Building a thriving talent pipeline is the perfect way to reduce your recruiting cost and fill positions. If you want to scale and onboard hundreds of employees a year, you need an even bigger database of potential empltooyees. Today, we wanted to shed some light on building your talent pipeline with ten tips that will help you attract better candidates.
Start With A Plan
Building a talent pipeline is a great way to make recruiting easier if you are adding the right people to your pipeline. If you are recruiting a ton of software engineers, but you need sales representatives you didn’t plan correctly. Your talent pipeline needs to be filled with people who can fill your open roles. Make sure you are getting the adequate data you need from people joining your pipeline so you can align your potential candidates with your plans.
Focus On Personalization
Once you have data on members of your talent pipeline, you can use that data to create messages for those people. Have you ever found an advertisement that seemed to be made just for you on social media? That message stopped you in your tracks and made you want to learn more about that brand. You can create those same messages for potential employees by using the data you obtain about them. If you want to compete with other companies, creating personalized messages is essential.
Here are a few simple ways to use personalization:
- At career fairs, have potential candidates fill out a form to be added to your career email list. Ask simple questions like their major or their year in college when they register.
- Tag your subscribers when they click on newsletter links. For example, if you send out an email featuring a sales representative job description, tag subscribers who click on the link as interested in sales roles. As you send out more emails with job openings, your “interested in sales roles,” category will become larger. As it grows, you can begin to send out sales roles to people in the “interested in sales roles,” tag, which will increase how useful your emails are.
Revamp Your Company Career Page
When someone is interested in working at your company, they head over to your careers page. Some career pages are underutilized and sparse, while some career pages make a statement. We all start somewhere, so take a look at your current career page and see how you can revamp it in 2020.
Here are some ideas to refresh your career page:
- A day in the life of some of your typical roles.
- Videos featuring some of your employees.
- Detailed breakdowns of your benefits and payment structures.
- Quotes from employees.
- Awards you’ve won.
- A showcase of your brand mission statement, values, beliefs, etc.
- A letter or video from your CEO or board members.
Your career page should be more content-heavy than you think. You want to make an impression and make potential candidates excited to see your job openings.
Find New Places To Recruit Talent
It can be challenging to build your talent pipeline if you are recruiting in the same spaces year after year. You may have legacy schools or events you like to attend every year, but it’s essential to understand if those places are serving you.
Get clear about how many employees you are gaining from where you usually recruit. How much time does your team spend preparing to visit those places? Where are you finding the most success? Stick with those places and explore other ways to recruit talent.
Encourage Employees To Refer People In Their Network
Your employees are your best employer brand advocates, but they can also be your biggest hurdle if you aren’t careful. Your employees should love to work at your company because if they don’t, it will be challenging to find new employees. Encourage your employees to tap into their network and refer candidates. If your employees are not referring you to their network, you might have a problem. Listen to employee issues, educate, and make changes so you can build your talent pipeline passively.
Create A Central Location For Your Pipeline
It’s hard to build an effective talent pipeline in bits and pieces. If half of your talent pipeline is in an Excel spreadsheet while the other is in the cloud, you won’t be able to manage your recruiting efforts effectively. It’s important to encourage or mandate that recruiters move potential talent to your database promptly. Any leads that come passively should be automatically added to your centralized talent pipeline. When your pipeline is centralized, it helps everyone. All of your employees can hire more effectively when you create a place that everyone can access and add to.
Build A Great Place To Work
One of the best ways to build a talent pipeline is to create a great place to work. When people recognize your company as one of the best places to work in your area, your talent pipeline will build itself. Working on your company culture and employer branding will help you build a company that is the talk of the town. Overall, you want to create an engaging company that your employees are excited to rave about wherever they are.
Make It Easier To Opt-In To Your Pipeline
You may feel the need to vet every employee who gets added to your pipeline, but this can become time-consuming for your recruiters. You don’t have to talk to everyone interested in getting career updates from you. Instead, have opt-in forms for your pipeline on your career page. Share those opt-in opportunities on social media so your followers can get career updates from your company. When potential employees know about your career emails or database, they have a better chance to opt into it.
Keep An Eye On Your Reputation
Your reputation impacts your talent pipeline. While your career site is a fantastic resource for potential employees, this is not the only place people look. Potential employees look at a wide range of employee and customer reviews. Take a look at your social media and review sites like Glassdoor to see what’s out there about you right now. Looking at reviews is the best way to understand your reputation and keep an eye on it as you grow.
Don’t Neglect Your Internal Talent Pool
Last, but not least, don’t neglect your internal talent pool. While outside talent is fantastic, you could also reward your current employees with raises and promotions. If you have a new content manager position open, you should look at your current content specialists first. Make sure you are connecting with your internal talent and giving them first dibs on new job openings.
Conclusion
Now that you have the tips you need to attract potential candidates, it’s time to put this into action. Here are some suggestions for getting started and building your talent pipeline:
- Create your recruiting action plan: If you want to build a pipeline that helps you fill open positions, you need to create an action plan first. Get clear on which positions are opening up based on growth and your employee turnover rate.
- Clean up your current pipeline systems: Having a centralized system will help everyone use your pipeline effectively. If your potential candidates’ information is housed in ten different locations, it creates unnecessary challenges.
- Start producing content that resonates with your candidates: Stellar career content will help you stand out and attract new potential employees to your company.