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!

Talent is Fluid

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

If Talent is a measurement, it is also fluid as there is no real start and stop to the candidate hiring process. While the recruiting process begins when you post for the position, job seekers do not begin searching and sourcing for positions at the same time.  This is why talent is a fluid process and by creating doorways into engagement with those interested parties through a talent network, you can create a more fluid recruitment and talent process for everyone involved. 

Talent Management is defined as the “ongoing process of analyzing, developing, and effectively utilizing talent to meet business needs.” The most important part of this definition is that it is the ongoing process. Even before you post a job online you’ve already started the process. Cultivating job requirements, defining specific duties, and creating a strategy on when and where to post the job are all parts of the actual recruitment strategy. Most companies take job applications prior to opening a specific job to have an ongoing candidate resource pool.

This process should be looked at as an ongoing cycle rather than the isolated event of posting a job online. This is even more crucial when your company relies on networking and employee referral efforts that have historically resulted in hiring a higher quality of candidates. Talent acquisition starts before you post your first job. In order to higher quality candidates you must start networking and engaging in potential recruits to build a talent pool.

Creating a more fluid talent pool is essential in an economy on the rise. Finding and recruiting top talent is the #1 priority of all recruiters and hr professionals. The quality of talent is a reflection of how well the HR department tracks, trains, and recruits. If recruiters are looking to keep top talent and increase the performance of their workforce, it’s essential to understand that talent is measured beyond the traditional concept and that in order to be successful you must always be recruiting and networking with top talent.

Is your talent fluid? What are you doing to keep it more fluid in your workplace?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit.

Four Passive Candidate Recruiting Best Practices

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

How to Build an Online Recruitment Strategy

Passive candidates are the Holy Grail of recruiting not actively or publicly looking for work and are not found in traditional recruiting methods like job boards and at career fairs.  Companies can leverage these passive candidates a number of different ways including building an employer brand, using SEO, and actively targeting these passive job seekers at conferences and through social media through Twitter and more specifically hash tags. 

Building Your Talent Pool with Passive Candidates

The passive candidate recruiting process is a long-term solution to fill your candidate pipeline, not a short term one typically.  Outside of sourcing for candidates for immediate positions on social networking sites like LinkedIn and specific online communities like Overstackflow and sending an email message, the passive candidate game is a long term one. 

But not all experts and practitioners buy into the idea of the "passive candidate."  The passive candidate is found to represent almost half of the workforce after only one year of employment.  In all sense all candidates are passive and active in a constant cycle which makes it even more important to continue to build your pipeline and actively engage your job seeker pool and network.  

• ·      Blogging.  Blogging is a great way to build relationships with your passive candidate pool before they are actively looking for work.  Draft content to provide resources and help solve problems for your target candidate pool.  It could be something as simple as “5 Ways to Update Your LinkedIn Profile for the Software Engineer.”  Guest blog often on other networks and industry blogs to build relationships and reach the largest target audience possible.  Never underestimate the power of an online influencer and blogger to help you.  These experts are tapped into the industry underground and can be the key to filling your future talent pool. 
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• Employer Branding.  Before you blog or even begin executing any type of online recruiting campaign, it’s important to unify your message making sure your passive and active recruiting plan(s) of attack sync and support one another.  It’s more than surveying your candidate pool and recent hires.  Build a 18-36 month tiered strategy progressing, building, and growing your presence throughout the web.  This slow momentum helps to build a solid relationship with your candidate population giving them time to adjust and adapt to your engagement approach. 

• ·      Search Engine Optimization.  Also called SEO taps into the power of online search engines strategically placing your content, job postings, and information at the finger tips of those who are searching for it online.  Long tail keyword strategies are best allowing you to reach very specific and targeted job seekers to drive to your job listings, online talent network, or careers page. 

• ·      Using Twitter Three Ways.  Twitter is a fantastic way to engage and recruit your passive candidate pool.  Using hash tags, you can organize and search for specific communities within the Twitter framework instead of wasting energy talking to microblog collective.  These hash tags are great for events like conferences, meetings, and Twitter chats.  You can easily expert this information allowing you to research this influencers and potential candidates before you reach out to them.  You can also use Twitter to help identify your industry influencers allowing you to research, identify absorb, and learn the online players and how the specific ecosystem works.  And thirdly, having established an employment brand and reputation, once passive now active job seekers will look for you and your job openings driving applications to your ATS and talent community. 

Recruiting Best Practices for the Long Term

Passive recruiting takes time and effort.  Using these recruiting best practices can reap huge rewards.   With a little strategy, preparation and patience, you can build a reputation and establish a conversation that provides a steady flow of interested job seekers and a community that gives back lowering your cost per hire and time to fill your future open requisitions. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit.