Hiring glossary
What is talent acquisition?
Talent acquisition (TA) is the ongoing, strategic function that plans for, attracts, assesses and hires the people an organisation needs, both for current openings and for the skills it will need in the future.
Recruitment is the process of filling a specific vacancy: write the advert, source and screen candidates, interview, make an offer. Talent acquisition includes all of that but takes a longer view. It covers workforce planning with the business, employer branding, building talent pools and pipelines before roles open, sourcing passive candidates, choosing assessment methods, candidate experience, recruitment data and the relationship with agencies and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) providers.
In practice the line is blurry and many organisations use the terms interchangeably. The difference shows up in how the team spends its time. A recruitment-led team reacts to requisitions as they arrive. A talent acquisition team knows which roles are coming from the business plan, has already built relationships with likely candidates, and measures itself on quality of hire and retention as well as speed and cost.
A typical TA function includes recruiters (who own requisitions with hiring managers), sourcers (who find and approach candidates), coordinators (who handle scheduling and logistics) and, in larger teams, specialists in employer brand, campus or executive hiring, and recruitment operations and analytics. It reports into HR in most organisations, sometimes directly to the business.
The most useful TA metrics combine speed (time to fill, time to hire), efficiency (cost per hire, interviews per hire), quality (quality of hire, first-year retention, hiring manager satisfaction) and fairness (pass rates by group at each stage).
Also called: TA, talent acquisition vs recruitment, recruiting.
Example
A fast-growing fintech’s TA team meets each department head quarterly to map next year’s hiring, builds a talent pool of engineers who applied previously and did well in assessment, and fills a new team lead role in three weeks from that pool when it opens.
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