Talent Acquisition Strategies: 12 Key Considerations - ApplicantStack

Hiring process, recruitment plan, talent acquisition strategy — are these all synonyms, or do they mean something different? This article will explain and give you tips to build your own successful talent acquisition plan.

What Is a Talent Acquisition Strategy?

A talent acquisition strategy is a long-term process that pertains to an organization’s overall hiring and business objectives. A successful talent acquisition strategy takes a big-picture approach, and a company can use it to hire multiple employees over a years-long period.

It’s valuable to stress that these strategies have a long-term focus. These aren’t recruitment plans to fill one or a few available positions at a time. Once an organization builds a talent acquisition strategy, it can then use it to guide its hiring efforts. It can also adapt and tailor the position to fill individual roles as needed.

The Importance of Talent Acquisition Strategies

With a codified talent acquisition strategy, an organization can reduce its hiring time. Knowing how to go about recruiting and hiring new staff gives a company a head start because it doesn’t have to sit down and figure out how it wants to hire somebody every time they have an open position. Furthermore, reducing the time-to-hire can also bring down the cost-per-hire, saving an organization money.

Having a defined way of hiring and of messaging potential candidates also reinforces an organization’s brand, specifically its employer brand. Following a strategy that’s transparent and unintimidating for candidates can widen a company’s potential talent pool. This can also increase the quality of hire for an organization.

Last, these strategies help future-proof a company. A good strategy accurately forecasts future needs, helping companies plan and avoid getting caught off guard when a job vacancy arises.

12 Considerations When Building a Talent Acquisition Strategy

Here are 12 talent acquisition factors and approaches to keep in mind when building your strategy:

1. Analytics

In 2025, an effective talent acquisition strategy should probably begin with data collection. By gathering data on your hiring processes as they are now, you can analyze it to optimize your recruitment process going forward.

You can use talent acquisition software, such as an applicant tracking system, to run data analytics on hiring trends, the efficacy of different recruitment channels, application completion rate, offer acceptance rate, average cost-of-hire and other valuable metrics. By establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) such as these before you develop a new talent acquisition strategy or tweak your talent recruitment efforts, you can judge how effective your new methods are.

Tracking these KPIs can show you what facets of your strategy are working, where you can improve and if you’re reaching enough qualified candidates. By incorporating applicant feedback, you can also learn about the candidate experience your hiring process provides and get a sense of your employer branding.

2. Automation

Another benefit of hiring and recruitment software is automation. Anytime you can responsibly automate your talent acquisition process, you should. Automation unlocks efficiency gains, frees up hiring staff from mundane tasks and makes talent management much easier, even with a plethora of applications.

An effective applicant tracking system (ATS) can automate tasks such as scheduling by checking the calendars of everyone involved to find a time that works for all. Doing this manually could take days of back-and-forth messaging, but an ATS can do it in seconds. Such a solution can also parse resumes, searching applications for certain qualifications, skills and other required criteria so a hiring manager doesn’t have to sift through myriad resumes from unqualified candidates. Last, a good ATS can screen applications looking for answers to a knock-out question, which is a query about a requirement that, if answered incorrectly, automatically disqualifies a candidate.

3. Branding

We’ve already mentioned the benefits of having a strong employer brand, and it’s something organizations should keep in mind during the hiring process. You want to convey that you’re a great employer and the ways you differ from other employers. The employer brand should inform everything the talent acquisition team does, from writing a job description to interacting with suitable candidates.

Employer branding covers the language you use to talk about your organization, the recruitment process and the candidate experience you deliver (preferably universally) and candidate sourcing.

4. Candidate Experience

Maintaining a robust talent pipeline means ensuring that enough people want to apply to work for your organization. Of course you want the right talent and the ideal candidate for every position that becomes available, but, at a certain level, recruitment is a numbers game; you’re unlikely to find the quality you need if you have a small quantity of applicants.

We too often think about attracting talent in terms of compensation, and we’ll get to that in a bit. But if the hiring process is too labor intensive and unpleasant, you’re going to miss out on potentially talented employees, regardless of what you pay.

But if your recruitment process isn’t intimidating or demanding, then you can provide a positive candidate experience. This can encourage more talent to apply and may make passive candidates, those not actively looking for a job, more inclined to apply.

5. Channels

In most cases, a strong talent acquisition strategy is a multi-channel strategy. Organizations, especially large ones or ones that operate in niche sectors, are unlikely to acquire the skill they need using a job board, for example. Posting a job listing on such a website is a good way to meet many job seekers, but it’s hardly the only way.

For example, social media recruitment can be a great way to engage suitable candidates. Of course this includes LinkedIn, but other platforms, from Instagram to TikTok to even Pinterest, could be a useful platform for meeting candidates, depending on what your organization does. Social media recruiting is also efficient for engaging passive candidates.

