What is a talent pool?

The phrase ‘Talent pool’ can be a little ambiguous. Cohesion define and deliver talent to clients in the shape of staff who, as a minimum, add above average value to their company – through quality of work, and longevity of service. Talent exists at all levels within a company, from Industrial Placements to Executives.

Confusingly we also refer to the function of our Applicant Tracking System to be able to store pools of applicants as Talent Pool technology. Even though there is not always talent in the pool!

So let us try to be clear!

Registering your interest to work for a company via their website will submit some of your basic details (sometimes only name and email address) to their recruitment database. This does not immediately qualify you as talent for that client. In fact for some of our clients, their pool of applicants who have registered an interest is so large, yet so unfocussed to their needs, that finding talent within it is like finding a needle in a haystack.

However, everyone in this pool has expressed an interest in working specifically for your organisation. Whilst you may not be able to offer them a job, what you can do is treat them well. With good communication, timely updates and company information, you build on that interest. In time, they will become good customers, if not talent, and will be more prone to use your services or recommend true talent to you.

What about the biggest pool of them all – the job boards. It takes some time, but amongst the millions of Candidate details on the hundreds of job boards in the UK, there resides most certainly a good quantity of talent. You just need to know how to find it. An advance working of Boolean search helps here, and then to remember that they might not know who you are, so a practised ability to win them over will help. Many of our clients source a good deal of true talent via this method (with our help).

And the best talent pool of the lot? The individuals who have applied specifically to work for you, who you have screened for talent potential, and that are sitting in a pool that you are nurturing until the next suitable job role comes along. Particularly in the current times, good applicants often, though far from always, exceed the number of current vacancies. But for many clients, those vacancies will come along again before too long. So keep the good candidates, who have already cleared the first hurdle of wanting to work for you, and the harder second hurdle of being of the correct calibre to be real talent for you, interested, excited and ready to go as soon as the next vacancy arises.

Focusing on the bottom end of the list of ‘talent pools’ will save you time – a much better ratio of potential applicants to job offers, and money – less need to spend on advertising if you have a ready-made pool of applicants waiting to hear from you, when you recruit.