By
Impactpool
How to build talent pools and rosters that fulfill their potential
Here’s a walkthrough of building talent pools and rosters that actually work, driving value for your team, the organization, and the communities who depend on your support.
1 – Identify your skills priorities
The first step towards building a talent roster or talent pool is to identify what you need talent for. For example:
What are your hardest-to-hire positions?
Where are your biggest skills gaps?
What projects are upcoming?
What recurring needs do you have?
Where do you need coverage for high-impact churn?
The right tooling helps a lot, giving you simple easy-to-understand analytics across your talent database. So you can see at a glance that you’re low on female health specialists in the Global South, for example.
A word of warning though: start with one priority.
Rosters often fail because organizations come to the table with grand ambitions to revolutionize recruitment across every function and grade, but underestimate how much work’s needed.
A talent roster can be astronomically valuable. But it’s an ongoing resource that demands buy-in from leaders, engagement from colleagues and significant ongoing management.
You’ll find it easier to scale if you start small, gain early successes, and prove value first.
2 – Decide which talent list you need
Different talent lists serve different functions. Here are loose definitions. (Loose because there’s not global consistency on how they’re used and there’s often overlap).
A talent roster is a list of pre-assessed candidates that can be hired for similar positions – ideally without a new recruitment process. (Although in practice, placing direct from a roster is complex. Instead, rostered candidates often get funnelled into the normal competitive process, to be evaluated as a priority).
For instance, you might build a surge roster of Spanish-speaking human rights professionals with 5+ years’ experience working with refugees and asylum seekers, for short-to medium-term urgent deployment.
An active talent roster is where you actively place talent against vacant positions. For example, you might create a roster for environmental engineers, then when an environmental engineering role comes up you’d add candidates from your roster into the hiring process.
A passive talent roster is where candidates apply for positions themselves. So you create a roster for your environmental engineers, then promote relevant roles to the roster. Those roster members can choose to apply, or not.
A talent pool is a list of suitable prospective candidates who aren’t (usually) pre-assessed. They provide a pool of talent to start sourcing from fast, but still move through your usual recruitment process before hiring. For example, you might want to build a talent pool of gender-based violence professionals with experience working in the Middle East.
And while we’re talking terms…
A talent pipeline is often used generally to refer to your ‘funnel’ of potential talent. But it can also refer to a specific bank of talent around core strategic skills needs, usually including some training and development components. For example, you might include top-performing female IT managers who you want to watch and support as their career develops, with a view to progressing them into leadership or more complex roles.
(In this article we won’t dive into building a talent pipeline as that’s typically a more complex, involved process.)
When to choose different talent lists
The type of list(s) that’ll work best for you depend on your hiring needs and challenges:
If you’re struggling with high time-to-hire or need to mobilise fast into emergency situations, an active talent roster can accelerate the process by skipping the need for lengthy re-assessment.
If you’re struggling with hard-to-hire roles or meeting diversity goals, a pool can broaden your access to talent but without the time investment of assessing everyone. Or the need to monitor availability, as you would with a useful surge roster.
If you’re thinking longer-term around strategic leadership development or hiring for complex crisis situations, a talent pipeline might be a good choice. It’s a larger cost and time investment but can help you lay the foundations today for your organization to evolve tomorrow.
3 – Develop process guidelines
Once you’ve decided whether to build a talent roster or pool, develop guidelines to ensure everyone involved knows what they’re doing and how.
That’s typically more complex if you’re building a roster, because of the additional qualification and maintenance. But even if you’re just getting started with a basic talent pool, it’s good practice to develop a short overview of how the pool will work.
Here’s the information you’ll typically want to outline upfront, to avoid internal confusion, conflict, competition and rework.
Who’s the owner of the talent roster?
Who’s the point of contact for questions or issues?
Who’s responsible for ongoing administration?
Who has access, for how long, and with what permissions?
What candidates should be invited to the roster?
Who invites candidates to the roster?
What candidate data do you need in the roster?
How long can candidates be on the roster (if not forever)?
Is the roster active or passive? If active, who can place talent against roles? If passive, who can promote jobs to the roster?
What are the guidelines around internal competition? Can multiple recruiters contact the same candidate at the same time? Only in certain circumstances?
Can you place candidates direct to similar roles straight from the roster? If so, what does “similar” mean? If not, what assessment processes apply?
4 – Source candidates
Here’s the hands-on bit, where you actively build your pool or roster. Most international organizations use a combination of sourcing methods, including:
Advertising roles: posting active jobs onto channels like third-party boards, social media, and your careers site, then pulling applicants into talent lists.
