What a talent pool is
A talent pool (مخزون المواهب) is an organised base of potential candidates that an organisation keeps and follows up, so that it can return to it when a vacancy opens instead of starting the search from nothing.
Three parts of that definition carry the weight. The base is organised, so that the people in it can be found again. The organisation keeps it and follows it up, so that it is maintained and not simply stored. And its purpose is a return: when a vacancy opens, the search begins with people the organisation already knows.
The people in a talent pool are potential candidates. Being in the pool does not mean that a person has applied for a role, or that a role is open for them now. It means that the organisation knows them and has a reason to come back to them when a suitable vacancy appears.
Who makes up a talent pool
A talent pool draws on five groups of people:
- People who applied before and were not accepted for reasons unrelated to their competence: one vacancy and two good candidates, or timing that did not suit.
- People recommended by employees at a time when there was no vacancy.
- People the organisation contacted who were not interested at the time. Circumstances change.
- Former employees who left a good record behind them.
- Current employees who are candidates for other roles internally.
The first group rests on the reason for the earlier decision. A candidate turned down because a single vacancy had two good candidates, or because the timing did not suit, was not turned down on competence. The reason that ended the first application was tied to that vacancy and that moment, so it need not apply to the next vacancy that opens.
The second and third groups were known to the organisation at a moment when something was missing. With a recommendation from an employee, the missing part was the vacancy. With a contact the organisation made itself, the missing part was the person’s interest. Either can change later, and the talent pool is where the name is kept in case it does.
The last two groups are people the organisation has seen at work. A former employee who left a good record behind them is someone whose work the organisation has seen, and a current employee who is a candidate for another role is already inside the organisation. What the organisation knows about them comes from their service, not from an application, a recommendation or a contact.
How a talent pool differs from a list of CVs
A list is stored. A talent pool is followed up.
The difference is practical. In a talent pool, three things are written down for each person: the reason they were not hired, the date of the last contact, and a note on what has changed in the candidate’s situation. Without those three, the pool becomes a folder that grows and is never opened, and that is what happens when a folder is called a talent pool without being followed up.
Each of the three answers a separate question for whoever returns to the record when a vacancy opens. The reason the person was not hired shows whether that reason still stands, since a reason tied to one vacancy or one moment may no longer apply. The date of the last contact shows how long it has been since anyone spoke to the person. The note on what has changed shows whether the record describes the candidate as they are now, or as they were when they first came into the pool.
A list of CVs holds what each person sent at the time they sent it. Whoever opens it later has none of the three notes to work from, and has to find out from the beginning whether a name is still a candidate.
What keeps a talent pool alive
- Periodic contact that asks for nothing. It can be news about the organisation or useful content, not a message that appears only when the organisation needs something.
- An update at every hiring round. It means that someone interviewed today enters the talent pool tomorrow.
- A periodic review that removes inactive records. It removes people whose career path has changed, or who have stopped replying for two years, because they are no longer candidates.
Periodic contact keeps the relationship from running in one direction only. A person who hears from the organisation only when it has a vacancy to fill hears from it only when it needs them. Contact that asks for nothing continues between vacancies, so the relationship does not exist only at the moments when a role is open.
An update at every hiring round ties the talent pool to recruitment as it happens. Each hiring round runs through a candidate pipeline, the flow of candidates towards one specific vacancy, which closes when that vacancy does. The people interviewed in that round who were not hired leave it known to the organisation, and the update is what brings them into the talent pool instead of leaving them in the file of a vacancy that has closed.
The periodic review keeps the talent pool from only ever growing. A name that is added and never removed stays in the pool after the person it describes has moved on. Under the review, a changed career path or two years without a reply marks the person as no longer a candidate, and the record is removed.
The side of a talent pool that is overlooked: candidate data
A talent pool holds personal data, and apart from current employees put forward for other roles, the people it describes are not employees of the organisation. Handling that data is subject to the provisions of the Personal Data Protection Law (نظام حماية البيانات الشخصية) in the Kingdom, which include specifying the purpose for which data is collected and limiting what is collected to the minimum needed for that purpose.
That those people are not employees does not take their data outside that law. The law applies to the processing, in the Kingdom, of personal data relating to individuals, and its scope does not turn on whether an employment relationship exists. Its definition of personal data names among its examples a person’s name and contact numbers. The records of the current employees in the pool fall under the same law, and the obligations it places on an organisation’s handling of its staff and candidate records are examined under employee data privacy.
Alongside those provisions, disciplined practice for a talent pool has three parts: a declared purpose for keeping the data, a period for keeping it, and defined access for the people who use it.
What measures the worth of a talent pool
The honest indicator is not the size of the talent pool but the share of hires that come from it, together with the time taken to fill a vacancy when the pool is used, compared with the time taken when it is not. A talent pool of thousands of names that does not produce a single hire is a storage cost, not an asset.
The first measure counts outcomes, not entries. It is calculated in the same way as source of hire, the distribution of the people hired in a period across the channels they came from, with the talent pool taken as one of those channels. The size of a pool and its share of hires are separate figures, and a rise in the first need not move the second.
The second measure compares two groups of vacancies. Time to fill is the number of days a vacancy takes from the opening of a requisition until it is filled, and the comparison sets the vacancies filled from the talent pool beside the vacancies filled without it. The definition describes a return to known people instead of a search from nothing, and that comparison is where any difference in time would show.
The two measures answer different questions. The share of hires shows how much of the organisation’s recruitment the talent pool supplies, and the time comparison shows whether recruiting from it is quicker. Neither depends on how many names the pool holds, which is why a pool of thousands of names with no hire from it is counted as a cost of storage and not as an asset.
This is an explanation of the concept and of the statutory provisions cited, not legal advice.
A standalone Saudi HR system
One employee file holding the contract, the documents and their expiry dates, the attendance record, leave, salary and end-of-service entitlements. End-of-service, overtime and leave-balance calculations are built into the system.
A standalone system on its own subscription. The connection to Qoyod Accounting is now available.