Talent Pipelining | Four Reasons Why Your Brand Needs It

Ask any hiring manager and they’ll tell you how the shrinking talent pool is making talent acquisition (TA) a total pain. Or maybe, they do have a flurry of resumes but unfortunately, none of them matches the current job opening. While sourcing is a great deal, especially with choked bandwidths, everyone is scrambling for top talent at the same time. A warm bench of talent can help one bypass the war for talent and still emerge victorious. Let us explain.

Build a talent pipeline

After going through active candidates, HR leaders are now zeroing in on passive candidates who are a tough nut to crack. So apart from keeping your brand game on point, what else can you do to attract them? The Talent pipeline is the process through which you build professional relationships with passive candidates and entice them to fill future openings. While the whole process is based on the principle of relationship building, curating a talent pipeline requires you to be more proactive than just engaging in reactive recruiting.

We have been constantly saying that the times have changed; what does this entail in the world of recruitment? Well, this means you get to be familiar with the entire talent landscape than just focusing on sourcing candidates. Imagine this; currently, you are hiring for a particular role and come in contact with a candidate who’s not looking for a change. Would you turn down that candidate? Yes, you would, but would you turn them down entirely? Your answer should be no because sooner or later, you will need them.

Now some of us might mistake talent pipelines for a repository of resumes, but that isn’t true in its strategic sense. Instead, it is a more calculated way of nurturing leads for long-term benefits. In a nutshell, a talent pipeline is a community of pre-screened candidates to enhance the recruiters’ experience and their employers’ credibility.

Let’s understand how your firm can be benefitted when you have a broader plan of action in mind for constructing a successful talent pipeline.

Attain higher retention rates

Usually, a candidate accepts the job offer with a sense of urgency just to get the offer letter. But does the role even make sense to them? Mostly, such rushed acceptance takes place when recruiters don’t get the time to source an absolute match, making them persuade the unsuitable candidate to fill the role without reckoning twice. However, candidates selected from your already-built pipelines don’t rush into taking the job. With your prior relationship with them, they will be more informed about the organisation and the role they are filling out the application for. Moreover, the mere fact that they understand the role and the structure of the organisation negates their chance to turn down the offer, resulting in higher retention rates.

Minimise the time to acquire talent

As per Linkedin, it takes around 49 days to get hired in a tech field like engineering. Additionally, non-tech fields, including finance and marketing, take 46 and 40 days respectively. Now imagine, if you had many pre-vetted candidates all set to take part in the current opening, what would have happened? Not only were you able to save your time, but you were also able to leverage that saved time and design the talent strategy, enhancing the quality of the recruitment process.

While a talent pool enables you to be two steps ahead in the recruitment process, you can actively narrow down the pipeline to find that ideal match. Additionally, keeping a talent pipeline in place allows an organisation to churn high-profit margins by eliminating operational distractions.

Welcome quality over quantity

Relationship recruiting or talent pipelining requires you to develop long-term relationships with people working in the same domain. And as you start communicating with people from the same ecosystem as yours, you open a path for them to refer their co-workers—possessing amazing capabilities and skills—to work with you. This indirectly makes your talent pipelines a pool of trustworthy and quality candidates, letting you bid adieu to cold-calling and spamming over job portals in the search of candidates.

Create an enhanced candidate experience

Another advantage of why you should be creating a talent pipeline is how smoothly you can improve the candidate experience.

Another reason, and we must say, the most important advantage of creating a talent pipeline is enhanced candidate experience.

Building a talent pipeline is a candidate-driven process where we focus on building relationships with candidates, thereby identifying their needs while meeting them smoothly. With a talent pipeline in hand, you get more time to engage with candidates, answer their queries and understand their dilemmas. Not to mention that with two-way communication, you will be able to eliminate the likelihood of miscommunication, giving a better experience to candidates during the entire process.

(The article was first published in People Matters – September 2022 Issue.)