Is your talent pool lacking skilled candidates?

Yes that’s right; Thanks to the power of science you can now create your own army of skilled candidates from a single cloned human. Ah. No, actually. Sorry, that was a Star Wars movie.

But in all seriousness, you do genuinely have the power to create your own talent pool of skilled candidates, trained in exactly the way that you need. All it takes is a little creative hiring strategy.

The Issue

It is universally accepted that skilled candidates are scarce. The 2016 Candidate Attraction Report identified candidate scarcity as the number one issue for both agency and in-house recruiters across all sectors. In the face of such a monumental challenge, the recruitment industry is reacting is a proactive and creative way.

In fact, in terms of creative hiring strategies, the recruitment industry is seeing innovation on an unprecedented scale. Savvy recruiters across the globe are coming up with some outstanding ways to get the best talent into their organisation.

One Possible Solution

One of the creative hiring solutions that has recently become available to medium sized companies is the ability to create their own training courses to train candidates before they are onboarded.

Using training in this way has traditionally been the stomping ground of corporate juggernauts, who could use their financial clout to sponsor accredited training courses. Recently however, thanks to the proliferation of online training platforms such as Udemy, Alison and others, this channel has become more accessible to medium sized companies.

The Benefits

The advantage of creating an online training course are perhaps not immediately obvious. After all, there is a chance that the candidates you are training will never work for you. But when you look at in the context of overwhelming candidate scarcity it begins to make sense. It is a low cost, scalable way to up-skill a huge volume of candidates. You are essentially creating your own talent pool of candidates that have been trained in exactly the way that you need them to be trained.

Once candidates complete the course, simply upload them into your recruitment software, to take full advantage of the talent pool nurturing features. By assigning skills and qualifications to candidates in your recruitment software, you can search for candidates that have completed your online training course, and begin personalised recruitment marketing campaigns.

Even if a small number of candidates are onboarded from this channel, the cost of acquisition could still be lower than other traditional channels. Not to mention, the new hires will be more productive in year 1 due to reduced training requirements.

Summary

This relatively new way to upskill candidates isn’t for every organisation. You have to weigh the impact of candidate scarcity with the potential downsides of this channel- namely, that you could be training some candidates that have no intention of working for you.

However, if the potential positives outweigh the negatives, an online training course could solve your candidate scarcity issue for years to come.