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March 30, 2021

How to Develop a Talent Pipeline for Your Business



Do You Have a Talent Pipeline?

Recruiting and hiring can be tough, expensive, and frustrating. And if you’re looking for ways to streamline the process, you’ll benefit from creating your own talent pipeline. The only question is, where do you start?

What is a Talent Pipeline?

A talent pipeline is best described as a pool of qualified job candidates that a company may be interested in hiring for future job openings and positions. You can think of it as a list of pre-vetted names waiting in the wings. There’s no guarantee that these individuals will be able or willing to take a job if offered – and you’ll still need to conduct a formal interview process – but it speeds up the process and makes it more reliable. Without a talent pipeline in place, you’d have to start from scratch with every single job search.



Talent pipelines don’t happen by accident. They’re intentional systems that require a proactive effort to find (and nurture) people who could be a good fit for your company’s needs and culture. But when you put in the time to develop a talent pipeline for your business, you can expect a long list of attractive benefits, including:

  • Access to better talent. A bad hire is expensive! (Like really, really expensive.) Unfortunately, most businesses are playing a hiring version of “Russian Roulette.” They might make a good hire five out of six times, but it’s that sixth one that ends up costing them. With a talent pipeline, you don’t have to play the odds. Everyone in your pipeline is a high-value talent. If the first person isn’t interested in the job, you move on to the next person, etc.
  • Faster time-to-hire. One of the biggest perks of a talent pipeline is the quick time-to-hire. In a time where only 30 percent of companies can fill a vacant role within 30 days, a pipeline gives you a huge competitive advantage over the competition. It’s not uncommon for a business with a talent pipeline to go from job opening to new hire in three weeks or less.
  • Better culture fit. In the rush to hire someone, it’s easy to get so caught up in the technicals that you forget about the softer elements (which are equally important). You could put “culture fit” into this latter category. When you have a talent pipeline, you don’t have to worry about this as much. Anyone who is in your pipeline for several months or years is going to be vetted based on technical skills and soft skills. So when you eventually do tap your talent pipeline, you know you’re getting someone who will naturally fit in with your team and jibe with your mission/values.

At the end of the day, a talent pipeline provides peace of mind. Rather than rushing through the recruitment process to find a bunch of candidates and hiring one of them based on a brief interview and resume review – which is akin to taking a shot in the dark – you can rest easy knowing you’ve carefully tracked and vetted talent over a period of months and years. When it finally comes time to make a hiring decision, it’s an educated one.

5 Ways to Feed Your Talent Pipeline

The benefits of a talent pipeline are abundantly clear. But in order to enjoy the peace of mind that comes from having top talent at your fingertips, you have to be purposeful in how you architect your system. Here are a few suggestions for stocking your pipeline with the right talent:

  1. Networking

Every individual within your business has a personal and professional network. By combining forces, you can develop a list of dozens of names right off the bat and give your talent pipeline a solid foundation of candidates. Plus, since each of these names is connected to someone at the company, it gives you an immediate inroad with the candidate.

The key to this approach is to vet the names you’re given and to build relationships with them. (It’s one thing for an employee to throw someone’s name into the ring – it’s something else entirely for that individual to be legitimately open to speaking with your company about future opportunities.)

  1. Content Creation

You can organically attract talent into your pipeline through a strategic content creation strategy. As you publish content about your company’s culture, mission, and values, people will feel magnetized to your brand. They won’t beg you for a job right away, but they will become gradually indoctrinated into your culture. Think of this as a slow nurture. You aren’t tossing steaks on a hot grill for five minutes – you’re slow-cooking in a crockpot until the “steaks” are tender.

  1. Scholarship Programs

The sooner you can put your company on a possible candidate’s radar, the better. One of the top ways to do this is by creating a scholarship program to help students pursue an education in a field of study that overlaps with your business.

Take Wiley as an example. Their company develops digital education and learning solutions to help businesses and individuals advance their careers in fields like accounting and finance. In light of this, they’ve developed an accounting and finance student scholarship that awards one student per month with a $1,000 scholarship. Not only does this help the student pay for school, but it builds healthy rapport between Wiley and the student.

  1. University Partnerships

If you have local colleges and universities, it pays to build relationships with their administration, professors, and faculty. By forming partnerships with the right people, you can get first access to the best talent the school has to offer. This is an excellent and cost-effective way to fill entry-level positions.

  1. Internships

Internships are often viewed as a way to give back and help young professionals and industry newbies learn the ropes so they can eventually launch their careers and find success. However, let’s not pretend like internship programs are designed for the interns. They’re actually created for you.

A well-developed internship program is perfect for identifying, educating, training, and indoctrinating talent. It gives you a low-risk environment to find top talent and pre-qualify them for positions. Whether you immediately hire interns to full-time positions, or you keep them in your talent pool for several years, interns often make incredible hires. (At the very least, you have an idea of what you’re getting. Likewise, the intern already has a clear understanding of the culture and what will be expected of them.)

Discover Your Advantage

It’s not enough to assemble a list of names in your talent pipeline. In order to make it a true pipeline, you have to build relationships with these individuals and slowly drip on them over and over again. (Otherwise, you don’t really have a pipeline – just a spreadsheet of candidates.)

You want to be so top-of-mind that they feel a surge of excitement when they hear that your company has a job opening. It’s at this point that all of the leverage flips to your side and you’re able to make a first-class hire at warp speed.



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