Talent Acquisition Manager Job Description

A Talent Acquisition Manager owns the machinery an employer uses to hire: the recruiting team, the applicant tracking system, the agency and job-board budget, and the sequence of steps a candidate moves through between a requisition opening and an offer being signed. The manager is measured on whether roles get filled with people who work out, at a pace and cost the business can live with.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics files this work under human resources managers. Its Occupational Outlook Handbook says some recruiting managers take on recruiting duties for filling high-level positions themselves, and that they must develop a recruiting strategy that meets the organization's staffing needs and competes for the best employees. In a small company that can mean one manager with two recruiters and a coordinator; in a large one, a manager may run a single business line or region inside a bigger talent acquisition group led by a director. O*NET's sample of reported job titles for the occupation includes Recruitment Director.

Running the desk. Part of every week is team management. The manager assigns requisitions, reviews each recruiter's pipeline, sits in on difficult intake meetings and steps in when a search stalls. For context on load, SHRM's Benchmarking Report: Recruiting, built on data collected from January to March 2025, put the median at 20 requisitions per recruiter among organizations with dedicated recruiters, and found that 55% of organizations employ dedicated recruiters at all. Where there is no dedicated team, the manager may be the recruiter.

Owning the process. The manager decides what a good hiring process looks like and then makes hiring managers follow it. That covers intake templates, structured interview guides, scorecards, debrief rules, offer approval chains and the reasons recruiters record when they reject a candidate. Consistency matters for quality and for defensibility: if a selection decision is challenged, the file has to show that candidates for the same role were judged on the same job-related criteria.

Running the stack. Talent acquisition runs on software. A stack can pair an applicant tracking system such as Workday Recruiting, Greenhouse, iCIMS or SAP SuccessFactors with sourcing tools, interview scheduling, background-check vendors and an HRIS feed that turns an accepted offer into an employee record. The manager owns the configuration decisions, the vendor contracts and the question of which automated features get switched on.

Partnering with the business. Department heads bring headcount plans; finance brings the budget. The manager translates both into a hiring plan, says plainly which roles will be hard to fill, and decides when a search goes to an outside agency or a retained executive search firm. Reporting closes the loop: time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, offer acceptance, source of hire and pass-through rates by stage, broken out so a leader can see where a search is actually stuck.

BLS says candidates for human resources manager jobs typically need a combination of education and several years of related work experience, lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education, and notes that some positions require a master's degree. It also lists five years or more of work experience in a related occupation, and says some managers start out as human resources specialists or labor relations specialists.

Education. As a rough guide, a bachelor's degree in HR, business, psychology, communications or a related field is the usual starting point. A master's in human resource management, industrial-organizational psychology or an MBA can help a manager who wants to move toward a director or HR leadership role. Recruiters who fill technical or clinical roles sometimes come from those fields and learn the HR side on the job.

Experience. As a rough guide, expect several years of full-cycle recruiting before a first manager role, with a track record that includes senior or hard-to-fill searches and at least some informal leadership: training new recruiters, running a campus program or owning a hiring project for a new site. Agency recruiting counts; the move in-house mostly requires learning to work inside an HR department's policies, budget cycle and compliance obligations.

Certifications. BLS describes HR certification as voluntary, but says it shows professional expertise and credibility and may enhance job opportunities. Options include the SHRM Certified Professional (SHRM-CP) and SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP) from SHRM, and the Professional in Human Resources (PHR) and Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) from HRCI. The senior credentials suit managers whose scope includes policy and workforce planning, not just recruiting operations.

Technical knowledge.

• Applicant tracking system administration: workflows, requisition approvals, offer templates, disposition codes, user roles and reporting.
• Sourcing tools and Boolean search, at enough depth to coach a recruiter and judge whether a tool is earning its license fee.
• Employment law that touches hiring: federal anti-discrimination law, the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, pay transparency rules and state or city rules on automated hiring tools.
• Recruiting metrics and basic spreadsheet or BI analysis, so the numbers in a monthly report can be traced back to the ATS.
• Offer construction: base pay, bonus, sign-on payments, relocation and the approval rules that govern exceptions.

