Attracting the right talent for your organizational goals is crucial to your current and future successes
Employees are the horsepower and creative synergy behind every successful business. Therefore, it stands to reason that no organization can thrive long-term without careful investigation into how to acquire and develop talent.
Talent within an organization is what’s known as an intangible asset – i.e., something that can’t be pinned down to a fixed value, like brand, IP, or client relationships. It is impossible to put a price on a talented, experienced, and motivated employee. Bad hires, on the other hand, carry a very specific price tag. The US Department of Labor estimates each bad hire costs approximately 30 percent of this individual’s first year salary.
Now, across your organization, try adding the value of strong hires to the cost of routinely hiring the wrong people. This is why you need talent acquisition solutions. And with 2023 set to, once again, be a candidate-driven market, a talent acquisition strategy is more than a nice-to-have, it’s a must!
What is Talent Acquisition?
There is a crucial difference between proactive talent acquisition and recruitment. And more and more organizations are recognizing the advantages of talent acquisition.
Recruitment means filling vacancies as they arise. Talent Acquisition solutions center on long-term HR strategies based on an organization’s long-term plans for growth, product creation, and succession planning.
Talent acquisition services are a group effort between HR, recruiters, and sourcing agencies, who can offer talent acquisition consulting and support steps along the way. This often includes their involvement from sourcing to interviewing, to hiring and onboarding. Instead of reactively filling open roles, talent acquisition services extend to continually identifying the best candidates for roles that may be harder to fill in the future. This is particularly relevant for senior management roles or positions requiring more specialist skills and experience.
Compared to recruitment, talent acquisition and performance management require significant strategic planning from the outset. Their long-term benefits, meanwhile, are a whole lot greater than the sum of their parts.
The Advantages of Talent Acquisition
Boosting business performance
A strong talent acquisition strategy will help your organization hire the best people as quickly as possible by evaluating candidates against every aspect of a role. This simultaneously ensures better hires.
As well as boosting business performance, this also reduces staff turnover – and its stymying effect – because people who are a good fit are less likely to leave. Hiring the right people with the right skills and qualities will instantly give your business a competitive edge. Hiring the wrong people, meanwhile, poses a serious threat to business performance and productivity.
Lowering costs
Recruitment costs time and money. From candidate sourcing, placing job ads, screening, interviews – through to onboarding. But by taking a little extra time to embrace talent acquisition solutions, you will ultimately be ‘recruiting’ less often and the people you hire will be a better fit and are likely to stick around for longer. This is just one way talent acquisition offsets its initial cost and ultimately saves you money.
Improving candidate experience
A thought-out organization-wide approach makes the recruitment process faster and smoother. This inevitably improves a candidate’s experience, as well. A formalized talent acquisition strategy also involves identifying and building relationships with potential candidates long before a suitable role comes up. This gives the candidate the chance to get to know the organization in advance and offers HRM or recruiters the chance to address any potential concerns in advance. Empowering candidates in this way means they are ultimately more likely to choose your organization.
Recruit for the organization you want to be
Unlike recruitment, the benefits of a coordinated talent acquisition strategy are not limited to filling short-term personnel needs. By looking ahead, you can take the time to assess exactly what skills and qualities you need in your future workforce to achieve your long-term business goals.
Talent acquisition helps you plan ahead and find the very best people with these skills for when the time comes. (For more information, see our blogpost on strategic workforce planning). And as market skills’ shortages look set to continue into 2023, a talent acquisition strategy has never been more important.
The ‘Good Hire’ Playbook
If you’re still unsure about the benefits of a talent acquisition strategy, try looking back at past ‘good hires’ and the value they have added to your business. This exercise should be led by HR, with input across the business – from senior management to talent acquisition. What metrics are you using to assess the value of the hire? And then consider how this good hire came about. Who recruited them? What methods were used? What worked well? And what didn’t work so well?
All of this will give you a sample of what a future talent acquisition strategy could look like and what it could do for your organization. This is the beginning of your playbook for matching or exceeding the quality of this one across all your personnel needs.
Talent Intelligence offers help at all stages of the talent acquisition process. We are always happy to talk things through and answer any questions wherever you are in your journey. Get in touch today for a consultation or an initial chat!