If you love cooking or baking, think about the ingredients for making your favorite dish or treat. Every ingredient contributes to an important part of the flavor and texture to make your favorite food what it should be. Applicant pooling is one of the many pertinent ingredients necessary for a positive candidate experience. Just as a chef combines ingredients at certain measurements for the best results, a recruitment team must mindfully manage hiring strategies for better recruitment outcomes.
For example, applicant pooling can contribute to a positive candidate experience by ensuring applicants remain engaged and informed throughout the hiring process. Candidate experience improvement should be constantly prioritized when reviewing current recruitment performance and while implementing enhancement strategies. Today’s competitive hiring landscape requires expedited recruitment and providing candidates the value and respect they deserve beyond just receiving a new job offer. This strategic and thoughtful approach to enhancing the candidate experience helps improve applicant satisfaction rates while strengthening a company’s employer brand.
The Basics of Applicant Pooling
Applicant pooling involves developing and maintaining a database of interested potential employees to draw from during general talent acquisition needs or high-volume hiring campaigns. Whether some applicants are hired quicker than others, staying connected with the candidates in this applicant pool is essential for future-proofing hiring solutions. By keeping these interested candidates in the pool, your recruitment team can enhance hiring efforts by hastening time-to-hire and increasing candidate engagement rates.
How Does Applicant Pooling Improve the Candidate Experience?
Developing an applicant pool for recruitment directly contributes to the candidate experience in various ways. From continuous engagement with candidates to faster and more personalized recruitment, utilizing applicant pooling can help a company succeed in more ways than one.
Continuous Engagement With Candidates
On-and-off candidate engagement can increase applicant drop-off rates. Applicant pooling ensures continuous candidate engagement to enhance the candidate experience. Splitting the candidates into different pools based on skill sets, educational background, and how well they are suited for one or more positions in the company can help the recruitment team tailor communications with each pool accordingly.
Besides communicating about future job openings and company newsletters, the recruitment team can send customized messages to each pool based on their category. For example, a grocery store may have two applicant pools for candidates with managerial experience and customer service experience. Recruitment personnel can send the managerial candidate pool blog posts about manager-based subjects like how to enhance managerial skills, how to gain experience as a manager, and the like. Hence, personalized recruitment measures also contribute to candidate experience improvement.
Faster and More Personalized Recruitment
Drawing from an applicant pool can reduce time-to-hire rather than waiting for new candidates to apply for open requisitions. Since recruitment personnel already have access to pre-screened candidates, they can expeditiously identify the best possible applicants to fill an open role to begin the interviewing process.
This efficiency contributes to improving the candidate journey while opening opportunities for more personalized recruitment efforts. By leveraging an existing candidate pool, recruitment teams can build enhanced relationships. Candidates already familiar with the company culture will feel more valued and respected as the recruitment team engages with them, increasing the likelihood of accepted job offers.
Better Job Matching
Applicant pooling institutes better job-matching measures because of AI-driven application screening and resume parsing. These automated applicant tracking system (ATS) features can expedite the hiring process because of its applicant pooling capabilities, therefore contributing to an enhanced candidate experience.
The recruitment team can search the applications and resumes based on keywords related to skill sets, educational background, and other pertinent candidate credentials to divide candidates into the proper pools. Based on these credentials, every candidate can be matched to one or more positions within a company that best suits their experience. Hence, this strategic approach enhances candidate quality.
Transparency and Clear Communication
Effective talent pooling can occur with transparency and clear communication measures. When candidates express interest in a job by applying, they are placed into a company talent pool where they can receive updates about future hiring opportunities and business newsletters. HR Magazine reports that 57% of job seekers believe that a company not providing timely communications is a warning sign of being a bad business to work for. This statistic shows the importance of clear and transparent communication during the recruitment process.
Proper communication will keep candidates engaged even if they are not onboarded with the company immediately. Receiving regular application status updates and emails or texts about interview offers can keep the candidates engaged throughout the hiring pipeline. This refines candidate experience improvement as applicants feel more respected and informed throughout the process.
Opportunity for Feedback and Improvement
Building a diverse pool of applicants can help companies gather valuable feedback about their current recruitment process. Candidates not selected for the position can have the opportunity to report their candidate experience to the recruitment team so they know how they can perform better in future hiring campaigns. Even selected candidates should take this same survey to enhance the feedback channels accordingly. This cycle of continuous improvement can ensure the hiring process evolves to meet applicant expectations in upcoming recruitment campaigns.
Conclusion
Applicant pooling is a vital recruitment technique that has enhanced companies’ time-to-hire and candidate quality. Investing in effective talent pooling can enhance the candidate experience by encouraging continuous engagement, providing clear and transparent communications, and initiating faster and more personalized recruitment.
Jump into the pool with us here at Cadient as we can be your centralized recruitment platform for refining your company’s applicant pooling strategy while improving the candidate experience. Our innovative recruitment tools and expertise in talent acquisition can help your company streamline hiring every step of the way. What are you waiting for? Put your hiring bathing suit and dive into a more efficient and candidate-friendly recruitment process.