Leadership skills. A manager has to coach recruiters through a job built on rejection, push back on hiring managers who keep changing the brief, and give honest performance feedback. Credibility comes from having done the work: a manager who has closed hard searches can diagnose a stalled one quickly.

BLS projects employment of human resources managers, the occupation that includes recruiting managers, to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations. It expects about 16,800 openings a year on average over the decade, many of them from the need to replace workers who move to other occupations or leave the labor force. The occupation held about 224,900 jobs in 2025.

Where the jobs are. Among the largest employers of human resources managers, BLS lists professional, scientific and technical services at 15%, management of companies and enterprises at 14%, and manufacturing, administrative and support services, and healthcare and social assistance at 9% each. Pay varies by setting. In the May 2025 OEWS industry data, the median for human resources managers in the information sector was $201,620. Those are figures for the whole occupation; BLS does not report talent acquisition managers separately.

Hiring conditions in 2026. SHRM's 2026 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking executive summary reported that over 2 in 3 organizations struggled to hire for open positions in 2026. It found the median time-to-fill for nonexecutive positions fell to 39 calendar days, while executive time-to-fill held at the prior year's level, and that extra-large organizations saw a 67% increase in median requisitions per recruiter. The same summary said executive cost-per-hire increased substantially. For a manager at a very large employer, a jump in requisitions per recruiter makes prioritization a core skill: deciding which openings get the team's best hours and which can wait. In SHRM's 2026 Recruiting Executives: Priorities and Perspectives report, drawing on 298 recruiting executives, 49% reported a lack of qualified candidates as a challenge.

Rules that land on the TA team. Illinois Public Act 103-0804, which took effect January 1, 2026, amended the Illinois Human Rights Act to cover the use of artificial intelligence in recruitment, hiring, promotion and other employment decisions. It makes it a civil rights violation for an employer to use artificial intelligence that has the effect of subjecting employees to discrimination on the basis of protected classes, to use ZIP codes as a proxy for protected classes, or to fail to notify employees when it uses AI for those purposes. A manager hiring into Illinois should keep an inventory of every tool that screens, ranks or scores candidates, and a notice process to match.

At the federal level, the Executive Order 11246 framework for contractors is gone, but the testing standard is not. The Labor Department's rule rescinding the Executive Order 11246 regulations says the action does not affect other agencies' interpretation and application of the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, or the existence of those guidelines more broadly. Adverse impact analysis of tests, screens and interview steps remains part of a careful TA manager's job.

Career paths. From talent acquisition manager, possible moves include senior manager or director of talent acquisition, head of recruiting operations, a broader HR leadership role, or a move to agency or search-firm leadership. Some managers move sideways into workforce planning, people analytics or HR technology, where ATS and reporting experience carries over directly.

Dear Ms. Alvarez,

I am applying for the Talent Acquisition Manager role at Northline Health Partners. For the past four years I have led recruiting for a regional logistics company, managing a team of four recruiters and a coordinator who handle hiring for warehouse operations, drivers, finance and corporate IT across three states.

When I took over the team, every hiring manager ran interviews their own way, and our offer acceptance problems were invisible because no one recorded why candidates declined. I rebuilt intake around a one-page brief that each hiring manager signs before a requisition goes live, introduced structured interview guides for our ten highest-volume roles, and added decline reasons to our applicant tracking system. Within a year we could tell the operations director exactly which sites were losing candidates at the offer stage, and the answer turned out to be shift schedules, not pay. That conversation changed how two sites posted their roles.

I also run our recruiting technology. I led the move from a legacy ATS to Workday Recruiting, wrote the configuration requirements, and reviewed the vendor's documentation and our own pass-through data before we turned on any automated screening. I keep the candidate notice language current and work with our employment counsel when rules change.

The part of the job I care about most is the team. Two of my recruiters started as coordinators, and one now leads our driver hiring program on her own.

Northline's growth into outpatient clinics will mean hiring nurses, techs and front-desk staff in markets where you are not yet known. I would welcome the chance to talk about how I would build that pipeline.

Sincerely, Jordan Patel