Recruitment Blog
How to keep your talent pool active in 2025
By Melinda Jennings
2024 has been a big year for talent leaders.
Candidate applications are at an all-time high – up 60% from this time last year according to our H1 2024 State of the Market Report. This has flooded the databases of many HR and talent acquisition professionals, putting added pressure on their workloads.
Not only are they overwhelmed managing such a large influx of candidates, they also have to find ways to keep their talent pool warm enough to tap into when new roles open.
We spoke with the experts to unpack how talent acquisition professionals can keep great talent engaged and set themselves up for an easier 2025.
The importance of keeping your talent pool active
It can be easy (particularly in such a fast-paced environment) to move onto the next role, once a candidate signs on the dotted line. But what happens to the top contenders who narrowly missed out and are sitting in your database?
Nurturing these relationships can bring many benefits, including:
- Faster hiring
A warm talent pool can save you significant time when it comes to hiring. Our H1 2024 State of the Market Report found that in-house teams using their JobAdder database filled roles 11 days faster than those using ad channels.
That’s because having a pool of engaged and qualified candidates, who already understand and trust your brand, is significantly easier to tap into than starting from scratch.
- Reduced ad spend
When you’re relying less on ad channels to source candidates and more on your vetted talent pool, you’ll also cut down on job board spend. For BlueCross, this equated to a reduction of 65% in advertising spend, as well as cutting their reliance on agencies by 30-40%.
- Enhanced candidate experience (CX) and employer branding
72% of candidates withdraw from the recruitment process due to a poor candidate experience, and a further 72% share their experiences with others.
This means that candidate experience can ‘make or break’ your branding, explains Steve Gard, founder of candidate experience platform Benchmarcx.
“Employer branding has two parts: what we communicate to candidates, and how they feel about what we’ve communicated,” he says. “Many recruiters and employers focus heavily on what they’re telling candidates but often overlook the actual experience of it, including even after a role has been filled.”
When the job market starts to undoubtedly pick up again, these elements will be crucial. Steve says.
“The market can shift at any time to become more candidate-driven,” he explains. “It’s important to ensure we’re consistently providing a quality candidate experience, so we have a candidate pool to tap into even when hiring volumes and application numbers are not as high as they are now.”
Streamlining your recruitment efforts through tech
Investing time nurturing your talent pool and enhancing your CX is a huge challenge for many organisations; especially whilst handling a higher-than-normal volume of candidates.
This is where technology becomes your best friend.
As Steve explains:
“Part of providing a good candidate experience is managing the application process in a timely and effective way … To facilitate this, it’s all about having the right tools in place, ensuring a seamless application flow.”
And the first tool that’s integral to put in place? Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or recruitment CRM.
Using JobAdder’s CRM for example, customers have been able to:
- Reduce admin time by 50%
- Reduce time-to-fill by 50%
- Reduce clicks-per-task by up to 75%
- Consolidate 9 different database into one centralised source-of-truth CRM
A lot of these benefits come from the automation capabilities your ideal ATS and CRM should provide.
Chris South, co-founder and CEO of Roi-AI, says that automation is a no-brainer for agencies wanting to get the most from their recruiting efforts and nurture future candidates at-scale.
“With so many applicants and such large databases to manage, automation is critical to reduce the manual overhead,” he explains. “The use of automation in recruitment may have been exceptional once upon a time, but now it’s the norm.”
Five steps you can take now for an easier 2025
Whether the job market remains tight or opens up in 2025, implementing strategies for better talent pool nurturing now will ensure you can weather anything the new year (and beyond!) throws your way.
Here are five actionable steps you can start working on right away:
- Clean up and segment your current talent pool
Rather than starting from scratch, take a look at your current database. Clean up any candidates who are no longer engaged or are off the market, then segment your remaining list. This will give you a strong pool to start using your new strategies on.
- Integrate or upgrade your recruitment software
As already mentioned, having the right tech on deck can make your recruiting efforts much more effective and impactful. Whether you have an existing system that’s not up to scratch, or you’ve never taken the plunge and invested in this type of tech, getting this right is a crucial first step.
Our team of experts are also always happy to chat about your requirements and take you through the JobAdder platform – request a free demo to get started.
- Automate your recruiting processes
There are endless ways you can use automation to save time, improve efficiencies, and be generally more productive. To get you started, Chris shares his top three examples of automation you can start implementing right away:
- Lost candidate aftercare. An absolute favourite automation of mine is to carry out aftercare on candidates that are hired directly or through agencies, especially temps and contractors. Set an automation so that candidates in this category are added to a list then sent a follow up after a specific time, or when they’ve specified they will next be available.
- Consistent email marketing. Another great way to keep your talent pool warm is to correctly code or categorise top contenders who just missed out on a role. That way, you can ensure they always receive your newsletters or new role updates. Automated activity alerts can be used in conjunction with email marketing to provide insights on the candidates that are engaging most with your email content.
- Automated updates. Send sequenced campaigns to your top talent at regular intervals, providing them with an easy opportunity to update their details and alert you to their availability.
- Prioritise candidate experience
With a cleaner database and the right recruitment tech and automated workflows in place, the next step is to start implementing strategies for better CX. Steve says the first step is about getting buy-in.
“Work closely with hiring managers to ensure they understand the significance of the candidate experience,” he advises.
Steve adds that while candidate experience will happen regardless of our actions, we can influence what that looks like.
“Creating a positive candidate experience requires intentional effort and intervention,” he says. “If we truly want to deliver a standout experience, we should manage it as a strategic initiative or project. Without dedicated work on this, it won’t naturally become a good experience.”
- Track engagement and adjust strategies as needed
Like CX, keeping a talent pool warm is not something you can set-and-forget. You must regularly monitor whether your strategies are working – using metrics like candidate engagement and brand reputation – and adjust your strategies accordingly.
Build and engage the ultimate talent pool for 2025
When it comes to engaging talent and providing an impactful candidate experience, a proactive, adaptive, and continuous approach is key. Technology provides an efficient time and cost-saving method for doing so, making it much simpler to keep your talent engaged for longer.
As we head into 2025, implementing these strategies now will help you future-proof your recruiting efforts and tap into top talent quicker.
To see how JobAdder can help you place roles 67% faster using candidates already in your database, and reduce time spent on admin tasks by 75%, book a free demo today.
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