By iCIMS' Blogger, Jill Cienki

We are all guilty of it at some point. You hit that point in your day – the wall. And the cure for the wall? A snack! (I know you are getting hungrier and hungrier as you read this.) While you consider what you will have for your mid-morning, mid-day, or mid-afternoon snack (or what you’ll have for all three…), take a moment and compare your talent pipeline to soup.

Yes, I said SOUP.

If you take a moment (or two) to think about it, the talent management process does, at least loosely, resemble the culinary arts. Both great cooks and skilled HR professionals take a mixture of elements and use a variety of supplies and resources to create a five-star result. So exactly how is assembling a strong team of employees for your company or clients similar to making soup?

Choose durable tools: Every top cook has a set of high-end cutlery as well as long-lasting cookware and storage containers to hold the leftovers. What’s in your HR cabinet? To create a top-notch talent soup, assemble tools to help you slice, dice, prepare, and store your talent pool data. By choosing tools that work well together or are part of a set, you can be sure that your data will be displayed consistently and accurately.

Cook up top ingredients: One of the many differences between a five-star restaurant hamburger and a Whopper Jr. is the ingredients. Don’t just make candidate chowder from leftovers...Create your sensational talent soup from the finest selection of candidates. A searchable talent management system can help you sort through talent to determine which candidates need to simmer longer and which are ready to be served.

Select ripe produce(rs): Is the talent in your pipeline ready to be picked? Keeping in contact with your candidates and building relationships will help ensure that prospective employees will turn to you when they are ready to start producing in the workforce. By using a web-based system to track your dialogue, you will have a record of your communication with the candidate along with their qualifications so you can decide if they can be a top producer for you.

By choosing the right tools and ingredients, you can be well on your way to concocting the talent soup you need to make your HR practices successful.

Now who’s hungry?