Guide
What is a talent pool, and how do you search one?
A talent pool is the set of people a recruiter has already met, sourced or placed and can go back to when a new role opens. The second choice for a similar role last year is usually the first call this year. This guide covers what goes in a talent pool, how to build one that stays usable, what talent mapping adds, and how to search a pool with a brief instead of a keyword box.
Armin Barimani, co-founder of Kretsia
Last updated
What is a talent pool?
A talent pool is a database of people a recruiter or an agency already knows and can approach again: past applicants, people sourced for earlier roles, candidates who reached an interview, people who were placed and finished a contract, and people who registered on a career site without a role in mind. It is different from a pipeline. A pipeline is the people in progress on one open role. A talent pool is everyone, across every role, kept so that the next role does not start from zero.
The test of a talent pool is a Thursday afternoon. A client sends a role. If a recruiter opens the pool, runs the brief and gets ten plausible names in two minutes, the pool is working. If they open LinkedIn first because searching the pool takes longer, it is a filing cabinet.
How to build a talent pool that stays usable
- Keep the CV, not only the tags. A tag says "Java". The CV says "led the migration of a payments platform from Java 8 to 17 at a bank with 300 engineers". A pool that keeps the document can be searched on the second sentence; a pool of tags cannot. Import the CVs you have as PDF or Word files and let the system read them.
- Put everyone in, including the people you rejected. Rejected for one role is not rejected for all. The reason you passed on someone in March ("too senior for the budget") is exactly the note that makes them the right call in September.
- Write one line per person at the moment you decide. Not a profile essay. "Strong on SAP FI, wants to stay in Malmö, available from Q2" is enough, and it is what you will search for later.
- Tell people they are in it, and for how long. A candidate who knows they are kept for a set period, and can say no, is a candidate you can call. Kretsia stamps a 24-month window when a candidate consents and tells them so.
- Stop duplicates at the door. One person, one record, whether they applied twice or came in from the ATS and from a search. If a record is deleted, it should stay deleted, including from old search results.
How to search a talent pool
Most pools are searched with a keyword box: type "project manager", get everyone whose CV contains those two words, in no particular order. That is why recruiters stop using their own database. A keyword cannot rank, and it cannot tell "ran a 40-person programme" from "attended a project management course".
The better way is to search the pool with the brief for the role, the same way you would search outside. Write the requirements: years in what, where, which languages, which kind of employer. Rank the whole pool on how well each person's experience matches, so nobody is dropped for lacking one word. Then read the top of the list against each requirement and show the line from the CV that supports each mark. A client who asks "why these five from your database" gets the same answer as for five people found anywhere else.
What talent mapping adds
Talent mapping is the research step before a search: who holds the role you are likely to be asked to fill, at which companies, in which cities, and roughly how many of them there are. A mapped market tells an agency how hard a search will be before it quotes for it. It also tells you what your talent pool is missing. If the map shows 200 plant managers in the region and your pool holds nine, the pool is not where that search starts.
In practice a talent map is a saved search with a pool estimate. Write the brief for the role as if the search were live, see how many people match each requirement and all of them together, and keep it. When the mandate arrives, the map becomes the long list.
How Kretsia searches a talent pool
In Kretsia the talent pool is searched with the same brief as a worldwide search. Paste the job ad or write the role in plain words, pick your own database as the mode, and the brief runs over past applicants, the talent pool and your Teamtailor candidates. The whole pool is ranked, nobody is dropped on a missing keyword, and the top of the list is read against each requirement with the line from the CV that supports each mark. When the pool gives you three good people and the client wants five, switch the same brief to the world. The detail is on the candidate rediscovery page, and the pool itself lives in the ATS.
Two things worth knowing before you import 8,000 CVs. Kretsia reads PDF, DOC and DOCX, up to 800 files in a batch, and holds them for review before they land in the pool. And a person you delete is removed from earlier search results as well, so an erasure request is honoured in one place.
FAQ
Questions about talent pools.
A pipeline is the people in progress on one open role, stage by stage. A talent pool is everyone you know across every role, kept for the next one. A person can be in both: on the pipeline for the role they applied to, and in the pool for whatever comes next.
That is the usual state, and the cause is the search box, not the data. A keyword box returns an unranked list and no reason. Search the pool with the brief instead: rank everyone, read the top against each requirement, show the line from the CV. The first time a recruiter gets five argued names from the database in two minutes, the database gets used.
For as long as you told the candidate, and no longer. Decide a period, write it into the consent text, and make it easy to say no. Kretsia stamps a 24-month window when a candidate consents to the pool and shows them that date; a candidate can withdraw from the portal, and a withdrawn or deleted person drops out of searches.
No. Mapping is counting and locating: who holds the role, where, at which companies, how many. Sourcing is finding and approaching the specific people for one mandate. A map is done before the mandate and tells you how hard the search will be; the sourcing starts when the mandate is signed and uses the map as the long list.
No. Kretsia works with Teamtailor: candidates and their CVs come in every hour, so a search of your own database covers them, and the people you pick go back into a Teamtailor job with a comment on why they match. Teamtailor stays the system the team works in.
Starter at 950 kr a month holds up to 2,500 people and Growth up to 7,500, and both include the pool and the brief-based search over it. The free plan gives 90 sourcing credits a month, about three searches, for trying the search on a real role first, with no card and no end date. The plans are on the pricing page.
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Start free, 90 credits a month, no card. Or bring a role and a folder of CVs to a 20-minute demo: we import them, run the brief over them, then the world, and read the marks together.