A talent acquisition specialist is hired to build pipeline and employer brand ahead of demand, not only to fill the reqs open today, so screen for sourcing depth, market mapping, and data discipline. In most companies the title overlaps with recruiter, so decide which half of the job you are buying before writing the ad, then interview for that half.
The strongest specialists usually come from companies that had to hire faster than their brand could carry, so look at scale-ups a stage or two ahead of you, embedded RPO teams, and campus or early-careers programmes where sourcing volume never lets up. Sourcing communities, recruiting conferences, and the people who publish openly about outreach and talent mapping are all productive hunting grounds, because specialists in this field tend to have a visible body of work. Ask your own recruiters who impressed them as a competitor on a search. Posting publicly brings a heavy flow of general recruiters, so make the sourcing and brand-building mandate explicit in your [talent acquisition specialist job description](/job-descriptions/talent-acquisition-specialist) instead of burying it in a bullet list nobody reads.
Be honest about the split between filling reqs and building pipeline, because those two jobs attract different people and a bait-and-switch here ends in a six-month resignation. If the role is mostly requisition work with occasional sourcing projects, write that. If it genuinely owns talent mapping, employer brand, and channel strategy, describe the mandate and the budget standing behind it. Specialists want to know who controls the careers site, whether marketing will partner on content, which events they can run, and whether leadership will meet passive candidates who are not ready to move yet. Naming your [talent acquisition](/talent-acquisition) priorities for the year ahead, including the functions you plan to scale, attracts people who think in horizons rather than in open reqs.
Set a live sourcing exercise on a role you genuinely struggle to fill, and give an hour. Ask for a market map of where that talent sits, a named shortlist of ten prospects with a one-line rationale each, and two outreach messages written for two different profiles. What you learn is whether they search or guess. Strong specialists narrate their search logic, explain the signals they used to rule people out, and flag when the brief itself is unrealistic for the market they just mapped. Weak ones hand back people who already applied somewhere obvious. Follow with a discussion of how they would nurture that pipeline so the next opening starts warm, and which [candidate sourcing software](/candidate-sourcing-software) they have used to keep those lists alive.
Four stages cover it. Begin with a talent-leader screen on scope, channels, and what they want to own. Second, debrief the sourcing exercise as a working session rather than a presentation, and disagree with them once to see how they handle it. Third, run a stakeholder round with a hiring manager plus someone from marketing or communications, since employer brand work dies without that partnership. Fourth, add a data round: how they report pipeline health, how clean they keep candidate records, and what they would change about your current reporting. Structured [talent acquisition specialist interview questions](/interview-questions/talent-acquisition-specialist) keep the loop comparable, which matters when two finalists arrive from very different backgrounds.
Sourcing-strong specialists are harder to hire than general recruiters, because fewer people do passive-candidate work well and the ones who do are usually employed and already being courted. Expect a longer search than for a coordinator, and treat the first conversation as a two-way sell rather than a screen. They accept for scope and belief: a mandate that is not purely reactive, tooling they do not have to fight, budget for content or events, and leadership willing to show up and talk to prospects. Show them what exists today, including your [careers page](/careers-page-builder) and how a candidate experiences it. If the site is neglected, say so plainly and frame it as theirs to fix.
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