Talent Acquisition Vs Recruitment: What is Better and Why?

What is Talent Acquisition?

It is an ongoing strategy that tends to focus on finding, attracting, and engaging experts, leaders, specialists, leaders, or future executives to hire for specific open positions in the company. They apply a talent strategy, and actively search for talents with a particular skill set, across different industries such as technology, medicine, etc. They actively search for qualified candidates, plan human resources, examine the elements of the hiring process, and set long-term organizational business goals.

Talent Acquisition Strategies and Long-Term Focus

Talent acquisition focuses on creating a workforce that will stay with your company in the long run. Here are some of the talent acquisition strategies that will help you to attract and hire top talent:

1. Employer brand: Employer branding is a key to successful talent acquisition. It communicates the company's culture, values, terms, and mission which helps the candidates understand, who the organization is and what is their aim.
2. Social media and other recruitment channels: Use different social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to showcase your company culture, work ethic, and activities and advertise job openings on these platforms. Attend career fairs and organize seminars or lectures at institutes to convert casual awareness into active consideration.
3. Employee referrals: Motivate employees to refer potential candidates in their circle, whose skills match exactly with the open positions and are fit for the company culture.

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What is Recruitment?

Recruitment is a process of identifying, attracting, screening, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding qualified candidates to fill vacant positions opened recently within the organization. It is one of the most essential and biggest components of talent acquisition.

Recruitment Process: What are the Recruitment Strategies?

Set up the best hiring team in order to optimize your recruitment process. A hiring team that searches, attracts, and hires the top talent in the most efficient way. The process involves all the steps from sourcing, attracting, screening, and interviewing to onboarding the right talent.

Following are some of the core strategies that you can adopt to enhance your hiring process:

1. Job description: Create a boomer job description that is clear about main responsibilities, required experience, what is expected of the candidate, and what they can expect.
2. Feedback: Take feedback from them, about their overall experience of the recruitment process and provide them feedback on their performance that can help them improve their skills.
3. Interview process: Create a smooth and efficient interview process that asks the right and appropriate questions which can access the candidate's skills and personality.
4. Use an Applicant tracking system: Utilize the power of ATS for recruiting to help streamline the hiring process and improve the overall candidate experience.

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What is the key Difference Between Talent Acquisition and Recruitment?

The significant differences between recruitment and talent acquisition are:

1. Scope: Recruitment is a part of talent acquisition and is a short-term process, that focuses on filling vacant positions, whereas talent acquisition is much broader and a long-term planning process, that identifies quality candidates, who can fill future open positions.
2. Objectives: The goal of recruitment is to fill the open job position as quickly and effectively as possible, whereas talent acquisition aims to build a pool of talented candidates who can stick with the organization for the long term.
3. Focus: Recruitment tends to focus on hiring people into open positions here and now, while talent acquisition focuses on getting the right people, either now or in the future.

Is a recruiter the same as a talent acquisition specialist?

While both the recruiter and a talent acquisition specialist are involved in identifying, attracting, and hiring the talent, there are some fundamental differences in their roles:

A talent acquisition specialist is responsible for engaging top talent with specific skills, qualifications, aims, and perspectives. As it is an ongoing process, they focus more on building good candidate relations rather than just simply filling the open positions.

On the other hand, a recruiter is reactive and needs to fill open roles by sourcing, screening, interviewing, and hiring candidates as quickly as possible. They potentially work with hiring managers and devise strategies to find quality candidates.

When do you need talent acquisition and when recruitment?

A company needs both recruitment and talent acquisition strategies, depending on the recruiting needs. When a company needs to fill an open job position quickly to either replace an employee who has left the company or in order to expand the workforce, they adopt recruitment. Recruitment generally focuses on qualified people that can start work relatively quickly. Whereas, talent acquisition is needed when a company needs to hire highly skilled or qualified talent for higher roles such as leadership, CEO, or other senior positions. It targets candidates who might not be actively looking for jobs but could prove to be a good fit for the role and the company.

What is better, talent acquisition or recruitment?

If your company wants to build a strong talent pipeline to ensure that the organization has access to the best talent for its future roles, it should move towards talent acquisition, as it targets candidates who might not be actively looking for jobs. Whereas if you want to fill an open position immediately with the best candidate, you should apply recruitment strategies. As recruitment is a reactive approach that targets candidates who are actively looking for jobs.

Both serve different purposes depending on the needs of the organization and the role. The choice is entirely upon the organization's objectives.

How to switch from recruiting to talent acquisition?

The first and foremost step is to understand the difference between both. Recognize the cost of reactive recruiting practice and know the importance of talent acquisition. Focus on employer branding through various channels to attract top talent. Develop a strategic mindset to engage potential candidates in the long run.

Postface:

Based on your organization's aims and objectives, you need to identify and analyze when to recruit and when to adopt talent acquisition, both have their focus and goals. If you want to fill an open position with a quality candidate as quickly as possible, go for recruitment, but if you want to gather a strong pool of talented candidates for the future, opt for talent acquisition techniques.

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