October 27, 2022
Modern-day recruiters need to have a multi-dimensional approach to sourcing and hiring candidates. Finding the right fit to hire is not the only big challenge talent hunters are facing today. Candidate sourcing and engagement need enough heavy lifting and it could easily get overwhelming for your recruitment teams, especially when you’re also racing against time. The way through is to have a readily available and engaged set of candidates at any given time. Building a talent pool solves this. Although building and managing a talent pool is a long-term game, it significantly impacts recruitment costs, time of hiring, talent engagement and hence the quality of talent acquisition.
Only 27% of the total workforce candidates are actively applying for jobs, whereas 87% of them are open to hearing about new opportunities. The idea behind developing an effective talent pool is to establish a meaningful relationship with qualified candidates. As a recruiter, the last thing you would want is to miss out on top talent when you know they can be great candidates for hiring in the near future. Talent pools help you and your recruitment teams stay ahead of the requirements, which also ensures smooth scaling up of the business.
Another core benefit of building a talent pool, which is the least talked about is that engaging candidates helps you get chosen among the flooded market of opportunities. The candidates in your talent pool are more likely to respond well and enter the recruitment funnel.
Building and maintaining your talent pool needs a thoughtfully planned approach. And in this blog, we will dive deep into all the different ways of creating a talent pool. Stick around for an insightful guide.
Before we get to the numerous ways to build a talent pool, let’s explore why it is so important today. The convenience of sourcing and recruiting, reduced cost and reduced time to hire are some of the top reasons, but what are the qualitative benefits? Take a look:
1 in every 72 passively sourced candidates gets hired against 1 in every 152 applicants. Active vs Passive candidates has been a long-chased debate for quite a few years now. It’s evident that passive candidates are more qualified, and hence 2x more likely to get hired as compared to others. This makes building a talent pool all the more important.
Please note that although passive candidates refer to talent who aren’t searching for opportunities, engaging them consistently helps. They are open to switching if offered better perks and assured of great work culture.
Scaling up is not easy. It requires every business vertical to push beyond limits, especially the talent acquisition space. Remember that organizations are dependent on recruiters for getting quality talent on board. However, finding and hiring good candidates promptly is a myth. You must have a long-term recruitment plan, as numerous factors drive your recruitment and you don’t necessarily have control always.
For both your upcoming hiring requirements and succession plan, building a talent pool is the priority. It also gives you the option to adjust your focus according to the situation and never end up hiring while in urgency.
The core aim of building a talent pool is having direct access to qualified and competent candidates for hiring them whenever required. However, for ensuring this you must have a high-quality talent pool in the first place.
In the last decade, tech hiring has undoubtedly been the greatest challenge for recruiters. While a majority of recruiters are not aware of technology and skills related to a role, some requirements are very specific. The chances to get quality applications are minimal in such cases, so in order to not disturb your company's functioning and growth – having direct access to an engaged talent pool is the road to redemption.
Also read: Why is Building a Talent Pool Vital for Hiring Passive Candidates Today?
It’s time to address the elephant in the room – top 8 ways to build a prolific talent pool. Remember that just like marketing, recruitment (especially passive) now needs an industry-specific approach and recruiters must figure out the platforms and social channels their target candidates are usually found at. How do you plan that? You will know soon.
That being said, let’s cut to the chase and find out the best methods to fill your talent pool with top candidates.
It refers to candidates who couldn't make it through the final rounds of your recruitment previously. If you feel they are highly qualified and would fit in your company culture well, add them to your internal talent pool. But that doesn’t end here. The primary factor to look after is their candidate experience, and to enhance it – you must closely engage with them. Contrary to popular opinion, candidate engagement is more about sticking to basics. Answering your candidates' queries on time, consistently meeting the preplanned timelines and giving them feedback are a few productive strategies you can leverage for effective engagement.
Note that these individuals could well be the most valuable part of your talent pool as they already want to work with you. Recruiting them would be easier and they are more likely to get hired to your organization.
Are you wondering - “They are already sourced – then why?” Well, not just because they are the easiest to add to your talent pool, but because they grabbed your attention and stood out. So once you source candidates and have their details, it’s important that you begin your engagement. Even if some of them do not fit the roles currently open, you must add them to your talent pool to recruit/ reach out to them later when you have relevant requirements.
The way you engage with your candidates would define the quality of your talent acquisition. Ensure you share enough about your company, the work culture, problems you are solving and more enticing information that grabs attention.
