Do you have a plan in place when one of your team members has to take an unexpected leave of absence or accepts a new position? Or are you left scrambling to find a replacement while trying to delegate extra work to your current staff?
Instead of being left unprepared when situations like this happen, you can start developing relationships with passive candidates today to fill potential openings in the future.
This long-range recruiting strategy is called a talent pipeline and requires a proactive approach and team effort to get the job done.
Discover what 3 resources are essential when creating a talent pipeline and find out how this approach can save you time, money, and help you plan for future growth.
Dedicated Sourcer
One of the most important resources you need to drive this ongoing strategy is a dedicated sourcer or sourcers, depending on how big your company is and your projected growth. This person can be a member of your internal recruiting team or you can get assistance from an external recruiting company. Either way, if you don’t have people in place to source and drive the talent pipeline initiatives, it will likely fall to the backburner and never get done.
If you decide to use an internal recruiting team, those team members need to act like ongoing sourcers and find talent for current open positions as well as forecasted positions. They can even start pipelining talent for future positions that don’t have a budget yet to start developing relationships and sending email campaigns to promote your employer brand.
Once you’re ready to start hiring for these positions, you will already have formed relationships with potential candidates and can easily reach out to them about these opportunities.
Applicant Tracking System
As your dedicated sourcers begin to make contact with passive candidates and start to qualify them, your sourcers will need a place to store the potential candidates’ resumes, contact information, and candidate notes.
An applicant tracking system is a recruiting software that can help you easily manage thousands of contacts, quickly sort through resumes, and stay organized throughout the recruiting process. If you don’t have an ATS but have a large volume of potential candidates, you should either invest in one of hire a recruitment firm to handle your sourcing projects.
If you have a small volume of applicants and passive candidate interactions, you might be able to get away with using a spreadsheet to store the information, but this can become complicated and cumbersome over time.
What tools are needed and what does success look like? An important resource needed for success is a dedicated sourcer or sourcing team, like described above. Another tool is an ATS where you can categorize these candidates. Also, a marketing automation tool where you have ongoing candidate campaigns to stay in front of these potential candidates and follow up with people when they’re responding.
Marketing Automation
Identifying and qualifying passive candidates is only part of the talent pipeline strategy. You also need ongoing candidate campaigns to stay in front of them and follow up with people as they’re responding.
This takes a lot of time and effort but can be streamlined using a marketing automation tool. The goal is to keep candidates engaged throughout the process so when you have an open position, it hasn’t been months since you’ve last contacted them, but weeks or even days.
Some types of things you should include in your candidate campaigns are relevant blog posts and content, downloadables, checking in emails to see how they’re doing, surveys to see if they’re still employed at the same job and if they’re looking to make a move soon, holiday emails and the list goes on.
Using marketing automation to set up these campaigns will make staying in front of all your potential candidates a lot easier and more efficient.
Using these 3 resources to create a talent pipeline will have an upfront cost, but can save you money and stress in the long run. Imagine having the names of several suitable candidates right at your fingertips the next time a new position is created or you have turnover?
