Talent pools at hand

Many recruiters miss out on the talent pools that are closest to them.

The Full Pool Sourcing Method addresses all talent pools at hand.

This includes:

1. The company’s current employee base
2. All candidates within the ATS
3. External candidate sources

1. Current employee base

The current employee base of a company is one of the most underutilized sources of talent. 

Most companies do not include checking the current employee base as a fixed step in the sourcing cycle.

In many cases employees are looking for a new role. In some cases to gain more experience and in other cases because they are unhappy in their current role.

If not timely addressed you risk losing these employees to other companies.

By including the existing employee talent pool in your search you can address accessible talent that already has a connection with the company.

Own employees are very accessible, you are sure you can reach them since they are included in all corporate communication channels. In addition there is a lot of information available about them in terms of their interests and performance.

Employees moving from one role to another in the same company is also referred to as internal mobility.

Especially in large companies internal mobility can be an important way of filling positions since the employee base is large enough to shift job positions.

2. Candidates in the ATS

The Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is full of candidates who have shown interest in the company in some way.

Some might have submitted an open application, some might have applied to a job but didn’t get the job and others abandoned the application process for other reasons.

In any case these candidates can still be matching the new job the recruiter is sourcing for.

The challenge with candidates from the ATS is that candidate information can be missing because profile data and touchpoints with the candidates are not recorded very well.

Enriching candidate information with tools can solve this problem partly by improving the quality of profile data.

3. External candidate sources

External sources are sources like social media platforms (Like LinkedIn and Twitter), community platforms (like GitHub and Kaggle), personal websites and job boards.

Nowadays with the breakthrough of remote working models the entire working world population has become the potential talent pool.

External sourcing is the biggest source of hires since the talent pool is a lot larger than the current employee base or the ATS.

An integrated approach to sourcing these talent pools

The Full Pool Sourcing Method taps into the mentioned talent pools in a systematic way.

Stepped wise approach to searching these talent pools

All company's recruiters should adopt a determined stepped wise approach to searching these talent pools.

This approach can look something like this:

1. The new hiring goal and set of job criteria are received by a recruiter

2. The recruiter creates a search based on the job criteria

3. In case there is no integrated solution to search all profiles in the separate talent pools, the recruiter inputs the search in the separate systems accordingly: first the own employee base (HR or internal mobility tool), Then the current ATS and lastly external sources

4. In case there is an integrated solution to search all talent pools simultaneously the search is executed in the integrated search engine

5. All matching candidate profiles found are reached out to and further processed according to the company’s recruitment protocol

Points of attention per source

Employee base

• Employees might want to be discrete about changing departments and/or roles
• The motivation of the internal candidate should be leading in the decision to move positions, not the motivation of the current or the hiring manager
• Performance data like work related reflections should be considered in the context of the next position

ATS

• The reasons for not continuing with a candidate in previous applications should be investigated carefully
• Candidate profiles should be cross referenced and enriched so the the most up to date data regarding employment history, skills data and contact details can be retrieved
• Take into account the specifics of how your ATS works, for example the way an ATS performs a search has to be understood to know which profiles are included in the results and which ones are left out

External sources

• Leverage multiple external sources on top of over competitive platforms like LinkedIn so you increase your sourcing success rate, niche platforms provide bigger talent pools and richer skills information and they are a lot less competitive
• Also with external profiles cross referencing and data enrichment is a key element in understanding the candidate's potential
• Follow the rules of engagement of the platform that you are sourcing candidates on, every platform has its own particular user personas and guidelines

Tooling and methods to integrate talent pools

Data enrichment tooling

Some ATS’s have profile data enrichment features. An example is Beamery that enriches profile data from candidates in the ATS with a combination of their own tool called Sherlock and a third party provider called FullContact.

The goal here is to get the most up to date, complete and accurate information possible about the candidate so job matching accuracy is increase, screening is better informed and candidate outreach is based on the most recent interests and skills of the candidate.

Tools like HeroHunt provide profiles from all relevant external sources that are always enriched with information found on the entire web and that is consolidated into one candidate profile.

Integration tooling

Tooling for integrating talent data from the employee base, ATS and external sources have still not emerged in the market in a way that customers can use it without the need for manual data import or having to develop custom integrations.

HR software like SAP SuccessFactors for example can integrate with other data sources like ATS’s but this is still a manual process.

Some companies are developing tools that integrate all talent sources including the employee base, ATS and external sources into one searchable database.