6 Quick Steps to Curate a Talent Pool that Saves You Money

Every HR professional involved in talent acquisition is a curator in their organization’s future talent gallery. The question is: how compelling are the candidates that you present to your hiring managers?

You probably find suitable talent from various sources including:

• Online job boards
• Recruitment agencies
• Staff referrals
• Meetups
• LinkedIn

If you currently use recruitment agencies, then you’re paying up to 25% of first year’s salary for each hire, plus admin time investment. And sometimes the candidates those agencies supply don’t work out.

What if there was a better way to create a beautiful gallery of future company stars at a fraction of the cost? A way that ensures your specially chosen ‘Artwork’ (the talent) is ready for display and hiring immediately, as soon as a new wall-space opens up?

Thinking of staff Recruitment in this way is a useful exercise.  It gets to the heart of what a good HR talent acquisition (TA) department should provide to their organization – fast time to hire, and great quality.

Talent pools

Creating talent pools doesn’t have to mean huge administrative change or lots of meetings.

Like so many elements of the HR world, talent pool creation is often overcomplicated beyond necessary. They can be simple to create and maintain. Your applicant tracking system likely has the functional capability, but the problem is that many TA departments don’t use the tool correctly. It all starts with a solid foundation and simple ongoing maintenance.

Here’s how to set up a quick talent pool with your ATS

By using an ATS, you’ll save a fortune on recruitment and reap the benefits of retaining staff for longer through enhanced fit characteristics. So that’s even less work in future then, with more deeply embedded and expert employees.

Let’s keep it simple – imagine you’re working for a tech startup selling a new SaaS product, with two locations. Each location has a constant need for off-site business analysts (BAs) with a tech background – to help new customers fully integrate your product into their organization.

Here are six quick steps to trial your very own curated talent pool.

1. Identify your highest recurring skills need

The job that crops up the most and has the highest hiring volume is where you’ll focus on for your talent pool trial. In our example, we need Tech BAs as the business expands.

2. Produce some media

Use the tools you have to create some media and involve the lead project & product managers in each office location. Encourage them to talk about their day to day, what they love about their jobs and how they innovate. This can be done surprisingly quickly with just a phone, or you can spend a little extra and pay a media agency. Get this media attached to your careers page and any jobs advertised for BA staff in the respective locations.

3. Write a speculative jost post

Create a speculative job post in your applicant tracking system for publication (with the media attached).

For example:

Include three or four questions in the application form to filter out unsuitable applicants: things like qualifications, language skills, and location that would be suitable. You can be more specific on application questions as it’s a speculative job ad.

4. Filter out the wrong applicants

Always filter out the wrong people as much as attracting the right people. Think of employer branding communications as kind of like a great dating profile that allows you to put into action what you already know: there’s wisdom in being honest about who you are and what you want. Wasting your time with people who aren’t the right fit doesn’t make sense.

Don’t forget to include a data retention permission question and a permission-request to contact them about company news – most ATS will have this option.

5. Set up and activate your ATS autoresponder

Ensure your ATS autoresponder is on for each job post to automatically let applicants know you’ve received their profile. Almost every ATS has this function.

6. Keep a list of the best applicants

Now create a talent pool of tech BA profiles you’ve reviewed in your ATS and save the good applicants. Stay in periodic contact – this can be as simple as sending out company news via email, or an industry survey.

If you don’t have talent-pool functionality available, you can easily create a workaround. Create a specific tag for curated talent you or your staff have personally reviewed and approved. Call it ‘future TechBA’, or something else you can easily search in the database.

And presto! In six months, you’ll have a deep Tech-BA talent pool.

The need to pay for expensive online job boards, Linkedin Recruiter, and even more costly recruitment agencies will be much reduced.

Conclusion

Everything here depends on a well-presented careers page, and your organization giving something back to candidates via video and cultural exposition. If you think your careers page doesn’t give potential applicants a good idea of your company culture, then consider a different ATS vendor.

Remember, your careers site is generally the first and most important place that candidates form an opinion of your employer brand. Make sure it looks good and works smoothly on mobile. Facilitate identification with your brand by giving candidates meaningful and useful information that excites them.

These simple and effective (and cheap) investments in your talent acquisition function will return ten-fold when new tech business analyst positions open up in one of your locations.

A small time-investment + simple cultural information communication = major recruitment savings: making HR a real contributor to the company bottom-line.