Talent Acquisition: The TA Process Explained + Tips

Talent acquisition (TA) is something every business contends with on a fairly regular basis, and for good reason. Bringing in the right talent is critical for helping organizations scale and keep up with growing demand.

Talent acquisition can be a complex process. It requires identifying the skills candidates need to help your business grow, screening applicants, scheduling interviews, and a variety of hiring tasks—all while offering a great candidate experience to start off on the right foot. It’s enough to bog down talent acquisition leaders and keep them from making smart, data-driven decisions about who to hire and when.

Fortunately, talent acquisition doesn’t have to be arduous. There are strategies and tools you can use to work smarter, not harder. In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about talent acquisition, from what it is and how it works to steps for improving your company’s talent acquisition strategies and the right tools to get you there.

What is talent acquisition?

Talent acquisition is the process of sourcing and hiring candidates who have the right skills to support your business. Acquiring the best talent involves attracting, engaging, converting, screening, scheduling, interviewing, and hiring candidates effectively and efficiently.

Successful talent acquisition processes are collaborative in nature, involving all relevant stakeholders to help identify the best internal and external prospects. These stakeholders include:

Sourcers: Identify potential candidates and make first contact with the prospect.
Recruiters: Take over communications after a candidate responds positively to a sourcer. They guide prospects through the application process and act as the liaison between the applicant and the hiring team.
Talent marketers: Use data and research to craft messaging that engages prospects and entices them to apply.
Employer brand marketers: Craft messaging that promotes the company as a sought-after employer. By bolstering the brand’s reputation, they help the rest of the team sell the company, its values, and its culture to prospects.
Recruitment event participants: Drum up interest in the company through on-site or remote events, like networking meet-ups, career fairs, university events, and industry competitions.
Talent acquisition leaders: Sometimes referred to as recruitment or talent acquisition managers, oversee and develop the strategies a company uses to attract new hires. Among other responsibilities, they’re often in charge of forecasting hiring needs and managing hiring budgets.

Now that we’ve covered what talent acquisition is in a broad sense, let’s discuss how it intersects with recruiting.

Related Resource: 10 Talent Acquisition Smart Goals for 2024

Talent acquisition vs. recruiting: How are they related?

Many people conflate talent acquisition and recruiting, but they aren’t interchangeable. While the recruitment process should be viewed holistically, it has a relatively short-term focus on filling open positions. Talent acquisition has broader aims and considers long-term, big-picture goals and initiatives for attracting and onboarding quality applicants.

This typically includes:

Identifying the skills candidates should have to help the business grow
Creating and maintaining a strong applicant pipeline
Developing and boosting the company’s brand as a reputable employer
Providing a stellar experience for prospective employees by using robust data to make informed decisions
Improving acquisition metrics like time to hire and cost to hire

Four tips to improve talent acquisition

The more sophisticated your acquisition process, the more elements there are to fine-tune. Here are four tips that will help nearly every organization improve their talent acquisition process.

1. Forecast your needs and establish goals

Successful talent acquisition looks ahead at what the business needs to grow. It can be tricky to determine which positions will be difficult to recruit for or how long it will take to fill positions. Talent acquisition leaders and managers need solid data, like historical turnover and retention rates for specific roles, to help them forecast business needs and make the case for appropriate budgeting and resources.

Acquisition goals are built off your forecast, business needs, and market trends. For instance, if data indicates it’s time to increase a role’s headcount, create goals for both employees hired and hiring timeline. Many industries are rushing to figure out how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact their fields, so one of your talent acquisition goals might be to find prospects who are already leveraging AI. Regardless, setting up smart long-term talent acquisition goals—and working proactively to meet them—will set your organization up for success.

2. Build a talent pipeline

Another way to improve talent acquisition is by developing a talent pipeline. To do this, identify both internal and external candidates that could be a good fit for key roles. At larger organizations, this work falls to sourcers. These team members comb through both new and past applicants and add candidates to the recruitment pipeline. Using a platform that integrates with your existing tools can streamline these efforts. For example, Life Time Fitness was able to leverage integrations and automation to optimize their talent pipeline to ensure a steady flow of qualified candidates. Read the full case study here.

3. Develop your employer brand

Employer branding plays a pivotal role in keeping talent engaged and invested in the application process, so it’s critical to invest in building a positive one.

Brand marketers pay close attention to the brand’s presence on social media channels, company review sites like Glassdoor, the organization’s website, and industry events. By conducting regular audits of these channels, brand marketers can get a better sense of what employees and prospects think about your company as an employer, identify ways to improve the candidate experience, and work with the rest of the talent acquisition team to make necessary changes.

