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November 12, 2025 
10 min read
Recruitment typically takes weeks or months — time you could spend training and integrating new hires instead. Rather than starting from scratch with each opening, source talent from candidate pools to get a head start.
A candidate pool is a group of pre-evaluated candidates organized by attributes such as role, location, or skill. It helps your talent acquisition (TA) teams hire faster, reduce costs, and align hiring with business growth. It does this by skipping the sourcing stage and engaging with people who’ve already shown interest.
If you use an applicant tracking system (ATS), you likely have candidate pools at your fingertips already. Here, we’ll explain what candidate pools are for and how to maintain and leverage them to reduce cost per hire and shorten time to fill.
Explore iCIMS Hire for building and managing talent pools.
Candidate pools are curated subgroups of talent pools. They consist of potential hires who are pre-identified and nurtured for future roles. Examples of people in these pools include:
Unlike general applicant lists, TA teams create these pools for specific recruitment needs. Expanding to a new office? Create a pool of local talent. Need specialized credentials? Group candidates by qualifications, like active licensure.
Candidate pools are strategic tools, whether you’re backfilling or growing. They reduce reliance on job boards and agencies by giving you ready candidates for critical or hard-to-fill niche roles.
Build your candidate pipeline with the inbound recruiting techniques below.
Attract candidates by making your recruitment needs known everywhere. That means advertising your company and open positions where they gather, such as through:
Pro tip: SHRM’s 2024 State of the Workplace says 62% of human resources (HR) departments are recruiting from diverse talent pools, including formerly incarcerated individuals. Try sites like Diversity.com or VetJobs.com to expand your marketing efforts through channels focusing on diversity.
Employer branding showcases your company’s culture, values, and employer value proposition (EVP), raising awareness and interest even among passive candidates. Examples of effective employer branding strategies include:
Current employees can be great additions to your candidate pipeline, especially for succession planning. Look for high-potential employees or those developing skills you’ll need for particular roles.
Learn more about the power of your internal talent with How to correctly use internal mobility to maximize talent ROI.
Always add past applicants, including silver medalists, employee alumni, and seasonal hires, to your pools. Your recruitment team has likely already evaluated these candidates. This makes them extremely valuable for immediate hiring needs in high-turnover industries, repeat-hiring environments, or early attrition events.
Candidate relationship management (CRM) software captures, organizes, and engages prospective candidates through targeted campaigns, career sites, and automation. Unlike basic ATS platforms, it can enable you to build candidate pools even when you’re not actively hiring.
iCIMS CRM, for example, uses AI algorithms to automatically tag and sort candidates based on criteria like skills.
Organize candidates into engagement segments based on what matters to your business. This goes beyond job titles, which often don’t reflect actual experience.
Consider these segments:
| Segment | Use case |
| Skill | Locate candidates with leadership and coding skills for a software engineering manager role. |
| Availability | Find applicants available for overnight shifts. |
| Location | Identify candidates near your new office. |
| Certification or license | Determine who has Spanish proficiency for a bilingual role. |
| Engagement level | Contact silver medalists or passive prospects following a critical vacancy. |
Segmenting your pools supports business strategies by providing ready-made lists as needs evolve.
While most ATSs typically offer basic segmentation tools, iCIMS’ ATS and CRM automatically parse candidate information and apply tags. This makes it scalable for growing companies. Its natural language search may also help you find candidates faster than traditional Boolean methods.
Want more segmentation tactics? Check out How to manage your talent pool for high-growth hiring.
Without constant engagement, your candidate pools may go stale as candidates lose interest or find work elsewhere. Here’s how you can keep talent invested and ready.
Nurture campaigns can maintain candidate interest through automated outreach about new openings, company news, and networking opportunities.
Look for CRM systems that support automated email, text, or social campaigns where messaging changes based on recipient actions. The goal is to re-engage silver medalists and passive candidates to act quickly on aligned opportunities.
