Building and maintaining an effective talent pool will help you improve 3 most important recruiting metrics: time, cost and quality of hire.

Talent pooling: A proactive recruiting strategy

According to Robin Erickson form Deloitte, “The task of recruiting has moved from the reactive filling of requisitions to proactively court high-quality talent.”

The only way to proactively court high-quality talent is to build and maintain an effective talent pool. Besides for engaging top talent, talent pools are also a very effective recruiting tool which can improve all the most important recruiting metrics, such as time, cost and quality of hire.

How talent pools help in recruiting top talent?

In today’s job market, an overwhelming majority of job candidates are passive job seekers. According to LinkedIn, 73% of your potential job candidates are passive job seekers. Passive candidates are already employed. Of course, top talent is high in demand so the chances are they are already employed.  This is the reason they actively look for a job. However, they would be willing to accept a better job offer. LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2016 reports that a massive 90% of global professionals are interested in hearing about new job opportunities

However, these passive job seekers need to be convinced that getting a job at your company would be a step up for them. If you manage to get these passive job seekers to join your talent pool, you will have to build relationships with them, foster candidate engagement and keep your company on the top of their mind until the moment they are ready to change jobs.

How to create and maintain an effective talent pool?

Building and maintaining your talent pool is hard work. First you need to fill your talent pool with high-quality candidates. You have to apply the best practices of lead generation to build your talent pool. Then you need to properly segment your talent pool. After you've done all that, the real works begins. You need to maintain your talent pools by engaging in relevant and interesting communication with your candidates. You need to create and distribute specialized recruitment content for every step of the candidate journey.

Yes, it's a lot of work. However, all the time and effort invested in building and maintaining your talent pool is very well worth it!

Main benefits of an effective talent pool

Building and maintaining an effective talent pool will help you improve 3 most important recruiting metrics: time, cost and quality of hire.

Talent pools reduce time to hire

A properly segmented and managed talent pool will ensure that the candidates in your database are engaged and eager to work for your company. That way, when you have a new job opening, you will be able to choose between qualified, interested candidates from your talent pool.

This will significantly lower your time to hire because you will be able to skip the whole process of advertising your open job position through different channels and waiting for great candidates to apply. Instead, you will already have a pool of great candidates you can choose from!

Talent pools reduce cost per hire

An effective talent pool saves your money in two different ways. First of all, it reduces time to hire, which means you can save money on your HR professionals wages. The second way in which an effective talent pool will lower your cost per hire is by saving the money you would otherwise spend advertising your open job positions. Imagine the budget savings you could achieve if you didn’t have to spend money to advertise your jobs on different job boards, LinkedIn, Facebook, career fairs, campus events, etc.

Talent pools improve the quality of hire

Nobody wants to hire B-players, much less C-players. Lower quality hires happen because of four main reasons: not enough qualified applicants, not enough time to find talent, not enough time to check if the best candidate is indeed a perfect fit and because the best candidates reject your job offer so you have to settle with the second best. An effective talent pool will help you avoid all four mentioned scenarios by ensuring a steady flow of qualified job candidates, lowering your time to hire and improving your acceptance rate.