With a rapidly growing number of LinkedIn Recruiter customers now forging ahead with new talent pipelining capabilities, we’re seeing some common themes for getting the most out of these new tools. Many are sharing unique success stories on how pipelining is changing the way they view the world of talent, even before the prospects hit their official ATS radar.  Building a targeted pipeline of prospective candidates has some clear benefits, such as zeroing in on the right talent well before reqs are even opened; generating an ongoing line of communication with those prospects; and ensuring your sourcing efforts don’t go to waste when a candidate isn’t initially the perfect match.
Our own internal pipelining experts have put together some practical tips to help others fully embrace the opportunity. As you kick off your own pipelining efforts, you may already be employing some of these approaches, but others may spark some creative and useful tactics to get your recruiting teams moving with purpose and efficiency.
Here’s our Top 10 list of tips and considerations for improving pipelining success. Following some or even all of these helpful hints will help you kick start your team’s talent pipelining action plan.
Lay the foundation
- Educate and engage hiring managers. Introduce them to the benefits of a talent pipeline so they are fully engaged and contributing leads. Referrals from key internal constituents who know top performers in the marketplace can be invaluable.
- Measure how long it is actually taking you to identify applicants, verify skills and quality, engage them, maintain contact and build relationships. The time investment is high—and you will quickly see the benefits of avoiding this process for every new search.
Focus your efforts
- Know what roles are on the horizon at your organization so you can get out ahead of the business need.
- Start by pipelining for roles that are frequently open at your company. With LinkedIn Talent Pipeline, use tags, statuses or project folders to build a pool of promising candidates and start each new search there.
Sweat the details
- Capture everything a prospect tells you in notes in the pipelining system so that you factor in their motivations and interests when you reach back out to them.
- Introduce an effective naming convention for projects, reflecting active job requisitions and pipelining activities. This will allow for standardization across project names and will also help if you ever need to re-assign a project.
Make the system do the work
- Set search alerts for your regularly recurring searches. LinkedIn Recruiter can do the searching for you and will notify you when new matches are found.
- Use tags as a shortcut for future searches. For example, tag great candidates for “sales director,†and the next time you do a search simply search on the tag for that role. If your whole team takes this approach, you can instantly start Âfilling your pipeline.
Always be pipelining
- Get in the habit of adding any top talent to the system, even if there isn’t a role for them right away. You can use tools like tags and statuses to indicate how this person could be a great in the future.
- Regularly step back and think about the health of your pipeline. Do you have sufficient volume and quality of prospects in the pipeline to meet your business needs?
Developing a talent pipeline can pay big dividends for you down the road, so get started early and experiment with these helpful best practices. You can start taking advantage of these great capabilities by simply having your LinkedIn Recruiter admin activate Talent Pipeline.
To put these tips to work and to read more about pipelining, download our latest white paper “Best Practices for Developing a Strong Talent Pipelineâ€Â or visit the Talent Pipeline Home Page to join a webcast or take a product tour.
Happy pipelining!