The Role of Talent Pools

Building a size-able and high-quality talent pool is one of the most effective long-term recruiting strategies. In fact, in today’s competitive recruiting world, talent pools are essential to maintaining an edge over the competition. Talent pools are defined by the databases that recruiting agencies acquire in order to store all current and potential candidates. Having a solid database of top talent will allow you to source candidates at faster and cheaper rates, giving your more control and leverage in the long-run. Below is everything you need to know about the role of talent pools and how to develop an effective talent pool strategy.

What is a Talent Pool?

As stated above, a talent pool is a database that stores all current and potential candidates. This refers to all candidates that you’ve been tracking or have reached out to you, including direct applicants, sourced candidates, referrals, and candidates who have entered your database inbound. Talent pool strategies are more than just collecting names into a list, though. They’re about building relationships, overtime and in a proactive manner, in order to constantly contact the most talented and high-quality applicants before they’re ready to enter the workforce. Talent pool acquisition, through the proactive lens, is really about developing a high quality database by maximizing your candidate experience, CRM, communication methods, and candidate engagement metrics. By utilizing all of these things, you’re ensuring that your talent pool strategy is holistic, recognizing the importance of brand recognition and candidate relations just as much as the actual data that a talent pool is made of.

Why Is Building a Talent Pool Important?

So why go through all the trouble of building a talent pool and engaging all of these candidates for job postings that don’t already exist?Even if you don’t have any immediate client demands or open positions to fill, building talent pools early on will ensure that you’re getting a head start on improving all the important recruiting metrics and best practices.When you engage in proactive recruiting and develop talent pools early on, you’re making efforts to reduce time to hire and cost per hire, while at the same time increasing quality of hire and your rate of hire. With more candidates at your disposal, you’ll have the leverage and options to pick the best candidates for the most demanding positions. At the same time, you won’t need to waste time sourcing candidates and culling together resumes from scratch. You want the best candidates for every job position that opens up, and building talent pools will make that way easier down the road.

How do you Build a Talent Pool?

Building a talent pool is all about utilizing your resources and relying on proactive recruiting to seek out the best candidates. While there isn’t a catch-all strategy to finding top talent, there are a number of recruiting strategies that agencies should rely on.

• Sourcing Automation: One of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to source candidates is through sourcing automation tools. Sourcing automation tools allow recruiters to input their needs into a database and, within a day, receive a list of top talent that fits their job description. Sourcing AI will do all the work while you’re busy with other tasks or simply taking a break.

• Referrals: Referrals are often some of the best candidates that recruiters can acquire. Obtaining referrals comes down to developing your candidate experience. If a candidate gets a good job that fits their needs and is happy with you as a recruiter, they’re more likely to refer a qualified friend or associate. Communicating with your candidates, engaging candidates, and improving candidate experience are all ways to increase referral rates.
• Utilize a CRM: Having a competent CRM is essential to long-term success if you’re going to develop talent pools. A competent CRM means you’ll be able to store data and keep tabs on any candidates that you come across in the recruiting process. Not only that, a CRM will make it easier to reach out to those candidates, distinguish whether they’re active or passive, and give you the information to create your talent pool strategies in the present and future.

In this day and age, it’s not a question of whether or not you need to build talent pools, it’s how best to do it. Loxo’s proprietary sourcing automation technology, advanced CRM, and innovative ATS will provide you with everything you’ll need to store candidates, proactively seek them, and build quality talent pools.Loxo’s state-of-the-art features will make building your talent pools more efficient and cost-effective than ever. Ensure long-term success and try your Loxo demo today.