Employee Benefits

Aug 25, 2023
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In 2023, you need a solid talent acquisition strategy more than ever. Even if you’re not doing any hiring right now (or managing redundancies), a good talent acquisition strategy is still essential to ensure you’re managing long-term talent-related decisions. 
Hiring people isn’t as simple as it used to be. With so much of the world’s workforce now remote and AI about to transform the job market, businesses must be a lot more strategic than they were before. 
You need a recruitment strategy that looks beyond your short-term hiring needs. It should see the long-term goals of your organisation and who you need to hire to support that. You need a strong talent acquisition strategy to thrive in 2023 and beyond. 
In this guide, we’ll take a look at the benefits of having a talent acquisition strategy, talent acquisition techniques to try and talent acquisition metrics to track that will help you continually assess and improve your strategy. 
But first, what does ‘talent acquisition’ mean, exactly? 

Let’s begin with a quick talent acquisition definition. Talent acquisition (sometimes referred to simply as ‘TA’) is the term given to the whole strategic process of finding, qualifying, hiring and retaining employees that meet the current and future goals of your business. 
It’s a proactive, long-term type of recruitment strategy that’s closely linked to the wider company objectives — not just its recruitment goals. 
To make our talent acquisition meaning clearer, it’s worth thinking about how TA is different from recruitment. 

Recruitment is concerned with the present, whereas talent acquisition is concerned with the future. In this sense, talent acquisition is more strategic and recruitment is operational. 
While a recruitment consultant’s job is to fill vacancies, a talent acquisition specialist’s job is to strategise for future hiring needs and nurture the best-fitting candidates into the business, whether a role exists for them yet or not. 

Here are just a few benefits of a strong talent acquisition strategy at your organisation:

Because talent acquisition isn’t a reactionary form of recruitment, it typically results in hiring better-quality candidates. 
This is because a talent acquisition specialist will take their time to be strategic with their approach, finding the right candidates for the business rather than hiring because a candidate is available at the right time (which can often be how a recruitment consultant would need to approach hiring as it tends to be more time-sensitive).

A good talent acquisition strategy will save a business on hiring costs in several ways. First of all, staff retention is a big part of the talent acquisition process — it’s not just about getting a candidate through the door and then forgetting about them. 
Hiring the wrong people into roles also costs organisations a lot of money annually - up to 30% of the employee’s yearly salary. The long-term approach to recruitment that talent acquisition involves means that typically, better-fit candidates are hired into more relevant roles and so stay in the job for longer. 

A study by Forbes found that diverse teams get 60% better results at work and make better decisions 87% of the time.
A talent acquisition strategy that prioritises diversity and inclusion therefore isn’t just great for morale and employer branding — it’s great for business too. 

A company that hires strategically will often generate a positive reputation because they care about making the right hiring decisions at all times. 
Businesses that rely solely on reactionary forms of recruitment are more vulnerable to high attrition rates and a less positive reputation as candidates leave their roles quickly.

Staff turnover tends to be much lower for organisations that have a talent acquisition strategy because lowering attrition is specifically part of a TA’s role. 
A talent acquisition specialist will take a lot of time to look for opportunities to hire the right people for the right roles. They focus on selecting candidates who they think will be the right match for the organisation rather than just the vacancy.

The talent acquisition process is long, fairly complex, and involves a number of different strategies that make up the wider company talent acquisition strategy. Here are some talent acquisition strategy examples to consider:
Proactively cultivating a positive employer brand should be a big part of any business’s talent acquisition strategy, whether they’re currently hiring or not. 
Your employer brand is like a subsection of your company brand that’s focused on showcasing why you’re a great company to work for. A strong employer brand will attract top talent by showing how much job satisfaction current employees have. Examples of employer branding techniques would be publishing staff testimonials on social media or sharing a video of a team-building event. 
Employee referral schemes are programs run internally by organisations to encourage current employees to recommend people they know who they think would be a right fit for the business. Employees are incentivized to refer potential candidates for particular roles, and if their referral leads to a hire, they get rewarded.
Studies have shown that referred employees are retained longer, perform better at work. They also save the company on recruiting costs, so they’re recruitment gold! 
A talent pipeline is a pool of potential candidates you have stored in your recruitment software or ATS that align with the organisation's future hiring needs.
The idea is that you proactively source them into your pipeline and keep them engaged by drip-feeding them personalised content until the right role comes along. For example, you could send content that showcases the company's value proposition or shows off your employer brand. Essentially, anything you can do to build relationships with these candidates that generate interest and consideration for future roles.
They might not be looking for a new role now right now, but when they are, you’ll be the first company they think of reaching out to.  
Data-driven recruitment involves removing any guesswork by paying close attention to your hiring metrics and moulding your recruitment strategy around this. 
For example, you might be getting lots of applications via LinkedIn, but how many of these applications are converting to interviews? How many of them become placements? 
By looking closely at your recruitment software data, you can gain invaluable insights about which recruitment channels and strategies have brought you the best-quality candidates in the past so you can target your resources there. 
Candidate experience is what it says on the tin: What are you doing at your organisation to ensure candidates are having a positive experience of your hiring process? 
A good candidate experience strategy can involve everything from having an easy and simple application process to providing regular candidate feedback and an enjoyable onboarding process. It’s a strategy that should have an influence on every stage of your recruitment process. 
Having diverse representation at your company is important for attracting a diverse workforce and ensuring candidates and employees feel represented at your organisation. Bringing D&I into your business effectively involves integrating principles of diversity and inclusion throughout the entire recruitment and hiring process. 
This can involve anything from using unbiased language in your job adverts, having an inclusive interview and selection process and even training recruiters in recognising and addressing implicit bias.

Talent acquisition refers to the strategic process of attracting, identifying and hiring skilled individuals to fill job positions within an organisation.

A talent acquisition specialist is an HR professional or recruiter who specialises in attracting, sourcing and hiring qualified candidates for job positions within an organisation. 

A TA specialist’s job is to use various strategies, channels and assessment methods to identify and engage with top talent, ensuring a successful recruitment process.

A talent acquisition manager is a senior-level HR professional responsible for overseeing the entire talent acquisition process within an organisation. 

They develop and implement recruitment strategies, manage the recruitment team, collaborate with stakeholders and ensure effective sourcing, screening, and hiring of top talent to meet the organisation's staffing needs.

Yes, talent acquisition is generally considered part of HR function of an organisation. But while talent acquisition is concerned with the hiring of employees, human resources is more concerned with managing the organizations existing workforce.

If you see "talent acquisition review in progress" on a job ad, this typically means the position is closed to new applicants. It normally means the hiring team are already reviewing and evaluating candidates for further consideration.

Recruitment refers to the process of sourcing, attracting and hiring candidates for job positions. At the same time, talent acquisition encompasses a more strategic and proactive approach to identifying, attracting and retaining top talent to meet an organisation's current and future workforce needs. 
Want to attract more talent without breaking your budget with salary increases? One-third of employees would take a strong benefits package over a pay rise. Learn more about the benefits employees want in our brand new European Employee Benefits Survey 2023.
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