What is Talent Acquisition and How to Do it Effectively

Talent Acquisition Defined

Talent Acquisition is a strategic process that usually falls under the HR department (recruiters, sourcers, hiring managers) in collaboration with talent acquisition specialists. The goal is to identify company objectives and the roles required to achieve them. Then, find the top talent sources and hire people who are the right fit for the job.

This strategy includes preparing and setting up the human resources team for success by establishing effective processes for candidate tracking and developing a solid acquisition process. The acquisition process is critical for sourcing top talent to pave the way for successful onboarding and talent management.

Differences Between Talent Acquisition and Recruitment

Although they may seem like the same process, talent acquisition and recruitment have differing goals and provide very different results.

Recruitment focuses on the short-term needs of a company to fill open positions with the candidates they find. Talent acquisition focuses on developing a strategy to fulfill the long-term needs of a company by finding and hiring the most qualified candidates. These positions are usually more difficult to fill, as they are often executive and leadership roles or roles that require particular skill sets.

How to Build an Effective Talent Acquisition Strategy

It is essential to establish company goals to build an effective strategy. After this step, you must prepare your people and systems and develop an acquisition process.

Prepare Your People and Systems

Prioritize Hiring Efforts

Once you have established company goals, the next step is to identify gaps in talent within the company and prioritize hiring for these positions. These are prioritized by the difficulty in finding a candidate and the estimated time it takes to source talent, conduct the interview process, and hire candidates.

Develop a Candidate Tracking System

As you identify and source candidates through various recruitment marketing efforts, it is crucial to have an applicant tracking system in place. Doing so will help you track candidates for current and future open positions.

Also, many companies will lose close to 90% of candidates due to a lengthy hiring process. You can reduce the time needed to find the right candidate by using a system that provides workflows and automation. This system also helps improve the candidate experience.

Prepare Your HR Department

Take the time to share with your employees the positions you need to fill and the types of people you are looking to fill those roles. They may be an excellent resource for finding top talent, as they should understand your company's culture, goals, and needs.

Be Prepared to Invest the Time Required to Source Top Talent

The interviewing process will take some time. It is essential to get to know candidates through interaction in different types of scenarios. Doing so will give you a glimpse into how they interact in business environments and in times of pressure.

However, there are ways to cut down on some of the time invested in more traditional interviewing procedures. Employee assessment software, automated reference checking, and one-way video interviews are great ways to speed up examining candidate skills and abilities.

This extra time allows you to examine their character to determine if they fit your company's culture well. People look great on paper but can sometimes be hard to deal with once hired and onboarded.

Develop an Acquisition Process

It is crucial to have an acquisition process in place. Doing so will help increase the number of quality candidates, improve hiring efficiency, and ensure an excellent candidate experience. This process includes: lead generation efforts, recruitment, interviewing, evaluating references, selecting candidates, and hiring/onboarding.

Lead Generation Efforts

It would be best if you began your lead generation efforts with an enticing job description that gives a good overview of the role and responsibilities and shows growth opportunities. From there, start looking for chances to network and build relationships on various platforms available for recruitment marketing. These may include online forums and social networking, events, conferences, and job boards.

As mentioned above, you should also utilize employee referrals. Consider providing referral incentives and bonuses to encourage employees to participate. If you have a solid employment brand, these leads can be among the best quality candidates as they are generated from satisfied employees.

Recruitment

Your company's employment brand is integral to attracting and recruiting top talent. If you haven't already, work to create a company culture that stands out and values its people with benefits and compensation. Doing so will help attract the specialists and the unique skill sets your company needs.

Interviewing

Prepare for your interviews with candidates by putting in some thought and pre-planning. Asking good questions that show potential employees' skills (or lack thereof) in different areas can help weed out candidates. Using an interview guide can help ensure you get the best results and enable only the top performers to move on to the next phase.

Evaluating References

Make sure you take the time to check potential employee references. The information you glean from a candidate's previous employers and coworkers can either confirm your impressions of a candidate or shed some light on potential problem areas should you decide to hire.

Completing this step can significantly impact the effectiveness of your talent acquisition efforts.

Select Candidates

Selecting candidates will be much easier if you have been using an applicant tracking system throughout the acquisition process. Our tracking system allows you to create candidate scorecards and keep track of interviews and references. All of this information is useful for helping you make the right decisions regarding potential employees.

Hire and Onboard

This final step may fall under the talent acquisition team's responsibilities or another group like talent management. Either way, the onboarding process for new employees is your opportunity to set them up for success and a solid long-term relationship with your company. This will promote the efforts and results you need on your team to achieve company initiatives.

Implement an Effective Talent Acquisition Strategy

At Discovered ATS, we can help you solidify your talent acquisition strategy. The acquisition and recruiting software that we have developed provides the tools you need to attract and hire A-players to help achieve your company goals. We even offer a performance management tool that can help boost your bottom line and help you retain your top-performing employees.

Our products and services make implementing your talent acquisition strategy simple and effective. Book a Demo today!