Keeping Track of Great Talent
- By Harri Insider Team | January 30, 2020
The interview process can be a demoralizing experience – going through a list of not-quite-right (or clearly completely unsuitable) candidates day after day. It’s all part of the race of figuring out how to hire great talent. But then you meet someone with all the right characteristics and experience for your operation – the problem is that they can only work nights and you already have a night manager. Even if you make both a mental and physical note to keep this person in mind for future opportunities, in all likelihood, your discovery of said talent will get lost in the shuffle.
Thanks to Talent Pool, an innovative service on the Harri platform, you can “tag” such candidates so that if the night manager position is ever vacant again, you can quickly filter through all those you’ve interviewed in the past to find that very candidate. As a plus, you’ve already interviewed them and they have already expressed interest in working for you, so much of the culling process is already underway.
Perfect for Franchise Businesses
Via three types of tags, Talent Pool lets you make the most of the interview process by vetting candidates for really any type of position in your organization even if it’s not currently open. Multi-concept or location businesses can enable the Pool’s Global Talent Tag service, which collects all tagged talent from each individual location, and creates an enterprise level pool of saved potential candidates that is visible to all locations within the enterprise.
Say you meet a fantastic and energetic candidate who will soon leave for college and only be available around the holidays and/or over the summer. You can simply add that candidate to your Talent Pool by tagging their profile card with “Seasonal.”
Once you’re faced with needing extra hands in the peak seasons, you can simply view the list of candidates under the Seasonal tag, select all candidates under that filter, and invite all to apply via bulk action. Much of the work has already been done on your end and stored in the Talent Pool. You haven’t even posted a public job posting yet and you have already solicited applications from a handful of very worthwhile candidates.
In addition to the Global Talent tags that are viewable across locations, users can also tag talent with Private Tags, which are only viewable from a higher-level access login, or Local Tags, which are unique to a single store location. It’s best to agree on a set of tags as an organization to make sure users won’t have to click through multiple tags to seek out a particular type of candidate.
Other Features
In addition to filtering candidates by tags, you can also use the Talent Pool’s main search filter to look for any keywords in candidates’ profiles such as position name, availability, former employer names, and skills, for example.
The Talent Pool also tags candidates with the date they were added to the system. This is especially important to customers in the UK, where it’s only legal to store candidates’ information for 6 months after their initial application. In order to stay compliant with this privacy standard and remove the required information, users can easily filter Talent Pool candidates by their “Added On” dates and bulk delete those added before 6 months.
Just as the Talent Pool can help you store potentially great talent for your organization, it can also help filter out historically unreliable candidates so you don’t waste any more time pursuing them. For example, if a candidate hasn’t shown up two times or more to an Open Day or Scheduled Interview (and did not notify the hiring manager), the Harri system will tag them as a “No Show” under General Tags.
To help facilitate human resource decisions, each Talent Pool candidate has a SpeedyScreen interface that centralizes appropriate profile information and lists possible actions. For instance, at the top, an Invited to Apply section lists the history of who invited the candidate to apply, to what position, when and whether they ended up applying. Likewise a Notes tab compiles comments that may shed context to why they were tagged in the first place to inform future recruitment decisions. These notes are time and date stamped, and can be filtered by the location and user who wrote the note, with the user’s profile picture.
As a cultivated internal marketplace, Harri’s Talent Pool allows businesses, especially franchise owners who are tasked with filling a variety of positions across multiple locations, the chance to tighten their hiring timeline while accessing a more optimal group of candidates from the start. It also means a better experience for potential new hires, and in the end, the hiring process is the first impression candidates have of company culture. In a recent survey, 39% of respondents say that they lose interest in a position and pursue other roles when the hiring process takes too long.
