Fast, cost-effective frontline hiring at volume is a constant challenge. Pushed to deliver on short notice, HR and talent acquisition teams often react by over-relying on expensive paid sourcing.
Yet your best candidates are already in your orbit, people who have applied to you, worked for you, or told you they are interested. Fountain Pool is a talent engagement platform built for high-volume frontline hiring. Its CRM-style database centralizes your past connections, providing the search and scalable outreach tools needed to hire familiar talent faster and cheaper.
Cue Works Alongside Every Step Here
Cue can answer questions about Pool, draft an audience from a plain-language description, and draft a campaign for you to review. Everything in this article can also be done manually in the Pool interface, and anything Cue drafts arrives as a draft for you to check before it goes anywhere. See Use Cue in Pool.
Three Contact Types
Pool pulls together three kinds of contacts:
Applicants who have applied to your jobs in Fountain Hire
Workers who have been hired
Prospects you import or add manually before they apply
Pool matches these records by email address and combines them into one Talent Profile per person, giving you a single view of someone's full history with your company. Every contact in Pool must have an email address; records without one are not in Pool. For how records arrive, how quickly they arrive, and how they merge, see How Pool Works.
Pool Benefits
Lower sourcing costs: Re-engage people who have already applied or worked with you, instead of paying to acquire new applicants through external channels.
Faster time-to-hire: Pool talent already know your company and have shown interest, so they tend to convert faster than applicants from cold channels.
Higher-quality pipelines: Audiences are built from people who have engaged with you before, so recruiters spend less time screening unqualified or uninterested applicants.
Less manual effort: Automated audience building and campaign delivery replace the work of tracking down and contacting past candidates by hand.
Stronger retention: Candidates who join through an existing relationship tend to start with a more positive view of your company.
What you can do with Pool
Use Match Score to see how well each person fits your open jobs.
Build Audiences that group talent by criteria such as job match, location, or last application date.
Send Campaigns to those audiences by email or SMS.
Set up the Hire sync once to keep Talent Profiles current as people apply, change stages, and are hired.
Pool vs Hire: Which to Use for Re-engagement
Pool and Hire both send messages to people who have applied to your jobs. They are for different moments, and using the wrong one produces messages that do not arrive, or arrive twice.
When to Use Hire
Manages people actively moving through a job Opening's workflow. Messaging there is part of a hiring process: tied to a stage, expecting a reply, belonging to one application.
When to Use Pool
Manages people outside an active process: before they apply, and after they have been rejected, dispositioned, or terminated. Messaging there is outbound campaign messaging: tied to an audience, expecting no reply, not connected to any single application.
Situation | Use |
Move an applicant through your workflow | Hire |
Ask an active applicant for a missing document | Hire |
Reply to something a candidate sent you | Hire |
Invite past applicants to apply for a new Opening | Pool |
Nurture people you have not hired yet | Pool |
Re-engage former workers who left in good standing | Pool |
Invite a group to a hiring event | Pool |
Three differences worth knowing:
Pool messaging is one-directional. Campaigns send from a no-reply style sender and recipients cannot start a conversation by replying. If you need a reply, use Hire.
Pool does not advance applicants. It never moves someone through a workflow or skips stages they completed on a previous application. Workflows and questions change over time, and fast-tracking would miss information and decision points.
Active applicants are excluded by default. The Exclude active applicants setting keeps Pool campaigns away from people currently in a Hire workflow, so the two do not talk over each other. Turning it off removes that separation.
Pool campaign activity does not appear on the applicant's History tab in Hire. See Read Pool Campaign Performance.
Pool Glossary
Pool uses a small set of terms precisely, and several of them are easy to confuse with each other. The Pool glossary defines every term used across Pool documentation, including the distinctions between pool, audience, and campaign, and between Match Score, Position Match, and Opening Match.
Start Using Pool
Before You Start
If your company uses Fountain Hire, complete the one-time sync setup in Pool Settings so applicant records flow in. Every contact in Pool needs an email address; records without one are not in Pool.
Work through these four steps in order to set up Pool and send your first campaign. Each takes a few minutes and builds on the one before it.
Set up Pool and start the Hire sync — connect Pool to Fountain Hire so applicant records flow in.
Find talent and build your first audience — filter your talent and save the result as a reusable group.
Send your first campaign — write a message, choose your audience, and activate.
Check your campaign results — read delivery, open, and click figures.
Track Applicants Sourced from a Campaign
Campaign links pass UTM parameters (source, medium, and campaign) through to applicants who apply. Because Hire has no dedicated "Pool source" profile field, you identify Pool-sourced candidates by filtering on those UTM values.
Every link in a Pool campaign carries utm_source=FountainPool automatically, even when you set no custom UTM Source, so filtering on that value works without any setup on your side. This is what lets you track Pool-driven applications in Hire's Applicant Sources dashboard.
To tell one campaign apart from another, set a custom Source, Medium, or Campaign value in the Insert link modal when you build the message.
Fountain Analytics also reports Pool as an applicant source in aggregate.