Your talent pool is never be too large if you have the right tools to manage it!

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

A few weeks ago, a participant to the Bersin/Deloitte Impact Conference wondered how she could make sure that her talent pool would only include qualified passive candidates? TalentCircles helps you to address this question optimally and define what's best for you.

Think twice about what a "qualified" passive candidate might be.

If the candidate is passive, this means that you may not have a job for her right away. Consequently also, it may be difficult to say whether or not this candidate is "qualified." So you may not want to apply to passive candidates the same criteria you apply to candidates who actively apply for a job.

If you want to attract passive candidates, remain open-minded. As a rule, an exclusionary strategy may make you miss lots of people with potentially interesting skills in a variety of business units and you will fall into the same predicament as what you experience today with too few passive candidates!

So the question becomes: how to make sure not to be overwhelmed by a large talent pool. TalentCircles gives you the ability to evaluate your talent pool along multiple filtering criteria, including:

• Job matching
• Questionnaires, which can be public or private
• Circles, which can be public, private or confidential
• Mass and individual tagging

Job matching

This feature is extremely powerful. Whether or not you have segmented your talent pool in circles, tagged candidates or selected them through questionnaires, the job matching capabilities will tell you immediately who in your candidate pool has a profile corresponding to the job you are trying to fill with the match percentage. You can also adjust the job matching criteria at your convenience on the fly.

Mass and individual tagging

You can tag any individual candidate, as well as bulk-tag candidates. All the candidates you have tagged will show in any search using that tag. You can connect and engage with these candidates at your convenience (alert them on any type of news, event, invite them for video interviews, webinars, etc.)

Questionnaires

Questionnaires, sometimes called pre-recorded interviews, allow you to filter out the candidates you attract. These questionnaires can contain as many questions as you wish and these questions can call for video responses, text only or multi-choices (with one or several valid choices). You can score all the responses. Questionnaires can be posted on public social networks, sent to a selection of candidates or posted in circles. In the event that questionnaires are posted in public, do not worry if you get hundreds of responses: TalentCircles allows you to sort candidates by scores.

Circles

When candidates opt into your network, they can subscribe to one or several public circles of interest that you have defined and where you engage people on topics that are of interest to them. For example, a candidate can belong to both a military circle and a sales circle. Each time, you will post a job, a blog post, an event, questionnaires or new documents related to this circles these candidates will be notified automatically.

Not all the candidates in public circles will be equally interesting to you. So you can run a search on candidates that are of special interest to you and invite them into a private circle that only these candidates will see.

There may be candidates that are of very special interest to you and whom you want to particularly pamper without letting them know how valuable they may be to you. You can make a search and assign these candidates into your confidential circle.

Of course, if you want to reduce the size of your talent pool, you can also decide to accept people upon invitation only.

Managing a large talent pool is easy when your talent acquisition platform is designed to do so!