Recruitment has changed considerably in recent years. Previously, the emphasis was on filling openings as quickly as possible, Now, recruitment is becoming increasingly strategic. This shift was kickstarted during the pandemic—a period that forced companies to quickly pivot to remote recruiting, video interviews, and online assessments. This marked a significant shift from traditional, in-person recruitment practices.
The shift from tactical to strategic recruitment
Here are some ways recruitment has shifted from tactical to strategic in recent years.
First, the entire recruitment process has been digitized for many companies. Recruitment automation has increased in popularity and usage, simplifying manual tasks and expediting hiring processes. This, according to LinkedIn’s “The Future of Recruitment Report,” allows recruiters to focus on the human aspect of recruitment, rather than time-consuming and manual tasks.
With Recruitee by Tellent, for example, users have access to a variety of automation features, such as knockout questions to automatically disqualify candidates, and screening questions built into online application forms. This makes it possible to efficiently assess and select candidates early in the application process, thereby weeding out unqualified candidates automatically.
Due to the tightness of the labour market, investing in an employer brand has also become increasingly essential. Job seekers conduct extensive research into companies—including their reputation and workplace culture—before applying.
A positive employee experience, as such, is increasingly important. A Dutch survey called De Stand Van Recruiting 2023 recently showed that 74% of companies surveyed see strengthening their employer brand as a top priority. Recruiting new talent, in fact, was the number two priority.
The increasing popularity of Freelance and gig work has also become a major factor in recruitment. As of 2022, McKinsey found that a staggering 36% of employed respondents to their survey—and equivalent of 58 million Americans—identified as independent workers. This was up from 27% in 2016. As talent continues to shift toward independent, contract-based work, recruiters are adapting how they hire, and how they fill skills gaps.
Lastly, recruiters and companies continue to place significant emphasis on diversity and inclusion in their hiring and workforce management practices. Greater access to data and analytics tools help recruiters audit and improve their DEI efforts, ensuring that workforce demographics align with the company’s overall goals. At the same time, recruiters are placing greater emphasis on screening for soft skills and culture fit, rather than just technical skillset.
All of these developments, and more, have shifted recruitment in a more strategic direction. This article will explore this shift—and how you can adapt—in more detail.
Why is strategic recruitment so important?
According to a labor market report from MorningStar, the labor market is expected to slow once more through the end of 2024, before beginning to accelerate again in 2025-26. In this type of environment, finding the right talent remains a challenge for recruiters. This is one of the reasons that strategic recruitment is so important for companies in 2024.
Before we dig deeper, let’s back up and explore the definition of strategic recruitment.
Strategic recruitment means being thoughtful, tactical, and structured in how you attract and hire new talent. It means creating a defined strategy for your recruitment efforts, rather than relying on ad hoc recruitment methods that aim to fill positions as they become available.
Strategic recruitment looks beyond just filling an open position. Instead, it also focuses on achieving the recruitment goals that are required for the organization to meet their strategic plan.
There are many reasons why strategic recruitment is important in 2024, including:
- Talent scarcity. Job market tightness makes it harder than ever to find suitable talent—especially for extremely in-demand skill sets. A strategic recruitment approach is essential to attracting, hiring, and retaining the right candidates in this environment.
- Higher candidate expectations. Candidates today expect an excellent recruitment experience. If your recruitment process is not set up properly, or does not provide a seamless experience, then you risk losing out on top talent.
- Steep competition. Companies are increasingly competing for talent—both in the form of employer branding, working conditions, and compensation. A good strategy is the only way you’ll distinguish yourself from top competitors. You can bet that they’ve initiated strategic recruitment too.
- The cost of a bad hire. Recruiting the wrong candidate costs the company in lost time, salary, and impacts morale and productivity. Strategic recruitment helps to reduce the risk of bad hires.
Without a recruitment strategy in place, chances are you will struggle to find suitable talent, are likely to make bad hires, and will miss opportunities to distinguish yourself as an attractive employer.
What are the consequences of recruiting without a strategy?
Recruiting without a clear vision and strategy leads to several problems, including:
- Low candidate quality. Non-strategic recruitment runs the risk of attracting candidates who do not meet your hiring criteria. This can lead to longer recruitment timelines, frustration, and mis-hires.
- Difficulty collaborating with hiring managers. Collaboration is a big part of strategic recruitment. Without it, you run the risk of low candidate quality and lower employee retention post-hire. This stems from a lack of alignment around screening for the right skills and culture fit.
- Few quality responses. Part of strategic recruitment is selecting the right channels to attract the target candidate persona. Without this strategic approach, it’s difficult to generate quality candidate responses, resulting in a weakened talent pool.
- Poor candidate experience. Lack of strategic alignment will also be felt in the candidate experience. The process is likely to be jumbled, potentially lengthy, and lacking in direction. This damages your company’s image and employer brand, making it hard to recruit top talent in the future.
- Higher recruitment costs. All of the above creates an ongoing issue with churn and lack of efficiency, increasing the cost of recruitment and the risk of mis-hires.
It’s safe to say that all recruiters want to avoid these pitfalls. For the remainder of this article, we’re going to explore ways to make your recruitment more strategic.