4. Leverage the right HR technology

One of the best ways to improve talent acquisition is to take advantage of intelligent HR tech. The right talent acquisition software utilizes AI to help inform and streamline nearly every step of the hiring process, including:

Building talent pipelines and prioritizing candidates by getting fit scores to help easily identify which candidates are the strongest match for open roles.
Hosting recruitment events by making it quick and easy to create events with customized registration pages, creating email nurturing campaigns to drum up excitement, and more.
Driving candidate outreach and engagement by helping craft and automatically send engaging nurture campaigns and easily reaching candidates through popular SMS channels such as WhatsApp.
Scheduling screening calls and interviews by automatically sending one-way video, audio, or text-based screening questions to qualified candidates; automatically scheduling interview sessions; and collecting data that gives decision-makers insights to help them move the right candidate to the next stage.
Creating a white glove approach to the interview experience for candidates by leveraging structured interview guides to help the team prepare, automated note-taking tools, and evaluations.
Improving the talent acquisition process by integrating with your existing HR tech stack and analyzing hiring data from every stage, evaluating impact, and reporting up and out.

Now that we’ve gone through some primary ways to improve talent acquisition at your company, let’s take a look at the acquisition process itself.

The talent acquisition process

Depending on the size of your company, the process and team members handling each step of talent acquisition might vary. But most organizations tend to follow these core steps.

Understand your needs

First off, develop data-informed hiring expectations and forecasts to figure out what actions your business needs to take. Employ forecasting to determine what roles need to be created or filled, develop accurate hiring timelines, and estimate the number of new hires needed to meet current and future organizational needs. You can also analyze data to assess whether current employees have skill gaps that need to be addressed and to find out what combination of talents and experience has historically led to the most success at your company in various roles.

Source candidates

Next, create a job description for open roles—with strong input from department managers and leaders—and share it on the appropriate channels. Post openings directly to your careers page, list them on job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed—as well as any local- or industry-specific boards—and have employees share openings through their professional networks, while passing along referrals. From there, you can start gathering a pool of candidates that best match the description you’ve put together.

Screen candidates

Once applications start coming in, you’ll need to screen them to determine who’s worth advancing to the interview stage. Depending on the industry and if the role is remote you may request short, pre-recorded video interviews or require text-based screening surveys for greater efficiency.

Screening candidates is time-consuming. That’s why many hiring teams are using tools to speed up the process. Candidate screening tools may include chatbots that can answer candidate questions, collect lead data, and actually schedule interviews. These tools can also parse applicant resumes to speed up the application process, and score candidates based on their work experience.

Schedule and interview candidates

Once you know who to engage with, it’s time to extend invitations to interviews. Depending on your hiring process, the complexity of the role, and the structure of the teams the new hire will work most closely with, there may be several rounds of interviews. If you’re filling multiple positions across large organizations, it’s easy for all of the necessary scheduling to quickly bog down recruiters and other talent acquisition staff. Automating interview scheduling heads off this time sink. Depending on the role or team, interviews might be in person or virtual. In either case, make sure you have the right questions ready, the right interview structure, and the right folks on the call.

Make a decision

After your team has completed the above steps, it’s time to select an applicant. Think about each candidate’s experience, how it aligns with the necessary skills for the role, whether their geographic location makes sense for the position, and how they might fit into your company culture. Having a set of agreed-upon criteria can make this process easier and help reveal any biases that might have crept into the selection process. Surveys and pre-hire evaluations are a good way to judge candidate fit, while scorecards help teams measure one candidate against another.

Even these basic talent acquisition steps add up to a lengthy process, made longer when staff handle tasks manually. The key to getting through the process quickly and keeping candidates engaged is to incorporate automation.

Can talent acquisition be automated?

In short, yes. The best talent acquisition tools have integrated AI capabilities to support hiring teams by automating tasks that they’d normally complete themselves. Intelligent platforms can automatically:

Campaign candidates from a variety of sources to help companies cast a wider net as soon as possible.
Analyze applicants’ resumes to see how well their skills and experience match the role, so you can identify and get in touch with top candidates more quickly.
Schedule and reschedule interviews with candidates to free up your team for higher-level tasks, expedite the process, and keep applicants engaged.

What is talent intelligence?

Talent intelligence taps into an ensemble of AI—like Natural Language Understanding, DeepLearning, and Large Language Models—to automate and optimize all aspects of talent management, not just hiring. These intelligence models accelerate recruiting and employee development processes while improving candidate experience.

As a result, HR teams are able to harness data, integrations, automation and AI to create more effective processes, remove blockers that disrupt employee experience and decrease productivity, and support their organization’s talent acquisition and talent management goals.

Improve your talent acquisition process with Phenom

Talent acquisition encompasses a lot, and it’s easy to see why some organizations struggle with it. In today’s job market, hiring teams can quickly get overwhelmed sorting through candidates, and sourcing hard-to-fill roles.

But as we’ve discussed, the right tools can help.

The Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform incorporates AI and automation into the entire talent experience. Its human-centered design seamlessly integrates people and technology in the same workflow. Build recruitment campaigns, source and manage candidates with Phenom Talent CRM, schedule interviews, and make data-driven decisions with Phenom Talent Analytics.

Learn how you can create the best candidate experience possible by reading our 2024 State of Candidate Experience Report or booking a demo today.

Joanna Keel