Talent Pool: How to Create and Optimize Your Candidate Pool?

The candidate pool is a key strategic recruitment tool for recruiters, offering them a database of qualified talent from which they can draw according to the company's needs and save enormous time.

Indeed, it is never possible to recruit all qualified candidates for a single position. In a context of an increasingly tight job market, creating a talent pool is ideal for filling an urgent need or anticipating future recruitment with the best profiles.

Want to facilitate your recruitment processes? Intuition Software explains what a candidate pool is, its advantages, how to create an effective reserve, and how to maintain this professional pool:

The candidate pool in summary

• The candidate pool is a talent reserve held by the company to meet the company's recruitment needs,
• It can contain candidates who have already applied or not to the company or former employees,
• The professional pool ensures faster, more efficient, more qualified, and less expensive recruitment for the company,
• Using an ATS like JobAffinity is the best way to create an effective candidate pool.

What is a candidate pool?

A candidate pool, also called a talent pool or professional pool, is a database containing promising candidate profiles (who have already applied or not to the company's offers). This reserve is ideal for recruiters, allowing them to find qualified talent more easily and quickly when there is a recruitment need.

These candidates can come from several sources:

• Unsolicited application,
• Candidates not selected during a previous recruitment (via an ad or the career site),
• Candidates from public online candidate pools,
• Candidates from social networks (especially LinkedIn),
• Candidates met at professional events, trade shows, or job dating,
• Former employees (employees, interns, apprentices, temps, freelancers, etc.),
• Employees subject to internal mobility,
• Co-opted candidates.

Why create a candidate pool?

The professional pool is an essential tool of the HR strategy, offering many advantages to recruiters, particularly in case of urgent recruitment. This pool notably allows for saving considerable time on the search and selection of promising candidates for a position to be filled:

• Save time on the recruitment process: having access to a structured database of interesting candidate profiles, the recruiter can more quickly find talent that corresponds to a job to be filled. They thus spend less time on the time-consuming search for qualified profiles;
• Have better quality candidates: the talent recorded in a professional pool being talent already examined (met or not during a previous recruitment), the recruiter is assured of having the best qualified profiles for the position to be filled. Moreover, the pool being entirely online, talent can come from all over the world;
• Reduction of recruitment costs: having a talent pool internally, the company realizes savings on its recruitment, especially during recruitment emergencies. It does not need to write a new ad, post it on multiple platforms, promote it, and wait for quality applications;
• Improvement of the employer brand: creating and maintaining a candidate pool allows the company to improve its image and attractiveness to potential talent. Indeed, responding to unsuccessful candidates, indicating that you are keeping their CV in a pool, and maintaining relationships with former candidates or employees strengthens your image and makes people want to apply to your offers.

How to create a quality talent pool?

In order to ensure you get a useful candidate pool that effectively optimizes your recruitment process, good creation and organization practices must be implemented:

• Choose the right tool,
• Collect applications,
• Retain unsuccessful candidates,
• Sort selected profiles,
• Organize the candidate pool,
• Update the talent pool,
• Ensure compliant confidentiality of candidate data.

Choose the right tool

In order to create, use, and maintain a practical and effective professional pool, it is essential to use ATS software. Indeed, if it is possible to create a professional pool with a spreadsheet (Excel or Google Sheet), these basic tools quickly find their limits: time-consuming and constant human work, lack of features, collaborative limits, data obsolescence, potential human errors, etc.

ATS software, like our JobAffinity recruitment software, allows you to save enormous time on the implementation and maintenance of a candidate pool, ensuring you have an automatically structured and organized database that is easily activated.

With our JobAffinity recruitment software, you can:

• Centralize and manage all your applications (profiles, experience, background, exchanges) in a unique and personalized space;
• Customize your candidate pools, creating as many distinct and customized databases as necessary, in accordance with your specific needs. You can also add "tags" to customize each profile according to specific criteria: sourcing origin, skills, experience, etc.
• Refine your recruitment, thanks to a practical search via advanced filters and efficient sorting in just a few clicks;
• Evaluate and preview CVs, to quickly analyze talent skills;
• Collaborative sharing of the pool and profiles, with all company employees, to have a collective view of candidates;
• Guarantee GDPR compliance, by obtaining candidate consent.

