How to Build a High-Quality Talent Pool: 8 Easy Ways to Build

Modern-day recruiters need to have a multi-dimensional approach to sourcing and hiring candidates. Finding the right fit to hire is not the only big challenge talent hunters are facing today. Candidate sourcing and engagement need enough heavy lifting and it could easily get overwhelming for your recruitment teams, especially when you’re also racing against time. The way through is to have a readily available and engaged set of candidates at any given time. Building a talent pool solves this. Although building and managing a talent pool is a long-term game, it significantly impacts recruitment costs, time of hiring, talent engagement and hence the quality of talent acquisition.

Only 27% of the total workforce candidates are actively applying for jobs, whereas 87% of them are open to hearing about new opportunities. The idea behind developing an effective talent pool is to establish a meaningful relationship with qualified candidates. As a recruiter, the last thing you would want is to miss out on top talent when you know they can be great candidates for hiring in the near future. Talent pools help you and your recruitment teams stay ahead of the requirements, which also ensures smooth scaling up of the business. 

Another core benefit of building a talent pool, which is the least talked about is that engaging candidates helps you get chosen among the flooded market of opportunities. The candidates in your talent pool are more likely to respond well and enter the recruitment funnel. 

Building and maintaining your talent pool needs a thoughtfully planned approach. And in this blog, we will dive deep into all the different ways of creating a talent pool. Stick around for an insightful guide.

Why Do You Need to Build a Talent Pool?

Before we get to the numerous ways to build a talent pool, let’s explore why it is so important today. The convenience of sourcing and recruiting, reduced cost and reduced time to hire are some of the top reasons, but what are the qualitative benefits? Take a look:

1. Hire Passive Candidates in a Jiffy 

1 in every 72 passively sourced candidates gets hired against 1 in every 152 applicants. Active vs Passive candidates has been a long-chased debate for quite a few years now. It’s evident that passive candidates are more qualified, and hence 2x more likely to get hired as compared to others. This makes building a talent pool all the more important.

Please note that although passive candidates refer to talent who aren’t searching for opportunities, engaging them consistently helps. They are open to switching if offered better perks and assured of great work culture.

2. Vital in Long-Term Recruitment 

Scaling up is not easy. It requires every business vertical to push beyond limits, especially the talent acquisition space. Remember that organizations are dependent on recruiters for getting quality talent on board. However, finding and hiring good candidates promptly is a myth. You must have a long-term recruitment plan, as numerous factors drive your recruitment and you don’t necessarily have control always. 

For both your upcoming hiring requirements and succession plan, building a talent pool is the priority. It also gives you the option to adjust your focus according to the situation and never end up hiring while in urgency.

3. Ready Access to Qualified Candidates  

The core aim of building a talent pool is having direct access to qualified and competent candidates for hiring them whenever required. However, for ensuring this you must have a high-quality talent pool in the first place. 

In the last decade, tech hiring has undoubtedly been the greatest challenge for recruiters. While a majority of recruiters are not aware of technology and skills related to a role, some requirements are very specific. The chances to get quality applications are minimal in such cases, so in order to not disturb your company's functioning and growth – having direct access to an engaged talent pool is the road to redemption.

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Also read: Why is Building a Talent Pool Vital for Hiring Passive Candidates Today?

How to Build a Reliable Talent Pool?

It’s time to address the elephant in the room – top 8 ways to build a prolific talent pool. Remember that just like marketing, recruitment (especially passive) now needs an industry-specific approach and recruiters must figure out the platforms and social channels their target candidates are usually found at. How do you plan that? You will know soon.

That being said, let’s cut to the chase and find out the best methods to fill your talent pool with top candidates. 

1. Partially Successful Candidates

It refers to candidates who couldn't make it through the final rounds of your recruitment previously. If you feel they are highly qualified and would fit in your company culture well, add them to your internal talent pool. But that doesn’t end here. The primary factor to look after is their candidate experience, and to enhance it – you must closely engage with them. Contrary to popular opinion, candidate engagement is more about sticking to basics. Answering your candidates' queries on time, consistently meeting the preplanned timelines and giving them feedback are a few productive strategies you can leverage for effective engagement. 

Note that these individuals could well be the most valuable part of your talent pool as they already want to work with you. Recruiting them would be easier and they are more likely to get hired to your organization. 

2. Add Sourced Candidates 

Are you wondering - “They are already sourced – then why?” Well, not just because they are the easiest to add to your talent pool, but because they grabbed your attention and stood out. So once you source candidates and have their details, it’s important that you begin your engagement. Even if some of them do not fit the roles currently open, you must add them to your talent pool to recruit/ reach out to them later when you have relevant requirements. 

The way you engage with your candidates would define the quality of your talent acquisition. Ensure you share enough about your company, the work culture, problems you are solving and more enticing information that grabs attention.

