How to Build Your School Talent Pool
Talent pools are an essential part of any school’s hiring process nowadays. Using recruitment technology, you can set up a talent pooling system that gradually recruits qualified teachers for you, all year round.
Eteach clients report a 30-75% reduction in hiring costs when they switched from a reactive recruiting model (i.e. only sourcing candidates when a vacancy opens up at your school) to a proactive strategy like talent pooling. Because why spend money advertising vacancies if the perfect candidate is already waiting in your existing candidate database?
Let’s take a quick dive into what talent pools are, how they work, and how you can start building up your school’s talent pools to give you the strongest chance of finding that perfect candidate every time.
What is a talent pool and how does it work?
Talent pools are a tailored database of qualified candidates who have already shown an interest in working at your school. It could be that they’ve applied to one of your vacancies before, worked at your school in the past or even just left their contact details through your careers site. Either way, these candidates are qualified, vetted and interested in hearing from you.
The concept behind building a talent pool is that you’re gradually growing a database of candidates that you can tap into the minute a new opportunity arises at your school. This reduces hiring costs substantially and results in faster hires.
To hire from a talent pool, you first use filters to narrow down your pool into a candidate shortlist. Filters can be anything form role, region, subject, education phase or even specific skills you’re looking for. Once you have your shortlist of quality candidates, you can email them individually with details on the vacancy, emphasising that you’re reaching out personally because you think the role would be a great fit for them.
If your shortlist is too big to email everyone individually, you can bulk email your entire list in just a few clicks. Using an email template with personilsation tokens will ensure the message is tailored to each candidate without giving the game away!
Some organizations will create individual talent pools for specific roles. This can be really helpful for positions that are a struggle to recruit for. So for example, you could have a talent pool for high school teachers in your school’s region who specialise in STEM. Any time a candidate enters your database with criteria on their profile that would make them suitable for this role, they’ll be stored in that talent pool. You can even set up a notification to be alerted the minute a qualified candidate appears in the pool, so you can reach out before another school recruits them.
How to build up talent pools for schools
The key to making any talent pool effective is to grow it. The wider your talent pool, the better (although the focus should always be on quality rather than quantity, of course!). In practice, you want to be bringing a constant stream of qualified candidates into your talent pools so that when a role comes along, you have a decent-sized pool of great candidates to tap into.
Here are a few ways you can start building up your talent pools:
1. Drive candidates to your careers site
No matter where you’re building your school’s brand (e.g. social media, at careers fairs, etc.), you should always be directing candidates to your career site.
If done well, your careers site should tell candidates absolutely anything they need to know about your school, why you’re a great organization to work for and any current vacancies you have.
Directing job applicants to your own website rather than external/ third-party sites make it much easier to grow your talent pools – and it makes your job easier by centralising your applications too.
2. Add a ‘Join talent pool’ widget to your career site
Every time a candidate visits your website, there should be a clear option to leave their CV and contact details even if they can’t see a vacancy that fits their skills at that time.
You can do this by adding a side banner to your website, or even a pop-up window that activates when a candidate is looking at your vacancies but hasn’t applied to anything yet. The banner could say something along the lines of “Can’t see your dream job? Leave your contact details and we’ll reach out to you when your perfect role comes along”.
As a candidate, how could you not to be convinced by a message like that?
3. Fill out candidate profiles in full
Talent pools rely on rich, accurate data in the candidate profile in order to work. Therefore, it’s important each candidate profile is filled out with as much detail about the candidate as you can get a hold of.
If you notice any gaps in information, there’s no harm in picking up the phone, checking in with the candidate and asking for some more details. If you make it clear that you’re doing this so you can contact them about roles that will be a right fit for them in future, they’ll respond positively to your call.
It’s also helpful to tag candidates based on things like skills or additional qualifications. Sometimes, a candidate won’t technically meet all the requirements for a role, but they have additional skills that could make them worth considering for a hard-to-fill role.
4. Capitalise on rejected candidates
Candidates who don’t pass the final hurdle to be hired into a role at your school are recruitment gold dust. You’ve already screened them and deemed them a good organizational fit for your school – otherwise, they would never have progress to the final stage. The last thing you want to do is let candidates like this go to waste.
Add these candidates to a role-specific talent pool and tag the profile clearly to show how far along they made it in the hiring process last time. They might not have been the right candidate for the role they originally applied for, but there’s nothing to say they won’t be perfect for the next role that comes up at your school. And assuming that their candidate experience was positive the first time round, they’ll be delighted to hear from you again.
5. Build your talent pool into your candidate communication
Any time you’re speaking to candidates – whether on the phone, over email or even at events or school visits – you should be encouraging them to join your talent pool.
So build key messaging about your talent pool into email templates, social media messaging and any other communication you regularly use.
Another nice idea is to add a call-to-action to your work email signature. It can be as simple as a sentence that says “Join our talent pool to get notified of your dream vacancy before we advertise” with a link to a landing page where they can easily submit their CV and details.
Take a look at this page on candidate management and talent pools to find out more about how Eteach helps schools use this technology to hire local talented educators, or request a demo to see the software in action.
About the author
Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson is a writer and digital marketer specialising in recruitment, marketing, HR technology, and business growth. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.