A crucial strategy: Why is talent acquisition important?

Today, talent acquisition is more important than ever. To be successful, an organization needs people with the right skills for its goals and needs. But technological progress is as fast-paced as ever. From the artificial intelligence (AI) boom to the increasing use of data across various functions—important new technologies emerge all the time, and with them, new in-demand skills. So, to keep up with digital transformation, companies increasingly often need people with relevant new skillsets. This requires constantly upskilling employees and bringing in new talent. On top of that, the specialists who are key to success are often in short supply, so the competition for top talent is fierce.

At the same time, digital transformation is a key to building effective, forward-looking talent strategies. Technologies, including AI, can empower talent acquisition managers to quickly make skills-based decisions and help accelerate organizational growth. Despite the highly competitive labor market and skill shortages, the right talent acquisition software and AI recruitment tools can help organizations bring in top talent and simplify the hiring processes.

Talent acquisition is one of the forces that help companies keep up with both digital transformation and their competition. By expertly curating the workforce of an organization, talent acquisition managers help ensure that the company always has the right talent to be successful.

Talent acquisition vs. recruitment

So, what is talent acquisition exactly, and what does it involve? To fully define talent acquisition, there’s another important question we need to answer: what’s the difference between talent acquisition, human resources (HR), and recruitment?

“Human resources (HR)” is an umbrella term that can refer to the employees comprising an organization’s workforce, the departments that deal with all issues related to employment, and the actual practices used in human capital management (HCM).

HCM refers to the activities and applications used for recruiting, managing, and developing an organization’s human capital—also called its workforce. People are one of the most valuable assets companies have, so it’s easy to see why human capital management is a crucial foundation of an organization’s business plan and success. And one of the essential components of an HCM strategy is talent acquisition.

In the general scheme of HCM, the role of talent acquisition is to help identify top talent, source candidates for both short- and long-term business goals, onboard, and retain employees. So, since it involves hiring, is talent acquisition the same as recruitment? Not quite. The primary difference is in the scope of responsibilities, so let’s break it down.

What does recruitment do?

Simply put, recruitment deals with hiring the right person for each job opening. A comprehensive recruitment strategy can guide how recruiters create compelling job descriptions, how they identify promising talent pools, and how top candidates are selected. But it’s not always recruiters that come up with the recruitment strategy; in fact, quite often designing the strategy is not their responsibility. Ultimately a recruiter’s main focus is to fill open positions.

What does talent acquisition do?

It’s important to note that there are differences in how companies approach human resource management; the exact distribution of responsibilities between different HR roles can vary. But typically, a talent acquisition manager’s scope is broader than a recruiter’s, and they are involved in hiring in a more strategic capacity. What does it mean? It’s up to them to plan long-term recruitment strategies and introduce relevant HCM software and processes, empowering their teams with the tools to improve talent sourcing, identify the best talent, and onboard new hires effectively. In other words, a recruiter deals more with immediate hiring tasks to address specific needs, while talent acquisition is more forward-thinking.

For a talent acquisition manager, the ideal workforce can handle the tasks at hand while also being versatile and dynamic enough to grow and adapt to future challenges. Talent acquisition managers need to look holistically at the type of skills and capabilities their organization needs and come up with a strategic, skills-based workforce plan. What does this mean? It isn’t enough to assess a candidate’s current skillset—how well they can do the job they’ve applied for. It’s important to consider how their career path aligns with the organization’s needs in the long term. Could this individual contributor grow into a manager over time? Would they be able to learn as they work and continuously upskill to meet the evolving needs of the organization?

Metrics used in talent acquisition

Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS) and employee NPS (eNPS) are two metrics that gauge how happy applicants are with their candidate experience and how content and loyal the employees are. These scores help predict how likely they are to recommend the company as an employer—and to stay.

Employee retention rate is a percentage of employees an organization retains (meaning “keeps”) for a particular period of time. Essentially, it shows how well a company can hold on to its top talent.

Employee turnover, attrition, and churn reflect the number of employees who leave the company within a specific timeframe (for example, a year). What’s the difference?

• Turnover is the percentage of total workforce that leaves a position for which someone else will need to be hired
• Attrition is similar, but counts only voluntary departures from positions which won’t need to be filled again
• Churn is the combination of turnover and attrition, counting total number of departures, for any reason

Unlike attrition, high turnover may indicate issues with recruitment, eNPS, or incentivizing employees. High churn doesn’t always mean the company is doing a poor job at retention, but it is likely to bring down productivity.

First-year turnover refers to the percentage of new hires who leave the company within a year after being hired. This metric helps spot issues with recruitment efficiency and gaps in onboarding.

Recruiter efficiency is an assessment of how optimized the recruitment process is, based on time, cost, and candidate experience.

Time to fill measures how quickly a company fills open positions, from when the job requisition is approved to when a candidate accepts the offer. This metric is good for assessing recruitment efficiency and strategy.

