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Is talent acquisition just another way of saying recruitment or is this just another jargon fad or is it something we should pay attention to?

I did a little research. According to some important human resource thought leaders, the difference between the two terms is strategic.

Bringing new talent into your organization is risky. So much can go wrong if you hire the wrong person.

Recruiting is the term we have used for years meaning to send out signals into the marketing place and bring a new person into your company to fulfill some important role. Recruitment is an action, a tactic. It is a process. It usually involves the activities of sourcing, screening, interviewing, selecting and hiring.

But the concept of bringing new talent into your organization should be more than a tactic. People are one of the costliest expenses. Adding new people changes your culture and allows you to reach a wider market. When the new person adds value, your organization is stronger. But when it doesn’t, wow you can have a problem. We should consider the concept of bringing new talent into your organization as a strategic initiative.

Talent acquisition includes the tactic of recruiting but also some strategic elements that help your business grow, such as:

Talent planning and strategy to ensure your talent is aligned with your strategic business plan

Employment branding: These are activities that help define your company image, culture and reputation in the marketplace. Think of it as marketing for the people side of the business. With social media, employment branding often becomes a candidate’s first impression.

Candidate audiences: Part of your talent strategy is to define and understand your target audience, the talent pool from which you source candidates. You might adjust your branding and sourcing outreach to a particular audience. But you have to know who you are talking to first.

Candidate relationship management includes the steps you take to offer a positive candidate experience and build relationships with people and audiences who might be candidates someday in the future.

Metrics and Analysis. You get what you measure, right, so talent acquisition concepts include some way of knowing if you are making progress to drive better recruitment decisions and improve the quality of hire.

These core elements have tactics and activities just like recruitment. Recruitment might be the element of talent acquisition you are most familiar with but talent acquisition is the strategic initiative that makes your business grow.

CEOs worry about talent. Talent acquisition and development routinely rates as the top 1 or 2 things CEOs worry about. They build business plans around having the right talent in the right place at the right time to accomplish business goals!

This is particularly critical in small to medium sized businesses leveraging fewer employees to accomplish your goals. Every team member has a critical role. A bad hire is an even bigger problem than in a larger business where one or two bad apples might be able to hide in the bureaucracy.

Make the most of your people assets by going beyond recruitment to think strategically about talent in support of your strategic business plans.

To view this video, or to view other videos featuring other strategic job search tips and tools from The Interview Doctor click here.

This year I have spoken to over 20 groups on the topic of talent acquisition with a presentation I call “Stop Wandering: Recruit with a Map and Plan”. This topic hits close to home for me as a human resources executive and consultant to individuals seeking new opportunities.

At gatherings of HR people, I hear the same stories about how important it is to find the right talent or develop existing talent so the right people are in the right place at the right time to accomplish business goals. Yet the quantitative and qualitative evidence indicates we are either deluded or wrong about how well this effort is going.

In my talk I point to evidence that all is not what it seems. Consider this statistic for a moment from the 2012 Bersin by Deloitte Talent Acquisition Factbook. Time to fill (a very common measurement of recruiting success) has reduced from 60 days in 2011 to 55 days in 2013 indicating companies are filling jobs faster than ever. In the same time period first year turnover (people who resign or are terminated in the first year) has gone up from 12.6% in 2011 to 14.5% in 2013. First year turnover is a complete waste. It means the wrong person was hired. All that time and money spent recruiting and training all down the tube.

That is some of the quantitative evidence. On the non-statistic side, candidates bitterly complain about how impersonal and cold it is to find a job. No one answers the phone or responds to inquiries. It takes ages to fill jobs. Any candidate will tell you that it takes longer than 55 days; candidates wonder where that statistic comes from. Candidates refer to the process of contacting some companies as the “black hole”. In fact they call the HR Department the “black hole” sometimes.

We have a talent problem not recognized or acknowledged in HR journals. HR people think they do a good job recruiting and retaining talent. I wonder.

I attended a Cleveland SHRM Staffing Management Association meeting recently that demonstrated this situation very well. It was a panel discussion exploring talent acquisition. Since the crowd was large, the external recruiters went into one room and the internal HR people who handle recruiting directly for companies stayed in another room. I went with the external recruiters since I was unaffiliated.

The external recruiters had a lively conversation about where to find candidates, how to court and tend candidates to have them ready for an opportunity in the future. The external recruiters used LinkedIn and networking to find people who might be interesting to a client in the future.

We rejoined the internal recruiters to debrief. The external recruiters shared the lively discussion about finding talent. The moderator for the internal recruiters was very quiet for a while. Then he said, “Boy, we didn’t talk about any of that”. The internal recruiters talked about on-boarding, dealing with recalcitrant hiring managers, paperwork, and the general process. They did not talk at all about finding candidates, courting talent, or building relationships with people that could be useful in the future. They did not even talk about LinkedIn. Not at all.

As the Captain said in Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” Business people, including HR people, talk extensively about the need to acquire the right talent but they are not building relationships required to actually do it. Maybe the largest companies are doing it but not the companies I work with or the people attending the meetings where I speak. Maybe they don’t know how.

Until companies begin realistically addressing talent by acting like they really value people, we will continue to have this failure to communicate.

Jargon Soup: The difference between Recruitment and Talent Acquisition

Is talent acquisition just another way of saying recruitment or is this just another jargon fad or is it something we should pay attention to?

To view this video, or to view other videos featuring other strategic job search tips and tools from The Interview Doctor click here.

Emphasis on “Talent Acquisition” not the same as Results

This year I have spoken to over 20 groups on the topic of talent acquisition with a presentation I call “Stop Wandering: Recruit with a Map and Plan”. This topic hits close to home for me as a human resources executive and consultant to individuals seeking new opportunities.

What is your view?