AI and Matching: Your Secret Weapon for a Top Talent Pool

Tips for Managing a Talent Pool

First and foremost, when sifting through potentially interesting applications, you need to adopt a holistic perspective. This is easier said than done, especially when you have to review hundreds of applications while trying to identify the skills that meet your needs. Keep an eye on the recurring positions your company is recruiting for, as well as other ongoing roles that your colleagues in HR are managing. When in doubt, it’s better to set an application aside rather than reject it outright. The objective is to create a large and high-quality pool of applications. But how do you ensure that you keep resumes on file?

If you want to build your pool efficiently and turn it into a Talent Pool from which you can select at will, the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) will be your ally. It plays a crucial role in managing applications (as explained in the previous chapter) and in building and maintaining your Talent Pool. In your ATS, you store applications that are directly linked to your job postings. Resumes sourced from job boards and other professional social networks are automatically integrated through native integrations between various tools.

Your ATS allows you to “tag” each candidate profile with specific criteria. For instance, if your company regularly hires individuals with rare profiles, such as specialists in Python development, you can easily create a pool of Python developers by adding them to the list of candidates you need for a particular task. You can access the Python candidate file as soon as you identify someone. When a new position requiring Python skills is advertised, you can retrieve all your Python profiles with just a few clicks and create a list of candidates to contact quickly.

To create an effective candidate pool, you will need to define a “field system” and tags that allow for a clear applicant database. Your fields must be sufficiently descriptive so that you can utilize the CV database months later, yet flexible enough for other HR professionals to fully leverage the database. The parsing of resumes (which we discussed in Chapter 6) helps you classify your entire applicant database more easily.

Similar terms (e.g., “English C1” and “fluent English”) are replaced with a consistent terminology. This way, your pool can be activated much more readily through parsing. You simply search for the keywords to quickly find the relevant resumes.

CV-Matching using AI

During your pool building, the applications in your database will be matched with your new hiring needs. This matching requires the use of digital tools that compare the features of a CV with a job advertisement and provide a percentage for the match.

With CV-Matching, you can quickly review the profiles in a specific pool (e.g., “Python Developer”) that have been created in your ATS for a new job posting. You might set up an automated system that selects all applicants with a matching score of over 70% of your target group.

Matching candidates from your pool will fundamentally change your recruitment process. Instead of waiting for new candidates to apply for your job advertisements and specifically searching for profiles through job boards (with the associated costs), you now have a new option: you can tap into the profiles stored in your ATS. The larger your pool becomes, the faster you will find profiles suitable for your new positions.

You now benefit from a time-saving program that automatically analyses the elements of a job advertisement and matches them with the CVs in your pool.

Here are the advantages of CV matching within the framework of the candidate pool:

• the guarantee that your pool fully realizes its potential, as the matching occurs automatically when you post a new position on your career page,
• significant cost savings since you have already paid for recruiting candidates from your pool on platforms and other job boards,
• an efficient hiring cycle: the time-consuming steps of posting, receiving, sorting, and assessing applications are eliminated.

To make optimal use of your pool, you need to segment the information in your ATS using carefully selected fields. The aim is good preparation and pre-qualification. This will make it easier to activate the pool at the right time. It is also important to update the information regularly. In just a few weeks, a candidate’s professional situation, address, or search criteria can change. Regularly prompt candidates (via an automatic email) to confirm that their information is still correct and obtain their consent to continue storing their data. Talent pool updates require ongoing effort. You must find fast and efficient ways to continuously maintain your pool so that deferred profiles can be easily activated when needed.

Pool Activation (CRM)

Effective applicant management today inevitably requires building a specific relationship with candidates. Establishing and developing a relationship with your candidates positively impacts your employer brand and is also a cornerstone of the inbound recruiting strategy.

Don’t just collect resumes in your databases. Build a special relationship with the individuals who have entrusted you with their trust through their applications. This is CRM (Candidate Relationship Management): the “management of relationships” with candidates. You need to view your candidates as customers whom you must engage, persuade, and reach out to again, ensuring they regularly visit your careers pages and apply.

To enhance the relationship with candidates, we recommend setting up automated email campaigns. From your ATS, provided it includes a CRM component, you have the ability to contact your candidates in a personalized manner based on their profiles and search criteria.

You can also specify a particular day, an achieved matching score for an active position, etc. Send new job offers that align with the candidates’ skills. You can also send recurring themed newsletters with information about careers, employees, or events that may be of interest to recipients (e.g., a coding challenge organized by your teams).

Through this kind of communication, you engage your candidates. You increase the likelihood that they will prefer to continue their career paths with your company rather than elsewhere. Encourage them to update the information in their candidate records. This way, you have up-to-date contact details, profiles, and search criteria in your candidate database.

In addition to emails and a candidate newsletter, you can also automate your pool through other communication channels, such as SMS. To take your pool activation a step further, you can operate at the level of workflows in your email and SMS sequences. You create automated conditions between the sequences. For example, sending a reminder message if the first contact email has not been opened. Or sending a message through another channel (email or SMS) if the previous messages were not opened, to ensure that the applicant receives your content (and that it hasn’t landed in their spam). You can also set it so that a personalized message appears after a specific trigger, such as if the applicant has been on the shortlist in the last six months. With activation sequences, you can make your contact with applicants more personal by sending them content related to the employer brand and recurring emails.

You should provide applicants with additional information about a position, your company, or new opportunities related to their last application. The aim is to increase the conversion rate (i.e., the number of applications) as well as the return and engagement of your applicants. This is about nurturing applicants.

If you continuously and qualitatively fill your applicant pool, it will be easier for you to recruit the right profiles in a timely manner. By properly activating and re-engaging your pool (using your ATS, which collects and evaluates applicant data), you can respond more quickly to urgent hiring needs. By managing your pool better, you won’t need to search for applicants anymore because you’ll already have them at hand.

Want to learn more on this topic? In this article you’ll learn how to boost the traffic to your careersite.