As we enter recession, the candidate market has changed once again. Job searches are booming, there are plenty of qualified candidates available and it’s likely you’ll see an increased number of applicants for your vacancies.
While this is good news if your company is currently hiring, an active candidate market can make it tougher to choose the right applicant from such a great selection. It’s likely that you’ll be left with a lot of talented candidates that you’d love to hire but don’t have the positions available at this point in time.
It’s important for companies looking to lower their recruitment costs to keep a record of these applicants, just in case other suitable opportunities arise in the future. Just think, if you already have a pool of talented candidates to choose from, it’s likely you’ll be able to make a hire quicker. This also saves you having to pay advertising costs or any recruitment agency fees.
The best way of doing this is by having an effective talent pool management system in place which will allow you to easily build, nurture and search pools of qualified candidates for future opportunities.
However, suddenly dealing with a large amount of candidates in your talent pool can be daunting so we have put together some top tips to help you structure and manage your candidate data.
1. Build in-depth candidate profiles
Build your candidate profiles with as much information as possible; this could include comments left by your team following an interview for a previous role, details of their salary requirements, desired job role or anything else which relates directly to the candidate that will help you assess their suitability for future vacancies within your company.
This is particularly important if you are dealing with a high volume of applicants as you are less likely to remember smaller details about individual candidates, their requirements and their suitability.
2. Structure your data so it’s easy to search
To locate the right candidates in your talent pool when performing a search, you need to make sure that their profiles are structured in a way that allows you to identify key skills and qualifications.
CV parsing software can help with this as it identifies key terms within applications. Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) should also help you to do this. For example, Webrecruit ATS allows you to tag candidates with specific qualities that will help your searches in the future.
Just make sure that you set up a tagging structure that will work for your company; whether it’s tagging candidates by professional background, skill, qualification or assigning a score. This will make it much easier when you perform searches as it will allow you to locate candidates with exactly the attributes you’re looking for.
3. Create saved searches
Saving your talent pool search criteria can be a huge time saver, especially if there’s a specific type of role that you regularly recruit for or if you have a particularly defined set of criteria.
Running a saved search will allow you to view all relevant candidates in seconds and help you to quickly identify any new candidates who have entered your talent pool since your last search.
4. Set data deletion rules
When storing candidate data in your talent pool, you need an easy way of maintaining compliance with data protection regulations, such as GDPR.
This means being able to easily identify all the information held on a candidate, should they want their data deleted. By using talent pool management functionality within an ATS, all candidate data is stored in one place and can be deleted easily, upon a candidate’s request.
You can also set automated data deletion cycles to ensure that you aren’t holding candidate data any longer than is deemed necessary. For example, is the candidate who applied for an entry level role with your company five years ago likely to still be available?
Maintaining a high quality (and legally compliant) talent pool is vital. Set your candidate data to be deleted after an allotted period of time – this could be two years, four years or whatever timescale is appropriate for your business. Then let your software take care of the rest.
Looking for some assistance with building and managing your talent pool? Book a demo of Webrecruit ATS.
