Keep reading for talent acquisition job responsibilities explained – plus the skills and tools that turn hiring from firefighting into future-building. Here’s what to look for in a talent acquisition specialist who drives true impact.
Every hire shapes your organisation’s performance, culture, reputation, and long-term success. But too often, hiring is treated like admin. Firefighting vacancies. Chasing managers. Plugging gaps.
Talent acquisition is different. It’s about building tomorrow’s workforce, not just filling today’s vacancies. In this guide, we’ll unpack the responsibilities, skills, and tools TA specialists need, to make talent acquisition a growth engine.
What is a talent acquisition specialist?
Talent acquisition isn’t the same as recruitment, although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably.
Read more: Talent acquisition vs. recruitment: how are they different and why should you care?
In a nutshell, recruitment’s more about filling today’s vacancies while talent acquisition is more about building tomorrow’s workforce. They’re both fundamentally about hiring, yes. But the emphasis is fundamentally different. And with that, the job responsibilities talent acquisition professionals need to excel in the role.
Ultimately, a TA specialist looks beyond your immediate vacancy list, to think more strategically about questions like:
- What skills could the organisation need in six, twelve, eighteen months and beyond?
- How do we reach, attract, and engage those people proactively, to grow pipelines for the future?
- How can we continually optimise hiring processes to be fairer, faster, and more cost-efficient?
- How can we better harness hiring data to measure what’s working, what’s not, and refine?
- What are our biggest obstacles to hiring – now and emerging – and how can we solve them?
Although recruitment isn’t “bad”, most organisations want to move towards a talent acquisition approach that’s better suited to driving strategic growth longer-term. And to do that, of course, they need people finders with the right skills. So let’s unpick talent acquisition job responsibilities.
Core talent acquisition job responsibilities
What does talent acquisition involve day-to-day, if it’s not the same as recruitment?
Let’s look at the job responsibilities TA professionals (or teams) typically own. Then we’ll talk about the skills a great talent acquisition specialist likely has, to excel across these responsibilities.
- Recruitment strategy and planning
Great talent acquisition starts with understanding the organisation. A talent acquisition specialist will typically:
- Collaborate with leaders to map future skill needs
- Forecast hiring demand based on growth plans
- Define (and refine) talent acquisition strategies
- Spot gaps in current workforce capabilities
- Build proactive pipelines to close those gaps
- Assess people, processes, and tooling is fit-for-purpose
- Designing and pioneering strategic initiatives
Without developing strategic alignment, hiring teams are stuck with order-taking and reactive firefighting. (“Sam from Engineering needs a Product Manager yesterday” – not fun for anyone.)
- Employer branding and candidate attraction
Top candidates don’t just stumble across your organisation – they’re persuaded. TA specialists help craft and promote your employer brand, to make that happen. That’s stuff like:
- Defining your employer value proposition (EVP)
- Managing careers pages and job board presence
- Running recruitment marketing campaigns
- Engaging with communities, universities, and industry groups
- Identifying and resolving employer brand issues
- Engaging with employees and securing employee-generated content
In short, talent acquisition professionals make sure candidates know who you are, what you stand for, and why they’d want to work with you. They build your long-term employer brand equity; not getting bums on seats.
- Candidate sourcing and outreach
Talent acquisition specialists don’t just stick a job on Indeed and wait for the applications to roll in. TA professionals actively go out and find talent – handling job responsibilities like:
- Searching CV databases and LinkedIn
- Building and nurturing talent pools
- Leveraging employee referral schemes
- Maintaining relationships with passive candidates
- Headhunting passive candidates
Sourcing is particularly crucial for hard-to-fill roles, where the best candidates may never apply directly.
Read how Well Pharmacy increased hard-to-hire applications by 150% with Tribepad.
A talent acquisition specialist will often have a strong network of candidates they already have a relationship with, who they can approach when there’s genuinely a great-fit role.
- Screening and selection
One of the core talent acquisition job responsibilities is overseeing screening and candidate selection. Where recruiters might be more focussed on the tactical screening process for each hire; TA specialists are also concerned with the bigger-picture, strategic view of how screening and selection happens.
One big area of change, for example, is the rise of skills-based hiring. TA responsibilities now often include designing and running skills tests, task-based assessments, and video screening.
Typical screening role responsibilities include:
- Working with hiring managers to establish clear hiring criteria
- Screening applications and running first-stage interviews
- Coordinating with managers for in-depth and technical interviews
- Collating feedback and passing onto candidates
- Ensuring managers have the right tools to make their lives easier
- Reviewing assessment processes for fairness and effectiveness
- Collecting references and background checks
- Issuing offer letters and getting onboarding sorted
Done right, screening is structured, fair and efficient – giving every candidate a fair shot while quickly surfacing the best-fit people, without demanding huge time investment from busy managers.
- Candidate experience
Candidate experience is a core differentiator of modern talent acquisition. A TA specialist’s job description should include:
- Designing frictionless, candidate-friendly processes
- Writing clear, human comms that align to your brand
- Advocating for accessibility and adjustments
- Measuring and improving CX over time (like cNPS)
- Recruitment data and reporting
One of the biggest differences between recruitment and talent acquisition is the emphasis on data. Reporting and analytics are a huge part of the talent acquisition job description.
Responsibilities include:
- Tracking important recruitment metrics to understand progress
- Tracking movement against strategic goals like DEI or CX
- Analysing process bottlenecks and trialling improvements
- Delivering regular reports that give leaders visibility and confidence
- Understanding and improving team and manager performance
Talent acquisition is about proving (and improving!) impact, not just filling roles.
- Stakeholder management
One of the most important talent acquisition job responsibilities is stakeholder management. While recruiters tend more towards shorter-term “order-taking”, a big part of the talent acquisition role is partnering with managers and business leaders.
