5 Reasons Why You Need to Build a Talent Pool and Hire Passively

Finding candidates who meet your qualifying criteria in terms of skills and experience is tough today. Especially when you’re scaling up and hiring in volumes for multiple roles, attracting and recruiting quality talent becomes a huge challenge for your teams. With less than 27% of the workforce actively looking for a job, the most optimal way through for recruiters is to take charge and consistently source passive candidates to build a talent pool. 

Remember that it’s a candidate-driven market currently, and amidst the stiff competition – you need to be ahead of time. Acquiring quality talent is the key to growing and sustaining a business. Hence, recruiters have a crucial role to play in shaping an organization’s future. 

Contrary to popular opinion, building a talent pool should not be a backup plan for your talent acquisition team. Every company – big or small is aggressively chasing growth, which means they do not only want to hire at scale but hire faster than ever too. So having a talent pool with quality candidates and engaging with them consistently is the road to redemption. Whether hiring requirements are urgent or not – keep looking for quality candidates for various roles and continue networking with them. 

If you’re looking to build a talent pool and searching for ways to recruit passive candidates effectively, this is the best place for you to be right now. In this blog, we will discuss how can you get started with building a talent pool, sourcing passive candidates and hiring faster than ever through your passive candidate pool. Stick around for an insightful discussion.

What is a Talent Pool?

To put it simply, a talent pool is an internal database of talented, qualified and experienced candidates:

• who might fit well into your team, and
• have shown interest at some point to work at your organization

The contestants for your talent pool vary widely. Whether it’s the candidates who couldn’t clear the last round during your previous recruitment campaigns or the candidates that you sourced through LinkedIn and Twitter, it might also be someone who was qualified enough and reached out to you, but there wasn’t an opening at the time – your talent pool should have everyone’s details. 

69% of recruiters are having difficulty filling open roles. If you have been in the talent acquisition space for more than a year, chances are high that you have already experienced candidates ghosting you after the offer or some candidates not showing up in the interviews after screening. Overall, recruitment has transformed and you need an established strategy to attract and engage candidates. Posting jobs on job boards and your company page is not going to work. You’ll always get applications - no doubt that, but a very few of those would be from quality candidates. Talent hunters are relentlessly chasing top candidates. Building an active talent pool or database of top candidates and engaging, and nurturing them is a necessity to put yourself in a good position when it comes to acquiring talent.

Why is Building a Talent Pool More Important Than Ever?

Let’s cut to the chase – you always want to hire better. In fact, 41% of surveyed recruiters said a single bad hire costs a whooping $25k. Secondly, passive candidate recruitment is not the same as conventional hiring. It’s a multi-step process and candidate engagement is the most critical aspect of it. Let’s have a look at the top reasons why building a talent pool is not a ‘nice-to-have’ but is a necessity:

#1 Difference Between Demand & Supply

The demand for quality talent is huge, no one would doubt it. However, the supply is pretty limited due to a large chunk (almost 3/4th) of candidates being passive job seekers. They are engaged in a job currently, and identifying, engaging and giving them an offer which cannot be refused – is not easy. Not to forget – you aren’t the only recruiter approaching them. So you need to be proactive with whatever you do to stay relevant for them. A candidate already in your talent pool with who you have been engaging for a long time is more likely to join you rather than others. Building a solid candidate pool is not a destination, it’s a journey and you need to be consistent at it for seeing positive results.

#2 Higher Skills & Experience

It takes a lot of time and effort to draw the attention of passive candidates. But it’s worth it because as compared to applicants, passively sourced candidates bring in 2x the skills and experience. 1 in every 72 Sourced candidates is hired compared to every 1 in 152 candidates who apply to open positions. Building a talent pool is in your control as a recruiter. So you can filter candidates based on their skills and experience. Additionally, candidates who stood out in previous recruitment campaigns but couldn’t get selected for some reason, have a higher probability of fulfilling role requirements successfully.

#3 Workforce Planning 

The top talent acquisition experts of the world have one thing in common. They focus on long-term recruitment. What does that mean? They plan their recruitment for years to come and strategically source candidates who would probably stay with them for longer, promote themselves consistently and will help the organization reach new heights. Diversity in hiring and long-term recruitment are two powerful aspects of workforce planning. Building a diverse, experience-rich talent pool ensures you have got the people with the required skills at any point in time. Hence, you can also do succession planning in advance for leading your company's workforce in the right direction.

#4 Acts as Your Savior

The global attrition rate is at an all-time high – around 20%. Imagine every 1 out of 5 employees leaving your company – even the thought is scary, right?

You never know as a recruiter when some of your employees quit and you’re left clueless. Sourcing effective candidates takes time and you cannot rush it due to immediate requirements. But the company cannot function properly or grow sustainably in such a scenario. Having an established talent pool helps you immensely in the case of sudden and unexpected resignations – you don’t want to launch recruitment campaigns forcibly, and depend on your luck for finding and hiring a suitable candidate. Sourcing passive talent from the talent pool would act as your safety net to fall on while such situations arise.

