Creative Hacks to Keep Your Talent Pool Full

by Raghu Nandhan | Jun 22, 2020 | Blog, Talent Acquisition

It’s important to keep your talent pool full of high-quality candidates as being a leader you wish to grow your company or your team. Also, you never know when people might leave your organization suddenly for some reason.But being prepared would definitely help as you would not want to waste 3-4 months for your next hire.Engaging top talent will shorten your recruitment cycle and is a good way to stay ahead in the fierce combat for talent.

Building a robust talent pool might seem difficult to accomplish, but with little bit of your continuous efforts, it’s easy enough and the results will surely be worth doing it. Make it a part of your routine, reserve time slots in your calendar and make it a point to meet new people within your industry.

Here are four hacks for you to build up your talent pipeline and foster your relationships with passive candidates:

Leverage Your Networks

Collegiate and other professional collaborations can be a great way to fill your talent pipeline. These affiliations will open doors to intellectual discussions and help you build relationships, as you already have something in common. Don’t limit this to just your own network, make sure your team is also on look out within their own networks. Setting up great referral program is best way to make it worth it.

Direct Outreaching

Use social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter to target some of your top prospects. For higher-level or technical position, many of the candidates will have their presences on LinkedIn and GitHub for sure. Upgrade your LinkedIn account and connect to relevant groups, this will allow you to send in-mails or have access to their contact information. However, avoid the hard-selling part and instead consider sharing an interesting article or ask them a question. This will open the lines of communication and you can further engage them about open opportunities at your organization.

Personalized Messaging

Rather than tormenting prospects relentlessly through labour-intensive conversations, try to stay on top of their mind. Have a real reason to reach out to someone – for example, you can send an article that reminded you of a conversation or a work anniversary congratulations message. Encourage your team also to brand themselves and personalize their messages.

Host Events to Engage your local industry to find passive candidates.

Best way to develop strategy to build your talent pool is to engage them on a personal and genuine level. You can consider organizing happy hours or open house and invite your area professionals into your organization and publicize the event by using social media platforms and a curated email list. Other great events that can be considered to attract talent might include inviting speakers, hack-a-thons and other industry meetups. These events will allow others to get a peep into your company and its culture. Also, do not forget to do your research on the attendees so that you can introduce them to the right people within your organization. Also encourage your team mates to attend the event.

Final Thoughts

Consider your talent pipeline a community, not just a database. Put continuous efforts to keep your pipeline warm and deliver what you promise. Building talent pipeline for your hiring needs might seem of obvious importance but, with so many priorities on your plate, it is easy to run out of time and you may forget to keep in touch. To avoid this send yourself calendar reminders to stay connected.

Create one “source of truth” to keep your all your teammates on the same page. Use it to keep track of your metrics over time, so you can be sure that your efforts are producing results and never sacrifice speed for quality.

Bad Recruiting Habits You Should Break Immediately

by Raghu Nandhan | Jun 5, 2020 | Blog, Talent Acquisition

Everyone fall prey of bad habits like few people are too addicted to their phones and check it too many times in a day or some just can’t resist chewing their nails. It’s easy to develop wrong habits and you won’t even realize you have one unless someone put the spotlight on your habits.

Hiring managers and recruiters can also easily all into a few bad habits amidst continuous pressure and challenge to find great talent. And you might not even realize that your behaviors are negatively impacting business. It’s time to raise awareness and make a change. The faster you take control of your recruiting and hiring habits the better it is.

Let’s start by identifying most common bad hiring habits that are likely to stop you from finding the right person for your team:

Lack of Organization

When things are not organized at your workplace you will forget to do important things like follow up with the potential candidates. But following up is the key to ensure that candidates feel important and are on the same page as you of the hiring process. Not following up on right time will result in poor candidate experience and you might also loose best candidates in the market to another job offer.

Weighting one factor above all others

If you have a habit of considering one factor above all, then you’re definitely going to end up making some poor and potentially biased decisions. This will limit your decision to be driven by a single hiring factor, leading you to ignore other major factors that could be telling you a lot about your candidates. Evaluating each candidate in a holistic way is not a good habit. Remember that skills can be learned, personality can’t.

Copy Pasting Job Postings

Many recruiting managers have the habit of using a same template for all the job postings over and over again. Never forget that job postings are a form of sales pitch which needs to be perfect because you need to sell the job to the candidate. Job postings should be crafted in a persuasive manner and contain high quality content. Make sure the job posting highlights exactly what is in it for prospective job candidates.

Making false promises to lure great candidates

Recruiters go through tough times when they don’t find enough candidates, but making false promises to fill your pipeline isn’t a good way. If you are not fully honest with the candidates about the job opening, they will drop out of the hiring process. Even if you end up filling positions based on empty promises you will definitely see a dip in employee retention resulting in high turnover costs.

There are a lot of ways to boost your sourcing tactics to attract great candidates but manipulating a candidate to accept a role will bring you back to square one to find someone to fill that same position after you discover the candidate is not the right fit.

Failing to Stay Up-To-Date with Technology

Modern technology keeps changing quickly. It’s important to keep yourself updated with the latest trends to make sure that you know all the possible ways to recruit and contact your next great hire. Also don’t consider technology as your competition, it can help you reduce a lot of your tasks and save time. Automation can help you organize your hiring process and can improve your hiring decisions.

Closing Thoughts

Leaving bad habits isn’t easy, but realizing and denoting time to address them can help you improve. Bad habits impact your ability to hire top talent directly and it reflects poorly on your company as a whole and brings down your employer brand. Have a crystal-clear picture of whom you want to hire or else it’s will be extra difficult to find them.