What is a Talent Pool? Your Easy Guide
Finding the right candidate for your role takes time. Around 44 days, in fact, according to recent research. When you’re growing fast or need those skills to fill a gap, that’s simply too long to wait.
But how do you accelerate the time to hire and find the best-fit candidates for your next role? We think a talent pool could be just the answer you’re looking for.
In this guide, discover what a talent pool is, why they’re worth having, and how to build (and maintain) your own database of high quality candidates.
What is a talent pool?
A talent pool is a database or list of potential candidates that are interested in working for your company. Maybe they’ve been shortlisted for a role in the past, are a former employee, or have applied to an open role. In the case of an internal talent pool, these are existing employees that are keen to explore further opportunities with you.
Think of your talent pool as the initial stage within your hiring process and talent pipeline. It’s a place where you can store and find great candidates as you consider adding a new role or growing your team.
Why building a talent pool is useful
Having your own database of interested candidates means you don’t have to start from scratch every time you advertise a new role. This is a huge time and energy saving move for your recruitment team.
Building your own talent pool also allows you to:
- Attract the best talent, even if you don’t have an advertised open role for them
- Understand your existing employees’ skill sets and competencies
- Support opportunities for growth within teams
- Filter through qualified candidates to quickly build a shortlist for a new role
- Reduce the time to hire
- Streamline the hiring and onboarding process
- Save money on recruitment costs
- Show that there are opportunities for existing employees to grow
- Support employer branding and culture initiatives
- Scale your hiring process quickly as you grow
While you’ll need to invest some time in setting up the system for your talent pool and attracting those first few candidates, it’s well worth it in the long run. An effective talent pool saves you time and money, helps you attract the best talent, and enables you to grow quickly if and when you need to.
How to create and sustain your talent pool
We know that having a talent pool can make the hiring process easier for everyone, but how do you get started? Let’s explore the best ways to build a talent pool from the start.
Learning how to build a talent pool is only the first step, though. We’ll also share some advice on how to maintain your talent pool so it works as well for your future needs as your current ones.
1. Determine your goals
To build an effective talent pool, you first need to understand what your wider goals are and how this fits into your workforce planning and recruitment strategy.
Think about why you’re creating a talent pool, and which staffing challenges it’ll help meet. Maybe your time to hire is too high and it’s taking too long to fill essential roles. Maybe you have employees eager to step up, but no way to record or use that data. Or maybe you simply want to collect speculative CVs for future opportunities.
Knowing why you want a talent pool, and what its purpose will be, guides how you’ll build and maintain it. It’ll be easier to decide which software to use, how your recruitment team will use it, and how you’ll find suitable candidates for your pool.
2. Run a gap analysis
Whether you plan to recruit soon or not, it’s a great idea to have an understanding of your current employees’ skill sets and competencies. Run through a gap analysis to build a better picture of what they can do, which areas they need support with, and whether you need to hire additional support.
Conduct a SWOT analysis to figure out everyone’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Gather information on employees’ qualifications, skills, and training history. Ask about employees’ career development plans and training requests.
After you’ve analysed your employees’ skills and strengths, use this data to start building your internal talent pool. You can also use it to inform how you’ll train existing employees and attract new candidates to fill skills gaps within your organisation.
4. Source suitable candidates for your talent pool
After you’ve decided how you’ll manage your talent pool, it’s time to start filling it up with the best talent out there. This won’t happen overnight, but over time you’ll be able to grow your database into a valuable resource of future job candidates.
You can find candidates for your talent pool almost anywhere, but some of the best sources include:
- Current employees
- Shortlisted candidates from previous hiring rounds
- Former employees
- Interns and work experience students
- LinkedIn and other social media channels
- Referrals from people you trust
- Freelancers and contractors
- Job descriptions and adverts on job boards
- Attendees from careers fairs and recruitment events
- Members of your personal network
- Visitors to your careers page or company website
Doing all of this can take a lot of effort, so perhaps it’s a good idea to take some of it off your plate with a tool like Charlie Recruit where you can directly post vacancies on your careers page and on job boards.
5. Assess and categorise your candidates
Whether you receive a huge number of applicants at once or they come in as a steady stream, you’ll want a way to organise your candidates so you can make faster (and smarter) recruitment decisions. Find a way to tag or categorise candidates as they come in, or on a regular schedule, to keep your talent pool up to date and easier to use.
Some applicant tracking software tools make this step easier. They allow you to have access to a range of features — like weighted scorecards and best-fit analysis — that help make the recruitment process easier, fairer, and more inclusive. You can also tag candidates’ top skills to make comparisons or skills gap analysis easier.
Making some initial assessments on your candidates and categorising them now speeds up the process in the future. Next time you realise you need someone with that specific skill set, location, or experience, you can use filters to surface relevant candidate profiles and add them to your shortlist.
6. Improve the candidate experience
Even if you can’t offer a candidate a role right away, you still want them to have a positive experience. Look for ways to streamline, improve, and personalise the recruitment process so they’re still excited about the opportunity to work for you months (or years) down the line.
Use all your talent management techniques to keep your passive candidates just as content as the ones in your active talent pipeline.
And once you've got a role that's fit to your talent pool, make sure you get them booked in for an interview straight away – once that's done, you're only a few steps away from getting them to sign an offer for a role!
7. Check your talent pool regularly
Over time you’ll start to grow your talent pool so that it naturally attracts candidates through social media, your website, and your active job adverts. It’s easy to forget that it exists, so build a habit of checking your talent pool at regular intervals.
Not only does this keep your talent pool top of mind, but it also means you don’t miss out on hiring top talent that might not be available for long. Get used to checking on this group of candidates weekly or monthly, instead of just when you need to advertise a new role or have a vacancy.
3. Find the right recruitment software
Before you start building a talent pool, you need to decide where to keep it. While you could use a spreadsheet or database software, a better solution is to invest in an applicant tracking system or recruitment software.
Look for software that allows you to keep candidate details on file after your hiring round, or with a dedicated talent pool feature. You can often find this functionality baked into HR software tools, or available as an add-on.
Charlie Recruit allows you to simplify the hiring process — including building and maintaining your own talent pool. Create your own careers site, analyse candidates, and use automation to streamline the hiring process from start to finish.
