Table of contents
Do you want to create your own talent pool? You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll take a look at the basics of talent pool management, and how to combine automated phases and manual interventions to create the perfect candidate experience 🧅.
What is a talent pool?
A talent pool is a well-structured, up-to-date database of candidates that can be activated at the right moment.
The ultimate goal of a talent pool is to close a new position with one phone call:
Business manager: “we are opening a position for a Lead Developer Node who speaks Spanish and Mandarin”
Recruiter: [searches 10 seconds in his pool] “I have someone in my talent pool who I spoke to on the phone 2 weeks ago and who was looking to change, I’ll call him”
Business manager: 😮
Recruiter: “It’s good, you can see him in an interview on Thursday”
Sounds like a dream? We’ll tell you how.
The talent pool allows you to capitalize on your research
Let’s start by demystifying talent pools: they’re a powerful tool if you have recurrent recruitments, but they require investment. So it’s not for everyone!
Having one (or more) talent pools is particularly relevant in the following cases:
- DSC (Digital Services Company): If you’re a recruiter in a service company, you probably recruit the same profile every month (e.g. 30 developers in a year)
- Specialized recruitment agency: You probably have job types that recur at regular intervals
Expert Tip 🧠
On the other hand, [unpopular opinion], it is not necessarily necessary to animate a talent pool for an exotic mission (the recruitment that you do once every 3 years). If we analyze purely rationally, this type of mission does not require follow-up or creation of a link over time: either the candidate is interested, or not… it’s fine either way!
Building a talent pool: a mix of human and machine:
The essence of creating a talent pool is to offer the right job to the right person at the right time. As a result, part of the work will be manual, particularly the segmentation part, which is quite detailed. But automation software such as LaGrowthMachine can save you precious time on the outreach part. So how do you go about it? We’ll break it down into 3 and a half steps 🙂
Prerequisites: the tools
Before you get started, let’s start with the tools. You’ll need 2 tools to follow this tutorial:
- an ATS: a sort of CRM dedicated to candidates, This tool is a database that enables you to track the progress of your recruitments and record all profile information. In short, your second brain as a recruiter! Huntool is the ATS of reference for recruiters of penurious profiles
- an outreach tool: This is a tool that will enable you to launch sequences to contact your candidates automatically. LaGrowthMachine is the benchmark tool for multi-channel candidate contact (LinkedIn, Email, Twitter).
Are you now well equipped? Let’s get started!
Step 1: Segmentation
Segmentation is the basis of the talent pool. Sending the right offer to the right person requires the creation of small, highly homogeneous talent pools. What size audience should you choose? This depends on your sector and the specificity of your profiles. Here’s an order of magnitude:
- if you have more than 150 people in your audience, you’ll probably benefit from segmenting your audience further: perhaps by seniority, geographical location, or specialization
- if you have less than 10 people in your audience, it may be quicker to do nothing automated and manage your talent pool by hand
In short, the idea is to have such a homogeneous audience that your candidates will receive the same message and say to themselves “Great, this job suits me perfectly”.
How do you create this audience? LinkedIn and LinkedIn Recruiter are your first allies. The problem is that your LinkedIn search may bring up profiles that aren’t core enough.
We, therefore, advise you not to select an entire search and import it into an automation tool, but rather to filter it manually.
How does it work? 🤔
For example, by browsing the profiles and importing those that suit you with one click in Huntool! We advise you to place all these profiles in a column of a process, for example the ‘sourcing’ column.
Step 2: Create the contact
You’ve created a small, highly homogeneous audience? Congratulations! Now let’s move on to the outreach phase 🥳.
If you’ve got Huntool and LGM, this is the winning combination! Simply select your ‘sourced’ column and click on ‘export LGM’: Your audience will be automatically created in LGM :
You can then launch a contact sequence by first chiseling out your message (you’ll find more information on how to write the best recruitment messages here).
Mind you, LinkedIn is now saturated with recruiters, so anything goes if you want to stand out from the crowd:
- Voice messages
- videos (for example, with VideoAsk)
- and above all, provide information to bait your candidate: position, salary, etc..
