Talent Pipeline: 6 Steps to Build a Strong Talent Pipeline with Sourcing Automation

Amidst today’s fast-paced and competitive landscape, you cannot wait for candidates to apply for your open roles. In fact, a majority of the global workforce consists of passive talent - around 70%, hence it is not the right approach to start sourcing only when you have requirements. Recruitment has transformed at full-scale over the last decade. Your organization needs to be prepared to hire candidates in no time, the attrition rates are at an all-time high.

On the other hand, top talent doesn't wait for anyone. It’s a candidate-centric world and recruiters are chasing quality talent harder than ever. Sourcing passive candidates is not a ‘nice-to-have’ strategy anymore, it’s being rigorously worked on and is already a mainstream talent sourcing approach for a large number of enterprises.

While identifying and reaching out to candidates in order to draw them to your recruitment pipeline is a tedious process, most recruiters do not have enough time to start from scratch every time they need to hire someone. Building your talent pipeline can help you solve this, it helps your recruitment team and overall organization to move faster with a lasting impact.

A solid talent pipeline will not only help you accelerate your hiring but also significantly improve the quality of candidates. The talent that you acquire drives your organization’s trajectory and can make or break your growth. So it’s vital to understand how to build a talent pipeline that your organization can rely on. In this blog, we will discuss the exact steps you need to build a strong sourcing pipeline, and how you can leverage automation to up your game. Stick around for some deep actionable insights.

What is a Talent Pipeline?

Before we dive into the steps required to build a talent pipeline, let’s first find out what exactly it refers to.

A talent pipeline, at its core, is a collection of pre-screened and qualified candidates who can potentially fill your organization’s open roles. Also, don’t forget – your talent pool should only consist of candidates who are willing to join your organization. The objective here is to hire quickly and easily whenever requirements arise. Having a talent pool full of competent candidates gives recruiters a great variety of choices while hiring for a role. With multiple rounds of screening, hiring teams can also find out if talent is compatible enough with their team culture.

Talent pipelines usually consist of two types of candidates:

External candidates: Qualified prospects who have been sourced by your team as they displayed potential to fit current or near future roles well.

Internal candidates: Covers the existing employees who have been performing well and hence can be hired to different departments of your organization.

A large part of your recruitment team’s efforts and focus should revolve around external candidates, because at the end of the day – your organization is growing. So adding up to the headcount is more important than anything else.

Top Benefits of Talent Pipeline

Building a talent pipeline filled with qualified and skilled candidates has multi-dimensional benefits for your organization. Whether it’s the stakeholders, hiring managers or recruiters – an established talent pool gives the comfort and convenience of effortless hiring. Additionally, as you source proactively and not just rely on job applications – getting high-quality talent is assured. This stat just confirms that – 1 in every 72 Sourced candidates is hired compared to every 1 in 152 candidates who apply to open positions.

Let’s find out the most impactful benefits of building a talent pipeline and see how they are transforming the face of recruitment.

#1 Improved Cost and Time of Hiring

Consider the case when you don’t have a talent pool ready and hiring requirements come about. If you don’t have a sourced pool of candidates, it might take you a few days or even weeks to get some candidates to the top of your recruitment funnel. No matter whether you are sourcing actively or passively – creating a talent sourcing strategy, screening sourced candidates and recruiting them is a lengthy journey. However, building a talent pool with passively sourced, qualified and screened candidates saves a plethora of time for recruiters and enables them to hire whenever there’s a need. As building a talent pipeline is a continuous process and it does not stop even when there are no open roles, recruiters don’t need to panic.

Costs related to recruitment are significantly reduced through building a talent pipeline and sourcing candidates passively as a matter of course. You primarily cut down job advertising expenses and utilize your recruitment team optimally for evaluating and engaging candidates, which further impacts the overall costs as well as productivity.

#2 Engaging Passive Candidates

A large number of candidates who you meet, identify on social media or the ones referred to you by someone trustworthy – are usually not seeking a job currently. But what if you have a tempting offer for them in the future? Building a relationship with candidates is the key to successful passive recruiting and having an established talent pipeline helps you in that. Effectively engaging and nurturing candidates in a consistent manner is fruitful in the long run as it builds trust and persuades top talent to work with your company.

#3 Improves Candidate Experience

Quality candidates do not apply to open positions nowadays, as they are already being reached out to by numerous recruiters. One thing that all candidates seek no matter what is a prolific candidate experience and that is led by building a talent pool. Unlike in cases of application-based hiring, candidates in the sourcing pipeline are constantly engaged, informed and nurtured by recruiters/organizations. Additionally, being informed throughout the application process reduces candidate drop-offs significantly.

What are the Different Stages in a Talent Pipeline?

Let’s break down the various stages of a talent pipeline:

Sourcing: Identifying quality talent and adding them to your initial sourcing campaign.
Pre-Screening: Passively screening them based on skills, experience and the type of work they have done in the past.
Outreach & Engagement: If a candidate is qualified enough, reach out to them. Engage with them through different channels. Create nurture campaigns for conveying company values, culture, career advice and more. Inform them about the compensation, perks and role requirements.
Assessment & Interview: Once you reach out and engage with them, and if they’re interested in the role - the next stage is interviewing them.
Onboarding: You have got the right fit for your company and it’s time to onboard them.
Training & Development: To help candidates understand and learn the way your company operates, you need to train them. This also minimizes the chance of candidates leaving the company soon.

