How to Widen Your Applicant Pool and Find Hidden Talent
Why Your Applicant Pool Is Shrinking (and What to Do About It)
If you’ve been struggling to find enough qualified candidates, it’s time to rethink your approach. This guide explores how to widen your applicant pool—so you can attract more talent, discover hidden potential, and build stronger teams in a competitive market.
Most companies unintentionally shrink their hiring funnel by relying too heavily on traditional filters: prior experience, education, or keywords in a resume. These filters may help screen candidates faster, but they can also block out people who could do the job, if given the opportunity.
Before we go further, let’s clarify a few key terms that often get mixed up:
- Applicant pool: Everyone who applies for a specific role, qualified or not. It’s all about volume.
- Candidate pool: A smaller, curated group of shortlisted or viable applicants for current or future roles.
- Talent pool: A broader, long-term database of high-potential individuals, including passive candidates, former applicants, and sourced leads.
Growing your applicant pool is the first step. But to build a sustainable hiring strategy, you also need to widen your talent pool so that potential hires don’t slip away simply because they don’t check every box.
The Resume Trap: Why Experience Alone Isn’t Enough
When you focus only on resumes and past experience, you limit your reach before the hiring process even begins. Strict job descriptions and automated screening tools often weed out people with potential who don’t fit neatly into traditional molds. In fact, research shows that over 75% of resumes never get seen by a human recruiter, as they’re filtered out by automated tracking systems. That means three out of four applicants, many with the skills or potential to succeed, never even make it to the next step.
There’s another catch: candidates with extensive experience often come with higher salary expectations and can be harder to retain. They’re more likely to be poached or to leave quickly for the next opportunity. In contrast, those who are given a chance to prove themselves tend to be more loyal, motivated, and appreciative of the opportunity.
When you only hire people who’ve already done the job before, you end up hiring clones — teams that look and think alike. And teams that think alike rarely innovate. The result? Limited perspectives, higher turnover costs, and a hiring funnel that narrows instead of grows.
Redefining What ‘Qualified’ Really Means in Hiring
Maybe the problem isn’t a shortage of talent, it’s how we define it.
Shifting the mindset from ‘hiring for experience’ to ‘hiring for capabilities and potential’ opens up a world of possibilities. Instead of fixating on where a candidate has been, look for soft and transferable skills: communication, adaptability, problem-solving, emotional intelligence.
A hire based on skills is five times more likely to predict job performance than one based on education alone. That’s because true capability often lies in a person’s aptitude and motivations, not their credentials. Tools like pre-employment assessments help uncover this potential by measuring cognitive ability, personality, and motivations — so you can evaluate how someone will perform, not just what they’ve done before.
How Hiring for Potential Leads to Better Performance and Retention
By broadening your hiring lens, you gain access to a much larger and richer pool of candidates:
- More applicants: Open requirements attract talent from different industries and backgrounds.
- Hidden talent: You’ll discover candidates who might not check every box on paper but have the potential to thrive.
- Diversity of thought: Broader hiring builds more innovative, resilient, and engaged teams.
And it works, 90% of organizations report fewer hiring mistakes, and 94% find that hires based on skills outperform those chosen by degree or experience criteria. Opening your funnel isn’t just a feel-good strategy, it’s a data-backed way to hire smarter and improve retention over time.
5 Ways to Widen Your Applicant Pool (and Attract More Great Candidates)
Ready to open up your funnel? Start with a few simple, strategic changes:
- Rewrite your job postings: Remove unnecessary “must-haves” that can deter great candidates. Focus on what’s truly essential for success.
- Adopt a potential-fit approach: Evaluate soft and technical skills as well as learning potential instead of years of experience.
- Leverage pre-employment assessments: Use to measure candidates’ aptitude, personality, and motivation objectively.
- Widen your sourcing channels: Reach out to passive candidates, career switchers, referrals, and even former applicants.
- Strengthen your employer brand: Show that you value growth, development, and potential—not just polished resumes.
From Bar Manager to Sales Star: The Power of Hiring for Fit
Meet Joe — on paper, his background in hospitality didn’t make him the obvious choice for a sales role. But our assessments revealed something his resume couldn’t: high motivation, strong interpersonal skills, and a natural drive to succeed.
With the right development, Joe went on to become one of Prevue’s top-performing sales executives. By using data-driven assessments to measure fit and potential, we saw beyond experience and uncovered a star performer. This is the power of widening your funnel, talent is everywhere if you know how to see it.
Start Hiring for Potential, Not Just Paper Qualifications
Hiring isn’t about finding someone who’s “done it before.” It’s about finding someone who can do it and grow into it.
As competition for talent continues to rise, widening your applicant pool isn’t optional, it’s essential. By focusing on fit, potential, and science-backed insights, you’ll attract more applicants, make better hires, and build teams ready for the future.
Want to see how? Explore how Prevue Assessments can help you evaluate potential and expand your hiring funnel today.