Building a ready to hire talent pool is one of the best recruitment strategies a scaling tech business can adopt. A talent pool is almost a queue of skilled candidates who are interested in working with you and are ready to step into roles as soon as they become available. A good talent pool should cover a wide range of skills from tech to soft skills and should also include people from different backgrounds, experiences and at different stages of their career. Building a talent pool takes work, but it also ensures that you have engaged, skilled talent at your fingertips for when vacancies become available, meaning you’ll be able to hire quickly, diversely and significantly reduce the cost of advertising roles. A talent pool can even help you plan for future hires and help you gauge the market; you’ll see the kind of candidates who are interested in working with you, their skills and experience.
We advised that many companies worked on building a ready-to-hire talent pool during the coronavirus pandemic as many of our clients were in a hiring freeze. In taking the time to engage and excite candidates, they’ll register their details with you and then you are better prepared for when hiring picks up again. In uncertain times a talent pool allows you to move rapidly and hire in a more agile way. For scaling businesses that may experience large-scale growth quickly and suddenly, it could be a vital tool to have at your disposal. It means you don’t have to pause and take time to plan for these new hires when you’ve been given the green light; you can reach out to your interested candidates.
Many techniques can help you build a talent pool, whether through digital attraction and paid media campaigns or keeping in touch with unsuccessful candidates. You don’t even need to have vacancies available. If you’re strategic, you can build a talent pool by promoting your employer brand and engaging suitable candidates for when roles become available.
However, once you’ve built a talent pool, what exactly do you do with them next?
If you don’t keep in touch with these candidates, they’ll lose interest. There are currently so many companies fighting to hire the same candidates, and more jobs are being advertised in sectors like tech than ever before. Therefore, if you go quiet and leave this talent pool for too long, your competitors will snap them up. You could be their dream company to work for, they could be very excited by your mission, values and culture as well as your product, but if you don’t remain in touch, they’ll be forced to look elsewhere.
This is why, even if you don’t have any vacancies currently available, you need to keep in touch. Nurturing your talent pool and ensuring that you’re top of mind is just as crucial as building one. Otherwise, when you’re ready to hire, you won’t have the same anticipation, engagement and excitement surrounding your roles, making your talent pool almost redundant. Of course, the idea of a talent pool is to ensure that candidates see your roles and apply; but to do this, you need to ensure that you aren’t entirely forgotten about in your quieter hiring periods.
How can you nurture a talent pool even when you’re not hiring?
Segment the talent pool
If you’re hiring for different roles across a large business, segmenting your talent pool may be a good idea as it means you can keep communications relevant. For example, say you’re a startup hiring tech teams to develop your product and sales teams to help you to sell; the two may not be interested in the same aspects of your business. Therefore you should divide your talent pool, if it’s large enough, into sections based on your talent acquisition goals— segment by role, department or skill for the best results.
The key to nurturing your talent pool in 20210 is providing each candidate with a personalised experience; this will make them feel valued and connected to your brand. To ensure that they continue opening your emails and engaging with your brand, you have to show them that you know who they are and why they want to work for you. In the tech sector especially, generic emails will be spotted quickly and could damage your employer brand as it will look like you don’t care.
Email nurture campaigns
The easiest way to nurture your talent pool is through regular email campaigns. If they’ve applied for a role with you, you should have their email address. If you’re running a digital attraction campaign to build your talent pool, a lead gen form or simple landing page can also collect them. Once you have all of the contact details, you can create a content schedule covering different areas of the business and helping to inform candidates about them. These subjects can include the benefits you offer, your company culture, employee stories and even any significant updates in your growth story like receiving funding or expanding into new markets. This will help candidates get a better feel for your business and what you do directly in their inbox and continue to build anticipation. It ensures that you’re top of mind, and when the time comes and roles become available, you can send your audience an email about it too.
Social media updates
Social media can help give your talent pool a community feel. With Facebook Careers pages, LinkedIn Groups and even designated Twitter or Instagram accounts, candidates can not only engage with your brand but with each other, discussing how excited they are about the thought of working with you. Some companies choose to keep their employer brand perceptions separate from their consumer ones. This could be because the audiences and messaging are very different; the people who work for you may not be the same people who buy your product. However, whether you choose to communicate on your primary accounts or not, engaging with your talent pool has never been easier than with social media. There are even capabilities to give live updates, like behind the scenes at your workplace, and so you can truly bring your company culture to life. Social media also allows your current team members to communicate with the talent pool, sharing their experiences and tips for getting hired.
Retargeted social media ads
While organic social media is excellent for giving an insight into your culture and workplace, paid social media can help you engage your talent pool. With the ability to target users based on email addresses or those who have previously visited your careers pages or landing pages, you can ensure that those engaged with your brand see your job ads as soon as they become available. As they’ve previously engaged with you, they should be more likely to click and be intrigued by your ads. This means that if they see a job, you’ll already be top of mind, and they’ll likely apply as soon as they’re able. This is a much more indirect way of keeping in touch, but it effectively gets applications for newly opened roles.
Share blogs and vlogs
Sharing business news, blogs and even vlogs are a great way for engaged candidates in your talent pool to stay up to date with the significant events in your business or industry talking points. If they’re very interested in working for you, they’ll be equally as interested in the content you’re putting out there. In addition, by sharing regular business updates and insights into the industry, candidates can learn more about what it’s like to work for you and more about trends or issues in your sector. This means when they eventually get a job with you, they’ll be better informed.
Survey candidates
The candidates you have within your talent pool could provide a great deal of insight when it comes to perfecting your EVP and employer brand. You could send them surveys to find out what they’re looking for in an employer and to gain a better perception of their expectations. This can form the foundation of your EVP research and help to inform your employer brand communications, ensuring that your business is a place where candidates want to work and are excited about. Also, if you have previous applicants in your talent pool, surveying them could help better inform your candidate experience in the future. Learning what you did well in the application and interview process and identifying pain points in the candidate experience will help you refine your candidate experience for future hires.
Update your data regularly
Not only is this important to ensure that you’re GDPR compliant, but updating your data regularly ensures that you’re keeping the suitable candidates in the loop. Some people in your talent pool will find other jobs and want to unsubscribe, but others will undoubtedly join as they become aware of your employer brand. Others may be sat in your talent pool for a while, gaining more skills and experience in the meantime. Remember, your talent pool is only as effective as the data it contains. If you wish to hire these people for your scaling tech business, you need accurate and up to date information, or you may let qualified candidates slip through the net. By ensuring that you regularly reach out to the candidates in your talent pool, you can see if their information has changed. You can build a trustworthy picture of the skillsets and knowledge at your disposal. You’ll also ensure that the people who have moved on or changed careers and are no longer interested in working for you are removed from your talent pool, helping it remain engaged and relevant.
At Talent Works, we’re experts in digital attraction campaigns, from Google and social media ads to email nurture campaigns. Our in-house digital marketers and sourcing teams help scale businesses build engaged talent pools using a range of tactics, but we also provide creative and innovative nurture strategies to futureproof tech recruitment for years to come.
From building and leveraging employer brands to creating content strategies, we understand that it’s not enough to attract top candidates. To ensure a more agile and efficient recruitment process in the future, you must nurture the relationship you have with candidate’s past and present. Our flexible approach to tech RPO helps scaling businesses to remain agile and recruit quality or hard to find candidates quickly, with the right nurture and attraction strategies.
To find out more about our flexible approach to RPO and how it can help your scaling tech business nurture candidates and attract them, contact us.
