9 strategies to build a reliable talent pipeline | Freshteam

Key strategies in building a talent pipeline 

1. Amplify sourcing 

When the business grows rapidly, so do hiring needs. This demands that you also amplify your candidate sourcing efforts – exploring new channels, expanding recruitment marketing efforts in the channels which are currently working for you, equipping your team for new hiring goals, and so on. 

One critical challenge at this stage would be efficiently handling multiple channels. An ATS can help you ramp up your candidate sourcing efforts and set you up for hiring success.

2. Leverage employee referrals 

One of the fastest ways to build your talent pipeline is by tapping into employee referrals. It’s no news that referrals are faster to hire, perform well and stay longer in the company.

The success of an employee referral process depends entirely on its execution. Choosing smart employee referral software, picking the right rewards, and internally marketing the program is crucial for the program’s success. The following are some ideas to amp up your employee referral process:

• Enable your employees to promote jobs – create and provide them collateral to share with their friends or family they intend to refer.

• Organize a referral hour and float specific questions and have them answer them. Example: Who is the best developer you have worked with?  

• Choose tools that make it easy for employees to refer and track the status of their referrals without recruiter intervention.

• Fast-track the hiring process for referrals – this might show that you are actively considering and recruiting referred candidates.

• Have a flexible reward system. Give your top referrers reward options to choose from.

• Put up posters of the reward in places where employees would notice them often.

3. Personalize experiences for candidates 

After putting in plenty of effort and finding the right candidates, why lose them to poor boring outreach messages/emails? Personalize your outreach messages. Keep them creative, thoughtful, and candidate-focused. If possible paint a vivid picture of what it would be like to work in the role at your company. Show them how their presence and contributions can make a difference to their team or the company.

Open with a great subject line and type out an email/message that piques their interest and spikes their dopamine. 

This is not hard to achieve. With the help of the right hiring tools, you can automate personalized communication to be sent out to candidates. You can build a library of reusable, canned creative responses that improve the effectiveness of your communication, improve response rates and hone the overall candidate experience.

4. Invest in the right tools

Everyday operational efficiency, growth, and success in a competitive market are a distant blur without the right hiring tools. 

Juggling hundreds of job boards, following up with candidates one after another, manually scheduling interviews, sprinting between color-coded spreadsheets – the point being, recruiters always have their hands full with mundane tasks without the right solution. 

Smart hiring tools can help recruiters streamline the process, take control of it, plan their hiring approach, and execute it effortlessly. This releases time and resources for other strategic initiatives and innovations.

For example, while scheduling interviews, notifying and following up with the people concerned (candidates, interviewers, hiring managers, etc) can take up a huge chunk of your recruiter’s time.. But with Freshteam’s recruitment automation, you can simply automate it.

Reduce up to 80% of the recruiter’s burden with Freshteam  ATS. Signup now.

5. Proactive recruiting 

Don’t wait until the hiring managers hand out requisitions. Be recruiting always. Proactive recruiting helps build a robust talent pipeline. It’s a sturdy way of finding and nurturing high-quality passive candidates. 

During reactive recruiting, you are racing against time to find candidates and rely heavily on candidates responding to your job ads. But proactive recruiting gives you the luxury of exploring niche channels and finding top candidates who are already doing amazing work at another company (and not actively looking for a job).

The success of passive recruiting relies on an engaging candidate nurture journey. Add them to a talent pool, engage with them and build a relationship with them. When the right roles open up, you can invite them to pursue a career with you.
 

6. Involve your hiring managers

Talk to your hiring managers from time to time to get their input and check if you are on the same page as them. You could ask them for ideas on ideal sourcing channels for the given persona, quick screening questions to find the right candidates, and so on.

Meanwhile, you can also show them if there are better ways to do things, tell them if some criteria have to be relaxed or tightened, and share any wisdom you picked up from hiring managers who have succeeded at hiring for similar roles.

This is a perfect way to fill your talent pipeline with candidates who are most likely to be hired.

7. Offline recruiting

Online recruiting is fast, necessary, and probably makes up at least 60-80% of your recruiting strategy. But offline recruiting is powerful and can help you reap the benefits of professional networking in the long run.

Attending job-specific or industry-specific meetups, and hosting events such as hackathons, can help you meet candidates personally and get to know them. If you genuinely invest in nurturing these relationships, you could even source referrals from this network. This is the most organic way of building a sustainable talent pipeline.

When you host events, you get a chance to watch them in action and learn about them in a way that you could have otherwise never had. Another good hack would be to involve a larger and more fierce networking team (hiring managers/employees) who can make quick connections, assess their potential, and leave an impression on prospective candidates.

8. Employer branding

Candidates respond to companies they have heard about, and companies that they are inspired by. Without employer branding, that’s very unlikely to happen. A job description alone is not going to bring in great candidates for you. 

You have to share your story, show your values, showcase your achievements and then invite others to be a part of your story – that’s what selling your employer brand looks like. Setting up an attractive career site can be your first step.

There are many ways to build and promote a striking employer brand, but the foundation for it is being an amazing employer for real. Start with engagement surveys to help you understand how your employees feel about working for you. Act on the feedback and findings.  Happy employees will inevitably talk!

Make sure you enable them to share their stories, opinions, and experiences with the outer world. Encourage them to leave reviews on sites like Glassdoor, share culture stories on their social handles and refer candidates actively when referral drives happen.

9. Creative and persuasive follow-ups

Not all great candidates may respond to your very first message or email. Creative follow-ups can help you tap into a new stream of potential candidates. You could also experiment with the timing (day of the week, and hour of the day) and frequency of your emails to identify response trends that might favor you. 

If you are connected on LinkedIn or other social networking platforms, you could use opportunities such as birthdays, anniversaries, or achievements to congratulate and connect with them.