What is a Talent Pool?

What is a Talent Pool?

A talent pool refers to the people who could work for your company in the future. For example, people in a talent pool may have previously expressed interest in your company, but not yet been hired. More about this later.

You might imagine that a talent pool can be very valuable to a company. When a position becomes available, it is nice if you already have several potential candidates in your network who you can ask to apply. This speeds up the recruitment process, you fill vacancies faster. In times of labor shortages, the question is sometimes whether you will be able to fill a vacancy at all, so it is nice if you can fall back on your 'pool' of talents. If you have a good pool yourself, you may no longer need to hire an expensive external recruiter to fill vacancies. Pretty interesting, right?

How can you set up a talent pool?

Companies often come into contact with potential employees in different ways. The most obvious are applicants who have not been selected at this time. If they do meet the right qualifications, it is of course very interesting to keep them involved in your organization. Other options are:

  • Students you spoke to
  • Participants in a career event who have shown interest
  • Former employees who left on a nice note
  • Friends or acquaintances of employees who were once referred, but for whom there was no room yet
  • Followers of your social media, for example students who follow your company on LinkedIn

You may also be able to come up with examples for your company.

Build your pool via social media

Social media, and LinkedIn in particular, is ideal for searching and approaching new potential candidates. LinkedIn's paid tools allow you to easily filter for interesting candidates in your area. You can approach them and gauge whether they are interested. At recruitment.nu we know from experience that it is a lot of work to keep track of exactly who is and is not interested and what the status is. Recuitment.nu can take care of this entire process for you, supplementing the talent pool with an average of 80 potential new employees per month. If you would like to know more about this, we would be happy to tell you more about it.

Manage talent pool

Okay, now you know how to fill and set up a talent pool, but how do you manage such a list efficiently? Most companies have dozens of positions, each requiring its own profile. It is useful to take this into account when building your talent pool. This is essential if you want to communicate effectively with your talents and easily make selections to invite candidates for an interview. Fortunately, nowadays you have very good recruitment software that allows you to manage such a pool very efficiently. This makes it a piece of cake to send a mailing to the right target group, for example.

You must cherish talent

If you have your talent pool neatly stored in an ATS system , you can easily make selections and, for example, send mailings to potential candidates. A mistake that is often made is that the talent pool is only contacted when a relevant vacancy becomes available. However, it is also smart - even if there are no vacancies - to show off your talent every now and then. If you have really large pools, you can choose to set up separate mailing lists. At the very least, it is advisable to put them on the general mailing list. Here are some more ideas on how you can bind your future employees to your company:

Nurturing talent through social media

Social media, and LinkedIn in particular, is an excellent medium to maintain contact with your talent pool. Above we are mainly talking about e-mail, but this medium is often inspired because candidates always send their e-mail address. Social media is of course a much more popular and effective way to stay on top of candidates' minds these days. Here are some things you can do.

  • Also have your director or manager linked to potential candidates on LinkedIn. This way they can also personally contact candidates in the future. They also naturally see their posts on LinkedIn.
  • If you are linked as a recruiter or manager, you can also invite candidates to the company page on LinkedIn. This way they also see the general corporate communication and you stay top-of-mind with candidates.
  • If you have really large pools, you can also use LinkedIn or other social media advertising to stay 'in the picture' with potential candidates through retargeting.
  • Former employees are also interesting to nurture in a talent pool. Many companies set up a separate LinkedIn page for this, the so-called 'alumni' page. Invite all your former employees to this event, so that you can immediately keep them informed with relevant information for former employees.