Introduction to Talent Pools

The best candidates for your open roles are already in your system.

You’ve met them before. They’ve interviewed, come close, or sent in a strong application at the wrong time.

The challenge isn’t finding them. It’s finding them again. When thousands of applicants sit in your ATS, and everyone tags or saves things their own way, even great people disappear.

The next time you open a role, you end up posting the same ad, running the same search, and talking to the same kinds of people all over again.

Talent Pools fix that. This feature gives you one organized place to keep every strong candidate you’ve already found, grouped in a way that actually makes sense. You don’t need to start from scratch every time.

You just need a clear system that remembers the right people for you.

Talent Pools were built to make hiring easier every time

Setting up Talent Pools takes just a few hours, and whether you spread that time over a day or a week is entirely up to you.

A few focused hours now means you can source talent faster than ever, forever. You’ll spend less time searching for candidates and more time talking to people who already know your brand and have shown their interest.

That extra structure gives you back the time to focus on what matters: engaging great candidates, not trying to remember where you last saw them.

It also makes it easier for your team to work together. When everyone’s using the same naming, tagging, and process, your best candidates stay visible no matter who’s leading the search.

At first, it will take a few to set up. And we know you’re busy, but once it’s up and running, every new search gets faster.

We promise it’s worth it.

How to plan your first Talent Pools project

Talent Pools will work best if you treat them like a real project, not a side task.

A clear plan, a few hours of focus, and a defined goal are enough to get things moving.

1. Define your scope

Start small. Pick two to three Pools that you know you’ll use to hire again soon. In our guide, we focus on Alumni, Speculative Applications, and Silver Medalists.

2. Assign clear ownership

Every project needs someone to lead it. Choose one person who understands the roles and process best, whether that’s a recruiter, a hiring manager, or someone in talent operations.

Having a single point of contact keeps things moving and prevents the “too many cooks” problem that often stalls progress.

3. Define what success looks like early

Before you begin, decide what good looks like. It might be hiring one person from your new Pool instead of posting a new ad, reducing sourcing time by a third, or helping your team find past candidates in seconds.

Let’s get started!

This guide was created to make your hiring life easier.

Once your Pools are in place, they save hours on every search. You’ll have a cleaner system, stronger relationships with candidates, and far fewer great people slipping through the cracks.

Remember, you don’t need to do everything at once. Each chapter is designed to walk you through individual steps, so that by the end, you’ll have a process that’s consistent, easy to manage, and proven to make hiring faster and more effective.

Ready to start? Jump into Chapter 2 to learn how to build your first Pools and set the foundation for everything that follows.

Part 2

How to set up your first Talent Pools