This post comes from Karen Nicholson Jones, a Consultant with StepStone Solution's UK team.  In the post Karen shares three talent pooling best practices.

I recently joined members of StepStone's customer community at a forum to share experiences and opinions on talent pooling.

Angela Williams, Resourcing Manager for TUI Travel UK and Ireland made a valuable contribution to the conversation, speaking of her experience of developing a Talent Pooling strategy to help in the recruitment of 3,000 customer facing staff each year to work as Cabin Crew, Call Centre and Retail Advisors and Holiday Representatives.

She had a strong desire to pro-actively manage high application volumes and to develop a talent pipeline so that candidates were "oven ready" when new positions became available.  Despite the "Great Recession" there was a risk of losing these candidates to competitors so it was essential that whatever approach was adopted, the candidate experience mimicked the TUI Travel company strategy of "making our customers feel special"

To achieve this TUI did two things:

• Redefine core competencies of customer facing staff
• Retrain the recruitment team

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Our first guest post comes from Susan Miller, StepStone's Director of Consulting Product Design.  Susan shares her thoughts on the importance of preparing for the up-turn by building a quality pool of talent now and gives 10 points to action.  

Your organisation may have a freeze on recruitment but that doesn’t mean that the applications stop arriving.  Application levels can be even higher during a down economy and smart HR organisations use this opportunity to help identify candidates they might want to hire in the future and to keep in touch with them until the right job opens up.

No one can predict when we will come out of the current economic situation but one thing can be predicted – we will come out of it.  When we do, organisations want, and need, to be ready to hire the best.

Right now some organisations are drowning in applications.  Tools like StepStone’s recruitment products can help employers manage the deluge and keep in contact with candidates who have future potential.  The software can take the strain but changing business practices is essential.  For example, once a candidate's application arrives in an organisation's database and has been filtered and categorised properly, organisations can gain sourcing advantage by using the database as a resource to tap later.  Defining key roles and critical criteria now is the first step to profile the type of talent that you want to pool for the future.

We know of organisations that have paid to post new positions on job boards with agencies or in paper media only to discover that the candidates sourced were already in their own database.  What happens with former candidates that were classified as ‘nearly there’ for previous vacancies?  Do you keep in touch with them?  Do you actively look at what you already have before advertising?

In a time where companies must optimise the use of all existing assets, talent pooling is a must-have.  To develop, maintain and nurture a quality talent pool takes time and effort but it should be an essential element of your near-term plan to ride the up-turn.  So what do you need to do to get started?

1. Identify the area of operations most likely to need resource in the upturn
2. Work on the resource requirements for those areas
3. Design role profiles
4. Agree criteria and ratings for the profiles
5. Create talent pools based on the criteria and ratings
6. Search your database for candidates that match the criteria and ratings and assign matches to your talent pools
7. Contact candidates added to your talent pools to establish if they are interested in future roles
8. Identify the % of potential roles that might be filled by those in your talent pool and keep track of the costs in order to demonstrate cost savings
9. Keep in touch and build relationships with the candidates in your talent pool
10. Set goals for the number of hires that you wish to make from your talent pool and monitor progress against them     

Once you’ve set up your pools, the next element of your near-term plan is to look into where you will source candidates for potential roles that have a low probability of being filled through the talent pool.  With those elements taken care of, you can get back to dealing with the present and eyeing the long-term.   Even during lean times, business critical roles always require high performers; so if you spot a star for the future don’t leave them unattended in your pool.