From companies' surging use of artificial intelligence (AI) to low unemployment rates in specialized fields like IT, competition in talent acquisition (TA) is rife. The skills required for today's jobs are changing fast, and so must the people who recruit them.
Thanks to AI accelerating work, by 2030 the skills required to do certain jobs will have changed by 68% compared to 2015, as estimated by LinkedIn's Economic Graph Research Institute. Unsurprisingly, some businesses need help finding the right teams to bring their mission to life. Fifty-eight percent of companies report that skill shortages significantly impact their business plans.
Yet, only around a third of talent acquisition leaders—the gatekeepers of talent who can make or break a company—are invited to contribute to strategic workforce planning.
This article explores how organizations can overcome this damaging divide and elevate talent acquisition to its rightful place as a strategic cornerstone of business success.
Hiring used to be about finding a highly experienced candidate who could seemingly tick all the boxes of a job description through a perfectly crafted resume. However, that approach to hiring the perfect candidate who only fulfills the current needs of the business has become outdated and even "limiting," says HR Expert Lars Schmidt. "We need to stop thinking about hiring as a "match" between a resume and a job description and start thinking about it as an exercise in potential," he argues.
To escape this "match-making" model, TA leaders need to abandon tactics and become empowered to be strategic.
Sourcing high-quality candidates is the number one objective for TA professionals in 2025, but the role needs to evolve to operate effectively.
A survey of CEOs by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that "hiring" is considered the third-most bureaucratic part of their companies, with emails and meetings that they see as time-wasting.
With all they are now asked to accomplish, "staffing departments" or "hiring teams" seriously need a rebrand. Perhaps the perception of "strategic talent acquisition" teams would help the leadership value their crucial role in business strategy and integrate these teams into the organization's broader objectives.
Gregory Karanastasis, global head of talent acquisition, onboarding, and career transitions at Accenture, told LinkedIn, "The way that we're doing work is literally going to change, which means that the recruiter will move up in the value chain."
It may be no surprise that in a market where CEOs view TA as time-wasters, a staggering two-thirds of TA leaders are also asking to cut costs.
According to HR thought leader Josh Bersin, this "service-delivery" perspective of doing more with less is short-sighted but a pattern. In his conversations with talent acquisition heads, a top automaker moving frenetically to keep up with electric vehicle engineering said that he was asked to hire "any engineer he could find, regardless of skill, " leaving no time for skills assessments or planning.
Another TA head told Josh, "We are not treated as a strategic function; we are being asked to cut costs, and we are constantly running from fire to fire to keep executives happy."
It doesn't add up to cut costs while the prices to attract talent for IT, finance, and specialized roles are surging due to high demand.
Josh says business behemoths like Bayer and Verizon are adapting to this new world. Their "recruiters" are now "talent advisors," and they are building skills like learning and development, career management, and employee engagement.
Workday and Hanover Research found that applications for roles were 4x larger than hiring demand. Fittingly, 72% of leaders say they are upping the ante for qualification and experience requirements for candidates.
Making even one right hire can be complex, but here are a few things to consider.
Taking an employee-first approach to recruiting pays off.
Every time a recruitment professional checks in on how the hiring or onboarding process went for employees, it shows that they care and trust the thoughts and preferences of others. These regular, casual pulse checks also set up the organization as a safe place for people's honest feedback. This can help down the line for more meaningful employee surveys.
For businesses that want to slow down employee churn or have uncertain financial futures, hiring professionals can focus on continuous employee development to fill skills gaps within the business.
Amy Schultz, global head of talent acquisition at Canva, shared her advice for her industry colleagues on LinkedIn: "If you're not going to be growing as much in the coming year, you want to have a degree of comfort that you have the right people."
Businesses should see where they can promote from within. Plus, developing and investing in their existing staff ensures they're sticking with people who evoke the right cultural vibe. A Workday survey found that internal mobility has positively impacted 67% of organizations within the past 12 months.
However, aside from testing to ensure a candidate or employee has the proper skill set for a role, many talent leaders are building "skills architecture" to make hiring decisions more sustainable. This strategy helps understand what and how many "job families" are within the organization, what skills are inherent for each, and what skills can transfer to another role.
Talent intelligence tools can help TAs better understand candidates' skill sets or uncover hidden talent in their workforce. These tools help answer questions like: How productive is the employee? Is the new hire speeding up the team's output? How are they meeting or surpassing their KPIs?
According to a new report, 89% of recruiters now frequently use AI automation. Despite this, Josh Bersin argues that TA is "becoming more human-centric." AI technology can make initial screening, such as administrative tasks, more efficient, leaving talent professionals more time to give candidates great experiences or develop new talent initiatives.
Hiring professionals can hugely help the business when given a voice and the right resources. Here are a few key ways to build a framework that sets the company up for black-line success.
Only 32% of TA leaders are involved in strategic workforce planning and an even more significant percentage (42%) think their company needs a workforce plan.
To truly get the strategic hiring team out of a silo, businesses should look at how their organization structure is set up: Should a TA leader be considered part of the executive team? Should TA be included earlier in regular meetings with business development to help them prepare for wherever the business is going?
Once the organizational structure and workforce planning are in place, the talent team's tech stack should be rejuvenated.
Utilize the benefits of AI-powered solutions, whether it be to help brainstorm, draft emails, or find trends in data. Or take a more holistic approach to work. Using AI-powered platforms allows users to find highly skilled candidates quickly, harnessing a large partner network while also optimizing cost, effort, and time to find the right candidates for the job.
Tip: Recruitics’ Reach™ Job Distribution Media Network allocates and optimizes ad spend across leading job sites worldwide, using campaign performance insights and machine learning to anticipate, manage, and enhance job distribution.
Tech can support candidates in myriad ways. Applicant tracking systems help streamline the application process. AI and chatbots answer frequently asked questions and speed up responsiveness. Analytics can also help TAs personalize the candidate journey.
As recruitment teams look to build a road map that better integrates with the rest of the business, they need to cover vital landmarks.
First, assess how the current hiring team functions to get a baseline. Part of this assessment should evaluate the capabilities of the team's technology stack – do they have what they need to be efficient and successful? Does that technology help measure the strategic impact of their efforts, like hitting the KPIs around the specific skill sets required by new hires? Measuring turnover or gauging the company's culture?
Secondly, to implement a renewed focus on talent acquisition, work on a strategy to measure the capability of the team members already in place who can develop into new roles as the business does.
Thirdly, based on the assessment, if a team still needs to be available to grow into the company's next iteration, it may be time to get ahead of any pain points and rethink the organizational structure.
Tracking and measuring a new hire's quality doesn't feel daunting with modernized tech tools that can make talent acquisition 10 to 100 times more efficient. But first, employers need to determine what qualifies as a "quality" hire—is it their capacity to shift into other roles, cultural fit, etc.? And, of course, even the best technology will not suffice if the TA team is shielded from the strategic side of the business.
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