Expanding and Strengthening Your Talent Pool with AI

Recruiters around the world already know the power of passive candidates. This heavily desirable talent pool often comes with tried and tested experience, little to no competition in recruitment, and sometimes a highly specialised skill set that is much harder to find inactive job seekers.

Talent acquisition challenges for modern businesses

In 2016, the Society for Human Resource Management estimated in its Human Capital Benchmarking Report that businesses spend an average of 42 days trying to fill a new position, at a cost of $4,129 USD per hire. While this is already substantial, for recruiters at organisations looking to mass hire, this becomes a mountain of work, resources, and cost.

Where to find the right talent?

With so many channels to reach job seekers nowadays, one of the major challenges for recruiters is trying to quickly and efficiently find a rich selection of talented individuals to consider. While recruiters may have advertised for a role on a reputable job board or website, this may still only present a limited number of active jobseekers, who may be under-skilled or underqualified.

By advertising on multiple channels, recruiters increase their chances but have the added workload of trying to pull together and compare applications across multiple platforms with inconsistent levels of information.

A costly exercise

Additionally, using traditional methods of manually sifting through hundreds of CVs, can ultimately lead to greater instances of losing quality hires due to speed of outreach, human errors and bias. Time then spent on vetting potential, but underqualified candidates, adds to the cost and resource capacity for recruiters. Not to mention that many companies fail to contact those strong, but ultimately unsuccessful candidates. This presents a huge missed opportunity.

Think about every hire for an open role. Only a small percentage of the top talent makes it through to the final interviews. And there is often only one winner, amid difficult decisions to narrow it down. Meanwhile, this leaves a whole swathe of highly talented applicants who didn’t quite get past the post. But they still could offer a great deal to your organisation in the future!

Similarly, one of the longer-term challenges for recruiters in today’s market is missing out on top identified talent, simply because you don’t currently have a role that fits them. For those organisations with the foresight to invest time in building a strong talent pool, the rewards can be enormous.

What is a ‘talent pool’?

A talent pool is a database of individuals to consider for hire for current or future roles. But it is so much more than that. When utilised correctly, a well-maintained and nurtured talent pool is the single most effective long-term recruitment strategy.

Talent pools usually include a variety of candidates, such as:

• individuals who have previously applied and were unsuccessful at the time
• passive candidates
• former employees
• applicants who have given their details for unspecific roles
• generalist profiles
• internal candidates
• referral candidates

In reality, and if adhering to best practices, your talent pool should be made up of every individual your organisation has ever found, identified or been recommended, whether they are actively seeking work or not. This of course is provided that these individuals have given consent to their information being retained.

Benefits of building a strong talent pool 

The benefits of building and maintaining a strong candidate pipeline are numerous for both standalone recruiters and HR professionals. Think of the power of having a reserve pipeline of highly qualified candidates. Some of these candidates are already familiar with your organisation, ready to be hired as needed.

One major benefit would be bypassing expensive job postings and advertisements. You can tap directly into your talent pool before engaging in expensive external job postings and advertisements through associated campaigns. This can result in a dramatic reduction in cost and time per hire as you are getting straight to qualified candidates, who you may have already assessed.

Having a strong talent pool also greatly lowers your chances of bad hires. Indeed, many of these candidates have already been evaluated, recommended, have worked, or do work with you now. This means that you already have a number of insights on the candidates, which can be greatly increased through the use of AI, enabling better hiring decision-making.

Always having qualified candidates at hand is also a fantastic safety net in case the unexpected happens and an employee or multiple employees depart unexpectedly. This means that you can have some comfort in knowing there are skilled individuals ready to be engaged, if and when needed.

On a similar note, a well-maintained talent pool can help with workforce planning in the long term. Whether its succession planning or something larger, having an active and engaged talent pool can help plan for any future scenarios.

Some interesting traditional ways to add to your talent pool

Already have a talent pool and are struggling to grow it on a regular basis? Here are a couple of interesting ways to add future prospects to your talent pool, whether you are actively searching for roles or not.

