Best Practices for Organizing and Nurturing Talent Pools for Recruiters

Have you ever found yourself scrambling to fill an urgent role? This is a common scenario for TA professionals—but it doesn’t have to be. When you build a pipeline of prospective candidates in a talent pool, you can engage with candidates over time and speed up the recruitment process whenever a role officially opens.

In this article, we’ll review some of the best practices that will help you create, organize, and nurture these pools to optimize your recruiting strategy.

Individual Talent Pools: Creating Focused Projects

Building talent pools for each open requisition is an effective way to accelerate your hiring process. By organizing candidates into focused projects, you can maintain a clear overview of qualified talent, ensuring that no potential hire is overlooked. This individualized approach allows you to be more strategic in your outreach and personalize your engagement with candidates so you can easily track their interest and assess their fit for specific roles.

Here are some key activities for managing individual talent pools:

1. A/B Testing Outreach Strategies

By testing different messaging formats, tones, and subject lines, you can determine which approaches lead to better response rates. This insight helps you tailor future outreach to specific talent segments, improving the likelihood of meaningful interactions with top candidates.

2. Revisiting Candidates for Future Engagement

Talent pools are not just for your immediate hiring needs. You can also periodically revisit candidates who expressed interest in previous roles or “silver medalists” (candidates who came close but didn’t receive an offer) to re-engage them and keep the lines of communication open. 

3. Collaborating with Hiring Managers

Sharing individual talent pools with your hiring managers ensures alignment between your recruitment team and other departments. Your hiring team can review and provide feedback on the candidate list, helping you adjust your outreach strategies or focus on a specific skill set. This collaboration reduces miscommunication and ensures that your recruitment efforts are tailored to the expectations of your hiring team.

Team-Wide Talent Pools: Streamlining Engagement at Scale

As recruitment efforts grow and hiring needs evolve, moving from individual talent pools to a team-wide approach will help you manage engagement at scale. While individual talent pools provide a tailored, focused approach to specific requisitions, team-wide talent pools can enable you to track and nurture larger volumes of candidates who possess evergreen skills or fit common hiring personas.

Moving to Team-Wide Talent Pools

You should consider transitioning to a team-wide talent pool when:

• Hiring demands increase: If your company is regularly hiring for the same role, such as software engineer or sales representative, consolidating these candidates into a shared talent pool ensures that all recruiters from your team can access the same database, preventing duplicate efforts.

• Standardizing for efficiency: When hiring personas and skill sets are consistent across multiple roles, team-wide talent pools allow you to collaborate efficiently, making the candidate-sourcing process more cohesive and reducing the time spent searching for candidates.

Organizing Team-Wide Talent Pools

Organize your team-wide talent pools using relevant skill sets or hiring personas. For instance:

• Skill-based pools: Examples might include engineering roles like front-end developers, mobile engineers, or machine learning specialists.

• Persona-based pools: This can include broader categories like entry-level candidates, diversity and inclusion candidates, or leadership candidates.

Standardizing Evergreen Skill Sets and Hiring Personas

Roles like software engineering, data science, and sales tend to be perpetually in demand.

If you standardize these evergreen skill sets and hiring personas, you’ll be set up to efficiently source, track, and engage candidates who are always relevant to your organization’s needs.

To create effective talent pools for evergreen roles, start by clearly defining the skill sets and qualifications a candidate needs. For example:

• Software engineer: A pool for front-end, back-end, or mobile developers.

• Data science: A pool dedicated to professionals with machine learning, artificial intelligence, or statistical analysis expertise.

By creating well-defined talent pools, you can ensure that you’re collecting the right candidates for these roles and avoid duplication or misplacement of candidates across multiple pools.

Many companies have already standardized their talent pool structure around evergreen roles. For instance, Enigma, a Series C Data-as-a-Service company, has set up dedicated talent pools for software engineers and data scientists. By focusing on core technical areas, they can streamline recruitment efforts and ensure they are consistently building a robust pipeline of candidates with the right skill sets.

Similarly, Dropbox has implemented talent pools for specific technical areas like mobile development, security engineering, and machine learning. This ensures that recruiters and hiring managers can easily access a shared database of candidates who are aligned with the company’s ongoing technical hiring needs.

Leveraging CRM for Additional Candidate Attributes

Talent pools can be even more powerful assets when enhanced by candidate relationship management (CRM) tools. With a CRM, you can filter and search for candidates based on key attributes like work history, location, or diversity instead of creating multiple overlapping talent pools for each specific need. This streamlined approach ensures you can make the most of your existing databases, reducing redundancy and improving efficiency.

