Recruiting Vs. Talent Acquisition in Construction - Which is right for your organization?

Is your construction, general contracting, or specialty firm looking to grow or expand in 2024? You may be wondering how you will add new team members who can help push you to the next level and looking into Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Services.

While sometimes used interchangeably, important differences in each framework are important to understand to avoid risk & loss to your organization's financial and cultural state. 

What is Recruiting? 

Recruiting is the active search & delivery for a specific position based on key factors of experience, skills, relationships, or characteristics that will fill a gap an organization.  

Companies may engage an agency or use internal resources to identify and engage ideal candidates.  

Agency Recruiting services is often based on a single transactional per position and will require an organization to pay a fee based on a percentage of a candidates first year’s salary if successful placement is made. 

Most often, recruiting is utilized to fill an urgent need, whether a replacement of a previous team member or a strategic addition to expand markets, locations, or relationship opportunities. 

Recruiting is an active way an organization can access candidates outside of their referral network or post jobs on job boards. 

Organizations can and do engage multiple agencies. 

What is Talent Acquisition?

If Recruiting is transactional based on one or a few specific roles, talent acquisition is the active development of strategic long-term systems that aim at solving hiring needs. As a practice, it addresses multiple aspects of the hiring process from branding, interviewing, onboarding, and long-term talent retention.  

Talent acquisition is often a process of building systems with long-term returns on investment.

Talent acquisition services can be utilized to build organic attraction and retention by creating interest in target candidates or addressing long-term growth or succession planning concerns even there are no immediate hiring needs.

What are Questions you should answer to determine which may be right for you?

Do you think this is a one-time specific need, a hiring spree or are you looking to add positions over an extended period? 

Will you hire the first good candidate, or are you in a wait-for-the-right-person phase? 

Do you have internal stakeholders who have the skills and resources to effectively build out our attraction, interviewing, and onboarding processes before you need to hire? 

Are you dealing with the same performance problems when hiring and firing? 

Here are some observations we’ve made,

If a company is hiring for multiple roles, companies spend a small fortune for “recruiting” and talent acquisition may be a better model.

Recruiting can deliver instant relief on a difficult-to-fill position. 

Talent acquisition Services Aim to overhaul your entire hiring process.

Some companies don’t have the time, skill, or resources to invest in their hiring processes to hire effectively.

Timing can often be a very important consideration, Too much or too little time before hiring may limit an agencies success.

There are many recruiting agencies, but not all may be right for your organization. Vetting that a recruiting agency understands and can deliver on the position is critical

Even with a solid talent acquisition process, a specialized recruiter with an existing pool of network connections may be the only solution.

Talent acquisition may require hiring a team to internally roll out new systems and processes even if you aren’t hiring.

Ultimately, Many General contractors and Specialty firms decide to use both or one at different times as it best suits them.

If you are in the consideration phase, we encourage you to find the right solution that will understand your market, build your team’s culture, and bring you long-term results.