• Non-specific or general job applications –  you’ve seen these messages before on other organisation’s job sites. Calls to action like: ‘Couldn’t find the job you were looking for? Send us a CV and we’ll let you know if something suitable comes up’. This is a great way to have potential candidates send their CVs without any specific role in mind. If their skills are a great match for a future position, you can pull them straight from the pool.
• Employee referrals and referral schemes – one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to continually add to your existing talent pool is to ask current employees to recommend a few. Often they will have worked with, or know highly skilled individuals with similar or even heightened job experience. They already also have a great understanding of the working environment, culture and expectations.
• Employer branding campaigns – every company should aspire to be the place everyone wants to work. Create excitement with employer branded content to encourage proactive applications and outreach.

How can an AI solution like X0PA AI Recruiter help to expand and nurture my talent pool?

There are so many ways in which AI can augment your short and long-term talent pool strategy. Above all, the goal is to not only expand your candidate pipeline, but also help to manage and strengthen it over time. Here are just a few examples.

1. Talent pool management with a customisable platform 

The best practice for managing a talent pool is keeping an active eye on your candidates. The key is to ensure that the information you have is up to date and sorted for relevancy.

Utilising X0PA AI Recruiter, you can strengthen your talent pool by continually organising and managing candidates, as you like in one easily customisable platform. Additionally, you can flag and label certain candidates by status or specific analytics, or organise your talent pool into buckets for ease.

2. AI Sourcing

One of the most powerful ways that AI can dramatically increase an organisation’s talent pool is through AI Sourcing. AI has the ability to instantly filter through millions of data points to enable recruiters to rapidly pinpoint new candidates. X0PA’s AI Recruiter allows companies to enhance sourcing for best-fit candidates by integrating with third-party providers. Recruiters can get access to more than 750 million profiles, ultimately funneling high-potential candidates directly into their ATS. The AI Recruiter can source for candidates from more than 40 web platforms such as LinkedIn, idibu, github, kaggle and stackoverflow.

X0PA’s Machine Learning can even go one step further to understand user preferences on candidates and recommend better profiles over time.

3. Automated Job Matching and Candidate Recommendations

With the AI Recruiter platform, companies can instantly discover candidates in their existing talent pool and retarget them for current or future roles that they are best suited for.

The AI scores candidates in the existing talent pool based on patented algorithms and recommends candidates who are a strong fit for the open roles in a company.

4. Using predictive analytics to assess candidates’ organisational and role fit

AI gives recruiters the ability to go beyond basic and subjective human insights by using analytics to make powerful predictions, decreasing sample bias and enabling best-informed decisions.

While we might make assumptions about whether someone will be a good cultural fit, or their likelihood to stay in the job, X0PA uses machine learning to give objective analysis on these factors amongst many others, including:

• Cultural fit analysis
• Predictive metrics to assess the performance and likely job retention of candidates.
• Skill gap identification
• Persona mapping through cognitive and behavioural patterning
• Benchmark analysis
• Internal employee skill identification and job rotation recommendations
• Enhanced Employer Branding and Candidate Engagement

You can further nurture your talent pool successfully with the AI Recruiter by engaging with candidates periodically to improve the candidate experience. Candidate engagement via emails can be personalised and automated for a seamless candidate experience with minimal effort and human intervention. Additionally, the platform can also be white-labelled to maintain corporate branding in-line with your employer branding campaigns.

4. Workforce planning analytics

As a HR professional or hiring manager, you often want to plan for your future workforce as well as get a lot more insights into your current hiring practices and organisational make up.

With X0PA AI Recruiter you can gather intelligence across a wider range of sources to empower decision making, including:

• Hiring statistics
• Diversity analysis
• Pay gap analysis
• Succession planning
• Job rotations
• Skill gap analysis and recommendations
• Workforce analytics
• Internal hiring
• Effectiveness of hiring sources

Save time and cost while maintaining objectivity in hiring with X0PA AI

Finding the perfect people for your company is difficult and time-consuming. Make sure you are constantly expanding and managing a strong and rich talent pool for long-term recruitment success.

Find out more how you can augment your talent pool with X0PA AI to:

• Easily Scale Hiring
• Enhance Efficiency of Hiring
• Enhance Candidate Retention
• Save significant time and cost of hiring
• Maintain objectivity in hiring
• Ensure High-Performing Hires

Ready to start?

X0PA’s comprehensive solutions and customer success team will ensure that you achieve your goals.

Watch the following short video on X0PA AI Recruiter