As part of a strategy to build up a talent pool, the aim is to create an initial exchange with candidates: once a candidate responds to you, you’re in business! If you’re using Huntool, we advise you to set up a goal reached with Huntool integration so that your candidate moves to the ‘replied’ column on his own.
Pro-tip in your sequence: a little boost (almost) never hurts 😉.
Step 3: Make contact
If your candidate replies ‘Thank you, I’m interested’, you can go and get a bottle of champagne 🍾. If he says ‘no’, then the work of breeding begins 😅.
The 2 main types of negative response are:
No thank you, this is not the right time for me.
Great, you’ve hit the target! Now all you have to do is send out a job at the right time!
In fact, I’m looking for this or that
Good news, it’s not a big deal, because now that you know what your candidate is interested in, you’ll be right on target next time. And in any case, you’ve started the conversation!
You’ll now build on this first exchange to weave the relationship using 2 types of messages:
- Content messages: in particular, a selection of current jobs or business content.
- Milestones: “It’s been 6 months since we last spoke, would you like a career update? ”
Let’s break it down together:
3-1 – Content messages
Personalization isn’t necessarily necessary in content messages: if you’ve targeted your candidate well (or re-targeted them if necessary), the jobs on offer will be relevant to their profile and will enable them to mature their project without being intrusive.
For this type of informational message, the simpler the better. A mailing is the ideal way to remind your community that you exist.
Here are a few examples of content messages:
- Front of house: This is a summary of the jobs you have, for example, every month. If we draw a parallel with a real estate agency, the idea is to present your storefront: here’s the type of houses we’re selling right now, if you want to know more or we analyze your personal need to present you with the perfect house for you, we’ll discuss it. Feel free to select the most attractive jobs 😉
- Market insights: The advantage of being an in-house recruiter is that you have access to a wide range of contacts who are often decision-makers in your sector. As a result, even if it’s unconscious, you probably have an excellent intuition about developments in your sector: how is the market doing, what are the trends, what are the concerns of managers, what jobs are in demand, … In short, enough to make a great newsletter!
Expert Tip 🧠
If you can add numbers to this market sentiment, you have the winning recipe for a captivating newsletter.
3-2 – Milestones
After each exchange, we need to define the next step: When are we going to meet up again to see where your candidate is in his or her professional thinking?
The aim is to keep up to date with the candidate’s career path, so as to adapt the segmentation (‘I took a management position’ => we move him/her into the manager pool) and, above all, to detect as early as possible the moment when your candidate is ready to change employer.
If your candidate has an exceptional profile that you want to capitalize on, we advise you to do this follow-up completely manually.
If you have Huntool, you can create a view of star contacts with no interaction for over 6 months, and call them at regular intervals.
Expert Tip 🧠
The views of your contacts (or saved searches) allow you to see at a glance if your pool is up to date or not. Sort from oldest to newest (1), save your search (2) and check if you have profiles dating back more than 6 months (3).
On the contrary, if your candidate is a profile that you feel is less of a core target for your business sector.
Example 🔍
A pre-recorded message with a LinkedIn automation software for example:
We haven’t spoken in 6 months
(+ CTA) may be enough.
Last but not least: talent pool ethics
Cultivating a talent pool involves handling personal data. And personal data means RGPD!
Fortunately, the French CNIL has published a didactic guide to explain what you have the right (or not) to do. In particular, you must obtain the consent of candidates to be present in your recruitment pool! It doesn’t matter what form consent takes (e-mail, LinkedIn, etc.), as long as it’s explicit and in writing (to be justified).
But your obligations go further than simply obtaining consent: you must be transparent with your candidates about your approach, and not dangle a non-existent position in front of them.
If you don’t have a position for him/her at the moment, tell him/her! Being realistic and transparent about your ability to support them will build trust.
A talent pool isn’t just an ordered database: it’s above all a network of relationships built up over time.
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