Top Talent Acquisition Strategies for 2023

As a business and an employer, your main priority will be finding employees who can help your company reach its fullest potential. After all, what are businesses without their employees? Rarely successful, that’s for certain. However, recruiting the right talent can be tricky. 

The hiring process is often rushed and largely overlooked by businesses, meaning the wrong candidates are sometimes taken on. It’s not that these candidates are necessarily bad at their roles, but they might not be the most well suited for the business culture or where the company is heading in the long term. 

As we well know, the wrong recruitment decisions can be costly, both in terms of money and production – so any methods you can use to sharpen your hiring process should be explored in detail. 

This is where talent acquisition strategies come into play. If you’re looking to hire top talent across 2023, keep reading as we share some essential tips on how you can implement talent acquisition strategies and build a strong, dependable team that will last.

What is a talent acquisition strategy?

Talent acquisition is a technique employed by businesses that want to make their recruitment process more streamlined and efficient. Every company is different and therefore the approach of finding new employees needs to reflect this. You need to make sure that the people you’re looking to hire align with your core business values and can help you reach your overall goals, and that’s where talent acquisition comes in. 

A talent acquisition strategy looks to help you refine your recruitment process and attract only the most qualified and suitable potential employees. Not only does this streamline your hiring process and have a direct impact on your staff retention later down the line, but it also helps you to keep costs down by ensuring you’re not making the wrong hiring decisions. 

Through a well defined talent acquisition strategy, you can set out your objectives and attract a diverse set of candidates who will enrich your business and help you achieve your goals. In return, you can help candidates develop their personal careers and reach their own goals by creating a work environment that is mutually beneficial. When they come to move on, your business will stand tall with a good reputation amongst jobseekers – something which is important in itself. 

Why is it important to have a talent acquisition strategy?

There are numerous reasons why you should be looking to implement talent acquisition strategies across your company for the year ahead, with the main one being that you can make sure any potential employees are a good fit for your business. 

Every company has its own culture and its own way of doing things, and some dynamics simply don’t work for everyone. For example, if your company culture is one that is high intensity and high pressure due to the nature of your industry, this won’t be suitable for some candidates. Some people get easily overwhelmed, and therefore need a slower pace in order to work to the best of their abilities. They may produce great work, but they may not be best placed within your company culture. So, if you hire them, they may leave shortly afterwards.

This is less than ideal from an employee retention standpoint and can cause bigger issues if the same thing keeps happening. When you have gaps in your workforce, your productivity and output is slowed due to being a member down. This means existing employees often feel the need to pick up the extra workload, much to their detriment. If there is more than one vacancy, this problem is amplified. 

Of course, there will always be employees who leave for pastures new, and a lot of the time it will have nothing to do with you as an employer, but if you’re finding you have a high staff turnover, this is a good indication that something may be amiss – especially if employees are leaving soon after starting. This points to incorrect hiring decisions. 

To avoid all this, talent acquisition strategies can be introduced during the recruitment process. 

8 talent acquisition tips for 2023

Implementing a talent acquisition strategy isn’t quite as straightforward as you might think – it all depends on your business. Below, we’ve listed some of the best practices for defining a strategy to help with your recruitment process. One of the most essential tips to keep in mind, though, is that not every suggestion will be applicable to your business, so make sure you’re choosing the right approach for your business. 

After all, talent acquisition is about not just attracting and employing top talent, but retaining the top candidates, too.

Improve employer branding

Employer branding is all about how people perceive your company as a place to work. It works in a similar way to business branding in that you want to do everything you can to build a solid reputation. Reviews and word of mouth are highly important, but this is something a lot of companies overlook. 

As an example, if multiple customers had a bad experience with your business and left negative reviews on Google or Trustpilot about you, you’d likely investigate what happened, try to console the customers and make it right, and enact change to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again. These are the fundamentals of customer service, and can be the deciding factor on whether or not other customers decide to shop with you. You’ll be aware of the impact such interactions can have on your business, so it’s important for you to mitigate the situation. 

Employer branding works in the same way, but not a lot of businesses see the value in it and often gloss over it. You’ll have heard of websites like Glassdoor where employees can go and review what it was like to work at your company. This is a website that is increasingly becoming more popular with job seekers, with many basing their decision to work at a place on feedback and word of mouth from previous employees. The sticking point is that a lot of employers don’t acknowledge such feedback, and some even dismiss it, meaning their employer brand could be in tatters and affect their ability to attract top talent, without them realising it. 

You could have the best pay package and the biggest projects for people to work on, but if your reputation is a bad one, top talent won’t come to you. With this in mind, make sure you listen to feedback from employees and find ways to improve your employment offering, either by investing in the office, nurturing staff more, or implementing new processes that generate engagement and positivity. 

Streamline the hiring process

A key factor that can play a pivotal role in securing the best talent is the hiring process, or rather the length of it. If you have a long hiring process that contains several stages and takes weeks or even months, you’ll likely find that you’re losing out on the best candidates. This is because the longer your recruitment process is, the more time you’re giving candidates to consider other positions and take up work elsewhere.