Searching for talent: sourcing profiles from online professional networks, specialist skills communities, job boards and social media.
Contacting former staff: grouping people who have already successfully worked for you into relevant talent lists.
Revisiting former candidates: silver medalists are especially valuable – the people you interviewed and liked, but didn’t select.
Collecting referrals: asking – perhaps incentivizing – staff and candidates to refer other qualified professionals.
Recruitment marketing: running targeted campaigns to attract prospective candidates, then adding them into lists.
A note on generalist versus specialist sourcing channels.
The likes of Indeed and LinkedIn are important sourcing channels for most recruiters – but they shouldn’t be your only recourse. They might boast enormous reach, but the quality of that reach is questionable because it’s so generic.
Imagine you want to source Family Planning Advisors with a relevant master’s degree, 10+ years’ experience, fluent English, fluent Syrian, and expertise working on the frontlines, for instance. There might only be a handful of people who fit the bill across the globe.
Indeed say they have over 225 million candidates. But if you’re looking for needles, a haystack that large makes your life harder, not easier. Especially given search functionality that’s not tailored to the criteria you actually care about.
In practice, sourcing for humanitarian and international development jobs is much easier, faster, and far less manual with a sector-specialist talent community.
If you don’t yet use Impactpool, it’s a great addition to your sourcing mix. We’ve got an engaged community of 900,000+ impact-sector professionals in 195 countries, with advanced AI-matching to help you source talent based on granular sector-specific criteria. Search for talent and easily post and promote jobs across the community.
5 – Qualify candidates
If you’re building a talent roster, you’ll need to screen or assess talent before you place them onto your list. That’s where your guidelines are handy, outlining how rigorous assessment should be to warrant inclusion.
What are your minimum eligibility requirements? Are they set at the right level to ensure you’re not besieged by applications but are getting interest?
Will you place talent onto a roster after a phone screen, or only after manager interview? Or can candidates apply and answer screening questions?
Do former staff members and silver medalists need re-screening? Or re-screening after a certain time-lapse?
6 – Engage talent
Vanishingly few talent rosters are actually useful, because teams let them lapse into a wasteland of outdated resumes, old contact information, and disinterested candidates who forgot who you are.
Useful talent pools and rosters are living documents. That demands regular communication and monitoring, like:
Updating candidate data
Checking availability and interest
Promoting relevant roles
Providing content and resources
Sharing employer branding content
It’s often useful to set internal guidelines for how often engagement should happen. For example, maybe you want to contact everyone in your talent pool at least once a month. Or maybe you want to check your surge roster’s availability every Friday.
Talent engagement is one area Impactpool really stands out.
Poor engagement a huge reason rosters and pools fail.
How do you motivate candidates to update their CV on your database monthly, when they’ve spent the past 5 years working elsewhere? And how do you get job views from passive candidates who aren’t checking the major boards?
We answer that challenge in two main ways:
1. We treat candidates as a major stakeholder. We invest heavily in building a value-add career platform for the impact sector, where candidates are active, engaged, and inspired. It’s not just a dead repository of information. That’s why our community is growing by 3000-5000 members weekly.
2. Our ecosystem is inherently collaborative with centralized candidate profiles. Candidates in your talent pools also sit in our wider 900,000+ community – so when candidates update their profile to apply for any role with any of the 3000+ organizations we work with, you benefit.
7 – Review, evaluate, scale
After a period of time – three to six months, say – take a step back and evaluate progress.
What worked?
What didn’t work?
What were your bottlenecks?
What process changes might be useful?
Who else needs to be involved?
Then roll those lessons into continuous improvement, scaling incrementally across the organization until you’ve got (thriving!) talent pools and rosters in place everywhere you need them.
Effective talent rostering demands the right tools
If you’re serious about building talent pools and rosters, you need tools designed for the job.
Many international organizations rely on generic HR software that’s not built for this sector, so lacks the search functionality or access flexibility needed. Or, worse, they rely on spreadsheets. Flat, dead documents that lack nuance, searchability, or candidate outreach functionality.
To build effective talent rosters and pools, you need software designed to build talent rosters and pools. Software designed for your specific operating context as an international organization.
That’s what you get with Impactpool.
Impactpool gives you everything you need to build teams for the world’s most critical challenges – including ATS, CRM, talent rostering and talent pooling. Built on an engaged community of 900,000+ impact professionals, with the best sector-specific AI out there to search and surface the right people.
It’s a proven toolkit to become more strategic and accelerate recruitment delivery.
Impactpool is a talent ecosystem for the global impact sector. We help mission-driven organizations attract, source, engage, hire, and deploy sector-specific talent faster.