Recruitment Blog

Talent acquisition vs recruitment: What is the difference?

Sarah Linney
Content Marketing Manager at JobAdder
talent acquisition vs recruitment

Talent acquisition and recruitment are two terms that can often be used interchangeably. While they have the same end goal to hire the right talent to fill any open positions that your company needs, they do have different meanings. 

Recruitment is all about hiring individuals to fill open positions, focusing on finding and screening qualified applicants to fill an open position. Talent acquisition focuses on the bigger picture and acquiring skilled workers to help fill any gaps in your business. It’s about analyzing the data to determine what your long-term business needs are. 

What skills and experience are needed to fulfil this goal? How many people with these skills need to be hired? What is the company’s budget to meet this need? What training team will help the new hires become acclimated to what is required of them and the company’s culture?  

These are all questions that talent acquisition looks to answer. In this article, we’ll discuss the key differences between talent acquisition and recruitment in more depth. 

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What is recruitment?

The recruitment process is the best strategy for filling vacancies fast. It’s usually much quicker than talent acquisition. If your goal is to get qualified candidates into roles as soon as possible, recruitment is an efficient solution.

An effective recruitment strategy works in favour of the company by giving them the ability to create a larger talent pool, meet the demands of the business by maintaining a higher success rate of meeting hiring needs and promptly filling vacancies on your team. 

Staffing needs can change in an instant. Without an immediate solution in place, the business can experience a decrease in workplace efficacy and the onset of worker dissatisfaction and burnout. 

Recruitment is a quick and efficient talent pipeline that many corporate recruitment teams use to fulfil their immediate needs. 

It’s essential to understand that recruitment is a subset of talent acquisition. It doesn’t replace talent acquisition.  

Instead, it can be used alongside your hiring strategy to keep the business moving towards its overall goals and avoid any major pitfalls caused by staffing issues. 

What is talent acquisition?

The talent acquisition process is incredibly important to your business and it’s a much more involved hiring process. It’s a strategy that looks to solve short and long-term issues in staffing, such as building relationships with potential candidates to fill future job openings.  

These candidates are chosen based on the extent that their skills and experience align with the company’s culture and their ability to carry out the position’s duties. Talent acquisition takes a lot of long-term planning and candidate relationship management.

Talent acquisition is an ongoing strategy that creates opportunities to enhance a company’s services by hiring the best talent to provide the service. It can help you bring on talent with specific skill sets and competencies and help with long-term employee retention rates.

Since talent acquisition looks into increasing retention rates, it focuses on meeting the needs of candidates by providing competitive compensation and benefits packages.  

Overall, talent acquisition is an ongoing process in the hiring realm and requires a strategic approach from the beginning. 

While some of these approaches will be trial and error, the overall goal is to create a thriving workplace filled with satisfied and motivated workers that complement the culture of the business.

Talent acquisition vs recruitment: What should your company be doing?

Every business should be consistently recruiting and using talent acquisition strategies to hire.  Sourcing employees from various levels of experience and industries is extremely important when staffing a company. 

Diversity in the workforce leads to a better employee experience overall and a rich company culture. It creates an atmosphere of creativity and finding new ways of solving complex problems that work for the business and its consumers.

There is a lot of trial and error in talent acquisition strategies. That is why decision makers must understand that there is no one way to achieve success. Businesses need to always look for ways to improve their recruitment and talent acquisition strategies. 

Unfortunately, many talent acquisition teams and recruiters often underutilize one of these strategies, leaving more margin for error in creating a successful business.  

Both strategies need to be used to ensure that the company is able to deal with short and long-term issues in staffing and business efficacy.

Recruitment and talent acquisition strategies

There are many different talent acquisition strategies for overall business success. However, LinkedIn and other social media sites are top contenders for both recruitment and talent acquisition.  

In fact, LinkedIn is the largest professional network worldwide with 800 million members, making it the prime channel to get your job descriptions in front of qualified candidates. It also allows you to directly connect with your potential employees to understand better how their needs and your business needs coincide. 

It’s the best way to start building a relationship with them even if they don’t take a position with your company at that time.

Another important aspect of talent acquisition is having an efficient applicant tracking system in your hiring strategy. It will streamline your recruitment strategies and ensure qualified candidates are seeing your open positions.

Not to mention, it will save recruiters time and give them the space to focus on the tasks of building relationships with potential candidates, freeing them from manual admin tasks and letting them manage the candidates in one place. 

Having a successful careers page plays a massive role in talent acquisition and recruitment as well. A careers page not only lets you showcase the company’s mission and successes but also important things like employer branding, diversity and inclusion efforts and employee testimonies.  

It’s even a great place to educate potential candidates on your talent acquisition strategy.

Upgrade your talent acquisition and recruitment strategy with JobAdder

There’s no denying that the recruitment process for new employees can be complicated.  

Constantly working to streamline the talent acquisition process, finding the best talent and the often lengthy interview process can present many challenges to recruiters and human resource leaders.

JobAdder is a great solution to streamlining the talent acquisition and recruitment process. It’s an easy-to-use and comprehensive recruitment software explicitly designed for recruiters and hiring managers. 

Recruitment software helps you quickly post job openings and stay on top of hiring compliance.  It also streamlines onboarding and eliminates the need for lots of paperwork.

JobAdder is your talent acquisition strategy solution because it helps you match applications to jobs and track the progress of each candidate. Many JobAdder users love that they can post openings to a variety of job boards and social media websites and manage candidate communication via email, phone and SMS. It’s perfect for relationship building and helping to find top talent and onboard new employees. It’s your simple solution to effective talent recruiting. Find out more here.

Need help building your talent pool? Download our ultimate guide to sourcing talent.

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