Ensuring your company has the best talent in the right jobs and at the right time is essential for the future success of your company, but this is no easy task - particularly when taking into consideration the huge skills shortage occurring for the vast majority of today's industries.

Meeting workforce objectives isn’t as simple as reaching out to the perfect candidate and filling an open vacancy immediately. Your business needs to find the right candidate, and then hope that they're both available when you need them and that they actually want to work with your organization.

In fact, a study from Manpowergroup found that almost three quarters (72.8 percent) of employers are having a difficult time finding skilled candidates and 45 percent of employers are concerned about finding employees with the necessary talents. 

To overcome this challenge, it’s essential that your organization creates a talent pool - but what actually is a talent pool, how can it benefit the recruitment strategy of your company and how do you build one? HCMWorks will answer your questions in this blog.

What is a talent pool?

A talent pool is a database of potential job candidates that have either already worked with your company as a contractor in the past, or have shown interest in working for your organization through a job application. The candidates in this talent pool will have the potential to meet your immediate, short-term or long-term workforce needs - helping your company to hit those important business goals.

Including both full-time and contingent workers, your company’s talent pool will store information about each prospect - including the roles they could fill, their skills, their qualifications, how they’ll help you meet your business objectives and whether they’ll fit in with your company culture.

A talent pool will feature sources for talent acquisition such as staffing agencies, recruiting companies, previous employees and social media contacts, as well as making a note of internal talent who have the ability to advance within your organization and contingent workers who you can build a long-term partnership with.

How your organization will benefit from the creation of a talent pool 

Building a talent pool can bring your business a wide range of benefits, from reducing talent acquisition costs, finding a way around today’s shortage in skilled labour, speeding up the recruitment process, identifying your company’s skills gaps and much more.

Here are just three benefits your organization could realize from the creation of a talent pool:

1. Reducing the time to hire: With the creation of a talent pool your organization can significantly reduce the time it takes  to hire the right candidates. Not only will you be able to bypass the time-consuming nature of screening, selecting and interviewing candidates, you’ll also have a clearly-thought-out recruitment strategy to ensure you hit your workforce targets and business goals.
2. Identifying quality candidate to fill both short-term and long-term needs: A talent pool is the start of an overall workforce strategy that will give you more visibility and control into your current workforce, and which workers you need to hire to meet workforce objectives. The result? You’ll be able to identify the right workers before a position even needs to be filled, helping you to achieve both short-term and long-term goals.
3. Reducing recruitment costs: A talent pull will completely negate the need for a large portion of those expensive and time-consuming jobs you have to perform when hiring a new worker. That’s not even mentioning the money you can save by avoiding a bad hire.

How can your business create a talent pool?

Your company can create a talent pool through either inbound or outbound recruiting strategies. Your talent pool can be built from:

Previous applicants: Often known as ‘silver medalists’, these are the candidates that were incredibly close to getting the job but got pipped to the post by a candidate that was slightly more qualified for the role. They should be added to your prospects for future roles, not simply discarded.

Work experience schemes: If you run work experience schemes and internships then this is a fantastic way to not only give students their first taste of the business world but to also start adding the next generation of talented workers to your talent pool.

Employees who leave your company: When good employees leave your organization it doesn’t mean it’s a goodbye forever, and that’s even more true for contingent workers. Those who leave your company might be opening to rejoining if you engage with them at the right time.

Other methods include:

• Career fairs and events
• Online CV databases
• Networking events
• Social media networking

Want to learn how to build your very own talent pool? HCMWorks provides its clients with talent pool and contingent workforce management solutions that improve the visibility of your workers and potential workforce through complex reporting and analytics.

We have years of experience in helping to implement and optimize talent acquisition and management strategies, so contact us today to find out more.