Talent Pools: What Are They and How Do I Create Them?

What Are Talent Pools?

A talent pool is a segmented database of candidates that could include past applicants, sourced prospects, former employees, and other contacts all organized by categories that matter to your business so you can re-engage the right people when the right roles open up.

If that sounds a lot like how marketing teams segment their customer lists, it should. The underlying logic is identical: group people by shared attributes, then reach the right segment with the right message at the right time. Marketers have been doing this for decades, and the results speak for themselves.

According to the DMA (Data & Marketing Association), segmented campaigns can drive up to 760% more revenue than unsegmented ones. Recruiting teams sitting on thousands of candidate records have the same opportunity but most just haven't organized the data well enough to act on it.

The Marketing Parallel

Think about how a savvy e-commerce brand operates. They don't blast the same email to every customer on their list. They segment by purchase history, engagement level, geography, and dozens of other attributes, then tailor campaigns to each group. A lapsed customer gets a win-back offer. A high-value repeat buyer gets early access to new products. The segmentation is what makes the outreach relevant, and relevance is what drives results.

Talent pools work the same way. Instead of treating your ATS as a graveyard of old applications, you segment candidates into groups based on your own categories: specialty, skill set, location, licensure, activity level, or whatever taxonomy fits your business. A healthcare staffing firm might build pools around nursing specialties and certifications. An IT staffing firm might segment by programming language, clearance level, or contract preference. The categories are yours to define with the point to make a large, undifferentiated database searchable and actionable.

Every candidate is a contact. Segmentation turns them into a pipeline.

Talent pools turn an undifferentiated database into organized, actionable groups sorted by the categories that match how your team actually recruits.

Why This Matters for Recruiting Teams

Most staffing and recruiting firms already have a significant asset they're underutilizing: the candidates already in their system. Gem's 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks Report, based on data covering over 165 million applications and 1.2 million hires, found that nearly 46% of sourced hires now come from rediscovered candidates already in a company's CRM or ATS which is up from 26% in 2021. That's a massive share of hires coming not from new sourcing spend, but from people a company had already found and evaluated.

The problem isn't a lack of candidates. It's a lack of structure. Without segmentation, a database of 50,000 candidates is just a list. With segmentation (organized into talent pools by role type, recency of engagement, geographic fit, and other relevant attributes) that same database becomes a pipeline you can activate on demand.

What Good Talent Pools Look Like

Effective talent pools share a few characteristics. They're segmented using categories that reflect how your recruiters actually think about candidates not generic labels, but your firm's own ontology. They include some signal of engagement recency, so you can distinguish between a candidate who applied last month and one who hasn't been active in two years. And they're connected to some mechanism for outreach, whether that's email, SMS, or automated workflows, so the segmentation actually leads to action.

The marketing world learned long ago that a well-maintained, well-segmented contact database is one of the most valuable assets a business can own. For recruiting teams, especially in staffing, where candidate relationships are the core product, the same principle applies. The candidates you've already sourced, screened, and engaged are worth far more than a fresh Indeed posting. You just need to organize them well enough to find them again.

Own your talent funnel.

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