Recruiting Framework Step 1: Build Your Talent Pipeline
This is Step 1 in a 5-part series on building and managing your pragmatic recruiting framework. You can view an overview of all five parts in this Intro to the Process.
Step 1: Build Your Talent Pipeline
Hiring Is A Competition
Think about it. As the candidate, you are competing against the other applicants to win the job. As the employer, you are competing against other companies to first draw the eye of the candidate, then have the most impressive Glassdoor/Facebook/Google Reviews/etc, then convince them to apply, AND offer a signing package that is agreeable for you both. Add in the distractions that your competitors are offering like ping-pong tables, unlimited PTO, and dogs at work. The bottom line is, competing for candidates can be extremely tough.
Just how tough are we talking? 80 percent of tech hiring managers have “high levels of concern about a talent gap in technology and engineering.” Now you need to be the most desirable option within a limited labor pool. Yikes.
To improve your odds of winning the competition for the BEST-FIT talent, you need to increase your pool of qualified candidates from the start. Makes sense, right? With a skilled labor shortage, especially in certain technical spaces, this sounds like a Catch-22. But believe us when we say you can create a healthy pipeline of qualified candidates to vet regardless of the shifts in the market or the apparent technical talent shortage.
We’ll explain everything you need to know to get started building your talent pipeline below.
What Is a Talent Pipeline?
A talent pipeline is the pool of qualified candidates who desire to fill a position at your company. This can be an entirely new role or a vacant position due to an employee's resignation, termination, promotion, etc.
Your talent pipeline strategy can include both internal and external candidates.
Before you begin, examine your internal talent pool. Is there an opportunity for an individual and the organization to mutually benefit from an employee transition — either promoting from within or making a lateral role transition for a more valuable skills-fit? If this is the case, you can either transition the employee and re-prioritize your recruiting efforts to fill their old role, or you can ask them to apply for the role and vet them through the same recruitment process as the external candidates. External talent simply is any qualified candidate who comes from outside of your company.
Why Do You Need a Talent Pipeline?
A healthy talent pipeline strategy is critical to running an effective recruiting process. What’s the risk of not building and maintaining your pipeline? When you DO need to add a new employee, your placement time will be significantly longer while your competitors who have a full pipeline have already started setting their phone screenings the same day.
Being proactive rather than reactive will save you more than time as an open seat in your organization can cause various negative downstream effects. With a strong talent pipeline, your organization can vet qualified candidates more quickly, shortening the recruitment cycle, demanding less of your teams’ productivity, and ultimately filling money-making roles faster.
It doesn’t matter what industry you are in or how happy you think your employees are; turnover is inevitable. According to a 2019 study by ADP, the national average for turnover is 3.2% per month. And if your employee demographic skews on the younger side – as most tech and startup companies do – then you should expect a much greater turnover rate. On average, 8% of employees 25 or younger turn over every month. Even if your team appears at capacity, always continue to feed the talent pipeline. You never know when you’ll need to tap into it.
How Do You Fill Your Talent Pipeline?
But how do you actually engage and attract candidates for an open role? What tools and strategies do you really need?
Ideally, your talent pipeline framework should use a mix of three standard strategies —
1. Active Prospecting and Recruiting
2. Employee Referrals
3. Passive Job Postings and Advertisements
The type of position will determine the weight of each tactic. Each strategy is explained below with some context around roles that rely heavily on that strategy.
1. Active Recruiting & Prospecting
Active recruiting and prospecting, or outbound lead generation, is about creating human connections. If you think one LinkedIn InMail or equivalent touchpoint will fill your talent pipeline, we’re sorry to inform you that your perception is a bit naive and shortsighted. Instead, you should focus on building a long-term network of people who would like to work with you. In a tight labor market, the best candidates are rarely unemployed. But, “73 percent of job candidates are passive job seekers,” and you’d be surprised how often they’re willing to hear about intriguing job opportunities while they’re satisfactorily employed.
Active prospecting and recruiting require the most time and resources for a company, but it’s often necessary to engage the right talent.
Typically, the more experience, technical, or niche skills required, the more active your recruitment needs to identify and attract the right talent. It’s a simple case of supply and demand. There are just fewer senior leaders or highly experienced candidates than entry-level talent.
The largest source of candidates for professional role placements is LinkedIn. The social media network enables you to filter potential candidates by location, skills, company, experience, and more. Of course, LinkedIn isn’t the only pool of potential job seekers. You should actively browse other job sites, meetup groups, and other digital mediums to find candidates.
Not everyone you reach out to will be the right fit, but that doesn’t mean engaging them was not worthwhile. They may be a better fit for a position down the road. Or they may know someone in their field who is looking for a position and is a good fit. Positive interactions in the market contribute to your “employer brand” - your reputation as an employer among job seekers, employees, and other key stakeholders.
Large companies with full-service recruiting teams or a dedicated TA function often execute active recruiting and prospecting in-house. However, smaller organizations usually recruit for roles as needed and don’t have the resources to engage their pipeline proactively. If you don’t have an internal recruiting team nor the capacity to take on this strategy yourself, you can use an outside recruitment consultancy to support your needs. If you choose to bring on a hiring partner, you will get the best results by hiring someone with strong experience in your industry and a record of hitting relevant hiring goals.
