- Talent acquisition includes attracting, engaging, and onboarding skilled talent — internal and external — for immediate and future needs.
- Successful talent acquisition is a strategic, long-term process that focuses on workforce planning, skill needs, and securing the right people for specialized roles.
- How your organization markets itself to candidates is critical to attracting top talent in a competitive market.
Defining talent acquisition seems simple enough — after all, it’s right there in the name: acquiring talent for an organization. And because that’s what recruitment is, many people use talent acquisition and recruitment interchangeably.
Yet talent acquisition differs from recruitment, just as detailing a car differs from washing it. One addresses immediate, surface-level needs. he other focuses on long-term maintenance and performance. While recruitment is tactical and reactive, talent acquisition is strategic and proactive.
Filling vacancies matters, but talent acquisition also entails anticipating future skill needs and understanding the skills and potential of your organization’s existing talent. Talent acquisition encompasses the plans to acquire those harder-to-fill, higher-level, more specialized roles — the ones that will make or break your business.
Below, we’ll discuss what talent acquisition is, its importance in ensuring short- and long-term success, and what you need to know for the ongoing success of your recruiting and talent acquisition efforts, including:
- The five key components of talent acquisition.
- Why talent acquisition is critical for business success.
- Talent acquisition best practices.
- What the future of talent acquisition looks like.
Related content: Skills-based talent intelligence can help your organization attract top talent and meet business goals.
5 key components of talent acquisition
Finding and screening applicants may be the crux of recruitment, but it’s just one element of talent acquisition. Acquiring top talent is an umbrella function that covers all HR activities used for attracting, engaging, and onboarding skilled talent.
An effective talent acquisition program has multiple components:
1. Strategic workforce planning
Skill gaps and inadequate succession strategies are two organizational issues that stem from a lack of effective workforce planning.
Today, 82% of HR leaders are misaligned with executives. You need to coordinate with leadership so that your talent acquisition team is updated on overall business goals and has the necessary fiscal projections, skill trends, and other data to make strategic talent decisions.
Rather than homing in on the talent needed now or for the next quarter, workforce planning accounts for longer-term needs and emerging skill requirements. For instance, just a couple years ago your recruiting efforts probably didn’t focus on hiring talent with the skills or potential to work with emerging AI technologies. With the pace of change, that is now a priority with nearly one in four tech job listings in the U.S. requiring AI skills.
In short, workforce planning requires:
- Understanding your organization’s long-term goals.
- Anticipating and adapting to technical, market, and economic changes to ensure your workforce stays aligned with your business goals, along with closing skill gaps.
2. Employer branding and recruitment marketing
The point of talent acquisition is to hire the best people for today and tomorrow. Because competition for the best is fierce, you need to promote your organization as much as candidates do.
Here’s the upside: organizations that invest in branding have a 50% increase in quality candidates and hire 1-2x faster.
You must highlight the benefits of working for your organization to candidates — and not just when actively looking to fill roles. Showcase your values, culture, and benefits consistently via social media, events, and your website.
This puts your organization in the advantageous position of having candidates wanting to work with you,, rather than having to vie for talent alongside other organizations.
3. Sourcing and attracting candidates
A major benefit of recruitment marketing is that it allows you to build a talent pool of qualified potential candidates. This talent pool should include current and past employees, silver medalists, online professional groups, and more.
Employee referrals, networking events, social media, and job boards are all other great tools for sourcing candidates.
4. Candidate evaluation and selection
Because talent acquisition is concerned with both strategic, long-term hires and immediate needs, candidate assessment must take into account adaptability, flexibility, growth potential, cultural fit, current skill sets, and past accomplishments.
The process is typically more involved and time-consuming than simply filling a vacancy as quickly as possible. With AI-powered talent intelligence, you can immediately reveal a candidate’s skills and potential to reveal skills adjacencies and inferred skills they may not have listed on their résumé but are likely to have.
This dramatically widens the talent pool while revealing truly great fits for open roles.
5. Onboarding and integration
The talent acquisition process isn’t over once a candidate has accepted an offer. Beyond providing the employee with the necessary equipment, compliance training, and policy manuals, this step should include one-on-one meetings with teammates and stakeholders, an introduction to the organizational culture, a schedule of cascading objectives, and regular check-ins with supervisors over several months.
This isn’t exclusive to external hires either. Internal employees considered for new roles should also receive an onboarding experience to help them adjust to their new teams and responsibilities.
