When it comes to filling vacant roles within your organization, talent acquisition and recruitment are important practices to help employers find qualified workers. These terms are often used interchangeably but they have unique features to assist organizations with short-term and long-term goals. Learning the difference between talent acquisition and recruitment can help you determine the best ways to utilize both practices for finding skilled employees to fill vacant roles in your company.
Recruitment describes the act of filling current vacancies in your company. Talent acquisition, on the other hand, is an ongoing strategy of identifying talent to fill important roles in the future. Successful companies seek out employees with specific skill sets that promote organizational success and fit within the company's culture. While recruitment is a short-term process to quickly fill current vacancies , talent acquisition is a long game, focused on building a sustainable talent pipeline, often with an emphasis on difficult-to-fill roles.
Niche markets, positions that require specific technological skills, and leadership roles typically require foresight and a thoughtful long-term approach for improved career matches. Whether your company depends on the HR team for talent acquisition or employs a specialized team for the service, a carefully thought out process can help your organization prepare for the future. By planning ahead, employers can fill these vital roles quickly when a vacancy or need arises.
Evolving technology and maturing business models make it difficult for employees to develop an education that matches required and growing skill sets. With 87% of businesses either facing a current skills gap or expecting to be facing one in the near future, closing these gaps requires employers to seek employees that possess certain skills and are willing to upskill to fill required roles in the future. The talent acquisition process assists employers in their efforts to find qualified applicants to fill vital roles and train for rising roles of the future.
Additional benefits of talent acquisition include:
Talent acquisition is a process designed to identify and attract the right talent. Talent acquisition teams are also responsible for managing the candidate life cycle from the initial application through the final offer. The complete process is composed of several complex steps to communicate your company's brand, follow leads, and make final selections to onboard the strongest candidates.
We'll explore the steps of the talent acquisition process below.
Generating leads comes from a variety of activities that attract skilled employees to your company. Building your company's brand, creating profiles on social networks, posting on forums, and joining relevant communities will naturally attract employees with the skills that will help your company advance. Building professional relationships can help advertise your company's best assets and generate a pipeline of potential hires. These brand-building tasks act as a springboard for carefully crafted job posts that will attract qualified candidates.
Designing a plan to promote your company's unique culture and building benefits and incentive packages that meet the needs of interested employees is a vital part of attracting skilled employees. Advertising company benefits, communicating with candidates, and building strong employee networks work to recruit employees to your organization. When your job descriptions and advertisements align with your brand-building efforts, candidates are more likely to be eagerly awaiting a vacancy within your organization.
Creating an effective interview can help you identify employees with skills that match qualifications and traits that help them fit seamlessly into your company's culture. Aim for questions that help you determine a candidate's soft skills as well as qualifications. Communication skills, problem-solving, and a desire to build on existing skills are valuable assets that stand out in practically any position.
Checking a candidate's references can help you confirm your initial impression of qualified candidates. To make final selections, it's essential to consider a variety of qualifications and traits. Your final selection process will likely require you to seek the following criteria.
An effective onboarding process requires more than a handshake and orientation. The final steps of the talent acquisition process should end with a strong finish to offer new recruits a chance to feel like they belong in your team. Companies that focus all their efforts on recruitment but fail to follow through with a structured onboarding process risk winning the best candidate only to lose the employee within the first few months of employment. Nearly a third of all new hires quit their jobs within the first six months. Yet, 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding.
Also referred to as the candidate journey, the hiring and onboarding process includes salary negotiation, explanation of benefits, and an introduction to the onboarding process that will be carried out by HR and immediate managers. The process introduces new hires to all of their job responsibilities and the company's culture to provide them with a structured vision of their career path within an organization.
Attracting the best and brightest talent for your organization requires a strategy that fits your company's culture and produces ongoing results for a secure future. The techniques you use to design a strategy that aligns with your company's goals will make a significant impact on the final recruitment results. These tips can help you develop an effective strategy to acquire top talent.
Most companies are familiar with the process of brand-building to attract customers. However, your customer-facing brand won't necessarily have everything it takes to attract qualified talent for hard-to-fill positions or complex roles. Your employer brand is your reputation and popularity from a prospective employee's point of view. Building a strong employer brand can help you reduce turnover and attract more qualified candidates. Like the way you build your customer-facing brand, employer branding should include innovative techniques that will engage today's prospective employees.
While it's important to have a firm understanding of expansion efforts and roles that will need to be filled in the future, it's crucial to utilize what you've learned from past experiences to fill future roles. Certain roles may be more difficult to fill than others and require a longer process or specific advertising techniques. Focusing on the challenges can help you build a process that will deliver candidates in the time frame your company needs them.
In today's competitive hiring market, companies need to have an ongoing process that builds a professional network of talented individuals. This means you'll need a process that tracks your efforts and consistently places new leads within your company's reach. A combination of tools and advertising techniques is often the best way to build an ongoing process to attract and keep track of qualified candidates with the talent to fill leading roles.
Job seekers have a variety of ways to view every possible written job description and advertisement. That's one reason why recruitment techniques alone rarely help companies attract top talent for leadership and technical roles. Finding new ways to reach out to prospective candidates can help you stand out as a relatable company with an inviting culture. For instance, 80% of Americans agree that a video of a recruiter talking about a role as part of a job ad would help them better understand a job opportunity. Adding actionable videos to your company's employer brand-boosting efforts can make these candidates aware of your organization long before the hiring phase begins.
Talent acquisition is a long-term process to build company success over time. It's a way to help your company grow and promote a positive culture that leads to increased productivity and a team of motivated workers with goals that align with your organizational efforts. Yet, creating a truly effective talent acquisition process in today's competitive hiring market can be a challenge.
The Lumina platform gives HR teams and recruiters a way to turn boring job ads into attention-grabbing videos that help attract and inspire candidates. Lumina’s 1-click process allows you to receive a customized video job posting within 24 hours. To see how HR teams and recruiters use Lumina for improved talent acquisition, sign up for your trial today.