As recruiters, we use talent pools all year round. After all, thanks to them you have candidates that are ready to place as soon as you have a suitable role for them. Building pools can help you manage talent, engage your most promising candidates, and – most importantly - wow your clients!
The holiday periods are a perfect time to take a bit of a break from low converting cold calling and build up your talent pools. If you do it right, you’ll be way ahead of the competition when the September candidate overflow happens! Here’s why you should be working on your talent pools in August:
Stores all your promising candidates all in one place
This one is quite obvious - once you’ve set up your talent pools, they dynamic and work for you. This means whenever a suitable candidate drops in, you’ll be notified and can act – no more candidates will slip through the cracks!
The summer months are a great time to get back into your old talent pools and take the time to call any new candidates that have dropped in. You will also be able to add new candidates and build new pools, so your performance is rock-solid in September and October with fresh, bang-up-to-date talent pools! Now instead of searching for candidates in terror, you can relax and let the system work for you.
Nurture candidates in a few simple clicks
A database that’s full of dead data is no good to any recruiter. If you want to keep on placing talent, you’ve got to keep your candidates warm and nurture them into the next role – otherwise, what good does your talent pool do?
No, you don’t have to go through an endless list and message every single candidate. If that were the case, we’d give up quite quickly, too! Once you’ve created talent pools, it becomes super easy to nurture those important relationships with any set of candidates that match your criteria. Instead of sifting through and selecting talent one by one (and forgetting some) you can simply highlight your talent pool’s contacts and send out tailored bulk email campaigns and SMS that are relevant to their industry. You can also opt to send them a more personalised 1-to-1 message.
Nurturing candidates is crucial if you want to stay close to them, and in today’s market, a positive candidate experience is everything! When the number of vacancies dips in the holiday period, you can keep a hold of your candidates by sending them blogs, industry information, and other content -all in a few clicks.
Get those exclusive clients!
Your job is to find dream candidates for clients, and the good news is, some of these candidates are already in your database!
But before a client will be ready to work with you exclusively, you’ve got to prove to them you’ll always have talent ready to go. Talent pools can help you do just that! Whether you’re already working with the client, or you’re pitching for exclusivity, creating a talent pool that matches their requirements of experience, preferences, and skillset, gives them solid proof that you’re the recruiter that can help fill their roles. This will also target your BD in September as you can show just how many candidates you have ready to go for each role.
You can even take this one step further with the Firefish Employer portal and give your clients access to their own talent pools, effectively reducing your own admin time and giving your clients more control of their own recruitment.
Build your market knowledge
The best place to find out what the candidate market is like? Your talent pools. Send surveys, make phone calls, and record every email you receive in your talent pools. This will build up an accurate picture of the market in terms of popular candidate preferences and salary expectations. It can help you understand how many people are looking to move and what sectors are the most desirable.
From here you can pass this on to other candidates, clients, and prospects to cement your place as a recruitment expert and give you the edge over your competitors. And when September comes… You’ll be the go-to recruiter for your clients!