Example experience: If you’re a tech startup that recently raised funds and you are now looking to double your headcount rapidly, look for a recruiting partner who has experience working across multiple skillets in early-stage, high-growth businesses.
2. Employee Referrals
One of the hardest things about hiring new employees is projecting their job performance and synergy with your team. Even if they’re perfect on paper, it’s impossible to know what it’s like to work with them until, well, you’ve actually worked with them.
The closest experience to your own is a referral from your trusted network of colleagues and friends, or best of all, from a high-performance employee. Most of your employees have worked at another company or have a network from their college or certification programs. Everyone has met talented people at some point in their lives. These talented people should be a channel you tap to fill your talent pipeline.
Why would an employee make a referral? Perhaps they want to work with their personal connections or commit to strengthening the collective team talent. But for most people, that is not enough incentive to actively email or how conversations with their networks.
If you want to double down on this strategy, you can reward your employee per each candidate they refer who gets hired. To effectively run your employee referral program, your team must be aware and kept up to date on the talent needs of the business. Separately, a positive candidate experience is essential. Word of one bad experience can discourage an employee who had made a previous referral not to do so again. Offering a cash bonus to incentive your employees to engage in the recruiting process is typically cheaper than the expense of exhaustive recruitment efforts and ads without placements, and it improves the happiness of your existing employees, increasing the likelihood of their retention.
3. Passive Job Postings & Advertisements
Instead of approaching potential candidates directly, another effective tactic has active job seekers do the work to find a company and its openings.
Companies have two main tactics for posting job openings at the highest level: advertise on their own careers pages and/or on job board websites. For the best results, organizations should leverage both tactics as much as possible.
The first is straightforward: All companies hiring (or planning to hire) should have a careers section on their website where they detail reasons to work for the company and list their current job openings. People who visit this page can be some of the best candidates – they sought out the company intentionally, for any number of reasons, and want to work there.
Many modern applicant tracking systems (or ATS) offer this functionality as part of their offerings. In many cases, implementing an ATS is the most effective way to advertise your jobs and collect, organize, and update the candidate information.
The tactic is still fairly straightforward; there are just many more options. LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, and others offer jobs for all industries, levels, and locations. There are more niche sites: Ladders is only for jobs paying $100,000 or more; BuiltIn is for tech and startup jobs.
Recruiters must write job descriptions in an optimized way for job seekers and encourage them to apply. Job board websites also offer different options for getting a job posting in front of more candidates. For some positions, just posting a job to a handful of job boards will bring in numerous qualified candidates. More specific resources or more targeted advertising will have to be used to build a healthy talent pipeline for harder-to-fill positions.
What Talent Pipeline KPIs Should You Track?
Building and maintaining your talent pipeline framework is a lot of work, so it’s essential to measure if your efforts are successful. You should establish basic metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure what’s working and what's not.
What KPIs are right for you? The exact KPIs will depend on how you plan to recruit and what industry you are in. But three basic metrics every company can consider when analyzing their talent pipeline are 1. Source of Hire 2. Candidate Conversion Rate 3. Time to Fill.
Source of Hire: What percentage of your hires comes from each hiring source (i.e., Glassdoor, recruiting agency X, employee referrals, etc.). Tracking this metric gives you the data to measure the effectiveness and ultimately ROI of each of their channels. With this metric, you can adjust future budgets and hiring efforts accordingly.
Source of Hire % = (# of Source Placements/Total # of Hires) x 100
Candidate Conversion Rate: Measure the percentage of candidates who move from one stage of the pipeline to the next. Each stage of your pipeline should map to your process.
Sample Metric: % of candidates messaged on LinkedIn who engage with the recruiter.
Sample Metric: % of phone interview candidates who progress to an onsiteHow can you apply the conversion rate data to your process?
You can forecast how many candidates are needed to have a healthy talent pipeline.
You can test execution tactics and adjust them to improve success at each stage of the funnel.
Candidate Conversation Rate % = (# of Candidates at Stage 1/# of Candidates at Stage 2) * 100
Time to Fill: The goal of your talent pipeline is to minimize the time it takes to fill an open position. If your time to fill is too slow, break down how long it takes at each stage of the recruiting process. Often, there are bottlenecks at certain points that can speed up the hiring process drastically when alleviated.
Time to Fill = # of Days from Job Listing to Candidate Acceptance
In Conclusion
You will find yourself with a job opening to fill at some point. Be proactive by building your talent pipeline strategy. Use the right mix of strategies for your role. Measure what’s working and what’s not as you go. Engage with qualified talent quickly to minimize the risk of unfilled roles and keep your business moving forward.
If you have questions or concerns about building your talent pipeline framework, you can contact our team. We can answer your questions or grab the reigns and manage your process. We will combat lengthy openings by building a stable of qualified talent for all potential positions and actively and passively pursue new candidates when a position does open up. HirexHire is here to help.
