Brooks, who is senior manager - EMEA talent acquisition at McAfee, and his colleagues have created an online talent network which operates as an exclusive club. Club ’members’ can take advantage of videos, niche groups, invitations to seminars, information about the company’s products and access to key McAfee staff including potential bosses and colleagues. “They’ve onboarded before they’ve boarded,” Brooks told Recruiter.

Brooks predicted that the initiative will bring time to hire down to zero days once the pipeline was fully up and running.

“My view is recruitment needs to change,” Brooks said. “Today in the corporate world, recruitment and HR are too reactive to today’s business demands.

Recruitment needs to be aggressive, we need to be more proactive and recruit quickly and with quality as well.”

The McAfee Talent initiative resulted from Brooks’ frustration that the previous “shelf life” of candidates at McAfee was around nine weeks, “and sometimes we needed more than nine weeks to be able to offer someone a role. As I looked at it, what we’d been doing was old fashioned. I got my team together to look at what we could do. We wanted to flip recruitment on its head”, he said.

The basis of the pool was created through the process of selecting candidates for specific jobs, when “typically at least three suitable candidates” were sought, Brooks told Recruiter. When one was picked, if the other two were very strong, they were put in the pipeline, called McAfee Talent, where they were advised that they could be hired for a similar or equally suitable job in 12 to 18 months.

Candidates applying to McAfee on spec through the firm’s careers site who are identified as having good potential, will be brought in for interviews with both a recruiter and a manager and be added to the pipeline. “We’re always looking for talent -; not just when we have a requirement,” Brooks said.

The programme is in its Beta testing phase.