If you create and execute a structured, standardized onboarding program, employees are 50% more productive and 58% more likely to stay with your organization for three years.
Why talent acquisition is critical for business success
Strategic recruiting, upskilling, and reskilling help your organization stay competitive today and well into the future.
Here’s how:
- It allows for greater agility. Organizations often need to pivot quickly, especially in times of uncertainty or rapid change. The workforce planning aspect of talent acquisition ensures that you have the processes in place to quickly source talent who can handle new challenges or learn to do so.
- It reduces the time to fill roles. An organization with ongoing recruitment marketing and a continually updated talent pool or pipeline is several steps ahead of one that has to begin the sourcing process from scratch. When competition is tight, that head start can enable your ability to engage the best candidates before someone else does.
- It reduces turnover. When organizations don’t have to race to find someone to fill a role immediately, they can take time to ensure that a candidate ticks all, or nearly all, the boxes of an ideal hire. The better the fit, the more likely that employee is to be productive and remain with your organization.
- It improves culture. Great hires improve engagement and productivity. The right person for the right job at the right time is a positive addition to any workplace as they make meaningful contributions and support their team’s and your organization’s goals.
Additionally, turning to internal sourcing shows employees that your organization values them, and feeling valued is a key factor in strong employee engagement. when you consider that only 61% of workers are satisfied with their current roles, and 82% of employees reported looking for a job in the past 12-18 months.
Related content: Learn how Forvia, an automotive tech company, turned hiring challenges into an award-winning solution.
Talent acquisition best practices
Thoughtful, proven strategies and tactics can make the difference between a talent acquisition program that’s indistinguishable from a recruitment process and one that makes your HR team a revenue generator. These best practices will help you streamline the implementation and execution of your talent acquisition program.
Recruit with real-time data
You’ve likely benefited from applicant tracking systems (ATS) and other recruiting software for years. But recruiting methods that worked a decade — or even five years ago — aren’t meant to keep pace with change. Many use static data and are siloed, not allowing for full visibility into your current talent pool.
Today’s talent intelligence platforms for acquisition and management use AI to make screening résumés, validating skills, and moving candidates through the funnel even more efficient and effective.
Beyond those applications, AI can scan talent pools and find potential candidates who match critical criteria in a fraction of the time it would take your recruiting team, casting a wider net without slowing the process. And because AI-powered talent intelligence platforms screen and rate candidates based on objective skills insights, these can also minimize unconscious bias.
Create a more robust talent pipeline
A talent pool is a database of anyone who has expressed interest in working for your organization. This consists of potential candidates — internal and external — who have been prequalified for consideration.
Perhaps your talent platform flagged them as having high potential, someone from HR actively sought them out at a networking event, or they’re current employees being upskilled for promotion. Nurturing your talent pipeline by creating relationships with the best and most promising candidates gives you a significant advantage and head start when it’s time to fill roles.
Build an employee referral program
Talent sourced from referrals is more likely to stay on the job than those sourced via other channels. Many employers rate referrals as their most profitable hires.
If that’s not reason enough to develop and promote an employee referral program, there’s also the fact that such programs increase engagement among current staff. Generally speaking, referrals also make recruiting easier and more affordable.
Ensure a seamless candidate experience
Candidates who find the application process cumbersome, impersonal, or sluggish are much less likely to pursue or accept a position. They might also spread the word about the unsatisfactory experience, diminishing your employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts.
You can solve for this by ensuring that your online talent board is streamlined, your job application doesn’t ask for irrelevant information, you’re transparent about timelines, and that your team promptly responds to questions.
The future of talent acquisition
When it comes to talent acquisition, the future is now. Our recent talent survey shows a stunning 96% of HR leaders currently use or plan on using AI.
Looking forward, increased use of agentic AI in talent acquisition processes isn’t far away. Talent intelligence platforms that integrate agentic AI can improve speed and accuracy in recruiting, automate tedious, time-consuming tasks, and even highlight improvements to the talent acquisition process.
As adoption increases, AI will continue to improve the accuracy and efficiency of workforce planning. By analyzing historical data and economic and market trends, AI can increasingly generate more accurate predictive models for multiple talent scenarios.
Armed with that data and information about existing staff and your organization’s goals, you can accurately assess future workforce needs — and hire and promote top talent based on their skills and potential — and leave static processes behind.