How Candidate Pool Management Can Transform HCM
This article was updated on July 25, 2018.
Developing and managing a qualified candidate pool is crucial for meeting organizational hiring and growth goals. More than 70 percent of CEOs are concerned about their organization's ability to find candidates who have the skills needed to take their business into the future, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. So HR leaders who can build, nurture and manage a pipeline of qualified candidates will be ready to fill key openings or ramp up hiring to accommodate rapid growth.
An end-to-end HCM solution should include an integrated framework for automating and streamlining HR processes, including managing a group of prospects that will be available when needed.
Here are three important steps for better management of your potential employee candidates.
1. Regularly Interact With Your Candidates
A talent pool should not just be a file of resumes that HR can pull from when they need to fill a position. Instead, it should be a dynamic group of potential employees who benefit from being part of that group, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. HR leaders can provide value to their candidate pool by providing informative or educational content, collaboration and networking. In return, HR is able to get to know their prospective future hires better and establish a ready base to draw from when they need to recruit.
2. Organize Your Candidates Into Segments
Maintaining a large group of potential recruits can be difficult, and if all potential talent is lumped into one large group, the group is less useful for HR. Instead, savvy candidate management involves segmenting the group based on their skills or interest. It's much more valuable to HR leaders to be able to pinpoint candidates in a specific profession or with specific skills when needs arise. By using technology to customize communications for each segment, you'll should be able to provide individualized value for members of the talent pool and generate interest more organically.
3. Pay Attention to Your Internal Candidates
In many cases, the perfect hire for an open position is someone who is already inside your organization. But internal candidates are often pigeonholed into their current jobs and overlooked when other positions or responsibilities become available. Savvy HR leaders can avoid this by providing regular training and development opportunities, including opportunities that employees can select according to their interests.
It's also important that managers maintain ongoing conversations with employees about their career goals and aspirations, rather than simply having an annual performance review. That way, managers can encourage their reports to take advantage of training opportunities or apply for open positions that may lead to their desired career pathways. With an automated and integrated HCM solution, HR leaders can keep track of employee goals and training experiences to uncover hidden talent across the organization, and find and compare candidates at the touch of a button.
Gone are the days when HR leaders simply needed to maintain a stack of resumes. Today's HR leaders need a strategy for managing a growing pool of candidates and a technology solution that makes that process easy and streamlined.
