How to keep front of mind with your talent pool

In a recent article, we shared some of the key benefits of building a tailored talent pool, from reducing cost-per-hire to improving the quality of applicants and the time-to-hire. However, once you have designed your process and started to build a pipeline of suitable candidates, you need to proactively engage and consistently keep your brand front of mind as an ideal organisation for their future career progression.

This nurturing process may last just weeks or could be a long-term strategy to keep passive candidates on-side for future opportunities. The saying goes that communication is key and through continuous drip-feeding and creative campaigns, you can nurture your talent pipeline to be ready and eager when the right role becomes available.

Take a look at our top 5 suggestions for connecting with your growing talent pool:

Build a dedicated careers site/landing page

Your talent pool strategy will include you funnelling relevant and qualified candidates into a database, but in order to capture their information and interest, you need a structured and engaging careers site. This site or landing page will act as a catalyst for other engagement initiatives, by collecting contact information in a GDPR-compliant manner so you can reach out and communicate with your audience.

The site could include information about the company, an exploration of your employee value proposition, values, and company culture, with testimonials and employee advocate case studies too. This really is the foundation for keeping in front of mind and takes your candidate attraction strategies one step further to enable nurturing. Just make sure to ask a few extra questions about their interests or career to ensure you can segment the data and make the communications experience further down the line more tailored and relevant for your audience.

Design nurturing workflows utilising email automation

Once you have captured the interest and contact information of potential applicants, you are in a position to communicate and interact. You should be able to segment your data into relevant pools and can explore automation to circulate job alerts, opportunities, employee testimonials, career stories and exciting company news. 

Just as explored in recruitment marketing, you can use techniques such as email personalisation, content links to your wider website and collateral, and visual imagery to make the emails stand out and engage with your target audience. Even if there are no relevant opportunities at present, sharing interesting information and insight is a great way to position your employer brand and keep in touch with passive candidates who have already bought into your brand.

Grow your community through events

Emails alone do not always hit the mark. As our audience grows ever tech-savvy, it can be easy to see through the simple personalisation and lose touch with brands oversharing ‘noise’ in your email inbox. Candidates want authenticity and a chance to hear from potential peers and utilising webinars and events can be a great tactic to provide a more tangible interaction with your talent pool.

These events have been successfully run for years for students and graduates, with recruitment fairs at colleges and universities driving engagement and driving great traffic through talent pipelines for years. However, more recently organisations are offering webinar Q&A sessions or small group round tables with key stakeholders within the business, so potential applicants can ask questions, experience the culture first hand, and get to know the business in greater depth before applying.

These networking opportunities only serve to make those skilled candidates in your talent pipeline more sticky and eager to work within your organisation.

Amplify your activities with social media

We all use social media as an amplification tool to highlight success, news-worthy content and share our stories with our community. You will no doubt utilise these channels for your organisation and possibly even to share upcoming vacancies, but you can also use these channels to demonstrate more about your employer brand. 

Social media is a prime place for you to showcase employee well-being activities, career success stories, and testimonials from your team. This not only helps with candidate attraction but reaffirms why your talent pool is interested and encourages them to follow you on additional channels. Utilising a more relaxed communications channel, such as social media, you will be able to engage and interact with your prospective candidate audience in a more conversational manner, sparking likes and further amplifying your content with their individual network.

Broaden your reach with employee advocates

Alongside tapping into your talent pools’ network, you also have a wealth of opportunity with your internal team. Pioneering employee advocacy not only aids candidate attraction but can promote retention too.

In its simplest form, employee advocacy is the action of employees advocating for your brand. In practice, employees can contribute in many different ways, from social media sharing to workplace testimonials and promotion through events and networking. In some organisations this may evolve organically, but having a structured approach and proactively empowering your team to advocate your brand can have an incredibly positive impact on your recruitment outreach.

Final comments

Building a tailored talent pipeline is incredibly important for recruitment across your organisation, but without continuous nurturing and engagement, your applicant pool will easily become disinterested. With the wealth of support and tools available to make great strides in candidate engagement, communication should be at the heart of your recruitment strategy.

Check out IRIS networx solutions for more information about how we can support you in managing your talent pipeline,