Other channels include job fairs, industry events and weekly or monthly newsletters.

6. Compensation and Benefits

Speaking of benefits, they, along with compensation, play a huge role in strategic talent acquisition. While not the only way of attracting potential candidates, offering high compensation and strong benefits packages might just be the best way. Organizations have budgets and they can’t always offer the highest salaries, but offering competitive pay will go a long way to improving their talent acquisition efforts.

7. Goal Alignment

If your recruitment team, talent acquisition manager and human resources department aren’t on the same page as each other — or with your organization as a whole — you’re going to have a hard time with workforce planning. It’s wise to take the time to plot out what kinds of candidates you think you’ll need in the near- to medium-term future, if and how you plan to grow your staff and how you want to handle employer branding. Staying aligned on these goals also requires good communication, which is another function an effective ATS can facilitate.

8. Personalized Messaging

Nobody is going to be thrilled to receive a message addressed as, “Dear Applicant”. You want a candidate to feel seen as a real human being, not just another faceless job seeker. An ATS can make it easy to personalize all communication to candidates. This can create a more positive candidate experience and earn you a more respected employer brand.

9. Pipelining

Talent pipelining is a proactive recruitment strategy that involves identifying and engaging with potential candidates for future roles within an organization. Talent acquisition is a more forward approach to workforce planning, rather than recruitment, which is a reactive strategy focused on filling an immediate need.

Pipelining goes beyond other talent acquisition processes by actively engaging with potential candidates before there’s an available position. Building a pipeline is all about forecasting future talent needs and building a pool of prospective candidates. Effective talent pipeline management involves nurturing relationships with these candidates, keeping them interested and giving them updates about your organization.

10. Quotas

Successful talent acquisition teams often use quotas to set goals for their hiring process. These quotas must not be too broad or narrow, though, or they won’t be helpful and could make hiring ineffective. These quotas could be for hires in different departments, looking for a certain number of candidates with different backgrounds or skills and interviewing a set number of candidates per position.

11. Referrals

Many organizations have a referral program. If an employee recommends somebody who turns out to be a great hire, you can offer a reward to the team member who provided the reference. This could be a monetary reward, more vacation days or some kind of benefits package.

12. Software

We’ve already mentioned some benefits of a good applicant tracking system. The right ATS can make your talent acquisition process so much more efficient and easier. The best applicant tracking and recruiting software offers features such as:

• ​Candidate tracking: With advanced search, tags, candidate pools and other features, recruiters and talent acquisition managers can find the right candidate with a few clicks of a button.
• ​Customizability: The best recruitment solutions allow you to customize your system to meet the needs of your company and find the ideal candidate. An adaptable ATS can help you build processes that work perfectly for your organization. With custom pipelines and views, you can understand the candidate details that matter the most to you.
• ​Integrability: To make your hiring process more efficient, an ATS must be able to integrate with the other platforms and tools you and your team use.
• ​User-friendliness: The candidate experience matters, but so does yours. Talent acquisition teams can’t be efficient if their tools aren’t. The best recruiting software is easy to use.

Talent Acquisition FAQs

Here are some frequently asked questions about talent acquisition strategies:

How Do You Measure the Success of Your Talent Acquisition Strategy?

It depends on the KPIs you choose to track at the beginning of your talent acquisition process. Ultimately, the metric that matters most is finding the right hire. If your hiring or recruiting team has a track record of hiring candidates who become long-term, productive employees, then your talent acquisition strategy is successful.

That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, though. By tracking metrics such as cost-per-hire and time-per-hire, you may discover that you and your team are getting the ideal candidates, but at less than ideal efficiency. A slight tweak to your hiring process could potentially solve such issues.

Why Is a Structured Onboarding Process Important?

It can be helpful to expand how you view your talent acquisition process. Maybe go beyond the point where the candidate puts pen to paper — or puts their electronic signature on a document, which is another process a good ATS can facilitate. Training and onboarding are key to finding the right employee. A bad onboarding process can lower employee satisfaction and, ultimately, lower the long-term value of that employee.

Having an official onboarding process for your organization is wise. This allows HR to follow documented processes for getting new employees’ information and helping them get up to speed. Starting a new job can be nerve-wracking, but a good onboarding process helps everything go smoother.

What Is a Talent Acquisition Specialist?

A talent acquisition specialist manages and supervises the whole talent acquisition cycle. They take the lead on candidate sourcing and screening, creating job descriptions and postings and advising management on hiring. The professionals typically work with management and HR to create and maintain a coherent talent acquisition strategy.

What Software Tools Can Help With Talent Acquisition?

There are various recruitment tools and talent management software, but we recommend ApplicantStack. It has all the ATS features mentioned in this article and more. ApplicantStack can support your long-term talent acquisition strategy and help you make the right hire quickly and efficiently.