Note: Make sure to comply with data privacy laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). This means providing avenues for folks to unsubscribe from your content. Past applicants should also be able to remove their data upon request. See how iCIMS protects data with its Transfer Impact Assessment FAQ.
Personalized content is more likely to generate interest and responses from candidates.
Take stock of what you know about them — their skills, past applications, engagement behaviors. Use this information to personalize job alerts, newsletters, career growth resources, company news, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) updates.
For example, silver medalists will appreciate updates about similar roles they’re qualified for. Content highlighting your EVP may entice passive candidates to apply despite working elsewhere.
One way to develop personalized content is through iCIMS Video Testimonials. It lets current employees share authentic stories, enabling candidates to envision what it’s like to work for you.
Career events like webinars, in-person networking, and company information sessions give candidates a glimpse of your company’s personality and ethos. They can also give recruiters and hiring managers first impressions for future interviews.
Track candidate pipeline growth, response rates, conversion rates, and satisfaction scores to see what engagement tactics work and what needs improvement.
For example, if certain content generates more clicks, increase its prevalence. The more you review and act on your recruitment metrics, the warmer your pools might stay.
Technology helps make large-scale candidate pool management possible. Without it, recruiters would need to manually manage pools and create, send, and respond to engagement messages.
You could build a patchwork system of multiple tools, but it may not be scalable. Large companies can lose productivity from data flow delays and switching between multiple systems.
Instead, consider an all-in-one talent platform purpose-built with candidate management and marketing tools. iCIMS, for example, is a comprehensive talent solution for enterprises. It aims to maintain and expand healthy candidate pools without constant manual oversight. Features in iCIMS include:
Case in point: Perspecta, a government services provider, enhanced its career site and engagement campaigns using iCIMS CRM to track visitors and conversions. To meet its annual goal of nearly 3,000 hires, Perspecta implemented automated text campaigns to increase applications. As a result, it successfully built candidate pools for projects that often start on short notice.
While often used interchangeably, there’s a subtle difference. A talent pool refers to everyone potentially suited for a role (whether they applied or not).
A candidate pool is a curated subgroup of people who applied to a role or engaged with your talent network and were reviewed by your recruitment team. This screening and segmentation distinguishes it from a broader talent pool.
Base your candidate pool on your strategic hiring goals. This includes prospects who have shown interest in your company, silver medalists, passive candidates, referral leads, alumni, and repeat seasonal hires.
Candidate pools can ensure you have a list of prescreened and engaged individuals who are ready to jump on opportunities immediately. That means quicker sourcing and filling for positions in the event of major company changes or filling specialized skill gaps in response to industry shifts.
Common strategies to keep a candidate pool active include:
You can handle this manually or leverage CRM automation for scale.
You need ATS, CRM, recruitment marketing, and employer branding tools to manage candidate pools adequately.
Rather than purchasing these separately, look for comprehensive solutions like iCIMS. These typically include all these features for easier candidate capture, segmentation, and relationship building.
Candidate pools can enable faster, smarter recruitment and long-term workforce planning alongside quick sourcing for vital positions. But, it may be difficult to find a recruitment platform that can organize and leverage these talent lists effectively.
You need a solution that centralizes active and past candidates, automates segmentation, and measures recruitment ROI with powerful analytics. Avoid ATSs that merely focus on active applicants.
With iCIMS, your TA team gets all of this, plus marketing tools. This enables you to nurture and re-engage candidates with personalized content and video testimonials.
Sound like something you need? Schedule a demo to see how iCIMS helps you build, nurture, and activate your candidate pools.
Alex is well-versed in content and digital marketing. He blends a passion for sharp, persuasive copy with creating intuitive user experiences on the web. A natural storyteller, Alex highlights customer successes and amplifies their best practices.
Alex earned his bachelor’s degree at Fairleigh Dickinson University before pursuing his master’s at Montclair State University. When not at work, Alex enjoys hiking, studying history and homebrewing beer.
