Talent Pipelines: Definition, Strategy, Benefits & Tactics
The way candidates interact with companies and apply for jobs has fundamentally changed.
You can’t rely on the best talent applying organically anymore – to be successful long term you have to be proactive, targeting the candidates that are a great fit for your company and building a relationship.
“We’ve got a hundred year plus mission at Sellafield, and we are going to need skills in the future that probably don’t even exist today. So it’s critical that we maintain relationships with people right through their careers.” – Martin Stubbs, Talent Acquisition Leader, Sellafield Ltd
If you’re looking to move to a more proactive recruiting model, Talent Pipelines should be a critical part of your strategy.
As with any new concept though, there’s a fair amount of confusion around the best way to draw up and implement a talent pipelining strategy. So with that in mind, we’ve put together everything that your company needs to know about Talent Pipelines.
What is a Talent Pipeline?
A concept that’s well established in the sales and marketing sphere, a pipeline in the talent context is a collection of candidates that are engaged and can be contacted when relevant roles become available.
This is “relationship-centric” recruiting at its best. Instead of searching for candidates that fit an immediate need, talent pipelining requires you to build relationships with passive talent for future opportunities.
Developing a Talent Pipeline requires a company to shift from reactive to proactive recruiting. You’re no longer thinking about just filling open roles, you’re considering who your company will want in the future, and who they should eventually hire.
Both proactive recruiting and Talent Pipelines always rank high on the recruiting agenda. But remember: talent pipelining is a long-term play. The strategy takes time to develop and nurture, but the benefits are worth the investment.
Who should create a Talent Pipeline?
The short answer is this: every company will benefit from a pipeline of relevant candidates. With an engaged pipeline in place, no searches start from scratch, and organizations can dramatically reduce costs and time to hire.
Talent Pipelines are particularly important, though, for companies that are consistently trying to hire in competitive talent markets (e.g. engineers, quantitative surveyors, nurses etc). Having warm, “ready-to-hire” candidates here can make a huge difference.
Benefits of a Talent Pipeline ❤️
Talent Pipelines are not just another recruiting buzzword. Organizations who approach recruiting more proactively, and who focus on building relationships and pipelining the very best talent, can expect a multitude of benefits.
Here are a few:
1. Better candidates
A benefit that any recruiting team can get behind: building effective Talent Pipelines almost always help companies hire better candidates.
There are a couple of reasons for this:
Reducing the rush
Instead of rushing to find candidates for immediate needs, recruiters take a more long-term approach. Hiring targets are communicated well in advance, so recruiters have a clear idea of the volume and type of candidates that they need. They have time to focus on identifying the best possible candidates, not just submitting the first people that they find or those that are immediately available.
Reducing reliance on serendipity
It’s rare that the perfect candidate is available at the precise moment that you have their ideal job open. This can be a deeply frustrating process for recruiters – they find a great candidate, but can’t do anything with them because there’s no open role.
Talent Pipelines are the perfect way to deal with this issue. Either you can nurture exceptional candidates that aren’t ready to move, or you can create “evergreen jobs” that are always open so that you can hire the top candidate whenever they become available.
“Traditional talent pools are not as robust as historically we would go after. And so the opportunity for underrepresented populations to come into the Wells Fargo company is astounding.” – Art Lokerson, Wells Fargo
2. Engaging passive candidates
Passive candidates are not actively looking for new opportunities and, as a result, probably won’t see or engage with your job postings.
The bulk of the market is made up of passive talent (not active job seekers) so, if you want to compete for the best talent, it’s vital that you’re able to engage them effectively.
Talent Pipelines let you your team identify and build a relationship with these candidates without pushing specific job openings. Over time, you can introduce the idea of roles that could be a good fit and see if they resonate – a far more effective method of passive engagement.
“We don’t want to stay seated; we are going to look for that talent, look for the passive candidates instead of looking for the active, only because that’s where the best talent is.” – Fernando Bellon, Head of Talent Acquisition, BBVA
3. You’re less brand dependent
Many companies have underdeveloped employer brands or work in unfavorable locations. When hiring “reactively”, this can represent a significant problem. There’s no time for businesses to sell candidates on the role or company; there’s an immediate need, and recruiters need to move fast.
