6 Steps to Create a Thriving Candidate Pool

One of the challenges tech recruiters face is finding the ideal candidate quickly. You may receive hundreds of applications for every job posting but picking up the right talent is a tough nut to crack. There can be multiple reasons for this, but a major one is the absence of a succession plan.

Screening all the resumes can take days, and you may still need help onboarding the perfect candidate. However, building a candidate pool can accelerate hiring and ensure you hire engineers within a week or so.

So, how to build a talent pool of developers? Identifying and developing future talent may sound like a painstaking process, but it isn’t so difficult. We will walk you through six steps to build a robust candidate pool that will reduce recruiting time and improve the quality of your hire. Before that, let's understand what a candidate pool is and why every business must build it.

A candidate or talent pool is a database of candidate profiles who meet the job criteria and express interest in working with your organization. These are usually candidates who had applied earlier but failed to clear the final interview rounds or didn’t have the profile needed for the job requirement. They can also be passive candidates or former employees.

A hiring pool is a group of candidates who apply for an open position. It consists of a talent pool, an applicant pool, and a candidate pool. Let's understand these terms.

A talent pool is a list of workers who can fill an open position in the near future and the long run. The job seekers included in the database can be candidates who have previously expressed interest or meet the job requirements. A talent pool serves as a source of potential employees.

When people from the talent pool apply for the job, they move to the application pool. The application pool has been growing due to online job postings, making it challenging for hiring managers to find the right candidate. Multiple factors impact an applicant pool's size- qualification, experience, compensation, job location, etc.

Shortlisted applicants are moved to the candidate pool, which becomes a database for hiring future candidates. Every organization must build a strong candidate pool to hire the best talents.

Building a candidate pool helps you reduce the recruitment time for future hires. However, there are a few other benefits, such as the following: -

A pool of candidates significantly reduces the recruitment cost since you don't have to publish job advertisements. Most job sites charge a hefty amount for job postings. You can save that by simply having a database of potential employees. Moreover, when you have a solid candidate pool, you can hire the right employee in less time, reducing overall hiring expenses.

Sourcing developers is an essential part of the hiring process. It is time-consuming, but you can’t avoid it. Finding suitable candidates on job sites and other platforms takes a few days, if not weeks. A database of talented candidates can help reduce the hiring time because you have a list of pre-vetted developers ready for hire.

Finding candidates with particular skill sets takes work. When it comes to hiring software engineers, it’s more challenging, as talented candidates are highly in demand, and companies continuously compete to hire them.

Moreover, the need for candidates with specific skills is always high. This is because every company prioritizing those skill sets will want to hire the candidate that has them. Having a database of qualified candidates at your disposal can quickly help avoid this competition.

For example, almost every company is looking for data scientists, machine learning engineers, and cloud engineers, but finding skilled candidates for these roles takes time and effort. Hiring these professionals becomes easier with a candidate pool, as you already have a list of qualified talent.

Instead of competing with other organizations, you can simply start interviewing candidates from your database and hire an ideal one effortlessly.

Top developers are always in demand, and you can only hire them after some time. Building a long-term recruitment strategy is indispensable for every business as it helps you hire the best talent whenever you need new engineers. Candidate pooling is an excellent way to establish such a strategy, as it offers a continuous supply of the best brains in the industry.

A candidate pool can also help you identify strong candidates before there is an open position in your company. Once there is a requirement, you can approach them and schedule an interview quickly.

Creating and maintaining an organized database of robust candidates enables you to hire high-quality talent, even if you hire them within a short duration.

Technologies are evolving daily, and so are business requirements. As a recruiter, you must analyze the future necessities and identify the human resource required for them. It helps you create a database of candidates with the right skills and relevant experience.

Identifying the skills that will be in demand soon enables you to build a candidate pool for future hires. Besides that, assessing your company's current talent will also help you identify skill gaps and help you recognize the skills you should look for in a candidate and build a talent pool accordingly.

Sourcing suitable candidates depend mainly on your job description. With compelling job descriptions, you can attract the right talent for your open roles and build a candidate pool. These descriptions act as checklists for developers to determine whether they should apply. It also helps them analyze if they have the right skill and experience for the job.

So, how can you create an attractive job description?

Mention the skills you want your potential employee to have and list the must-have, nice-to-have skills and how much experience the role requires. Doing so will significantly decrease the number of unqualified applicants. The job description should contain components like job title, duties and responsibilities, compensation, and other perks.

Posting job advertisements on relevant platforms is essential to sourcing applicants and building a candidate pool. Once you create a job description, you should publish it on suitable media to attract talented candidates. But where should you post your job advertisement?

You can start with your company's career page and top job boards like Glassdoor, Careerbuilder, Indeed, etc. Besides that, post it on different social media platforms. LinkedIn is one of the most used platforms by job seekers, so make sure to publish your job requirement on this channel.

Once you post your job advertisement, you may receive hundreds of applications, and it’s key to acknowledge each one. It might be impossible to do manually, but you can use an applicant tracking system (ATS).

Workable, Greenhouse, Taleo, and Lever are some of the top ATS you can use. Utilize your applicant tracking system (ATS) to send an automated response to every applicant. Thank them for the application and inform them about the next steps.

Whether you select or reject candidates, you must respond to them if you commit to getting back within a stipulated time. Once you choose an applicant for your candidate pool, try directly engaging with them and responding at every stage. This helps to build your reputation as a good employer.

It is crucial to build a talent pool for your future hire. When recruiting highly skilled software engineers, looking for the necessary skills in the first stage of the recruitment process helps save time. It also lets you focus on candidates with all the essential skills. Look at the resumes to quickly prepare the initial list of candidates based on their skills and experience.

Moving forward, you will need to identify the best-suited candidates for your business and disqualify the unsuitable ones during screening. Remember, while hiring developers, you should assess their technical skills. It can include reviewing their Github account, live coding interviews, and programming tests. Doing so will help you build a pool of candidates with strong technical skills that will yield high-quality talent for the future.

Targeting talented students and fresh graduates is a great way to build a candidate pool for future hires of your organization. Many companies arrange internship programs to spot highly-skilled graduates and engineering students. It's a way to know if the candidate will be a right fit for your organization. Many graduates actively look for such opportunities once they finish their education.

Successful businesses are those that think about the future and prepare accordingly. A candidate pool should be part of your company’s future planning as it helps you swiftly hire the most suitable talent.

However, building a pool of experienced and talented developers involves sourcing and vetting. It includes creating and posting job ads on proper channels and screening resumes to shortlist candidates. Here, vetting plays a key role but stretches out the overall duration of hiring your desired candidate.

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