Talent acquisition

Talent acquisition refers to the process of identifying and acquiring skilled workers to meet your organizational needs. The talent acquisition team is responsible for identifying, acquiring, assessing, and hiring candidates to fill open positions within a company.

Employer branding, future resource planning, diversifying a company’s labor force, and developing a robust candidate pipeline are the cornerstones of talent acquisition.

In some cases, the talent acquisition team is part of an organization’s Human Resources department. In others, Talent Acquisition is its own department that works in coordination with HR. The skill sets of effective talent acquisition professionals include sourcing strategies, candidate assessment, compliance and hiring standards, and fluency in employment branding practices and corporate hiring initiatives.

Talent Acquisition vs. Recruitment
Understandably, many conflate these two roles. After all, both share the same objective of hiring people to fill open positions. While talent acquisition and recruitment overlap in many ways, there are also important differences. Consider the following sports analogy. Recruitment is akin to free agent signings. Sports front offices typically identify and sign free agents to fill immediate team needs.

Talent acquisition, in this analogy, relates to the long term roster health, which includes drafting young talent, remaining financially flexible, hiring a coaching staff that creates a winning team culture, maintaining that culture and ensuring long term team success.

In short, recruiters fill vacancies. Talent acquisition consultants, on the other hand, utilize an ongoing strategy of identifying specialists, leaders, and future executives for your organization. Talent acquisition departments focus more on long term human resources planning rather than short term labor demands. As one CEO put it, talent acquisition “is more focused on the strategic side of tougher positions to fill.”