The last thing you want is to lose on the best candidates because you’ve taken too long to narrow down your search. Instead, try and do as much filtering as possible during the recruitment process. TalentSpa’s recruitment software can help you streamline the process and make it easier than ever. Using a flag-based system that automatically ranks candidates based on suitability during the CV screening phase, you’re left with only the most suitable prospective candidates to interview. 

During the interview stage, try to keep it as short as possible. If you require an in-person interview and a test of some sort, try and send out the test before the interview and then talk through the results at the in-person stage. This reduces the time and comms between each segment and means you can find the right person faster, snatching them up before someone else has the chance to. 

Boost diversity and inclusivity

Diversity and inclusivity is an extremely important aspect of recruitment and something that the leading candidates in your field will be aware of. If candidates feel like they’ll be the only person from a certain demographic within your workforce, they may be put off because they feel left out or like they have no one to connect with. For example, if you work in the manufacturing sector which has, for a long time, been male dominated, and your entire team is male, you’ll want to increase your diversity to include women. 

This means tailoring your recruitment approach to promote diversity and inclusion, and looking at ways you can appeal to a wider demographic in a sensitive and suitable way. 

You can also take strides to make your workforce feel more safe and represented at work, such as having online chat channels for specific demographics to discuss things that affect them, and holding talks and meetings so people can learn more about each other. Things like this can go a long way to making employees feel valued and show that you, as an employer, care about them. In terms of talent acquisition strategies, this is a good way to build an excellent reputation as a fair and just place to work, which will naturally attract more candidates anyway.

Increase flexibility 

Flexible working is something that has really come to the forefront of workers’ needs recently and is a big factor in many people saying yes or no to a specific job. People want to have the freedom to work on a flexible basis in a way that suits them, because life happens. Whether they’re parents and have no childcare, are having issues with public transport, or aren’t feeling quite right in terms of their health, the option to work flexibly can ensure employees always have the reassurance to work how they need to. 

During the talent acquisition phase, it’s important to promote flexibility as this could be the deciding factor between the best person for the job choosing your company or not. 

Introduce perks and incentives 

Company culture is incredibly important and so is offering perks and incentives. Salary and job title alone aren’t enough to sway top talent to your company, so as part of your talent acquisition strategy, think about other things you can offer your employees. 

From free meals and additional time off to childcare vouchers and incentives to keep healthy, such as a gym membership, there are lots of things that you can do to encourage applicants to join your company. Talent acquisition is all about making your company as appealing as possible to applicants so that you find ones who fit in naturally with how you and your existing team work, so it’s important you showcase everything you do to generate as much credible interest as possible. 

Improve employee retention via a comprehensive hiring process

We’ve already mentioned streamlining the employment process, but another key thing to think about is the onboarding process after the hiring process. Onboarding is part of hiring but is something that far too many employers overlook. It’s not enough to simply bring someone on board, give them a workstation, and leave them to it. 

You need to be thorough with your onboarding process as this can make all the difference between an employee deciding to stay on with your company or leave. Again, talent acquisition isn’t just about getting people to sign a contract of employment, it’s about getting them to stay, too.

Invest in employee learning and development

Along with perks and incentives, many candidates are now looking for an employer who will give them the chance to develop their personal skills and career path. Ideally, your company needs to have a structured path where new candidates can see the potential for growth. An added incentive is being willing to enrol them on courses or programmes that will help them expand their knowledge and advance to the next rung on the ladder. 

This shows that you care about your employees from a personal perspective, so it’s worth doing if you want to keep the incredible team you’ve already got.

Learn from data

The final talent acquisition strategy every business can include is to listen to data, i.e. exit interview information. If you find that a lot of your employees are leaving in fast succession, this is an indication that something is wrong somewhere, and it’s your duty to try and find out what it is so you can fix it. If you don’t, not only will you accrue a negative reputation as an employer and have an unstable team, but you’ll end up spending thousands in between new hires. 

With this in mind, develop an open workplace where employees can give you constructive criticism on things you could improve. If a lot of your employees don’t like your working hours, try and amend it because at that point, it’s clear that numerous people are having issues and this could turn people off. Small tweaks can make all the difference between you keeping your best employees or losing them.

How talent acquisition software can help your business 

Whilst you can implement the above talent acquisition strategies to attract the best candidates in the market, you will always have applicants who don’t fit, and it can take time to separate them from those who do. In the meantime, those who might be a good fit could look elsewhere, defeating the object of talent acquisition altogether. 

This is where our recruitment software comes in. Using TalentSpa’s leading talent acquisition platform, you can narrow down your candidate pool to only those who are viable prospects, not only making your job easier, but ensuring that you’re not taking too long and missing out due to timings. 
Our software uses smart AI alongside our decades of recruitment experience to post insightful, optimised job ads on relevant job boards where your ideal candidates are likely to be. We factor in diversity and inclusion to ensure your ads aren’t inadvertently pushing people away, and we also rank candidates based on how suitable they are, meaning you don’t need to do much in the way of talent acquisition.

Discover more about TalentSpa

To find out more about how TalentSpa’s leading talent acquisition software can help your business recruit the brightest talent, arrange a free demo of our platform online today.