Responsibilities here typically include:
- Educating on market conditions and setting realistic expectations
- Liaising with leadership to tie hiring to business strategy
- Advising on interview techniques and bias reduction
- Keeping comms flowing between candidates, managers, and HR
- Bridging business needs and candidate experience
A good TA professional is equal parts recruiter, consultant, and relationship-builder – the voice of recruitment internally.
Now let’s look at the skills you’d expect a great TA specialist to have, to excel at these talent acquisition duties.
Core talent acquisition skills
Brilliant talent acquisition isn’t just about understanding processes. It’s about having the right skills and mindset to deliver those processes strategically, consistently, and impactfully.
Here are the core skills TA specialists need to fulfil their responsibilities:
- Strategic thinking
Talent acquisition specialists need to be adept strategic thinkers with the confidence and mindset to focus on tomorrow, not just today. That’s how they:
- Translate business strategy into workforce strategy
- Spot skills gaps before they become urgent problems
- Balance quick wins with longer-term talent pipeline building
- Negotiate for the people and tech to fulfil long-term goals
- Communication and storytelling
Talent acquisition is all about relationships, persuasion, influence, and connection. A good talent acquisition specialist must:
- Translate your EVP into compelling messaging
- Communicate clearly and consistently with stakeholders
- Build strong relationships with leaders, managers, and candidates
- Manage expectations both upwards, downwards, and laterally
- Prove and champion recruitment’s value and credibility
- Resolve internal misunderstandings and conflicts
- Persuade leaders to invest in tools and process improvements
- Coach hiring managers on best practices
- Build internal clout to get strategy signed-off
- Rally the troops to guide adoption and roll-out of new initiatives
This political nous is what makes TA a credible business partner, not just “HR admin”.
- Marketing mindset
Employer branding and candidate attraction are core TA responsibilities. Great TA specialists think like marketers as much as recruiters, with skills like:
- Competence developing and understanding candidate personas
- Experience running successful multi-channel campaigns
- Creating or curating authentic employee-generated content
- Ability to analyse which channels deliver results and tweak marketing strategy
- Data literacy
Data is the lifeblood of modern talent acquisition. TA specialists must have excellent data literacy skills, so they can understand, interpret, and apply recruitment data effectively. That’s central to:
- Drive data-based decision-making that’s better for everyone
- Experiment with process tweaks that improve outcomes
- Develop and track strategic initiatives to improve recruitment
- Improve operational efficiency, making recruitment faster and cheaper
- Deliver measurable business impact that leaders understand
- Tech savvy
High-performing talent acquisition teams need high-performing tools. But hiring tech evolves fast and the landscape is complex.
If you’re hiring a TA specialist you don’t need them to know your exact tech stack (although bonus if they do), but they do need to be technically competent in the tools of the TA trade. They should be confident using:
- ATS and CRM tools (and know the difference between ATS and CRM!)
- Recruitment marketing platforms
- Video screening tools
- Candidate assessment tools
- Background check integrations
- Onboarding platforms
AI recruitment software features are worth a specific mention too, as AI has an almost unspeakably-monumental impact on how hiring happens.
One of talent acquisition’s most important responsibilities is helping organisations step into these waters in a responsible, thoughtful way that’s good for everyone. A TA specialist who’s confident with AI is worth their weight in gold.
- Bias aware and inclusive mindset
This is a mindset as much as a skill, but TA professionals must be skilled advocates for DEI. Especially as pressure intensifies to cave or collapse these values. TA specialists should have experience:
- Writing inclusive job ads and building fairer processes
- Advocating for DEI at every stage of hiring
- Spotting where processes may unintentionally exclude people
- Articulating the quantifiable value of DEI
- Resilience and adaptability
The hiring landscape shifts constantly: economic changes, skills shortages, new tech, candidate expectations, restructuring. TA specialists need soft skills like:
- Remaining calm under pressure
- Adaptability to test new approaches
- Resilience to push back against unrealistic demands
- Curiosity to keep learning
- Courage to advocate for recruitment’s value
- Project management
Talent acquisition is a balancing act. TA specialists are typically spinning a thousand-and-one plates, and (to mix our metaphors) they’re the glue that holds everything together.
TA specialists are often handling:
- Multiple open roles across multiple teams
- Candidate, manager and leader expectations (often competing)
- Candidates at different pipeline stages
- Ongoing employer brand and sourcing campaigns
- Bigger-picture strategic initiatives
Good project management skills – prioritisation, time management, organisation, delegation – are critical to keep everything moving without smashing plates.
- Commercial awareness
The talent acquisition role focusses more on the strategic role of hiring within the organisation, rather than filling specific vacancies. One of the most important talent acquisition soft skills is commercial awareness. TA specialists must understand:
- The cost of unfilled roles
- The business impact of skills gaps
- How hiring connects to revenue and performance
This commercial lens helps them make smarter decisions and win credibility with leadership.
Talent acquisition specialists are a growth engine
Talent acquisition isn’t just recruitment with a fancier title. It’s a strategic function that balances today’s hiring needs with tomorrow’s growth, bridging people, data, and business priorities.
The job responsibilities are broad and the skills demanding, from strategic thinking and stakeholder influence to marketing know-how, data literacy, and inclusive hiring expertise.
But when you find (or grow) the right TA specialist, you gain more than a recruiter. You gain a business partner who fuels performance, culture, and competitive edge.
Of course, even the best people can’t do their best work without the right support.
The right tools free specialists from admin, give them sharper insights, and help them deliver fairer, faster, better hiring.
Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, Video Screening, and Onboarding, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for fairer, faster, better recruitment for everyone.
Trusted by organisations like Tesco, NHS Professionals, and Subway, 30-million people in 16 languages use Tribepad.
