What Is Embedded Talent Acquisition?

Embedding a team of talent acquisition professionals directly into your business could be the answer to your hiring woes. Here’s why.

How does your business take on new hires? Some choose to place job ads and read through CVs themselves, others take on recruitment agencies to find the most suitable talent for them. However, increasingly companies are embedding teams of talent acquisition specialists within their organisations, working alongside them like an integrated part of the business.

This is embedded talent acquisition, and for companies that use an ongoing recruitment strategy it is one of the best ways to ensure you have the right candidates available as and when you need them. It is a long-term strategy for continuously improving the way you hire, allowing you to plan out your recruitment in advance rather than reacting to gaps in your organisation.

It’s no surprise that many people see embedded talent acquisition as the future of recruitment. Read on to find out all about this exciting method of hiring.

Understanding Embedded Talent Acquisition

It’s important to remember that talent acquisition is not the same thing as recruitment. Where recruitment is all about filling in short-term gaps, talent acquisition focuses on your long-term hiring strategy, enabling your business to anticipate your workforce needs and plan for growth. As such, it is crucial to understand your organisation’s precise requirements in order to assess what talent will be needed in a month, six months or a year’s time.

Accessing this understanding with a traditional recruitment agency is extremely difficult, which is why many companies opt for an embedded solution. Essentially, this involves taking a team of talent acquisition specialists and placing them in your organisation to work as an integrated part of your business.

Traditional Hiring Methods Vs Embedded Talent Acquisition

Traditionally, recruitment is short-term. You identify a hiring need, you contract a recruitment agency to fill it, and once that has been completed you part ways. This allows traditional recruitment to be very flexible and convenient, but it isn’t very effective at helping your organisation scale or identifying long-term hiring trends.

With embedded talent acquisition, the recruitment agency’s team is placed inside your organisation for much longer periods of time. That provides two things. Firstly, there is an extreme familiarity with your organisation, its needs, its culture and the direction in which it is moving. This provides an embedded team with the understanding needed to bring in the candidates that are best suited to your organisation.

Secondly, embedding a talent acquisition team allows them to plan and strategize around your long-term hiring needs. While this is a bigger investment, it can actually be quicker and more efficient than traditional recruitment. When you decide you’re ready to hire, your talent acquisition team will often already have a shortlist of candidates to contact.

Benefits Of Embedded Talent Acquisition

Embedded talent acquisition has many advantages over traditional recruitment, and one of the primary benefits is the increased quality of hires. By working long-term within your business, an embedded team can curate a talent pool of candidates with the skills and experience your organisation needs long before you need them.

This talent pool will be continuously edited as time goes on to match everything from your company culture to the specific qualifications you’re looking for. When the time comes to hire, your embedded talent acquisition team will have already spent weeks or even months finding the very best candidates for you, as well as developing strategies to bring them on board.

This also improves the experience for the candidate, as they can be provided with a custom experience that emphasises your employer brand. This in turn improves staff retention. It can even save money, as the extra time spent planning and preparing will pay off with much quicker time-to-recruit and much lower chance of losing money on a poor hire.

Strategies For Implementing Embedded Talent Acquisition

Transitioning from traditional recruitment to embedded talent acquisition can be a challenge. You may need both for a short period, while your embedded team settles into your business and begins understanding your needs and processes. However, technology can make the whole process much easier.

Everything from search software to AI can be utilised to make the talent acquisition process more efficient. While there is no substitute for a high-quality, experienced talent acquisition team, technology can supplement their abilities and get your embedded hiring processes going sooner rather than later.

The Future Of Embedded Recruiting

Increasingly, companies are moving to an embedded model when it comes to their long-term hiring strategies. The earlier organisations are able to implement this, the better they will be able to adapt to this change. Embedded talent acquisition is developing in many different directions, and late adopters might struggle to keep up.

For example, it’s difficult to imagine a future of embedded talent acquisition that doesn’t include AI. A search engine powered by machine learning is already an excellent, effective tool. In the future, its role could be expanded even more, anticipating your staffing needs and preemptively selecting the traits and qualifications your business needs. Implementing this into an existing embedded team will be much easier than creating the whole thing from scratch.

There’s no way to ignore just how important embedded talent acquisition has become in a short period of time. The ability to take experienced recruiters and turn them into an integral part of your business allows you to plan out your hires in advance, building talent pools as you go and being prepared to scale your company up and down as needed.

If you’re interested in implementing embedded talent acquisition into your business, you can contact us for more information.

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