High performing recruiters build talent pipelines to meet business hiring expectations.
Successful recruitment teams regularly create a pool of highly qualified candidates in order to address talent capability gaps in specific hiring organisations.
With a view to help drive business outcomes, it is important to ensure that the TA and business leaders are building suitable talent pipelines at all times.
This posts covers the principles, process and best practices on talent pipelines.
When to Build Talent Pipelines
In many companies, recruitment teams are asked to build talent pipelines for all roles they hire for. But often times, some of those talent pools are redundant.
This can be due to a sudden change of hiring needs, role profile/location/level or a sudden headcount/hiring freeze.
However, some hiring managers expects recruiters to always build talent pipelines along with their day-to-day recruitment activities.
In my experience, building talent pipelines should be based on this scenarios:
Attrition/Backfill
Expected or upcoming attrition for a critical role i.e. major account, high revenue customer or industry
Exit/Replacement
In-flight employee exit process due to performance; Plan in place to replace a critical engineering headcount
Growth/Net New Role
Net new headcount that will make an impact to revenue; Also new role based on strategic business needs
How to Deliver Talent Pipelines
There is no hard rule on how to manage your talent pipelines method.
But if you have established a strong partnership with your hiring managers, then expect flexibility in when to invest time to build pipelines. When delivering talent pipelines, efforts should be made to align this to your diversity sourcing strategy.
Find below a simple approach to manage the collaboration, ensuring you and your hiring managers are accountable for specific actions.
ACTIVATE
Hiring manager makes the case for talent pipeline for the specific role
Recruiter connects with HM to validate the role with talent profile insights
CREATE
Recruiter creates LinkedIn Pipeline Project and populates with profiles
Recruiter connects with hiring manager to review identified profiles
ENGAGE
Recruiter collates relevant profiles from HM review and messages them
Recruiter conducts initial screening call; keep suitable candidates pipeline/CRM
Messaging Target Talent Pipelines
Recruiters still use tools like LinkedIn Recruiter to create talent pipelines.
They review LinkedIn Profiles and add them to a project for review and messaging. Over the years, there has been good advice on how to write great inMails.
But according to LinkedIn, the most effective inMails with higher open and response rates are typically shorter messages, a clear reason why you contacted and a call to action.
LinkedIn also recommends a personalised messages for best results.
Here is a sample of a message one of my previous teams:
Clear and short subject
Software Engineer Roles @ {company}
Salutation and Introduction
Dear {name}
I am a specialist technical recruiter at {company}. Your profile was at the top of my search for software engineering talent with expertise in (Insert location or skill).
Also, I notice that you have written a blog post on the {share something you found interesting about their work}. I will like to hear more about this.
State types of roles you hire for
At {company}, I work directly with our VP, Software Engineering to identify and recruit for Software Engineers and Software Engineering Managers across EMEA.
Call-to-action for intro call
Would you be open for an intro discussion so I can learn more about your career aspirations and the type of roles we hire?
Please provide me some times you are able to have an informal call.
Final Thoughts
This inMail was used to engage with Software Engineering talent.
At that time, this message was achieving 48% response rate.
Recruiters who build talent pipelines usually have better hiring performance.
This is evidenced in their productivity, time to fill rates and conversion ratios.
In a future posts, I will cover how to measure talent pipelines, conversion ratios and using the “working back method” for pipeline funnel metrics.