Collect applications

If your company has a strong employer brand, you will regularly receive applications, whether by email or on your career site. To feed your candidate pool, you must carefully study applications and collect those that are qualified or that have potential, even if they do not correspond to the company's current needs.

To optimize this process, it is therefore important to have a strong employer brand that will attract promising and qualified candidates and push them to contact you. And in order to have a rich and diversified application reserve, it is crucial to vary your sources. Collection will therefore apply to online applications, those received at trade shows or job dating events**, those from former employees or co-opted candidates**, etc.

Retain unsuccessful candidates

When you recruit for a position to be filled, you always have a shortlist of relevant candidates before making your choice. All the candidates you will not select having potential, it is essential to add them to your talent pool, their profile potentially corresponding to a future need.

It is also important to maintain contact with them, to maintain the relationship, stay informed of their evolution, and continue to make them want to join the company.

Sort selected profiles

Once your candidate pool is established, you must ensure you only have qualified or promising profiles for the company, corresponding to its image and culture. These profiles must also possess skills, know-how, or interpersonal skills necessary for the company's growth or its development projects.

Organize the candidate pool

Once candidates are selected, it is essential to be able to identify them quickly, in order to find them when there is a recruitment need. For this, you must add key information:

• Name and contact details,
• Type of targeted job,
• Skills (hard skills, soft skills, mad skills),
• Profile source (unsolicited application, unsuccessful candidate, former employee, etc.),
• References and professional links,
• Geographic area,
• History of exchanges with the company,
• Various notes.

This information can be filtered via a "tag" or keyword system. For example, if you are looking for candidates for a Community Manager position in Marseille who knows how to use Adobe's Creative Cloud suite, you can search for the following words: "community manager" (job), "marseille" (geographic area), "adobe" (skill).

Update the talent pool

Regularly updating your professional pool guarantees you a reliable and constantly usable database. Indeed, over the course of using and feeding your professional pool, selected candidates can evolve: job change, acquisition of sought-after skills, relocation, reorientation, etc.

You must thus do regular monitoring to add new profiles, delete those in position or having changed jobs, and update pool profile information: contact details, acquired skills, new experience, retraining, etc.

Ensure compliant confidentiality of candidate data

Your candidate pool containing personal information about candidates, you are required to comply with GDPR standards. You must thus inform candidates of the collection and retention of their personal data. They can accept the collection, oppose it, or request access to it, to correct or delete their data.

You must also declare your candidate pools to the CNIL (National Commission for Computing and Liberties).

How to maintain your professional pool?

To maintain your candidate pool, and stay in touch with different promising profiles or former employees, you must animate it regularly. This can include:

• A response to unsuccessful unsolicited applications, indicating that you are keeping their CV in a pool,
• A response to unsuccessful applications during recruitment, indicating that you are keeping their profile, even if it does not correspond to the current need,
• Sending personalized emails, asking for information about candidates, their professional evolution, updating their personal data, or indicating current offers that match them,
• Sending a monthly or quarterly newsletter, indicating company developments, the launch of a new activity, current recruitment campaigns, planned professional events, etc.,
• Following promising talent on professional social networks,
• Creating relevant informational articles.

The goal of maintaining your professional pool is to stay in the minds of candidates, stay aware of their developments (and their personal information) and, thus, continue to make them want to apply and join the company during future recruitment. This regular contact with potential talent also strengthens the employer brand and can facilitate future recruitment processes.

Once your candidate pool is created and maintained, you can measure its effectiveness through several indicators: conversion rate (number of pool profiles hired), candidate response rate, average recruitment time (reduction or not of delays thanks to the pool), hiring cost, etc.