The Difference between Talent Acquisition and Recruiting

The world of talent acquisition and recruiting has rapidly become crowded and complicated. An overwhelming number of staffing agencies, new technology, job aggregation, professional social media and other disrupters have completely changed what use to be a fairly simple marketplace.

As the marketplace for recruiting and talent acquisition strategy, tools and services becomes more complicated, other factors are at play that can further the confusion. An increasing gap between the technical skills companies need and the skills the candidate market produces is driving competition for high end professional and technical workers to incredible levels. Companies are having to reconsider what candidates value and what drives engagement, and they are having to answer these questions quickly. From start day gifts, to flex work and work from home policies, to unlimited PTO for parents, companies are employing varying, and often extreme tactics as they look for answers.

Trucast believes the first place to start for any company looking to improve it's results in the battle for talent is to clarify some of the confusion and this starts with defining two important ideas, talent acquisition vs recruiting. There are and will most likely always be very differing opinions when it comes to the subject of hiring, but if your company is trying to solve this problem or improve in this area, you must first come to terms with the difference between these concepts.

Talent acquisition is the total program a company employs to fulfill it's human resourcing needs. This includes planning/forecasting, process, tools, systems, people, training, leadership, content development, reporting and anything else that goes into developing, executing and managing the overall strategy for delivering the people a company needs. Recruiting, on the other hand, is the granular act of searching for and engaging candidates in the candidate marketplace. Recruiting is a subset of talent acquisition and involves the very specific processes for using the tools, systems, content etc., decided on as part of an over arching talent acquisition strategy, to fulfill individual job requisitions.

The point is that there must be a well thought out, big picture, strategic approach to talent acquisition that allows for or empowers your company to then recruit the people it needs. All of the factors I mentioned above must be taken into consideration and Talent acquisition is the umbrella that brings together all the pieces of the puzzle allowing improvement in recruiting results.

It's easier to understand the importance of the concept of separating talent acquisition and recruiting by looking at common metrics for each. Again, talent acquisition is the overall program and strategy a company employs to fulfill it's human resourcing needs, so the metrics for talent acquisition are things like company cost to hire, average time to fill, candidate quality (submittals to interviews to hire ratio), agency spend etc. These are big picture metrics that speak to return on investment in talent acquisition tools and process.

Recruiting metrics are things like candidate response rate, message acceptance rate, job posting performance, click throughs, apply rates etc. These are much more granular metrics that speak to an individual job posting, messaging campaign, recruiter, or team of recruiters return on activity in specific tools or systems.

The idea is to begin with an actual strategy, which is talent acquisition. Your strategy should include recruiting, but it should take into consideration much more if your expectation is to improve your companies ability to hire great people. Quite often a company will say "we have recruiters, why are we continuing to spend this money with agencies?" Or "we have recruiters, why aren't we able to find better people?". The answers to these questions are often found at the talent acquisition level, not the recruiting level. If you are asking these types of questions or looking to improve your companies ability to hire great people, start with talent acquisition. If you need help from a proven expert, talk to Trucast.