Time to hire measures how quickly the company can hire an applicant, from when a candidate applies for a role to when they accept the offer, which is critical for measuring recruitment efficiency and candidate experience.

Time to productivity (TTP) measures how long it takes for a new hire to achieve standard productivity from their start date, which makes it useful for assessing how well onboarding works.

How does the talent acquisition process work?

Generally, a talent acquisition process includes the stages described below. However, depending on how a company’s human resource management is organized, the process may look a little different or be spread across multiple roles.

Sourcing and strategy

• Identify skill gaps in the current workforce and areas where high-volume hiring may be required, particularly in expanding organizations that may need rapid workforce scaling
• Anticipate upcoming talent needs based on business goals and broader trends
• Work with internal stakeholders from across the organization to build an efficient strategy that sets them up for success
• Select and introduce tools such as talent acquisition software and AI recruitment features
• Build talent pools, networks, and a strong presence in hiring spaces, including on social networks and job boards
• Establish and uphold a good reputation as an employer
• Define and nurture a company culture that fosters productivity and appeals to top talent, especially for hard-to-fill roles

Things to consider:

What roles will the company need to fill in the foreseeable future, and how can talent for them be sourced?

Which hiring processes can be optimized using talent acquisition software?

Where do candidates look for jobs, and does your company have a strong presence in those spaces?

Attracting applicants and candidate leads

• Create and post compelling, bias-free job descriptions that correspond to hiring goals and attract candidates
• If needed, translate or adapt work descriptions depending on local regulations and market trends
• Maintain an engaging career website that showcases employer brand and communicates company culture and values
• Offer the right incentives to attract talent in the most cost-efficient way
• Build a talent pipeline of candidates
• Get the job posting in front of the right pool of candidates to improve the quality and relevance of applications

Things to consider:

Which sites do candidates use to research a prospective employer, and is your organization presented positively there?

When hiring deskless workers, how can you support them in their journey?

How do you ensure that your job descriptions are equitable and inclusive, and can your talent acquisition software help eliminate biased language?

What circumstances might the top talent be in, and what unique value can you offer them? For a dynamic young professional, mobility or relocation benefits could be crucial. A seasoned professional who has family may prioritize companies that uphold work-life balance and support remote work with a robust digital workplace.

Screening and short-listing applicants

• Review resumes, highlighting relevant skills and experience
• Screen candidates, verify provided information, and assess portfolios
• Compare applicants side by side, identify best-matched candidates based on their skills, background, and experience

Things to consider:

How can you automate or speed up screening processes and make it easier to identify candidates that have the right skills to excel and grow in the role?

Can HR software and AI help you make data-driven decisions free of bias?

Have the previous steps produced high-quality leads on promising candidates, or do you need to reassess your approach?

Assessing and selecting candidates

• Prepare questions based on the job description and the candidate’s resume, then carry out interviews
• Facilitate interviews with stakeholders, such as hiring managers
• Perform due diligence, including background checks if needed
• Evaluate candidates for culture fit and skill match to the role
• Assess the applicant’s career path and whether the position matches their long-term goals

Things to consider:

What is the best and most time-efficient way to make sure that a candidate possesses the skills required for the role?

How to balance elements of the candidate assessment, such as test assignments and multiple interviews, with the need to provide a good candidate experience?

Would the candidate find space to grow within your company? Overqualified new hires might move on too soon, forcing you to go through the hiring process again.

Can the candidate eventually become an asset in a different role? Every new hiring process is an investment, so high turnover can be costly and bad for productivity and reputation.

Making an offer

• Ensure that the candidate fully understands the scope of work, demands, and conditions of the role before they’re hired
• Negotiate the finer details of the offer
• Prepare hiring documentation, ensuring it’s compliant with local labor regulations
• Provide or source legal or immigration support if necessary

Things to consider:

What tools can help optimize the most resource-intensive processes at this stage?

In a global company, which stages of the hiring process and elements of the offer may need to be localized?

Onboarding

• Set up new hires for success with adequate training and introductions
• Optimize onboarding procedures to accelerate time to productivity
• Provide new hires with the tools and information they need, such as equipment, identification, and knowledge of the facilities if applicable
• Carry out all required trainings, such as security, workplace health and safety, and compliance
• Connect new hires with relevant contacts, such as their teammates and HR

Things to consider:

What resources can you provide to new hires to help them get started, and, in a global company, which parts of the onboarding process need to be localized?

Does your talent acquisition software work well with other HR systems in place?

Do the recruitment and onboarding processes add up to a good candidate experience?

Beyond hiring

Talent acquisition managers need to think beyond closing the role. It’s important to learn more about each new hire’s experience as a candidate. This insight can help talent acquisition managers improve the hiring process with every new candidate. This is essential, given the fierce competition for talent, and even more so when dealing with roles where the talent pool is small.