Searching for Key Candidate Attributes

Using a CRM, you can easily search your talent pools to find candidates who match specific criteria. Attributes such as professional experience, geographic location, education, and diversity metrics can be quickly filtered, allowing you to focus on candidates who best match your hiring needs.

Filtering Talent Pools Efficiently

Instead of building numerous talent pools for every minor distinction, CRMs allow you to filter existing pools based on additional candidate attributes. For example, suppose your company is looking to hire senior security engineers in Seattle and you want to ensure you’re sourcing a well-balanced representation of gender among candidates. In that case, you can filter an existing security pool by gender, seniority level, and location. This method reduces the need for overlapping talent pools and keeps the database manageable and organized.

Engaging Talent Pools with Relevant Content

Talent pools are only as valuable as the level of engagement you maintain with your candidates. Keeping candidates interested and engaged with relevant content is key to nurturing relationships and ensuring that candidates in your pool are informed and interested when a position opens up. 

Assigning Point People for Content Curation

One effective strategy is to assign point people within your team to curate and manage the content you share with talent pools. They can be responsible for creating and distributing updates that feature company news, blog posts, or upcoming events, keeping the candidates in the talent pool informed and interested in potential opportunities. 

Best Practices for Monthly Engagement

Here are a few best practices for monthly engagement:

1. Events: Send out invitations to upcoming company-hosted events, such as webinars, conferences, or recruitment drives. You can maximize the impact of your recruiting events by personalizing invitations based on candidate interests or location.

2. Blog posts: Share recent blog posts or thought leadership pieces relevant to the candidates in your talent pool. For example, if you have a talent pool for software engineers, consider sending out engineering-related content to keep them engaged with the industry and your company.

3. Company updates: Keep candidates informed about important updates such as new leadership hires, funding rounds, product launches, or corporate milestones.

Organizing Talent Pools for Recurring Engagement

You can maximize the value of your talent pools by organizing them around recurring events or initiatives. 

Creating Talent Pools for Recurring Events

Talent pools can be organized for any recurring event, making it easy to re-engage with attendees and participants for further opportunities. For example:

• Conferences and industry events: You can create talent pools for candidates who attend specific conferences, such as engineering or tech conferences. This allows for streamlined outreach when similar events or openings arise.

• University recruiting: Many organizations build relationships with students at career fairs or university events. Creating a dedicated talent pool for students from specific universities or programs can let you easily re-engage with candidates as they progress in their careers and become eligible for new roles.

A Pool for Valuable Candidates

Some of the most valuable candidates for recurring engagement come from your company’s internal network. Consider building talent pools for:

• Silver medalists: These are candidates who made it far in the interview process but were not selected for the role. They are often highly qualified and should be re-engaged for future openings.

• Former employees: Boomerang hires (employees who have left your company and are re-hired at a later date) are already familiar with your company culture and operations, which can shorten the time needed for onboarding and initial training.

• Past interns: Interns who have worked with your company before are often great full-time hires once they gain additional experience. Maintaining a talent pool for previous interns allows you to track their career progress and re-engage them when they are ready for more permanent positions.

Best Practices for Managing Team-Wide Talent Pools in Gem

Managing team-wide talent pools effectively requires careful planning and a structured approach. By standardizing how talent pools are created, named, and accessed, your recruiting teams can streamline workflows and ensure all team members have easy access to relevant talent pools.

Decide on Key Talent Pools

First decide which pools are most valuable. These may be based on evergreen roles or skill sets that your company is regularly hiring for, such as engineering, sales, or candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. Once key pools are established, share them via team-wide documents or wikis so every recruiter from your team has visibility.

The shared document should include the following:

• A comprehensive list of all talent pools.

• A clear description of each pool, including what types of candidates belong in them.

• Links to the respective pools for easy access.

Use Accurate Naming Conventions

Make sure you use clear and consistent naming conventions so all team members can easily search and access talent pools. Each talent pool should have a standardized prefix, such as Talent Pool or TP, followed by a clear description of the role or skillset the pool is focused on.

Maximize Your Talent Pool Strategy with Gem’s AI Recruiting Platform

Gem’s AI-powered recruiting platform provides you with a comprehensive solution to create, manage, and engage talent pools more efficiently. We streamline sourcing and engagement, helping you proactively communicate with your candidates and optimize your talent pool strategy.

Gem can help you engage with prospective candidates up to five times faster. Want to learn how? Get in touch to discover what Gem can do for you!