparation for jobs when they graduate.
The future of talent pool development
A talent pool provides your agency with a competitive edge, but you need to ensure that the information you have on applicants remains current for some time after your thorough screening processes. There is also the requirement to suitably manage your connection to them and keep them ‘warm’.
Fortunately, technology can innovate, automate and streamline many of the tasks involved in talent pool development. The development of AI and advanced analytics has streamlined the targeting of candidates via automatic candidate screening, which can find the top candidates from within the talent pool.
Also, analytics can help predict future staffing needs through AI forecasting to help you prepare your agency for the possible future landscapes. The software can be automated to identify the gaps within your talent pool and agency that you can rectify, enabling you to increase productivity.
Fill your roles fast with Vincere’s ATS
Having a talent pool of potential, suitable candidates ready for positions that arise ensures a fast and effective recruitment process. By reducing the time spent searching for candidates, which in turn reduces costs, a talent pool ensures faster onboarding, happier clients, and a better agency reputation and brand.
ATS software offers a range of advantages within these processes beyond recruitment database creation and control for staffing agencies. Not only does it enable you to match candidates to posts swiftly, but it also provides a constant flow of valuable business intelligence. This means satisfying your current client needs and filling roles fast as a staffing agency, and also being one step ahead of trends in your chosen recruitment sector.
Vincere Applicant Tracking System is one such talent pool solution for staffing agencies globally. Packed with pre-built analytics capabilities and an impressive degree of personalisation and performance, it makes talent pool attraction, screening and engagement reliable and responsive.
Contact us for more details and to get a demo of our ATS and CRM software to see how we can help you build a reliable talent pool system that simplifies the recruiting process and fills newly available roles with ease.