How to expand your talent pool

Businesses now recognise that finding the right calibre of future employees is both a major challenge and a potential barrier to growth. So how do you expand your potential talent pool, or even go about creating one in the first place?

Nearly all websites include an area or page for careers and they range from full blown job listings to a generic ‘we are always on the lookout for great talent’ message and they are primarily aimed at active candidates who are looking for a new role. However, as many recruitment consultants will tell you, the best candidates are not active, they are passive—already in good roles where they are being successful—so we need to find a way to engage with them.

In the same way that prospects who are not ready to buy yet need to be nurtured, so do passive candidates who are not yet ready to change jobs. The good news is that the tools and principles are also very similar.

Here are our top tips for expanding your talent pool:
- Consider employer branding to appeal to talent—the core values may be the same, but the proposition and messaging are likely to be different and aimed at attracting the right talent to your brand.
- Create good quality and engaging content to sell the brand and businesses culture. Promote this content via social media channels
- Where possible, use video content as this is proven to be the best way to create that all important emotional connection and will also promote a modern and forward-thinking business.
- Lead with culture rather than vacancies and show potential talent what it’s like to work at the company—use testimonials and case studies from existing employees.
- Create a talent attraction portal as a hub for the talent pool. Depending on the size of business and the future talent needs, the talent attraction portal can range from a talent-focused homepage on the website to a specialist software platform.
- Use marketing automation technology such as SharpSpring or Hubspot to nurture and lead score potential talent. This allows a strong relationship to be developed over time and help identify the most suitable candidates from within the talent pool as and when new roles become available.
- Encourage talent to subscribe to the talent pool allowing future communication to be personalised on a one-to-one basis.
- The war for talent is not likely to get any easier so winning will require both a good strategy and the right weapons, but the potential rewards will make the effort worthwhile.