Talent Acquisition 101: Its Importance and Effective Strategies

As workers, we frequently hear about talent acquisition during our job application process. We also often hear about human resources and recruitment, which are related to the recruitment process.

Are they the same? What is the difference between each of them? In this article, we will discuss everything about talent acquisition.

Check out the article below.

Talent acquisition is a role in a company where individuals are responsible for identifying and acquiring skilled workers to meet company needs.

Unlike recruiters who only look for new candidates with short-term plans, talent acquisition requires a long time to fill the empty role with the best candidates.

To extend, talent acquisition day-to-day activities include:

• Strategize and execute plans to assess and hire qualified job candidates at a company or organization.
• Do employer branding to make the company more appealing for job hunters to apply.
• Develop future resource planning to make sure all resources are well-planned.
• Diversify a company’s labor force.
• Develop a robust candidate pipeline.

Talent acquisitions stand alone as a team and coordinate with the human resource team, but there are also talent acquisitions that include the human resource team.

Some skills that a talent acquisition should master include:

• Sourcing strategies
• Candidate assessment
• Compliance and hiring standards
• Fluency in employment branding practices
• Corporate hiring initiatives.

Imagine you have a company that you build for years. Suddenly, one of your best employees leaves the company and this employee role is very crucial in the company.

Due to urgency, you hire the most available candidate and do not focus on the skill quality. Three months later, this candidate submits a resignation letter and you have to spend more time and energy to find the replacement.

Every company does not want this to happen because of wasting money and time. Talent acquisition is needed to tackle this problem.

A company needs to run as long as it can and be operated by the best quality and long-term candidates. The right candidates can improve productivity and maintain competitiveness in the market.

Without a good talent acquisition strategy, the company will suffer in looking for proactive candidates.

In details, AI HR shares the importance of talent acquisition below:

• Attracting top talent: Helps organizations find and hire the best candidates, tailored to fit the company's needs and vision.
• Improving employee retention: By hiring individuals who fit the company culture and mission, businesses can boost employee retention, saving money and enhancing team morale.
• Building productive teams: Talent acquisition aims to create teams with diverse skills, knowledge, and backgrounds, leading to better productivity and problem-solving.
• Reducing costs: A good talent acquisition strategy cuts recruitment costs by streamlining the process, improving hire quality, and reducing turnover, saving time and resources.
• Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace: By fostering diversity and inclusion, the company can enhance creativity and the employer brand.
• Ensuring business continuity: Builds a candidate pipeline and addresses future workforce needs.
• Effective succession planning: Identify and prepare potential successors for critical roles.
• Boosting business performance: Placing top talent in the right roles increases organizational effectiveness, driving growth and improving business performance.

Because the talent acquisition’s objective is to hire the best quality and long-term candidates, talent acquisition needs time to process the candidates, from pre-hiring to post-hiring. Below is the general process.

1. Align with your hiring manager

Talent acquisition needs to learn first about the role, the ideal candidate profile, and the required skills and qualifications from the hiring manager.

You can ask further about it to make sure you really understand the task, so you can help the hiring manager to find the best candidate.

Not only learn but also accompany your hiring manager throughout the process. Offer help to complete the things related to the hiring process, such as creating social media posts and compiling the right interview questions.

2. Write compelling job descriptions

A job description is not only just a long written requirement and responsibilities but also a medium to attract candidates. How to do it?

Try to share your company's uniqueness, such as dedication to diversity and inclusion, opportunity for growth, or in-demand benefits and perks.

Focus on the most important required skills. Be transparent in anything that needs to be communicated in front, such as salary. Most job seekers 85% prefer to apply for job openings that mention salary range.

3. Source candidates

Nowadays, there are lots of channels where talent acquisition can find great candidates. Some of them are online sourcing platforms, employee referral programs, internal talent, company alumni, and job boards.

Aside from sharing job openings in those channels, partnering with bootcamps and networking conferences can be an alternative where you directly can talk to the candidates and assess how they answer your casual question.

Build a positive relationship with all candidates, both those who accepted and rejected. Your candidate database can be a solid source of qualified candidates to find new candidates for future roles.

4. Attract and engage candidates

You need to know this. A great-skilled candidate has a lot of choices on where he or she wants to work. This candidate often gets many job offers.

The question is, how can a talent acquisition attract this candidate’s heart to choose to work in your company?

Build a strong employer brand, promote your unique company culture, and design a competitive compensation package. Make sure also that you give a positive recruitment experience and long-term relationships.

