A new way to build passive talent pools

3 min read

New this month for Eightfold customers attracting passive talent: the ability to use AI to build a community of talent around a certain skill or role, such as inside sales, growth marketing, foodservice, or Java, even without a specific job opening. 

Let’s say you wanted to build a pool of future salespeople. First, you’d “calibrate” the job, listing the skills required to be a successful salesperson in your organization. The Eightfold platform would add people who match those skills to the pool. They could be past applicants, externally sourced prospects, current employees, ex-employees, employee referrals, and contingent workers. And using Chrome extensions, you can add passive candidates you come across who match what you’re looking for.

All about capability and potential

These talent communities will come together using Eightfold’s global metadata set — with more than 1.5 billion talent profiles, one million job titles, and 1.4 million unique skills — paired with deep-learning patented AI technology that matches people based on their potential. 

That means that concepts like adjacent skills (if you know A and B, you have the potential to learn C quickly) are now available to sourcers and passive talent pools.

So, a company could build a community of potential sales-development representatives, regardless of whether the prospects have done that job prior. It’s all about people’s capabilities and potential; an employee in the mortgage, education, sales, or any other field could be flagged as a good match for the sales-development rep pool, based on how that community is calibrated. 

You could build a community of potential data scientists, regardless of whether the words “data science” appear in someone’s title or in their resume at all. The AI knows (remember the size of the global dataset mentioned above) that the prospect who spent 15 years in a given role in the Navy is highly likely to have data-science knowledge and experience.

The talent community syncs up with your ATS such as SuccessFactors, Taleo, Greenhouse, and Workday.

Nurturing the pool

Once you’ve got your community, you can keep your pool warm, running a nurture campaign for the community. And you can automate much of that. 

For example, you could indicate that everyone who responds to outreach for the first time gets moved to a new stage. 

Or, you can set it up such that every two weeks members get a text or email letting them know what your company’s up to. 

Or, let’s say you put on a hiring event or fair. You can bulk-upload all the resumes from the event, and have the platform add everyone who’s in the central time zone to your pool. You can add everyone who’s a strong match to the type of role (sales, engineering, etc.) you’re looking to fill. From there, you can automate invitations to future events. And, AI can automatically pull company videos or blog posts that match the subject of your talent pool (for data-science openings, it can populate your outreach with data-science-related articles and videos, for example).  

You’ll have insights into the pipeline of each talent community. You’ll see where you have plenty of prospects, or too few. And you can view analytics to see how diverse the pool is, perhaps then leading you to adjust your job requirements if some aren’t actually necessary.

“Sourcers and recruiters have been wanting intelligence to efficiently curate and nurture passive talent,” says Sr. Product Marketing Manager Conor Volpe. “With this launch, we’re helping customers do just that — the Eightfold way.”

Let us know if you’d like to learn more.

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

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