Find Future Staff through Talent Pools

Find your future staff by setting up a talent pool

Fiona Robertson, The National Business Review - 07/09/2007

Recruiters sink or swim on the strength of their talent pool but more firms need to develop their own candidate pools, Frog Recruitment development manager Katherine
Hall says.

Reaction-based recruitment as vacancies come up would always be needed, Ms Hall said, but “talent pooling” was a more pro-active recruitment strategy for employers.

This meant attracting potential employees and retaining information on them to keep in touch. Planning for hard-to-fill roles and jobs that required fresh employees on a continued basis was especially important, she said.

“The most aggressive companies are always out there looking for talent.” A recent survey of employers by Frog found 95% were aware of the concept of talent pooling but many were unsure how to implement it.

Talent pooling required both “high touch and high tech” techniques, Ms Hall said. Technology helped to capture information – for example, keeping data about applicants who missed out on jobs – but personal relationships were also important in keeping them interested. “Otherwise they think you’re only after their data,” Ms Hall said.

The more “high touch” techniques could include emails, blog invites, and videocasts
from an organisation or even old-fashioned phone calls when a candidate was likely to be moving on from other positions.

Making sure information was relevant to the candidates was vital so companies didn’t overstep the boundary into spam marketing type communications. “The key thing is maintaining the relationship,” Ms Hall said. “If I know that a business is interested in me, I’m already halfway engaged.”

Human resources staff could work with marketing colleagues to develop talent pools, she said, because identifying the types of people an organisation wanted to engage with was critical.

Talent pooling techniques would also probably differ according to the type of role targeted. Signing up candidates to a pool could be done through marketing channels or through “below the line” research which Ms Hall described as similar to headhunting – contacting people to see if they’re interested in staying in touch.