How to Build an Efficient Talent Pipeline in 6 Easy Steps?

Building an effective talent pipeline is not a destination, but a journey. As you move forward, learn and grow – your talent pipeline will be easier to optimize along the way. However, chasing perfection, in the beginning, might halt your growth. Here are the steps that you need to follow for establishing an efficient talent pipeline.

Analyze Your Organization’s Talent Requirements and Long-Term Goals

Before you start building your talent pipeline, discuss and analyze your organization’s existing skill gaps, current talent needs, upcoming open positions and the major changes in business strategy that might directly impact your recruitment plans.

Connect with talent executives, department heads, company leaders and other stakeholders to collect information and perform a thorough analysis of -

All the open positions currently
Relevant skills required for each of these positions
Locations for these open roles
Company expansion plans
Department restructuring plans

As a recruiter, you must plan for all the possibilities beforehand when creating your talent pipeline. It will further help you tweak the hiring strategy the right way and generate better results in terms of talent acquisition. How? By mapping the current requirements with the kind of talent to be sourced and keeping a check on the anticipated changes in the future.

Frame a Talent Sourcing Strategy

The next step is to plan your sourcing. Gone are the times when advertising all the different types of job roles on the same platforms was enough. With the competition rising every other moment, having just a couple of sources for acquiring talent won’t work. You need to have a solid plan that covers almost all the possible platforms for sourcing quality talent. Further, each platform has its own different formats and approaches that help in getting optimal results.

Your talent sourcing strategy comprehensively defines the various methods of sourcing you are going to follow, the priority order for each job role, job-specific resources and the ideal approach for each. Some of the most popular methods of sourcing candidates:

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Social Media sourcing: LinkedIn, being the biggest professional platform in the world, is the primary platform for sourcing candidates and it almost doesn’t matter what role it is. Apart from that, Twitter, Facebook and even Instagram are now being consistently utilized to source quality talent.

Referrals: 48% of businesses say their top-quality hires come from referrals. Often ignored, referrals can be a great addition to your talent pipeline strategy.

Events: Corporate events and recruitment fairs attract the best of the candidates and can connect you with quality talent.

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Reach Out to Candidates

Once you identify and screen candidate profiles, you can reach out to them via LinkedIn, emails or other channels they are usually active on. Remember to not follow a straight selling approach, but try to build genuine connections with your target candidates. For accomplishing this, you can engage with their content online, and talk about their career goals. Exchange opinions and discuss things they’re passionate about.

Lead the conversations to understand the candidate’s expectations and check if they are open to new opportunities. Follow a typical community approach rather than pitching them with lengthy job descriptions.

Reaching out to hundreds of candidates can be too overwhelming for you as a recruiter. But as your organization grows and requirements scale up, it’s necessary. How do you cope with it? Using a sourcing automation tool is the optimal way through to scale up your passive sourcing campaigns seamlessly (more on this later).

Evaluate Candidates in Your Talent Pool

Once candidates are sourced after pre-screening, it’s time to assess them and filter your talent pool based on various job role requirements. Note that this stage is very critical as you analyze if a candidate is a right fit for your company along with being technically suited. Some of the parameters apart from their role-specific skills are:

Overall professional experience in the past
Potential to deal with daily challenges of the role
Culture fit
Communication and collaboration abilities
Their personal goals and expectations

Although assessing and filtering candidates is largely driven by the department's expectations and core skillset relevant to the job role, recruiters need to double-check check personality traits and general abilities of the candidates.

Nurture Talent in Your Pipeline

One of the most important steps in successfully building a talent pipeline is candidate nurturing. Engaging with your candidates and nurturing them acts as a catalyst for your transition from sourcing to recruiting. How? Filling your talent pipeline with quality candidates is one task, but persuading them through value addition to joining your organization is a different challenge. A majority of individuals in your pipeline are passive candidates, who are pretty comfortable with their existing jobs. You need to strengthen the relationship by sharing relevant engaging content regularly.

No doubt nurturing talent in your pipeline is a long-term process. However, it returns compounding results when done in the right way. All recruiters need to do is to stick to it consistently and keep providing value along with reasons for the candidates to join your team.

Fill Your Talent Pipeline Seamlessly with Nurturebox

Analyzing your organization’s talent needs, preparing a strategy, sourcing candidates, and handling outreach as well as engagement manually, can be too hectic and tedious for recruitment teams. Add up to that the continuous management of the talent pipeline – it ultimately harms the productivity of recruiters and hence organizations who look to hire top talent in the shortest time possible and conveniently.

Nurturebox solves this huge problem by enabling recruiters and talent teams to automate candidate outreach, engagement, pipeline management and performance analysis. That’s not all – the tool integrates with your existing technology stack, so you, as a recruiter, do not need to worry about overwhelming configurations. Just download the Nurturebox Chrome extension, sign up and you’re good to go!

Here’s how you can fill your talent sourcing pipeline using Nurturebox plugin within minutes:

Once signed up, open the Chrome extension
Go to your LinkedIn profile and find your desired candidates using boolean searches
Add any candidate to your sourcing campaign with a single click
Extract the contact details of the candidates
Integrate sourced candidates’ data with your Recruitee ATS
Reach out to candidates on any of the platforms using templates – LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp and Gmail. You can opt for all the platforms at once too
Create your email nurture campaigns with the Lemlist plugin and engage your candidates

Hence your entire talent pipeline is sorted through a single window – all the more remarkable reason to join Nurturebox now!