The importance of a Talent Pool, and developments for implementing the tools which make this useful.
A couple years back we blogged about the value of developing a deep talent pool – a database of top rated talent at hand to cherry pick the best qualified and most appropriate candidate. This has consistently been one of the top 5 trends in recruiting and staffing for the past three years. Almost half of all employers report the current talent shortage as their top challenge.
Here is what we had to say about the value of a talent pool back then. (stick with us and we’ll get to the latest developments for implementing this):
…while 90% of professionals are interested in hearing about new opportunities, only a third of these will actively seek them out. (Source: LinkedIn). And if they are looking, you need to first figure out where they scan – is it social media, job boards, company hiring pages???
The value of a talent pool becomes apparent when you take away the need for the candidate to be looking, and have the recruiter take on that responsibility. Here is a verbatim phone call overheard in our office this afternoon:
“Hi, this is Melissa from Marberg Staffing, and you submitted a résumé to us last year as a project manager with SAP implementation experience. We have a client currently looking for someone with your experience, would you be interested in this?”
When the answer is “yes”, this position won’t get posted on job boards or social media. The talent pool is always the first point of reference, because these candidates have been personally interviewed, and short-listed. We’ll ensure that their resume and references are up to date, but the guess-work is already done.
Implementing Data Tools
Once you have taken the time to develop that database, you also need a way to find your needle in that haystack. Last year, we invested in an AI (Artificial Intelligence) to help us do just that. Marberg currently has over a quarter million pre-qualified candidates in our résumé database. Searching can be tedious and time consuming –that has never stopped us, as the prospect of being thorough has always enticed us. But now, a search which could have taken a recruiter all morning, can often be accomplished in minutes.
Beyond this, the ability to tweak the search criteria on the fly means that when you come up with a thousand (or no) qualified candidates, you can narrow or widen the search criteria with ease.
The truly cool thing about an AI search tool is that it can crowd-source its vocabulary and knowledge base. I might get asked to help find a web developer. Our AI will present me with candidates experienced with Swift, Scala, Ruby, Elm and Go – some of which I may not know about, and those people might otherwise have slipped through my fingers.
So diving into the talent pool is a necessary first step, but developing the tools to help you navigate that pool to your destination quickly becomes the next quantum leap in resourcing capability.
KM