By operating a pipeline model, though, recruiters give themselves more time to “sell” candidates on their organization and overcome limitations.
4. Improved diversity
Talent pooling and pipelining is one of the top tactics that companies are leveraging to increase diversity.
Many organizations are struggling to find candidates that fit their diversity requirements. Talent Pipelines give them the capacity to identify diverse prospects and build a relationship with them, instead of just hoping that they’ll come across their job postings.
5. Better candidate experience
Talent pipelining is an entirely candidate-centric process. Instead of driving candidates to job postings and hoping that they’ll apply, organizations focus on building a strong relationship and engaging candidates on their terms.
In a world where the candidate experience is instrumental to hiring success, this cannot be overlooked.
“We’re excited about the initial results that we’ve seen in not only streamlining how we approach the candidate journey internally within our talent acquisition teams, but also how we approach it from a candidate experience standpoint: what we’re allowing candidates to do and really be in control of how they engage with us, what roles we can deliver that ultimately increase engagement and conversion for us.” – Mike Rizzi, Senior Recruitment Marketing Manager, DraftKings
How to build Talent Pipelines 🛠️
As with any business problem, execution is the key. You should be able to sell the benefits of Talent Pipelines internally, but how do you create them consistently and effectively?
For anyone building Talent Pipelines for the first time, or even just looking to improve their methodology, this 3-step process should be helpful:
1. Identify your targets
Any effective recruiting strategy starts with a clear articulation of who you’re going after – the whole point of building Talent Pipelines is to help organizations engage with the right talent, not just the people that are applying.
Creating candidate personas helps to align your time, headcount and budget, and focus them on the right targets.
What is a candidate persona?
A candidate persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal candidate. This persona is formed by defining the characteristics, skills and traits that make up your ideal hire.
Creating personas help guide your hiring process and help you identify the talent that is the best fit for your organisation. Persona creation is an essential part of any successful recruitment marketing strategy.
How to build a candidate persona
Effective persona creation combines gut feel, historical data, surveys and a little analysis.
It all starts with research: the foundation for personas should be based on hard data, not assumptions. Your goal is to understand what it is that makes people successful at your company.
Start by interviewing or surveying successful employees and executives, ask questions on goals, motivations, and interests (e.g. why did they apply, what do they love about your culture). If you can, ask the same questions to current candidates, or people that turned you down, to build up a more complete picture.
Supplement this data by speaking to hiring managers, recruiters and sourcers: what do they typically look for? What does success look like to them? This discussion could be pretty far ranging. You should try to cover everything from the target companies that good candidates can be found at, to specific skill sets that hiring managers admire.
2. Fill your pipeline
Once you have clearly articulated relevant candidate personas, you can focus on filling your pipeline with prospects that match your requirements. This isn’t a one-time task; this is something that should be running in the background at all times.
There are three core tactics that you can use to build your Talent Pipeline:
1. Re-engage silver medalists
Candidates who have already shown significant interest in your company by applying are ideal for your Talent Pipeline. While you only hire one person for every role, you might leave behind hundreds of unsuccessful applicants.
Many of these people might make great future hires: they’ve all been assessed previously, so you have a fairly good idea of their competency, and you’ve already invested a significant amount in these candidates – attracting them to your brand, getting them to apply and assessing them. You might as well try and make use of them!
The issue? In most organizations, they sit locked away and forgotten in some corner of the ATS.
Your first port of call when you start to build Talent Pipelines should review this data, identify silver medalists (people that narrowly missed out on an offer), and start re-engaging candidates that are relevant.
2. Use campaigns for talent attraction
If you want to build Talent Pipelines effectively, you need to create awareness and attract the talent that your organization really needs. Armed with personas, you should be in a better position to do this – you’re a long way past spray and pray!
Traditional talent attraction relies on things like advertising to drive applications. When your goal is to build a Talent Pipeline, the approach is slightly different. It’s less around driving an immediate conversion and more about connecting with the best candidates and starting the relationship.
Events are a great example. Creating opportunities for candidates to meet your team in person helps accelerate their evaluation of your company. They get to interact firsthand with the people that they’d be working with – there’s no better window into your organization than your employees.
