In today's highly complex and competitive hiring market, recruiters must be agile and flexible enough to source and vet multiple candidates. Learn more about becoming a proactive recruiter by leveraging the power of talent pipelines.

Today’s hiring economy is highly complex, confusing, and competitive. Job growth has been dramatic, but at the same time many positions remained unfilled and wages aren’t keeping pace, which continues to cause turnover. On average, companies receive an excessive number of resumes for every open full-time permanent position.

This current recruiting and hiring complexity is also underscored by the fact that we’re in a divided job market. On one side, you have a global shortage of skilled science, technology, engineering and mathematics professionals, plus a shortage of leadership candidates. And on the other side, there's a surplus of non-technical individuals that are needed to fill those highly repetitive jobs.

Furthermore, Millennials now make up most of the workforce and they’ll continue to demand relevant opportunities be marketed to them in mobile-friendly ways. According to data from a 2019 survey by The Muse, 58% of Millennials are looking to change companies. That said, all generations today are becoming digitally savvy shoppers when it comes to careers and employment brands, researching employers via Glassdoor and LinkedIn while circumventing applicant tracking systems for referral networks and two-way employer communication.

This is why PeopleFluent Recruitment empowers companies to get outside their own reqs and generate talent pipelines. Being proactive with sourcing and screening doesn’t have to be aspirational—companies can do it with their own applicant databases and HR systems.

Related resource: '4 Best Practices for Your Onboarding Checklist'

The Advantages of Talent Pipelines

By building talent pipelines, employers can develop talent pools around job types, skills and competencies to which they can turn to fill key roles without having to restart the processes from the beginning. This saves time and money and can help improve the relationships with hiring managers.

Talent pipelines can also help improve the candidate experience and employer brand. For instance, informing candidates who weren’t selected that they could be kept in a pool and considered for future positions will not only let them avoid having to reapply, but also create a more positive impression of the company.

A talent pipeline strategy can enhance talent mobility. Understanding the talent already in the organization and identifying who can be called on to fill key gaps is another key advantage. Using employee data stored in the HR system can illuminate the talent already in place and their unique skills and strengths.

In addition, the use of a talent pipeline can also help companies address a pressing challenge in talent acquisition today: the need to create a diverse workforce. A company that hires individuals of all backgrounds is likely to benefit more from the life experiences of their diverse employees. A report from McKinsey & Company emphasizes the benefits of developing a diverse workforce. The study found that gender-diverse companies are 15 times more likely to outperform their competition financially, while ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely.

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Since so many companies are still reactive in their sourcing and recruiting efforts, we recommend going further and applying our five-step transformation model for your talent pipeline.

Step 1: Mobile Optimize Your Career Site

Move to responsive design and mobile-friendly career sites so that they’re readable on any device. This will ensure the candidate experience is consistent from mobile to desktop without having to have a separate mobile career site and will help reduce drop-off rates and increase qualified applicant conversation rates.

Also, include video in your career site and candidate portal. Do this to differentiate your organization’s workplace culture, overall brand, and especially your job postings. Video job postings are much more memorable than text descriptions. And video overall will help you accelerate your screening process and ultimately improve your recruitment spend return.

More from the blog: 'The Role of Video in Future HCM Products'

Step 2: Shorten Your Online Application

If it takes 45 minutes to complete, it’s 40 minutes too long.

Attract applicants based on skills and experience needed, not just the literal requisition (especially for non-technical repetitive hiring), and collect just enough information to screen and create qualified talent pools for your recruiters and hiring managers. This allows you to create proactive people pipelines based on skills needed and not the job itself, which can maximize your recruitment dollar.

Step 3: Increase Sourcing and Screening Speed

Once applicants complete their initial online profile, you can:

• send them screening questions
• ask for more information and documentation
• and more.

You can also launch video questionnaires anywhere in your recruiting workflow for those qualified applicants. Video screening is an incredibly powerful way for job seekers to introduce themselves to your organization.

Recorded video questionnaires aren’t a replacement for the traditional interview. Video questionnaires are powerful tools for earlier stages of the talent acquisition screening process, giving talented job seekers the platform they need to share their ideas and demonstrate how they’ll be a great part of your team. These screening activities can help increase the number of qualified candidates to move along your pipeline.

Keep reading: 'Learn from the Best: How Goldman Sachs Uses Video Interviewing to Improve the Candidate Experience'

Step 4: Automate External Succession Slating

Since your company most likely already does succession slating internally, use your ATS to implement your own external slating by automatically adding those initial qualified applicants to your job workflows for further data collection and screening. Then place applicants not qualified into other talent pools, especially if they have any relevant qualifications for future roles.

Tag them accordingly in your applicant database and give your recruiting team the ability to create saved searches that will automatically show matching candidates. Then keep in touch with all your candidates about your jobs, your company, your industry and more. This is what sourcing ahead of need is all about and will help you focus on speed and quality.

Step 5: Leverage Social Onboarding

The onboarding experience is just as important as any other part of the talent experience. Thus, having onboarding software in place for new employees to complete their paperwork before they arrive at work is a critical next step. Automating this process paves the way to welcome them properly to the company, the teams they’ll be part of, and the people who are part of company “community” helping them become productive fast.

Video is again another key ingredient here, giving new hires immediate immersion into what their roles will be all about, what their first few days and weeks will look like, what their particular learning and development “career pathing” will look like, and much more.

This Five-Step PeopleFluent Pipeline Transformation Model combined with our recruitment solutions gives you the recruiting power that increases the speed and quality of their sourcing and screening process, extending the value of your recruitment-marketing dollar, and giving your company an unfair advantage.

Recommended reading to download today: '5 Recruiting Metrics that Drive Business Value'