6 Ways to Build Recruitment Pipeline and Optimize It Effectively

Many recruiters struggle with creating an effective recruitment pipeline while racing against time to hire the best talent for their company. Talent Acquisition professionals spend almost 13 hours per week sourcing candidates for just one position. [1] Building a recruitment pipeline is not a walk in the park. It involves many steps. This blog will dive into some of the most common challenges that recruiters face when constructing it, and how to overcome them with effective solutions and best practices. Let’s get right to it.

What is a Recruitment Pipeline?

Simply put, it is a systematic approach both businesses and hiring teams use to streamline the hiring process by identifying, attracting, and nurturing potential candidates over time. The recruitment pipeline comprises various stages, from identifying hiring needs to onboarding new employees. This structured process helps you maintain a clear overview of each candidate’s status, ensuring that the recruitment efforts are organized and efficient.

The Importance of Building Your Recruitment Pipeline

A structured recruitment pipeline speeds up hiring, improves candidate quality, and aligns workforce planning with business goals. It also enhances the candidate experience by maintaining clear communication, which strengthens employer branding and saves on recruitment costs. For example, building relationships with potential hires early can fill future roles faster and more efficiently.

Key Benefits:

• Faster, higher-quality hires: A pipeline provides pre-screened candidates, shortening hiring time and improving quality by focusing on long-term relationships with potential hires.
• Proactive workforce planning: Pipelines help you identify future hiring needs and prepare in advance, ensuring you’re ready to fill roles as business demands change.
• Better candidate experience and employer brand: Regular communication keeps candidates engaged and valued, improving their experience and strengthening your company’s reputation.
• Reduced recruiting costs: Early relationship-building minimizes the need for expensive ads and external recruitment services.

Tackling Recruitment Pipeline Challenges

Despite the benefits that you can get from building a recruitment pipeline, you can’t ignore the fact that there are challenges to creating an effective pipeline. Here are some key challenges you might face:

Further below, we will walk through how to tackle these challenges as you build your recruitment pipeline from scratch. Additionally, you can leverage comprehensive recruitment software like Manatal to make many of these problems an automated breeze or a simple click or two. Manatal’s ATS comes with the industry’s best recruitment pipeline and candidate sourcing tools that help source candidates from 2500+ channels such as LinkedIn, Indeed, your company’s career page, and more…

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How to Build a Recruitment Pipeline

Before starting your recruitment pipeline, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your current and future hiring needs, as well as your hiring goals. This involves analyzing your current workforce, determining the skills and qualifications required for the positions you are looking to fill, and understanding your long-term business objectives.

Build a Short Term Recruitment Pipeline

If you have an urgent hiring need, you may want to use some quick and effective methods to find and reach out to candidates who are ready to apply. Some of these methods are:

LinkedIn Recruiter:

To fill urgent positions using LinkedIn Recruiter, follow these strategies:

1. Utilize Advanced Search Filters: Narrow your candidate search by location, skills, experience, and job title to quickly identify suitable talent.
2. Leverage InMail Messaging: Reach out directly to candidates, even if they aren't connected, to share job details and encourage engagement.
3. Saved Searches and Email Campaigns: Set up alerts for new candidates matching your criteria and proactively communicate opportunities to keep potential hires interested.

LinkedIn Profiles

If the LinkedIn Recruiter Pricing is too expensive for your budget, there are still other ways to make the most out of the platform. Manatal’s Chrome extension allows you to import any profiles that you find from LinkedIn into your recruitment pipeline.

• Profile Importing: Click the extension while viewing a LinkedIn profile to capture essential candidate details automatically.
• Data Parsing: Extracts and organizes information, eliminating manual entry and saving time​​.
• ATS Integration: Once imported, candidates can be managed directly within Manatal, facilitating quick communication and short-listing​.

Candidate Database Search

You can use a candidate database search tool such as Manatal’s Sourcing Hub to find candidates that match your requirements. This tool allows you to find and filter candidates by their current job titles, skills, locations, and more.

Building a Long-Term Recruitment Pipeline

• Employer branding: If you want to build a sustainable and diverse talent pool, you may want to invest in your employer brand, which is the reputation and perception that you have as an employer. The stronger the employer brand, the more candidates you can attract, engage, and retain.
• Use ALL the job boards: Use popular job boards and post your job openings to expand your reach and attract potential candidates actively searching for jobs. Depending on your industry and role, you can go for general job boards like Indeed, Monster, or Glassdoor, or niche job boards, such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, or Dribbble. You can also use paid options to boost your visibility and reach more candidates.
• Optimize your career page: Your career page is the first impression that you make on your candidates, and it is where you can showcase your EVP, culture, values, and achievements. Use a career page to tell your story, highlight your benefits and perks, and feature your employee testimonials and reviews.
• Social Media Recruitment: Social media is a powerful tool to reach and engage your target audience. Most social media networks come with built-in job posting features that you have to optimize for the platform. Check out our guide on how to write a job description.
• Passive Candidates: Passive recruiting is a critical part of maintaining a long term recruitment pipeline. With 70% of the workforce being passive candidates, recruiters can benefit from this strategy by accessing a larger talent pool and reducing hiring costs. The strategy involves around focusing on candidates who are not actively searching for, yet open to new job roles.

Conclusion

Building a strong recruitment pipeline is a must for any organization that wants to hire the best talent in the market. A recruitment pipeline can help you reduce hiring costs, improve time-to-hire, and increase the quality and diversity of your talent pool. Whether you need to fill a specific role quickly, or you want to create a sustainable and long-term talent strategy, following solid recruitment pipeline strategies will help you steadily reach your goals.

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Citations:

1. LinkedIn