Talent acquisition is an ongoing evolution, not an as-needed initiative. Does your team have replicable processes in place to ensure your talent pipeline is consistently growing? Developing a talent pipeline is a work smarter, not harder method of investing in your company’s future growth. A well-planned talent pipeline provides your team with a vetted pool of qualified candidates, so your team can be prepared to move quickly when it’s time to fill future hiring needs. Provided your team is equipped with the correct hiring tools, a relevant talent pipeline will help ensure your team isn’t starting every search from scratch.
Attending hiring events are a great starting point to build a well-vetted talent pipeline, and implementing event management software can help your team engage with top talent well after the events are complete. Using correct tools will bring clarity to event staffing, resources, registration and communication, better managing event attendees and post-event follow-up, to fill your talent pipeline with future potential employees. This resource will mitigate distractions to keep your team from moving forward, and prevent your talent pipeline from stagnating. Below are the key benefits of growing a talent pipeline at the hiring events your team attends, and how event management software can help facilitate this growth.
To Keep the Talent Pipeline Flowing
Your company’s talent pipeline should be continually refreshed. Using software at hiring events will help your team easily build, search, organize and add new candidates to your talent community, including:
- Silver medalists: Candidates who were finalists for a position, but ultimately did not receive an offer .
- Referrals: Candidates who were referred, but weren’t right for the current opening .
- Inexperienced or overqualified applicants: Applicants who didn’t align with experience qualifications for the current position, but could be a good fit for a future role .
- Career fair and event candidates: Candidates you met at career fairs or networking events .
- Company alumni: High-performing employees who left for other roles and interns who returned to school .
- Candidates who declined an offer: Even candidates who accepted another opportunity may be looking for a new position in the future.
Find out more tools your team needs to effectively manage the hiring process.
To Focus on Building Candidate Relationships – Not Paperwork
Implementing event software allows your talent acquisition team to better manage candidate relationships to ensure they don’t fall through the cracks post-event, and provides an overview of all candidate communication, from prospect to hire. It also allows every team member to search millions of candidates’ data in less than a second, and view a particular candidate’s profile and history with your company. This in-depth overview can help team members better connect with prospects, by inviting them to join your company’s talent network, share jobs on social networks, encourage passive candidates to comment on a particular job or company and send them relevant content that might pique their interest.
To Track Key Recruiting Metrics
Measure success to gain insight into the overall strength of your talent pipeline, and understand how it contributes to talent acquisition objectives. The way you measure success depends on the goal you set out to achieve. Key metrics include:
- Time-to-fill: Growing a talent pipeline can help to reduce time-to-fill; candidates who are already familiar with your company move through the hiring process faster. Compare time-to-fill metrics from before and after you launched the talent community to monitor improvement.
- Cost-per-hire: Cultivating a pipeline of interested candidates helps to cut cost-per-hire, reducing money spent on job advertising, job boards and other recruitment marketing initiatives.
- Engagement: Find out if your post-event communications resonate with your audience. Use software at hiring events to track candidates who engage with your content post-events by analyzing open and click rates.
- Growth: Establish your starting point to ensure your talent pipeline continues to grow over time. If membership plateaus, evaluate your promotion strategies and remind team members to continue to add new candidates.
A talent pipeline is a slow-building initiative that requires a long-term commitment from recruiters. By investing the time, talent acquisition teams can build a steady stream of future talent, to hire for even the most hard-to-fill positions.
To Provide Data Insights for Long-Term Talent Pipeline Planning
Events are an important component of a long-term recruiting strategy. It’s critical to effectively evaluate which events provide a strong return on investment and which do not, to plan for future hiring. Event management software allows teams to track event metrics, to better plan the future talent acquisition strategy. Investing in software can measure event attendance ROI to maximize your company’s presence at hiring events. These data-driven performance metrics measure the hiring events that result in the highest ROI, track the number of hires and total the overall expenses per recruitment marketing effort. This allows talent acquisition leaders to allocate time and marketing dollars to the events that offer the biggest return.
To Focus More on Candidate Relationships and Less on Event Planning
One of the most challenging aspects of recruiting events is coordinating hiring managers and on-site staff who aren’t part of the talent acquisition department. Talent acquisition teams have a limited amount of time to train the on-site staff, to ensure candidate experiences at events remain consistent. Event management software can help company representatives easily access and understand their roles and expectations so the recruiting team can run seamless events that offer a positive candidate experience.
To Reduce Search Fatigue
Juggling the demands of hiring managers, candidates, leadership and peers can quickly wear down your team if you don’t have the technology resources in place to streamline processes. Recruiters are constantly engaging with active candidates and nurturing passive pipelines. Without a pre-established talent pipeline, managing a continual cycle of names, backgrounds and career goals is both time and labor intensive. Don’t start from scratch every time a vacancy opens; instead, continue a conversation with a previously engaged candidate you met at a past event.
To Provide Team-Wide Visibility
Actively recruiting at hiring events is one of the best ways to connect with qualified candidates. If your organization’s experience at recruiting events is chaotic, inconsistent and filled with manual processes, event management software can help. Leverage its functionality to increase attendee engagement by advertising your organization’s event presence through branded email templates, invitations, career page integration and event pre-registration links. Ensure these candidates enter your talent pipeline and continue to nurture them.