5. Evaluate job candidates (interviewing and assessing)

Choose 3-5 most important skills required for the role and the key performance indicator (KPI) that will define the success of the role. Craft them into some questions and ask the candidates.

There are several ways to know whether the candidates have those skills and KPIs or not:

• Give them a task or case study, such as writing or programming test
• Personality and cognitive test
• Present a pitch
• Sudden case study question without a brief

Knowing that you and the hiring manager assess many candidates, make your time effective by utilizing a system to help you choose the strongest candidate, such as:

• People tracking and evaluation software
• Internal grading system.

So, in case you and the hiring manager are busy, the system will help you decide which candidate is the best choice.

Don’t forget to also do background checking by contacting their reference, usually the direct manager or peers in the last company. This is to make sure that the chosen candidate has a good background and impression.

6. Make a job offer (hiring and onboarding)

In this last step, talent acquisition needs to verbally inform about the offering, share the reason why the company chose the candidate for the role, answer their questions, and discuss the offer.

Send the written offer which contains the total compensation package. Once the candidate signs the offer, welcome the candidate and share the next step to prepare for the first day of work.

Your role does not stop there. Make sure that you also provide a great onboarding experience. The onboarding session is the first activity that the candidate experiences.

A bad impression on the onboarding can lead to how the candidate sees the future of the company.

Talent acquisition and recruitment seem similar because of their objective: hiring people to fill open positions. What is the difference then?

Talent acquisition focuses strategy on finding and hiring qualified candidates to be the specialists, leaders, and future executives of a company. Their focus is on the long-term impact of hiring rather than short-term labor demands.

Recruiter fills vacancies as a reactive method of filling immediate job openings in the quickest time possible. It is about meeting the company’s urgent current needs.

How about human resources? As mentioned before, talent acquisition is a human resource responsibility, but in some cases, talent acquisition is a standalone department that works with human resources.

Human resource functions can be both though, talent acquisition and recruitment. This team manages a positive work environment, overall organizational development, benefits, employee relations, training and development, and compliance with the law.

To make sure your strategy in finding the best candidate runs smoothly, you might consider these tricks below from LinkedIn.

1. Talent forecasting

First, figure out which roles in your company are the hardest to fill. Make those positions your top priority.

These challenging roles might include ones needing niche skills, very specific experience, technical or engineering expertise, or senior leadership. Usually, it takes about 3-6 months to fill these positions with the right candidate.

Develop a strategic talent acquisition plan for the company's future needs and goals so the team can adjust to changing circumstances.

With developing some plans, hiring the right person, promoting team members, and building a team quickly become much easier.

Furthermore, be ready for economic changes in the future. Broaden your strategy to include hiring part-time workers, freelancers, or using agency services.

A forecasting strategy like this helps you prepare for unexpected events and keep your hiring plans on track.

2. Talent pipelining

Knowing that talent acquisition has a long-term impact, it's important to build a talent pipeline.

Keep track of the candidates you find by using a simple spreadsheet or software. Manage your time by scheduling daily or weekly talent acquisition activities, such as networking, outreach, updating candidate details, and building relationships that might be useful for future roles.

Don't focus on just one channel of talent sourcing, instead utilize others, too. Encourage the company’s employees to help you through employee referral programs. If they can bring the best talent, the employee can get monetary rewards.

Make sure also that the employee and the other talent acquisition members know what positions to look for, the type of people, and the vision for the company's future. By doing these, you are able to find candidates faster.

3. Employer branding

A strong employer branding can be a powerful asset for attracting high-quality candidates. Make sure that the company website, social media profiles, and company culture appeal not only to customers but also to potential candidates.

This usually requires collaboration between the marketing, communications, and HR departments. Effective branding is essential for catching the attention of talented candidates and motivating them to apply.

4. Skills-based hiring

Skill-based hiring focuses on evaluating candidates based on their skills rather than their educational background.

For example, you can remove degree requirements from job descriptions and focus on responsibilities and competencies instead.

Talent acquisition who prioritize skills in the hiring process are 60% more successful in finding the right candidates compared to those who do not.

5. Candidate experience

Positive candidate experiences can attract more job seekers and convince top-choice candidates to accept your job offer over others.

What does a positive experience look like? As a talent acquisition professional, he or she should provide candidates with a seamless and respectful experience from start to finish.

This includes being transparent about the hiring process, maintaining timely communication, and exchanging feedback.

6. Internal mobility

Not just externally, you can also find candidates for open roles from within your company.

Start by identifying top performers within the company and take time to train and prepare them for more responsibility and leadership roles.

The timeline can vary, usually from months to years. Training can be provided through regular and detailed feedback, internal mentorship programs, and challenging assignments.