Another practice, which is especially important in the age of AI, is upskilling your workforce. When employees have the tools to learn new skills, the entire workforce can become a valuable talent pool to hire from. Nurturing existing talent is not easy, but employees themselves can be great allies in uplevelling initiatives because many of them also want space to grow. Investing in upskilling can help build employee loyalty, improve internal mobility, and make future hiring easier and more cost-effective.

How to build a good talent acquisition strategy: Best practices

Hiring can be demanding and fast-paced, making it harder to find time to consider the big picture and strategy. But a sound talent acquisition strategy is worth the effort because it can save time down the road and alleviate the day-to-day pressure. So, here are some best practices worth incorporating into a talent acquisition strategy.

Assess the organization’s business plans and strategy

To anticipate a company’s talent needs, it’s important to understand the direction in which the company is moving and the challenges that might arise on this path.

How you can do it:

• Stay current on strategic updates even when they don’t directly affect your day-to-day work
• Communicate with business leaders from other departments
• Work with colleagues in HR, such as the chief human resources officer (CHRO, also sometimes called director of HR), to understand and adjust the talent acquisition strategy

Proactively gather and analyze feedback

This is especially true for heads of talent acquisition and other leadership positions: your people have insights that could help you optimize day-to-day processes and make HR work easier.

However, people won’t always think to share their observations: to colleagues in non-strategic roles, some things might look unimportant or seem too trivial to bother leadership with. This is one of the reasons why fostering openness and a healthy company culture is important.

How you can do it:

• Carry out anonymous surveys
• Hold office hours or regular roundtables
• Set up internal communication channels where colleagues can flag problems and share insights
• Institute and promote a culture of openness, listening, and approachability

Understand and uphold the company brand and reputation

Another helpful practice is to infuse recruitment materials and candidate experiences with company culture and brand values. This will help candidates understand what they’re signing up for so they can make better choices—and you can get better leads and less churn.

Keep track of how people perceive the company as an employer. If you monitor feedback from current and former employees, you can spot issues in human resource management, which is important for eNPS. A poor reputation as an employer can damage the company’s overall image and undermine recruiting efforts.

How you can do it:

• Monitor recruiting networks and social media, such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn
• If possible, keep in touch with the PR department and ask to be appraised of any issues casting doubt on your company’s reputation as an employer
• Showcase your employer brand on the career website, highlighting culture and values
• Provide a channel for current and former employees to voice their concerns directly to HR

Think outside the box

Hiring a full-time employee is not the only way to close your company’s talent needs. For a temporary task, engaging contingent workers may suffice—and save resources. Companies may also lose top candidates to external service providers who specialize in a particular field. For example, sometimes, if you can’t compete for talent with an award-winning creative marketing agency, you can just hire the agency.

If your talent acquisition software or other HCM tech supports engaging contingent workers and service providers, an external workforce can come in handy, allowing you to:

• Quickly add the talent and resources you need to stay competitive
• Scale up workforce capacity on demand
• Optimize costs through proactive control over each aspect of engaging external workers

Learn more about talent acquisition

• Follow authoritative sources, such as Forbes, TechTarget, and Gartner

• Read more on related topics:

  • What is an applicant tracking system (ATS)?
  • The hybrid workforce: Overcoming recruitment and onboarding challenges
  • Hiring shouldn’t feel as bad as firing

Tips for effective talent acquisition

Here are five ways to help make your talent acquisition strategy more effective:

• Use digital tools to optimize recruitment performance across tasks—for example, talent acquisition software and other instruments for human resource management
• Use analytics to track your performance through the metrics and talent acquisition KPIs
• Use data and insights from your HR analytics software to identify issues early on and find areas for improvement
• Use benchmarking to understand your performance in a context
• Use new tools, such as AI recruitment, when they become available, so as to not fall behind your competitors adopting the latest technologies

AI in talent acquisition: How to use AI for recruiting and sourcing?

With nearly every field finding applications for AI, recruitment is no exception. While the exact features depend on the AI and the talent acquisition software you’re using, AI can help HR teams to optimize recruitment performance, simplify complex tasks, and increase recruiter efficiency across all stages of the hiring process. The benefits of AI for talent acquisition include:

• Stronger collaboration: AI can make it easier to collaborate across departments and systems, thanks to data-driven people insights
• Automation: AI can help personalize employee and candidate experiences at scale, improving eNPS and cNPS
• Productivity: You can create and enhance job descriptions and other HR materials much faster with the help of AI-assisted content generation
• Agility: Data insights can help you make skills-based, equitable, and bias-free hiring decisions quickly and confidently, thanks to features like AI-assisted applicant screening
• Improvement: Talent intelligence solutions can offer custom tips for learning and growth based on each employee’s skills to help build a future-ready workforce

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