Talent pipelining is the process of building a pipeline of potential candidates who could apply for roles in the future but are not yet ready to enter the selection process for an immediate opportunity.
Your talent pipeline should be a collection of candidates who are engaged and can be contacted when relevant roles become available. This is relationship-centric recruiting, instead of searching for candidates that fit an immediate need, talent pipelining requires you to build long-term relationships with passive talent for future opportunities.
Developing a Talent Pipeline requires an organisation to shift from being reactive to proactive in their recruitment strategy. To be successful organisations must be proactive by targeting candidates that are a great fit for their company and Talent Pipelines should be a critical part of this proactive strategy.
Talent Pipelining, much like your sales and marketing pipeline – takes time to develop and nurture. Organisations need a space to build and manage sustainable relationships with talent while demonstrating brand values and what it means to be part of an organisation. At Hollaroo, we simply deliver qualified candidates by building an automated community of talent to create, engage and nurture in a secure and fully GDPR compliant environment.
Why is a talent pipeline so important?
By building a talent pipeline, an organisation will have consistent access to a qualified stream of high quality, diverse and engaged candidates. Put simply they deliver qualified candidates into talent pools and communities providing an effective way to make faster and better hires.
Talent pipelines allow you to build your pool of candidates ahead of your need. With senior or hard to fill roles the likelihood of an opportunity becoming available at the exact moment a candidate is considering their next move is very low. However, if you are already engaged with potential candidates beforehand, you have a pipeline of talent already available when specific needs arise.
A talent pipeline will decrease the time to hire, because you will always be two steps ahead in the hiring process. A highly engaged talent pipeline is statistically much more likely to respond positively to the opportunities you present because of prior engagement.
Over time your talent pipeline will start to convert into applications and hires. You have had time to establish a better fit between the candidate and their desired role meaning the quality of hire will improve. Additionally, as more and more of your hires are delivered via your pipeline, your need to actively market opportunities decrease, ultimately providing you with substantial cost savings.
What are the Talent Pipeline Stages?
Overtime you will typically take your candidates through three relationship stages:
Understanding – Establishing where the candidate is on their career journey and what help they need
Engaging – Making your organisation the first choice amongst your membership
Matching – Identifying the best fit for the candidate and tailoring to your requirements
How do you build a talent pipeline?
The pipelining process involves converting passive candidates into active candidates by increasing their engagement with your organisation.
Organisations need to think carefully about what they are going to deliver to these candidates to keep them interested and engaged. Think of the candidates like you would consumers, they will expect regular engagement using personalised content. They will be looking for meaningful engagement.
- Plan ahead and build your employer brand ensuring you pay attention to the candidate experience during the process.
- Ensure your careers page is useful, easy to navigate and attractive.
- Find a space to easily invite your passive talent into, preferably a branded and secure environment.
- Invite talent in from various sources including employee referrals, recruiters sourcing potential candidates externally, recycling candidates from previous campaigns (your silver medallists), your careers site, advertising, job boards, recruitment events, social media and even your alumni.
- Demonstrate your brand values and provide insight into what it means to be part of your organisation, your culture, and values.
- Deliver quality personalised content and invite candidates to online and offline events.
- Ask employees to share their experiences using stories or videos.
- Engage with your candidates around conversations rather than jobs. Candidates will appreciate a human approach with the flexibility to meet their needs. They plan their careers strategically so require the time and space to learn more about you rather than focussing on specific roles.
- Allow candidates to engage on their own terms, express their interests, build profiles, and engage with content and conversations.
- Provide your candidates with access to a recruiter and employee ambassadors.
When the need arises, you will have an engaged pool of candidates to present a job opportunity to!
Benefits of a Talent Pipeline
Organisations that approach their recruitment proactively and focus on candidate centric relationship building can expect a multitude of benefits:
- Reduced time to hire
- Significantly reduces recruitment marketing spend
- Reduces dependence on external advertising and sourcing tools
- Transforms recruitment from reactive to proactive building pipelines ahead of need
- Improved positive impact on your employer brand
- Significantly reduces administrative time
- Typically converts 10-20% into hires
- Increases offer conversion rates
- Helps with ‘hard to fill’ roles
- Increases candidate satisfaction
- Builds and strengthens relationships
- Builds commitment and high levels of trust to an organisation way before offer of employment
- Attracts higher quality candidates
How can talent pipelining improve diversity?
The value of diversity and its impact on the bottom line is a well proven fact and building a talent pipeline is an excellent way to develop a strong and diverse workforce.
Many organisations are struggling to find candidates that fit their diversity requirements. Talent Pipelines give them the capacity to identify diverse prospects, target them and build a relationship with them, instead of just leaving it to chance they will come across their job postings!
Talent Pools vs Talent Pipeline – why you need both!
These terms are often used interchangeably, but there are key differences between a Talent Pool and a Talent Pipeline:
Talent Pool – A talent pool consists of a broad group of potential candidates who can be identified by characteristics such as experience, location, qualifications etc. and who expressed an interest in your organisation at some point. You can have as many talent pools as you need for example for high volume roles, you’ll have a talent pool of candidates who meet the basic skills for that role.
Talent Pipeline – Talent pipelines feed into your talent pools. A talent pipeline consists of passive candidates you are building a relationship with over time. You stay in touch with them even if you don’t need to fill a role right now, you get to know them and gain a better understanding of their needs, goals and wants.
With Hollaroo we have taken the Talent Pipeline one step further and created talent communities for members to interact with each other, providing access to recruiters and brand ambassadors.
Tools and Technologies for building a Talent Pipeline
An ATS will not provide you with a platform to build and nurture your Talent Pipeline. You will need a Talent Pipeline solution that will integrate with your ATS solution.
Hollaroo provides Community Engagement and Talent Pipelining software. We can help transform your recruitment from Reactive to Proactive enabling organisations to build and manage relationships with talent not yet ready to enter the active selection process. Our next generation CRM will help organisations address some of the issues with traditional approaches, such as being resource intensive and whether actually sending a bunch of emails is true engagement! The Hollaroo approach is much more akin to consumer relationship building that candidates would expect from a consumer grade experience.
Read some of our success stories where we have provided Talent Pipeline solutions and software to customers such as Screwfix and Veolia.
