A talent pool is a database of potential employees with particular skills that are valuable for your company. They can be both external, (i.e., people outside your organization who work for someone else or who are looking for a job), or internal, (i.e., your own employees that can be considered for new openings). For a seasoned recruiter having such a pool is an absolute must. But equally important is making it grow and keeping it fresh. How do you make that happen?
Application forms
For each new opening use an application form. Don’t ask your prospective candidates for email applications as this is something that requires time and they can easily forget. An application form works like a call-to-action in an advertisement, prompting a ‘spontaneous’ action. Also, using them keeps your candidate database organized and ready for ‘fishing’ even after specific recruitment has been closed, whenever such need arises.
Emails
Of course, you can’t prevent people from sending you their resumes via email, especially if someone has referred them to you directly. With an ATS in place, you can use those emails to expand your talent pool and keep it fresh. As long as the documents sent to you – or your system mailbox – contain personal data processing consent, you can easily add them to your pool, and your ATS will automatically import all the necessary data into the database.
Career page
Whether you have any openings at the moment or not, make sure that your Career page includes an invitation to send speculative job applications. Use a separate form just for that. This will ensure a fresh stream of high-quality prospective employees, as they will be the ones who actively researched your website and are truly interested in what you do.
This is a great source of knowledge about people, their skills, and their experience. So whenever you find someone who would fit into your team, add them to your candidate database for later. You can contact them whenever there is a new opening in your company that might interest them. (Click here to learn more about the LinkedIn-Traffit integration).
Previous recruitments and referrals
What if you’ve got resumes or contact details that came via channels different than those mentioned above? If it’s a CV file (i.e. PDF or DOC), you can add it to your talent pool with the TRAFFIT CV Parser tool. It will automatically create candidates’ profiles in our system with the most important fields like name, phone number, email address, or LinkedIn profile.
Whether it is a paper copy of a resume, an Excel file, or a business card, you can still add them manually to your database, ensuring that it’s well organized and searchable.
Conclusion
Building your own talent pool is not such a difficult task. It only requires integrating different methods into one, as well as adding new candidates and updating the existing candidates regularly. And this is where TRAFFIT comes in handy – importing, tagging, CV parsing, and advanced searching options, among others, all make maintaining your talent pool easy. See for yourself; sign up for a free trial now!