To your surprise, it’s not necessary to add candidates passively to your talent pool. You can also form internal talent communities by inviting a large number of candidates to your career landing page and filtering them based on various parameters. This would help you in two ways:
Your careers page should always be up to date with all the openings arranged in an organized way. Additionally, once candidates join your talent pool or community, they should receive regular updates regarding the open positions.
When it comes to filling your talent pool with top candidates, nothing can beat the power of events and career fairs. Investing a part of your recruitment budget into hosting periodic events could generate great ROI in the long term. Not to forget – your employer brand gets a heavy boost through these events.
‘The Great Resignation’ period was observed after the pandemic and recruiters struggled a lot to fill in positions and keep their companies on track. One of the observed recruitment trends was online events such as webinars and virtual career fairs. As virtual events didn’t require much investment of resources, companies of all sizes from various industries were following this practice.
Offline events and meetups are now getting higher traction than ever. You should definitely consider organizing periodic events and generating quality talent leads.
The taboo related to rehiring former employees is a thing of the past now. This is a common practice in the corporate world today. There could be numerous reasons for someone leaving your company - maybe they got a lucrative offer elsewhere, they started on their own, family needs or any other. Adding your former employees to your talent pool can be a wise decision as you can even leverage the experience that they gain over the time they’re out.
Especially if you have a positive work culture, you will be surprised how many people usually apply to work with their former employers. Add them to your engagement and nurture campaigns to help them stay updated with openings and company news.
82% of surveyed employers claim referrals yield the best ROI when it comes to hiring. Create a referral scheme for your entire organization, and promote it regularly in order to build awareness and fill your talent pools faster. Remember that your employees’ network combined together is probably much bigger than your companies’ network and you must leverage it the right way. We have observed a constant upward trend in the referral rewards space. If you haven’t already, you should incentivize the referral scheme so that your employees maximize their efforts in driving the right talent. The rewards can either be financial perks, electronic gadgets, gift cards/coupons or others based upon your schemes.
Establishing a referral policy is an added advantage for building your talent pool and filling it proactively.
Sourcing from expensive job boards or career pages isn’t as effective as it used to be. Modern recruiters need to be where potential candidates are spending the majority of their time on - social media. 86% of candidates use social media in their job search and it is the best place for you to find top candidates. LinkedIn is undoubtedly the most popular place for recruiters and candidates to connect, and it’s not the only one. Sourcing is scaling up on platforms like Instagram and Twitter too. Recruiters are going all-in for candidates who create content around their profession as that depicts the passion they have.
Your social media recruiting strategy should be focused on quality content creation and engagement with candidates. Just like marketing, social media also helps you attract the most relevant eyeballs through your campaigns. If the budget allows, you can even run ads on these platforms for maximizing your reach. Apart from heavily contributing to your talent pool, active social media engagement also boosts your employer brand.
One of the crucial activities most recruiters miss out on is updating their talent pool regularly. You don’t want to end up scrolling to find relevant candidates for reaching out. As soon as you get information like a candidate moving abroad, having a successful startup, or going for a long degree like a PhD, the chances of them working for you significantly drop. It’s always better to keep your talent pool lean and clean with quality candidates who might well be recruited in the near future.
Maintaining and updating your talent pool is equally important as building one. While you add sourced candidates rigorously, also remember to remove the irrelevant candidates for your and the team’s convenience.
What’s the biggest challenge that you face while building your talent pool? The race with time and limited resources, right? Well, that can now be solved efficiently with end-to-end candidate sourcing automation. As a recruiter, you never ideally want to take charge of the mundane repeated admin tasks of managing candidate pipeline, updating their sourcing status and spending a majority of your time in maintaining the ATS or candidate database.
Nurturebox is a comprehensive candidate sourcing and engagement automation platform which allows you to delegate all the iterative tasks of building your talent pool. Recruitment is already challenging enough and you don’t need to juggle multiple tasks to be able to hire the best candidates out there. Here’s how Nurturebox allows you to focus on the human side of recruiting and spend most of your time evaluating candidates.
Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.
Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.
Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.
From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:
While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.
A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.
As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.
To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.
Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.
Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.
Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.
Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.
Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..
A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.
Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.
Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.
Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.
Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.
Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:
Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.
Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?
You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.
Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.
Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.
As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.
Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.
Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:
Role
The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.
Responsibilities
Requirements
Soft Skills
Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.
Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:
Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.
Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.
Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.
Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.
Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.
Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.
Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?
Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.
Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:
