Four Ways to Nurture Your Talent Pool

Keeping your talent pool engaged can be extremely valuable to your long-term hiring strategy, by providing you with warm contacts whose talent and skills your already understand. Below we go through four methods for nurturing your talent pool so your recruitment team never have to look far to fill their next vacancy.

Support Internal Progression

If your recruitment team is operating on a tight budget, your internal talent pool can be one of the best, cost-effective resources. Internal career development can also be key in retaining talented employees who are keen to take on new responsibilities and pick up fresh skills. To ensure they’re aware of any vacancies and don’t take their talent elsewhere, draft up a plan of how you can spread the word about new roles.

Coordinate with line managers to ensure they announce vacancies to their team, and work with HR or your communications team to send out organisation-wide email announcements with clear instructions on the application process. While it can sometimes be best to target these communications towards individuals or teams you know to have expressed interest or possess the foundational skills needed to take on the role you’re looking to fill, sometimes a further reach can turn out talent you were never aware of. Whether it’s employees looking to move to a different department or those with a relevant education or past experience, the further you spread the message the more chances your recruitment team have of reaching unique talents.

Boomerang Employees

An alumni strategy can be hugely beneficial to your long-term recruitment efforts. Alumni will have an understanding of your organisation’s culture, practices, and values in a way fresh talent simply cannot be expected to. Having gone on to new opportunities and picked up new experiences they can be a significant asset if they return to your organisation – which they’re more likely to do if they have positive associations and a strong network.

Activities you may want to include in an alumni recruitment strategy include:

• Hosting alumni mixers and events
• Creating an alumni newsletter
• Sending your alumni network holiday cards or gifts
• Staying connected on platforms such as LinkedIn
• Contacting talented alumni about specific vacancies they may be interested in

Learn more about boomerang employees here.

Target Your Varying Demographics

When crafting a strategy for nurturing your talent pool, it can be useful to start off with a simple, general approach. However, once you have the basics sorted or you have a larger talent pool, it will be important to remember to differentiate your strategy based on the varying demographics.

We’ve already covered boomerang employees, who already have an inside understanding of your organisation and pre-existing network. You may also have members of your talent pool who came in 2^nd or 3^rd place in previous hiring processes. You may also have candidates in your pool who are currently on sabbatical or parental leave. There could be proactive graduates who have signed up to newsletter or connected with your hiring team on social media.

The diversity of your talent pool is important when deciding what activities to undertaken, and who it should target. For example, a talent on parental leave will be more likely to engage with digital activities. Keen graduates or previous runners up from past recruitment processes may have their eyes peeled for announcements of job opportunities. Your alumni may respond best to more personal, direct messages or invites to events.

Implement a Talent Pool Management Tool

Manually managing a talent pool can be time-consuming and complicated. With a talent pool software, you can easily and effectively keep track of a wide pool of candidates and increase both the quantity and quality of applicants.

You can create talent pools based on criteria such as skills, experience, location and more. This way when you have a vacancy or if you are looking to recruit new employees, you will have a database of candidates who are suited to your organisation’s needs. A talent pool management software should also work to encourage speculative applications and engage passive candidates who might have an interest in your business.

It also reduces the risk of human error when it comes to a data retention period. With Hireserve ATS, your team can use the automated removal process to ensure you comply with Data Protection Act (DPA) laws around storage limitation.

Learn more about Hireserve’s talent pool management feature here.