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The overall health of a company depends on its talent acquisition strategy — not just today, but every day. A business needs to hire if it is to survive. What’s more, it needs to hire the best talent possible. However, it isn’t that simple. It takes a thoughtful approach and dedication, but the right strategy can make it possible for even small businesses to recruit the best talent on the market.
Roughly 80% of hiring managers agree that talent acquisition is the key to a company’s overall success.
A talent acquisition strategy is necessary as the modern struggle of recruiting is a complicated one. It requires companies to build an employer brand, market their roles where their ideal candidate will see them, and figure out the best way to assess and select candidates. All of which require strong team collaboration and a conscious understanding of company needs.
And these are only the challenges that must be overcome in hiring. There are also serious financial benefits of an effective acquisition strategy. According to Zippia, the average vacancy costs employers $98 per day. With an average time-to-fill of over 42 days across industries, that means filling a vacancy costs employers an average of $4,129 per employee.
That is why today we’re going to cover some talent acquisition strategy examples and explore how you can build one that works for your team.
The fundamental problem of building a talent acquisition strategy is the number of moving parts in the process. There are governance, operations, recruitment, employer brand, and many other components that you need to consider when building a talent acquisition strategy framework.
It’s important to note here that traditional hiring practices are time-consuming. For example, according to Yello, it takes many recruiters 30 minutes to 2 hours to schedule a single interview for a single candidate. That’s not even counting the interview itself or the time it will take recruiters to review and screen these interviews. And this is problematic for building a talent acquisition strategy.
Today’s recruiters need to be agile, not only in their methodology but in their overall talent acquisition approach.
The most important benefit of a talent acquisition strategy framework is that it provides guidelines on the hiring process. This keeps the recruiting team and hiring managers working in a unified and efficient hiring machine. The ultimate goal of a framework is to build a formalized approach to acquire top talent and build a positive candidate experience during the hiring process.
With the importance of a strategy well established, let’s take a look at some talent acquisition best practices as well as the basic talent acquisition process steps.
Understanding the process of recruiting is well and good. However, that understanding is useless when employers fail in terms of their talent attraction and retention strategy. After all, what good is a hiring effort if no one applies? How can any business be effective when they consistently and quickly lose high-value talent?
Neither is an easy task. Candidates today are flooded with countless ads for goods, services, and even jobs. It’s easy to see how your job ad could go overlooked in the ceaseless deluge of solicitation. Successful talent attraction strategies have to be adapted to survive in this environment. That is why the modern recruiter relies heavily on consuming marketing strategies to gain the attention of relevant talent.
As part of this strategy, work to build on your existing employer brand. Ideally, you want to become the employer in your industry that everyone wants to work for. A strong employer brand will help generate talent attraction on its own. To achieve this, communicate the most compelling benefits you offer to your employees as well as what you value in your candidates.
Building this narrative will allow all candidates to make an informed decision when they apply while helping ensure that those candidates that do apply are more likely to align with your company's values and needs.
At the end of the day, talent acquisition needs to:
Furthermore, it’s important to consider the future of talent acquisition. Although the core goals of a recruiter's job remain the same, the means by which they achieve them look vastly different than they did 10 years ago.
According to SHRM, today’s recruiters are looking to improve and implement the effective use of social media for recruitment, improve their reporting and metrics tracking, and build strong talent pipelines through improved sourcing and reduced time-to-fill.
All of this gives a solid impression of the future we can expect in recruitment and talent acquisition. More and more companies will look to streamline their hiring processes and utilize less traditional candidate sourcing, i.e. social media, to attract the best talent on the market.
