Talent Acquisition

What talent acquisition is

Talent acquisition (استقطاب المواهب) is the long term approach to building an organisation’s capacity to attract the competencies it needs, not merely filling the vacancies that are open today.

The definition sets two things side by side. One is filling the vacancies open today, which concerns the positions that are empty at a given moment. The other is the capacity to attract the competencies the organisation needs, which is built over the long term. Talent acquisition is the second, and the words “not merely” mark its relation to the first: filling today’s vacancies is not excluded from talent acquisition, but it is not the whole of it.

How talent acquisition differs from recruitment and talent sourcing

The difference between talent acquisition and recruitment lies in the horizon, not in the activity:

• Recruitment is a response to a vacancy that already exists: the role is advertised, applicants are screened, someone is appointed, and the file is closed.
• Talent acquisition is continuous work that does not stop when the vacancy is closed: building a relationship with the candidate market, knowing where people with a particular specialism are to be found, and staying in touch with those who were not appointed this time.

Recruitment and talent acquisition are not told apart by what is done in them. They are told apart by how long the work runs. In recruitment it runs from the point at which a vacancy exists to the point at which the file on it is closed, and the four steps in that sequence have a defined end. In talent acquisition the work continues after that end, so what was built for one vacancy is still in place when the next one opens.

An organisation that practises recruitment alone starts every vacancy from nothing. It has no established channel and no base of earlier candidates, so the work of building a source of candidates enters the cost per hire and the length of the hiring process on each occasion, the length that time to fill measures.

Starting from nothing means that nothing carries over from the previous vacancy. The channel used last time was not kept, and neither were the candidates met last time. Building a source of candidates then becomes part of the work for each vacancy, and it is counted again in what that vacancy costs and in how long it takes to fill.

The same question of horizon separates talent acquisition from talent sourcing, which is identifying potential candidates and reaching them before they apply. The part played by talent sourcing ends once there is an interested candidate. Talent acquisition, as defined above, does not stop when a vacancy is closed.

The components of talent acquisition

Talent acquisition is made up of four components:

• Planning the need, derived from workforce planning (تخطيط القوى العاملة) and not from separate requests sent in by individual departments.
• Building stable channels: universities, professional communities and referral by employees.
• A base of candidates that the organisation keeps and stays in contact with, not CVs that are buried once the vacancy is closed.
• The organisation’s reputation as a place to work, which determines who replies to its message in the first place.

The first component concerns where the need comes from. When it is derived from workforce planning, the roles to be filled follow from a plan made for the workforce as a whole. When it comes from separate departmental requests, each request arrives by itself, and nothing joins one department’s request to another’s.

The second component is the set of channels through which candidates are reached. Three are named: universities, professional communities and referral by the people who already work for the organisation. The word that qualifies all three is “stable”. A stable channel is one that stays in place from one vacancy to the next, instead of being sought again each time a vacancy opens.

The third component is a base of candidates, and it is defined by what happens to it after a vacancy is closed. The candidates in the base are kept, and the organisation stays in contact with them. CVs that are buried once the vacancy is closed are the opposite case: records that exist but are not returned to. A base of this kind is also described as a talent pool, an organised base of potential candidates that an organisation keeps and follows up, so that it can return to it when a vacancy opens.

The fourth component is the organisation’s reputation as a place to work. It determines who replies to the organisation’s message at all. Its effect comes before any conversation begins, at the moment a person who has received the message decides whether to answer it.

When talent acquisition is worth investing in

Not every organisation needs talent acquisition to the same degree. Investing in talent acquisition is worthwhile when roles are:

• Recurring, opened every few months.
• Scarce, with a limited supply in the market.
• Critical, so that leaving the role vacant disrupts the work.

A role that opens once every few years is a different case. Recruitment when the need arises is enough for it.

Any one of the three conditions is enough to make the investment worthwhile; a role does not need to meet all three. For the third condition, how a critical role is identified has its own test, set out under that term.

How talent acquisition differs from talent management

Talent acquisition works on people outside the organisation: how to reach them and how to persuade them. Talent management (إدارة المواهب) works on people inside it: how to develop them and how to retain them. The first fills; the second preserves.

The line between talent acquisition and talent management is the boundary of the organisation. On one side are people the organisation has not yet brought in, and the questions concern reaching them and persuading them to join. On the other side are people who already work there, and the questions concern developing them and keeping them.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.