Your event strategy should align clearly with pipeline goals around things like diversity. If you’re struggling to find diverse prospects, launching targeted events can be a great way of building awareness and attracting people that are currently slipping through the net.
A clear pipelining strategy also allows you to personalize a lot of your careers content to stand out to your target personas. We recommend setting up landing pages for hard to fill roles or projects. These pages are totally geared around creating interest with people that typically don’t apply (e.g. female engineers for technology companies, quantitative surveyor for construction etc.) and can play a critical role in pipeline generation.
3. Source talent directly
Successful talent attraction helps your organization cast a wider and more effective net. The goal is to “catch” candidates that are a right fit for your positions and corporate culture. Sometimes you can’t afford to wait for the right candidate to fall into the net, however: you need to be proactive and go after talent yourself.
This is where sourcing comes in. Instead of fishing with a net, sourcers are spear hunters... picking their targets carefully and reaching out in a targeted and personalized fashion. Sourcing is a crucial element of a competitive talent acquisition strategy.
The most sophisticated recruiting teams look at sourcing through two different lenses: “fast” and “slow” sourcing. Both require a proactive sourcing function, but the latter is more relationship focused, and therefore critical to talent pipelining.
Sourcing fast
“Fast” is the sourcing default. You have a role to fill, and you’re sourcing for candidates that fit a specific list of requirements.
The jobs you fill vary, but once you get going muscle memory usually kicks in and you run through the same tried and tested tactics on autopilot. (Usually... some roles require significantly more effort than this).
Speed is key. Every day these roles lie unfilled, potential revenue and productivity is lost, and hiring manager time is wasted.
“Fast” sourcing gets results, but ultimately fast is entirely reactive. If this governs a company’s talent outlook then it’s hard for recruiters to think strategically.
Sourcing slow
Slow isn’t a measure of speed: it’s indicative of a different objective.
There isn’t an immediate role to fill. The goal is to find “quality” candidates to add to your pipeline. “Slow” sourcing is strategic: you’re searching for candidates that could make a “10x” impact in your organization. Outreach is almost always to passive candidates, and success relies on carefully building personas of the kinds of people that “fit” your company.
These candidates could end up being hired in the future; equally, they might not. Either way, they should be of a sufficiently high quality that your company will benefit from building relationships with them.
Sourcing: Pro tips
- Personalization matters: Getting emails from people outside your address book used to be a novelty, but now candidates are drowning in them. If your message isn’t personalized, don’t expect a response
- Protect your brand: Your sourcers are the footsoldiers of your employer brand. Every time they contact a candidate they have a chance to positively or negatively impact the perception of your company in the market.
- “Not now” doesn’t mean “no”: Not every candidate you contact is ready to move right now. Don’t despair, keep them on file, nurture them with marketing content, and re-engage them down the line.
3. Engage your pipeline
Identifying the right candidates is only the beginning. For your Talent Pipelines to be effective, you have to nurture relationships in the right way.
The key to successful candidate nurture is understanding how to engage candidates in a time efficient way, without overloading them with messages, being irritating or spammy. It’s a delicate balance to strike!
According to Forrester research, it can take as many as 8 brand touch points to influence a decision. Nurture is a long-term investment – you have to persevere with it to convince candidates to apply.
These touch points are not necessarily part of a linear process, though. Candidates typically consume content based on what they’re doing at the time, and what they fancy reading, not how you draw it out on a storyboard.
This has ramifications for the way that you think about engaging your Talent Pipeline.
You have to segment people based on the status of their relationship with your company. If they’re in the early stages of your pipeline, your goal should be to send them content that educates them about your company and helps them understand why it could be a fit.
If you think they could be might be ready to learn more about opportunities or even make an application decision, then you should be leveraging content that helps them understand your EVP, or sending them to personalized landing pages that are more likely to drive applications.
Pipelining is a long game, and while you need to make sure that you’re helping candidates move through the process in a timely fashion, to be truly successful you need to map your engagement to their level of awareness.
What now?
Reading through this article you’ve probably been wondering whether your ATS will let you build and nurture Talent Pipelines. Well, the simple answer is that it usually won’t.
So what’s the solution?