Do regular updates about the open roles within the company will help the employees be aware of the opportunities that they can apply.

7. Diversity, equity, and inclusion

A company needs a variety of perspectives and experiences. This can be achieved in a diverse team, which can lead to innovation and creativity.

Building a diverse team is not just the responsibility of the talent acquisition team. To ensure everyone contributes, you can start in several ways. Start from writing inclusive job descriptions, sourcing diverse candidate pipelines, and reducing bias throughout the hiring process.

A professional talent acquisition can pave the way for underrepresented candidates to experience an inclusive recruitment process. The goal is to create a more equitable workplace.

8. Talent analytics

Nowadays, many talent acquisition software and tools can help to make more data-driven decisions. With those software and tools, talent acquisition can optimize the recruitment process for better hiring outcomes and return on investment (ROI).

For example, you can identify which candidate sources provide high-quality applicants and which ones are less effective. This information helps you determine the best budget for recruitment marketing.

Aside from the strategies above, you can use another tips below.

1. Get the team on board

The task of recruiting new people to fill some positions in the company belongs to talent acquisition, collaborating with human resources and management.

But, encouraging the whole members of the company will make the job less hard. Announce the opening roles to the company and inform them that you have employee referral programs.

If an employee can bring one or more than one candidate and hired in the company, then this employee will get some monetary value.

2. Build a strong employer brand

Imagine you want to buy a black t-shirt. There are many shops, both online and offline, that sell black T-shirts.

To ensure you buy the comfiest and most suitable with your size t-shirt, you might choose a clothing brand that has a big name, famous for its high-quality products, and is suitable for your budget.

It goes the same when people are looking for jobs. They know what position they want to apply for and choose the company based on their track record and how the company treats the employees.

That is why, a strong employer brand is important. It can show how your company supports the employees and the fun of working there.

A good employer brand will also impact how the employee rates the company on some job platforms, such as Glassdoor and Indeed. The reviews will be seen by others and can be your next ammunition to attract new high-quality candidates later.

3. Align your talent acquisition process with business goals

It is important to keep the company's business goals in mind. This to ensure the candidates you look for and hire later are a match long-term.

Furthermore, the candidate can contribute more to the company and help the company get bigger.

4. Take enough time

An effective talent acquisition strategy requires a long time. So, take your time to interview the candidates. Don’t do it in a rush and don’t skip any other thing to identify the candidates just for the sake of saving time.

When you invest more time to make sure you get the best candidate, you will save the company’s energy, time, monetary, and any other sources in the long run.

5. Utilize talent acquisition software

Talent acquisition tasks are many, including filtering which candidates are suitable to be processed and who are not. Generally, there are 250+ applications are received by the company on a single corporate job. Probably, it can be more than that.

To make sure a talent acquisition can finish all tasks, using talent acquisition software can be an alternative, such as Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

ATS can filter which candidates have the required skills and experience for the related job openings and who do not. ATS also can help you to automatically post jobs and reply to applicants.

6. Be transparent in the beginning

Imagine you are a talent acquisition and currently you are in the last interview stage in hiring a candidate. You ask about the salary expectation and it is beyond the company budget. Unfortunately, you have to reject this candidate after doing such a long process.

It sounds exhausting, right? As a talent acquisition, you must be clever in managing your strategy to save time and energy. On the candidates' side, they don’t get false hope because they pass all the stages and get rejected in the end.

So, be upfront about the expectations. It is not only about how much compensation the candidates expect and the budget that you have, but it is also about the required experience and work-life balance.

By doing it, both talent acquisition and candidates can have a great hiring process experience.

ADP shares some talent acquisition strategies for hiring specific roles below:

Bulk hiring

For some growing companies, bulk hiring can be difficult. Not just only the cost, but also the quality of the candidates.

To minimize the risk, talent acquisition software can help to automate repetitive tasks and bring data-driven decision-making.

Senior leadership

Senior executives are expected to lead from day one on the job. So, sourcing candidates for these roles can be challenging. The company needs experienced talent acquisition staff or partnering with a talent sourcing agency.

Technical specialists

When it comes to hiring candidates to fill technical roles, it is not enough to just asses them through a series of interviews. Skill tests, case studies, questionnaires, and demonstrated assessments are often more effective in determining if someone is the best candidate to fill the role.

Internal hires

Aside from hiring externally, hiring internally can simplify the talent acquisition process. Many companies already doing this as a goal to elevate the employees' growth and acquire new skills.

There will be some steps that you can skip, such as gathering information for payment, or HR interviews.