#5 Reduce Cost & Time to Hire

A major concern for all recruitment teams is the cost of talent acquisition. The need of the hour for companies scaling up is acquiring the best talent at a minimum budget and as quickly as possible. Practically, building a talent pool doesn’t cost anything except the recruitment teams’ efforts and the outcome also compounds in the long run. One of the biggest advantages of having an established talent pool is the significant reduction in cost and time of hiring. Talent acquisition teams can optimize their utilization of the allotted budget, for example – instead of investing heavily in job board features, they can focus on recruitment marketing campaigns and employer brand building for attracting even the most qualified and experienced candidates and developing an even larger talent pool.

Common Reasons for Candidates Being Moved to the Talent Pool

Why do we add candidates to the talent pool and not recruit them instantly?

If you have this question in mind right now, it’s totally justified and expected. Remember that you don’t add any candidate randomly to your talent pool, but only those who seem to have the potential as professionals in their streams and who can fit very well in your team. So adding candidates to the talent pool database and not recruiting them instantly can have a variety of reasons, here are the most common ones:

• You reached out to them, they are interested in your company but are not open to switching roles right now.

• They reached out to you and there’s no relevant opening currently, but you’re sure they got the skills needed and there will be openings soon.

• The candidate was an applicant who couldn’t clear some of the last rounds of interviews in your previous recruitment campaign but has good potential to join you.

• You have plans of scaling up in the next two quarters and you're in search of qualified candidates in advance.

• Someone you trust referred them, but you do not have the right openings currently.

• You met someone at an event who is currently employed but you can offer them a better position at your company in the future

Why Should You Engage with Candidates in the Talent Pool? Top Benefits

Companies that focus on candidate engagement and improving experience have an upper edge when it comes to acquiring great talent. Engagement with candidates currently in your talent pool will not only keep them aware of you as an employer but can also trigger their motivation to work with you. Let’s dive into the top benefits of candidate engagement:

• Grabs the interest level of candidates: Consistently sharing content like newsletters and nurture email sequences with your candidates draws their attention towards the openings and that’s what you need the most. Additionally, presenting your company culture, behind the scenes of building business fascinates them and significantly boosts their interest.

• Reduces drop-offs: Effective candidate engagement with your talent pool also helps you cut down the drop-off rate, especially at the bottom of the recruitment funnel. As candidates are actively engaged with your recruitment team and they know a bit about the company too, they are least likely to ghost you once they enter the recruitment process. Quality interactions and frequent positive engagement build a relationship with your candidates that helps you and the organization in the long run.

• Boosts your employer brand: Your employer brand is what the workforce thinks about you as an employer of choice. Engaging consistently with candidates helps you spread the word of mouth and hence grow your employer brand. It doesn’t matter if you are recruiting candidates or just nurturing the ones in your talent pool, they will share their experiences about your company within their personal networks. It also means that other potential candidates would hear about you and maybe they even get attracted to work with you. Just like a consumer-facing brand, an employer brand has a compounding effect too.

• Makes you stand out among the pool of competition: Something you should never underestimate is the huge pool of competition over talent acquisition. Building a talent pool is just the beginning. You need to keep nurturing, interacting and persuading candidates in order to convince them for joining your workforce. When it comes to standing out among the competition – consistency and creativity help you in engaging candidates in a way never done before. 

Keep in mind that candidate engagement is not a sprint, but a marathon. That doesn’t mean running slow would be fine, but you need to keep running in order to stay in the competition. Often recruiters withdraw candidate engagement efforts with their talent pool after some time, because they don’t see results. It’s a compounding journey – and no one is perfect in the initial period. Once you activate the systems and automate them to some extent – it’s highly rewarding.

Ace Your Talent Pool Engagement with Nurturebox 

There’s a lot on the recruiters’ plate at any given time. Whether it’s sourcing candidates, outreaching, engagement, managing the recruitment pipeline, evaluation, the hiring process, onboarding and the list is truly endless. While you’re always looking to hire for multiple roles, building a quality talent pool is a big challenge in itself. Add up to that manually engaging with candidates consistently, it would probably become too overwhelming. But as you’re already here, there’s no need to worry about mundane candidate sourcing and engagement tasks. 

Nurturebox helps you optimize your recruitment process by automating talent sourcing engagement activities. The tool activates maximum productivity for recruiters as they can focus on the human side of recruiting – interacting and assessing the candidates. With Nurturebox’s Chrome extension, it takes a few clicks to add identified candidates to your outreach & engagement campaigns. What’s equally crucial is that the tool handles your entire talent pool management tasks and gives you a complete overview of your sourcing pipeline. Passive candidate recruitment has never been easier than now with the comprehensive sourcing automation solution.