How to build a candidate pipeline that cuts your cost and time to hire

Time to hire is a crucial recruitment metric for tracking hiring success and optimizing an organization’s recruitment process. This metric directly impacts the cost and quality of hire, making it imperative for an organization’s recruitment expenses, processes, and strategies.     

A talent pipeline is a ‘relationship-centric’ recruitment strategy that refers to a collection of quality candidates who are engaged and can be contacted when relevant job roles open in an organization. Affecting a shift from reactive to proactive recruitment strategies, building a talent pipeline requires establishing and cultivating relationships with passive talent for opportunities that may surface in the future.  

Talent pipeline:

It is a recruitment approach where interested as well as passive candidates are nurtured. It involves active relationship building and guiding relevant candidates through a journey towards working for the organization.  

Talent pools:

This approach is about the categorization of candidates, grouped by aspects like job roles or location, for easy data management instead of a large database that must be mined every time there’s an opening.  

Building a talent pipeline is beneficial for organizations that constantly need to hire talent in competitive markets.

Time to fill:

Measured as the number of days between raising a job requisition and offer acceptance, time to fill can be tracked across functions, teams, sources, etc., to help optimize talent pipeline strategies.  

Source of hire:

Tracking the number of hires by different candidate sources can help analyze and optimize strategies based on sources that are working for the organization.  

Conversion rates:

This is the rate of progress candidates make as they move through the different stages of the talent pipeline. It helps understand recruitment efficiency and the quality of the sourced talent.  

Rate of job offer acceptance:

The rate of offer acceptance by candidates helps understand if the candidate's experience is good and if the remuneration is competitive. This aids in identifying the hiring strategies that have a positive impact on candidate decisions.  

Modulate sourcing efforts:

Ensure sourcing efforts remain at par with the growth of the organization. Scalability is a crucial aspect of successful talent pipeline building.  

Get referrals:

Leveraging employee referrals can fast-track pipeline building significantly. According to a report by LinkedIn, referrals are a top source for quality hires.  

Curate personalized experiences:

Personalize outreach communications and focus on thoughtfulness, creativity, and making sure they are candidate-centric.  

Involve the stakeholders:

Touch base with hiring managers regularly to ensure that the talent pipeline building and strategizing is in line with their expectations.  

Focus on branding:

Candidates are more likely to join companies they have heard of, so ensure strategies focus on building the organization's employer brand.  

Transform conventional recruitment strategies into an optimized, ongoing, and efficient procedure by creating a quality talent pipeline. Mercer | Mettl’s suite of talent assessments helps businesses create and nurture their talent pipelines. For example, our pre-employment tests allow recruiters to gauge candidates for a given role and add them to the talent pipeline if they currently don’t meet job requirements but are talented and suitable for different roles. This helps create a resourceful talent pipeline for the future, ensuring quick and time-efficient hiring.