3. Invite People to Join Your Talent Community

To your surprise, it’s not necessary to add candidates passively to your talent pool. You can also form internal talent communities by inviting a large number of candidates to your career landing page and filtering them based on various parameters. This would help you in two ways:

• Add a number of qualified candidates to your talent pool at once, which is what you need while hiring for numerous requirements

• Focus more on interacting with candidates and less in reaching out to them individually and collecting.

Your careers page should always be up to date with all the openings arranged in an organized way. Additionally, once candidates join your talent pool or community, they should receive regular updates regarding the open positions.

4. Host Events and Career Fairs

When it comes to filling your talent pool with top candidates, nothing can beat the power of events and career fairs. Investing a part of your recruitment budget into hosting periodic events could generate great ROI in the long term. Not to forget – your employer brand gets a heavy boost through these events. 

‘The Great Resignation’ period was observed after the pandemic and recruiters struggled a lot to fill in positions and keep their companies on track. One of the observed recruitment trends was online events such as webinars and virtual career fairs. As virtual events didn’t require much investment of resources, companies of all sizes from various industries were following this practice.

Offline events and meetups are now getting higher traction than ever. You should definitely consider organizing periodic events and generating quality talent leads. 

5. Former Employees

The taboo related to rehiring former employees is a thing of the past now. This is a common practice in the corporate world today. There could be numerous reasons for someone leaving your company - maybe they got a lucrative offer elsewhere, they started on their own, family needs or any other. Adding your former employees to your talent pool can be a wise decision as you can even leverage the experience that they gain over the time they’re out. 

Especially if you have a positive work culture, you will be surprised how many people usually apply to work with their former employers. Add them to your engagement and nurture campaigns to help them stay updated with openings and company news.

6. Initiate Referral Policy

82% of surveyed employers claim referrals yield the best ROI when it comes to hiring. Create a referral scheme for your entire organization, and promote it regularly in order to build awareness and fill your talent pools faster. Remember that your employees’ network combined together is probably much bigger than your companies’ network and you must leverage it the right way. We have observed a constant upward trend in the referral rewards space. If you haven’t already, you should incentivize the referral scheme so that your employees maximize their efforts in driving the right talent. The rewards can either be financial perks, electronic gadgets, gift cards/coupons or others based upon your schemes.

Establishing a referral policy is an added advantage for building your talent pool and filling it proactively.

7. Social Media Promotions

Sourcing from expensive job boards or career pages isn’t as effective as it used to be. Modern recruiters need to be where potential candidates are spending the majority of their time on - social media. 86% of candidates use social media in their job search and it is the best place for you to find top candidates. LinkedIn is undoubtedly the most popular place for recruiters and candidates to connect, and it’s not the only one. Sourcing is scaling up on platforms like Instagram and Twitter too. Recruiters are going all-in for candidates who create content around their profession as that depicts the passion they have.

Your social media recruiting strategy should be focused on quality content creation and engagement with candidates. Just like marketing, social media also helps you attract the most relevant eyeballs through your campaigns. If the budget allows, you can even run ads on these platforms for maximizing your reach. Apart from heavily contributing to your talent pool, active social media engagement also boosts your employer brand. 

8. Keep Updating Your Talent Pool

One of the crucial activities most recruiters miss out on is updating their talent pool regularly. You don’t want to end up scrolling to find relevant candidates for reaching out. As soon as you get information like a candidate moving abroad, having a successful startup, or going for a long degree like a PhD, the chances of them working for you significantly drop. It’s always better to keep your talent pool lean and clean with quality candidates who might well be recruited in the near future.

Maintaining and updating your talent pool is equally important as building one. While you add sourced candidates rigorously, also remember to remove the irrelevant candidates for your and the team’s convenience.

Building Your Talent Pool is Easy with Nurturebox

What’s the biggest challenge that you face while building your talent pool? The race with time and limited resources, right? Well, that can now be solved efficiently with end-to-end candidate sourcing automation. As a recruiter, you never ideally want to take charge of the mundane repeated admin tasks of managing candidate pipeline, updating their sourcing status and spending a majority of your time in maintaining the ATS or candidate database.

Nurturebox is a comprehensive candidate sourcing and engagement automation platform which allows you to delegate all the iterative tasks of building your talent pool. Recruitment is already challenging enough and you don’t need to juggle multiple tasks to be able to hire the best candidates out there. Here’s how Nurturebox allows you to focus on the human side of recruiting and spend most of your time evaluating candidates.

• Source candidates with a single click from platforms like LinkedIn
• Integrate your sourcing campaigns with your ATS to put your talent pool management on auto-pilot
• Automate candidate outreach and engagement through channels like Whatsapp, emails and LinkedIn DMs.
• Measure and analyze what type of engagement is working the best for you and capitalize accordingly.