UK 
United States
In the current candidate-driven recruitment market talent pool management is a vital recruiting tool. In fact, the UK could reach full employment in 2016, triggering a period of extreme candidate scarcity. In such a competitive market the ability to quickly market to a warm pool of passive candidates could be vital for making successful placements.
Last month we talked about segmenting your talent pool in order to successfully communicate with candidates. But how else can you find candidates in this vast ocean of skilled professionals?
Searching is one way to narrow down your talent search. Aside from the obvious – location, experience, job titles etc., and the more advanced “skills match” there are several ways you may want to search your talent pool to help you pinpoint the right candidates to approach.
Reverse Search
Can you do a reverse search in your talent pool? The regular way to search your talent pool is to start with a job and then match a candidate’s skills to that job. But you might want to do things the other way around. If you have an excellent candidate in your talent pool, can you search and then skills match that candidate to a current or future role?
Engagement Search
Another advanced way to search your talent pool is to look at how engaged each candidates is with your recruitment communications. Searching by engagement activities (emails, careers site visits etc.) means that you can track down candidates that have varying levels of interaction with your talent pool communications. For example, are they opening your email? Are they clicking on links to jobs? Are they logging in to your careers site and updating their profile?
Search by high engagement
Searching for highly engaged candidates means you can identify which candidates are actively reading your talent pool communications. They are lapping up your careers advice and pouring over your weekly vacancies round up. Do you want to send them more content to engage with? Is your next step to engage them on social media in the hope they become brand advocates?
Search by low engagement
For candidates that aren’t engaging with your content, you can identify and target them with a “what can we do better?” survey. Of course, if their engagement is low already, more content might not entice them, so some incentive might be required. Can you identify why they aren’t engaging? Perhaps you have already lost them to a competitor, so it would be good to know which one.
With the right technology your talent pools can rapidly grow. However, with scale comes the challenge of being able to sift and pinpoint the right candidates to proactively make your approach. Having the right tools and strategies for searching your talent pools is more critical than ever.
