Every business needs the right people in the right places, and finding the right people can be tricky. When a business is small, it’s usually the CEO — or someone very near to the CEO — who decides who to hire, but in larger businesses, that function gradually gets delegated to other personnel. In many businesses, the CEO has little control over most hiring arrangements, other than to set policy.
In addition, acquiring talent quickly starts shifting from hiring the people you know to hiring people you think will do a good job from the resume they have written and the interview you have conducted.
Unfortunately, this increases the likelihood of a bad hire. The US Department of Labor estimates the overall cost of a bad hire to be around 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings, although various HR agencies provide eye-watering cost estimates of up to $850,000.
That’s where recruiters and talent acquisition specialists come in.
The essence of both recruitment and talent acquisition are the same: hire the right people. However, they do have some crucial differences.
The recruiter generally looks at short-term issues. Typically, it’s a case of having a vacancy and filling it. Beyond that, the recruiter doesn’t worry about the longer-term direction and how the vacancy will fulfill a longer-term strategic view.
This is ideal for lower-level work where the aim is to have bodies on the ground and it doesn’t matter too much whether a proportion of them leave within a year. For higher-level positions, however, this approach doesn’t work as effectively.
A talent acquisition specialist, on the other hand, takes a much longer-term view. Ideally, they should be aligned with your company values and be able to predict to a certain extent how someone will fit into the longer-term goals of your company.
For example, a recruiter would look at a job position and see that it causes someone who needs knowledge of Ruby on Rails. That recruiter would then look at people who have that knowledge and hire based on that — in this case, 15 years of experience might win out against seven years of experience.
A talent acquisition specialist would look at other factors, such as whether the firm might need a wider range of knowledge than it currently has. If the person with seven years of experience also has experience with Java and a couple of other languages that could complement areas that the firm doesn’t cover, they might win out against the person with 15 years of experience.
In essence, talent acquisition is about strategy — how each person can contribute to the company long term. It’s not enough to simply put the right person for now in the driving seat; you need the right person in the driving seat next year and the year after. It’s much easier to do that if you have a long-term strategy planned.
Sonatafy prioritizes talent acquisition to deliver great results every time. We hire from Mexico and Latin America to create outstanding teams that can handle a huge range of projects, whether it’s augmenting companies such as Cisco, IBM and TaylorMade or delivering complete projects for smaller enterprises and start-ups.
And what we ask for is simple: A professional attitude, an ability to continuously learn new things and an ability to grow within each position. As a result, we are one of the leading nearshore development providers to companies all over the United States. We offer significant cost savings with all the benefits of understanding US customers and clients as well as being a short journey away. Talk to us today to see how we can build or augment your entire software development process.
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