Developing a High Quality Talent Pool

Talent pool management plays a critical role in staffing efficiency and effectiveness. Staffing organizations that report top performance for key staffing activities – including time-to-fill, offer acceptance rates and cost-per-hire – tend to develop larger candidate networks. This 19-page document details how staffing managers can effectively focus on activities that have the greatest impact on talent pool generation.

Key Topics
1. Relationship-building with candidates who are not actively seeking employment
2. Employee referral programs
3. Professional and special interest organizations
4. Return on investment analysis of candidate sources
5. Employer-of-choice reputation
6. Targeted retention strategies and skills inventories

Key Practices
1. Establish and build ongoing relationships with networks of talented passive candidates to improve the size and quality of the candidate pool.
- The Director of Recruiting and Resourcing at one company keeps her own Rolodex of names referred by other employees and maintains records from her own networking activities and calls these individuals on a monthly or quarterly basis to keep the relationship fresh and maintain a level of interest among these passive candidates.
2. Encourage employee referrals to strengthen the quality of the talent pool.
- To encourage employee referrals, benchmark partners offer different financial and non-financial rewards.
3. Create sourcing capabilities in-house and with dedicated executive search firms to identify hard-to-find top talent.
- One benchmark partner employs an hourly executive recruiter to work closely with hiring managers and the company’s executive search firm to build a pool of critical skills and managerial candidates.

Methodology
This document was created from a Best Practices, LLC consulting project.