Weaning HR from the expensive job-advertising lifestyle to talent pools

The symbiotic relationship between advertising and growing your own database

 

Think of it as a symbiotic relationship – you advertise, you process the applications derived from your ads (expensive ads) and you tag the good ones for future roles – they just have to work together and before you know it… you own a talents-on-tap database you can rely on to fill most of your roles.

What’s talent pools?

A talent pool is pretty much a tag (segment), in your database – so the idea here is to segment your database based on skills or role type (whatever works for you) so when you need a candidate to match a vacancy, you should be able to go straight into the right segment (pool) and find a great match from there and so easily too.

The advertising Addiction – Why Relying solely on advertising is a bad strategy

Having to pay for one or more ads every time you have a vacancy to fill, will simply make your ability to attract good candidates directly dependent on how much you can afford paying.  This means companies who are prepared to pay more, will appear before you on a job-board and will, therefore, attract the majority of good candidates and you end up with the left-overs.

The Talent-On-Tap Solution

 

OK, on average, from every ad that you post, onto the job-boards and social sites, let’s say you end up hiring one person, but there are about 5 who don’t get the job but they’re strong candidates.  So they’re good but you don’t have a use for them now – so this exactly what we’re talking about here – you need to store these 5 candidates somewhere where you can easily find them when you need them.  Find them????  What does that mean in the context of “matching a candidate for a job”?  So it’s about “finding” the best candidate for a job – and you start to see now, that we need to store some metadata about the candidates that enable us to use when we’re trying to find a candidate.  Enter the talent pools dragon!

How do you decide on the right talent pools for your company?

The best way to answer this question is to give you an example.  Here’s what I would do if I recruit B2B sales and Marketing people – I would create the following talent pools:

1. Inbound Sales
2. Outbound Sales (cold calling)
3. Business Development Managers
4. Channel Partner Managers
5. Marketing Coordinator
6. Marketing – Digital
7. Marketing – SEO
8. Marketing Manager
9. Etc.

The Location:

You shouldn’t make the location part of the talent pool description, instead, your ATS (Applicant Tracking System) should allow you to do dynamic location search.  OK, say that you’re looking for an Inbound-sales person to work at your office in Melbourne?  In this case, you would follow the following two quick steps (2 clicks really):

Step 1 – Click on the “Inbound-sales” talent pools – this will show me all of them across all locations

Step 2 – I would type Melbourne within 30K in the location search

And that’s it – this will show me all the inbound salespeople in Melbourne.

How do you keep the talent pools up to date?

 

Your ATS or recruitment software should allow you to easily communicate with your talent pools on a regular basis – you need to create and communicate relevant content to the relevant talent pools.  In the candidate record, you should be able to capture a resume file as well as social ID(s) for the candidate across many social sites – you should have their Facebook ID (URL), their LinkedIn ID, Snapchat, Instagram etc.

Your ATS (recruitment software) should allow you to preview the social profile of the same candidate from the same place.

Your Applicant Tracking System should allow you to send an email requesting your candidate to update their details, by clicking on a button (URL). They should be able to update their latest skills and competencies in less than a minute using a few simple drop downs.

State of play – outlook folders or a clunky ATS

Let me ask you this question – Where do all the applications generated from the 100s if not 1000s of expensive adverts that you’ve paid for, over the years… where do they go?  Are they sitting in the complex and maze-like structure of inboxes, that you’ve built in your outlook over the years?

Look, you’re not alone in this situation where you’re wasting the opportunity of building your own database – probably 40% of corporate HR still run recruitment this way!   So I think that 40% HR out there, either don’t have a system or have one that doesn’t allow them to leverage their advertising dollars into talent pools.

Conclusion

You can NOT continue to rely on having to pay big $$$ every time you have a vacancy to fill!  Your own talents-on-tap database MUST be your end-game!

You need to acquire a recruitment software platform, that allows you to create and manage the perfect set of talent pools for your business and start leveraging all these applications that are generated from your ads.

There are no excuses these days not to have a modern recruitment software platform because there are some vendors out there like MyRecruitment+ for example, who come with ZERO setup cost and with a very small subscription fee, which makes both the RISK and the UPFRONT INVESTMENT very very small.