If your company’s biggest investment is in people, your biggest risk is hiring the wrong ones.

Your company’s talent acquisition (TA) strategy matters more than ever in today’s economic climate. A TA strategy is designed to build a high-quality pipeline of candidates that aligns with your business’ goals and allows for your HR department to hire less reactively and more proactively. Top talent in today’s market has options and companies that are taking this into account when they are creating a plan for the future are pulling ahead of the pack when hiring.

We will create a practical playbook for building an effective talent acquisition strategy. The HR Manual will outline actionable steps and dive deep into core components of effective talent acquisition strategies, flagging common mistakes as we go. The goal is to give your organization a competitive edge in the search for top talent.

What is Talent Acquisition Strategy?

Talent Acquisition Strategy is about building a long-term repeatable process for attracting and hiring the right talent that aligns with business growth. It is not about just filling open roles.Much too often, companies prioritize recruiting efforts that are reactive and only begin once someone quits. Looking at talent acquisition from a strategic lens means planning, six months, a year or even 3 years ahead. This is what it means to build a strategy around hiring and make a push towards what you’ll need, not just what you’ve lost.

Staffing reacts to openings. Strategy anticipates them.

The core components of a strong TA strategy include:

• Workforce forecasting this ties directly into your headcount planning
• Employer branding that answers the candidate’s question: “Why should I work here?”
• Sourcing strategy which we’ll dive into shortly
• Candidate experience that reflects your culture before day one
• Metrics and optimization show what is working and what is not

Organizations that use a structured hiring method (Behavioral interviews, job simulations and assessments…etc.) are consistently outperforming those who just rely on intuition according to SHRM.

Align Talent Acquisition with Business Objectives

Start by meeting with business unit leaders. Finance, operations, products, they all have insight into what roles will be needed and when. Translate revenue and project goals into actual roles, salaries, and timelines. That’s your hiring plan.

It’s also where performance management data can be incredibly useful. If certain teams are seeing high turnover or low productivity, your TA strategy should address that head-on with different sourcing, different profiles, or better screening.

Helpful tools here include:

• TA dashboards for real-time tracking of openings, funnel health, and offer acceptance
• Workforce analytics platforms to forecast needs and spot risks early
• A dynamic recruitment lifecycle map that evolves with the business

Financial and operational goals and timelines set by leadership can be reached more quickly when your recruitment team is in sync

Building Correct Infrastructure

Even the best hiring plan falls apart if your process is a mess.

Start by defining your recruitment process. Everything, from the intake meeting to the offer letter, should be mapped out and owned. What happens when a req opens? Who reviews resumes? What feedback is expected? What is the timeline on displaying feedback?

The correct tools can ensure that the process runs smoothly, and everyone is on the same page. HR should implement a good applicant tracking system (ATS) to manage all workflow and make sure candidates are kept engaged at all times. A Talent CRM can be quite effective as well to nurture top and passive talent. For growing orgs, tools like scheduling automation, assessments, and templates for structured interviews can save serious time.

Internal mobility should also be a key part of your infrastructure. Promote from within when possible. Make internal openings easy to find and easy to apply for.

Moving an employee should not be an afterthought and is a core part of a talent development strategy. Seeing a path forward for in your career is important and without it can cause employees to look elsewhere.

Pivoting employees into new roles, pivoting them into other areas of the business and stretch assignments is made easier with a well laid out talent mobility strategy. Building agility within your workforce keeps top performers and new hires engaged.

Developing a Scalable Sourcing Strategy

Do not overinvest in one recruiting channel and spread the companies’ resources thin. An effective sourcing strategy is not a one size that fits all and should reflect the roles you are hiring for.

Let’s talk about recruiting channels:

• Job boards and ads: Optimizing your job advertisements should attract exactly what you are looking for in a candidate. Gone are the days of posting general catch all job descriptions or overly detailed wish lists that are looking for a unicorn.
• Referrals: Build out a referral program with clear incentives like referral bonuses.
• Outbound sourcing: Reach out to talent communities, do cold outreach and rely on passive candidate sourcing for hard to fill roles.
• Diversity source: Finding the most effective sources of talent for your business is critical. Develop new networks, find additional schools, create new partnerships to find your honey hole for recruitment.

Your sourcing engine should run on data. What’s your application-to-interview rate by channel? What’s the cost per qualified applicant? What’s converting into hires?

Drive Decisions using Metrics

Don’t guess, measure your funnel!

Time to fill, cost per hire, quality of your hire and developing a pipeline are the basics that you should start with. Once these are established, go deeper. Answer the questions: Where is your top talent being sourced from? Are interview processes dragging out longer than they should? Is the quality of candidates dropping as you scale your talent acquisition strategy?

Tracking these things isn’t just about reporting. Build a system that is flexible and has the ability to adapt as the business’ needs change. A talent acquisition strategy has to have the ability to pivot through efficient use of data.

Build a feedback loop that has agility like: Insight → Action → Iterate. Taking the guesswork out of decisions leads to more streamlined processes.

Common Pitfalls to Watch Out For

Even great Talent Acquisition teams fall into these traps:

• Gut Hiring: Having good charisma is not a qualification. You are guessing if you don’t have structured interviews and seek job related skills from a candidate.
• Ignoring your employer brand: Candidates are researching you. If your Glassdoor page is outdated or your career site is bland, it shows.
• Leaving hiring managers out: Get your managers to participate fully in the interview process. If they are introduced at the end, rush decisions can be made and could even stall the process completely.
• No Metrics: Creating an effect strategy is impossible if you do not know what is working.

It is easy to avoid these pitfalls if you clearly define your process, involve the stakeholders and let your metrics show you the way!

What Strategy Looks Like in Real Life

Here are two examples…one big, one small, to show you how this plays out.

Case Study: Mid-Size SaaS Startup

This startup had 100+ employees and no formal process. By introducing an ATS, clarifying their hiring stages, and training leaders on structured interviews, they doubled their team in 9 months.

• Cost per hire dropped below 4% of total salary
• First-year attrition cut in half
• Candidate NPS jumped by 35 points

This stuff works. You just have to work it like a business function.

Final Thoughts: Strategy Is a Cycle, Not a Checklist

A strong talent acquisition strategy isn’t something you build once. It’s a cycle: forecast, attract, select, measure, repeat. Each stage feeds the next—and the best companies revisit and refine their strategy quarterly, not annually.

If you’re ready to level up your recruiting function, don’t start with tech or branding. Start by aligning with the business. Build the right infrastructure. Be deliberate about your sourcing. Measure everything. And make sure your hiring managers are part of the process.

Want more?
Subscribe to The HR Manual for upcoming posts on passive candidate sourcing, recruiting automation, talent strategy, talent retention strategy and structured interviews that actually work.

And if you’re reworking your recruitment lifecycle or building out a diverse sourcing strategy, those posts are on deck too.

Let’s keep building smarter.

References

Breaugh, J. A. (2021). Talent acquisition: A guide to understanding and managing the recruitment process. Society for Human Resource Management.

Cascio, W. F., & Boudreau, J. W. (2022). Investing in people: Financial impact of human resource initiatives (3rd ed.). Pearson Education.

SHRM. (2024). Talent Trends Report: Recruiting for Tomorrow’s Workforce. Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org

Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting the validity of selection tools: Meta-analytic evidence on structured interviews and other predictors. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 15(4), 567–594.