8 tips for strategic recruitment
Now that we’ve the importance of strategic recruitment—and the risks of not being strategic—let’s explore how to set the foundation for a strong recruitment strategy.
1. Define your story
Strategic recruitment starts with determining your employer brand. Ask yourself: what do we stand for as an employer? Why do candidates choose us? How can we better position ourselves to appeal to the types of candidates we want to hire. Use the answers to these questions as the foundation of your employer brand story.
According to Karim Gharsallah, former Head of Talent at Recruitee, an effective recruitment strategy is all about defining and telling your story as an employer. This is especially true for startups, scale-ups and companies that struggle with recruiting top talent.
Karim’s advice is to start with the basics: define your hiring process and what you mean by talent in the content of your company. Then, connect this concretely to your business objectives. Make a link between recruitment and the company’s bigger picture. That way, you can craft a compelling story that attracts the right kind of talent.
2. Get back to the basics
Strategic recruitment starts with the basics. You need to have the fundamentals of strong recruitment in place before you can take a more strategic approach to hiring.
To start, analyze your recruitment process. Note all of the steps that your candidates go through and audit the quality of each touch point. Next, determine the right talent for your organization—what general skills and attributes do they need to be successful?
Lastly, find out what your businesses’ short- and long-term goals are, and link them to your recruitment goals. Ask yourself: how does recruiting the right people contribute to achieving the goals of your organization? Use this as the driver behind your recruitment efforts going forward.
3. Challenge the status quo
Take a critical look at your recruitment department’s current processes and tactics. What is going well? What can be improved? What innovative recruitment channels and methods can you use to reach top candidates? Dare to think outside the box, but also think critically about what new tactics you’ll use.
According to Karim Gharsallah, recruiter’s should just blindly cooperate with a request for a new position. Instead, they should ask critical questions. Why do we need this new hire? What skills do they bring in that we’re missing? How does it contribute to the goals of the team and the organization?
A strategic recruiter must be analytical and dare to ask whether a particular hire really contributes to the company’s objectives. Sometimes, this means that you have to challenge the status quo, even if the organization is going in a certain direction.
Dare to think differently and advise the business based on your insights
is Gharsallah's advice.
This way you really contribute to attracting the right talent that drives the right results.
4. Be picky with candidates
Make sure that hiring managers are aware of the importance of strategic recruitment. Avoid hiring candidates under pressure. This will ensure you take the steps to find the right person for the job.
According to Karim Gharsallah, companies tend to fill offers mainly for today's problems. He advises recruiters to not forget about the skills needed for the next 12 to 18 months to meet the company’s strategic goals.
Priorities can change quickly. As such, it’s important to look at a bigger picture than just your immediate skills gaps. You should also be looking at developmental potential in candidates you’re hiring. If you don’t, you run the risk of a new hire being capable of solving the current problem, but not major challenges that might pop up in a year’s time.
Gharsallah therefore advises getting sharp with what talent you need—now and in the long term.
In this way, you ultimately avoid expensive mis-hires and retain the flexibility to respond to changing needs.
5. Don’t forget talent that’s already employed
Many recruitment strategies focus only on candidates who are actively looking for work. But it’s also a good idea to tap talent that’s already employed by other companies. These candidates likely have, and are actively using, the skills you’re looking for, and are currently driving impact at another organization.
Reaching out to passive candidates and informing them about the possibilities within your organization is a great way to pique their interest and generate a pool of qualified candidates for future openings. Who knows—they may be looking for a change, and may be intrigued by your employer brand and goals as an organization.
6. Think global and offer remote work
Chances are, the best talent in your industry does not always live within driving distance of your office. Because of that, recruitment sometimes requires you to look beyond national borders to attract the best talent.
Recruiting internationally increases your talent pool and brings top talent closer. To do so, you need to allow and support remote work. This is an appealing perk for many top candidates, and often an expectation amongst workers in the post-pandemic world. You also need the tools and processes in place to attract, screen, and hire talent remotely.
7. Automate manual recruitment tasks
Many recruiters still spend too much time on manual, repetitive tasks like sending emails and updating client files in their ATS. Recruitment software can save recruiters a significant amount of time by automating these time-intensive, manual tasks.
Think, for example, of the Workflow templates within Recruitee. These allow you to streamline your processes by creating automated templates for things like talent pipelines, candidate profiles, candidate emails, evaluation forms, questionnaires, and more.
A recruitment software can also automatically disqualify candidates based on set selection criteria, such as visa requirements. This immediately reduces the size of the applicant list, allowing you to focus on only candidates with the right qualifications.
These tools can also automate the process of scheduling interviews, and automatically send out invitations, video call links, and reminders to candidates. This relieves a significant amount of pressure from the recruiter, allowing them to focus on tasks where human contact and strategic thinking are essential—such as interviews, onboarding, and sharing feedback.
There are, of course, limitations on what you can automate. For example, you can automate:
- Screening CVs based on set criteria
- Scheduling events and interviews
- Sending standard messages such as acknowledgements and reminders
You cannot, however, automate things like:
- Conducting selection interviews
- Giving feedback to candidates
- Onboarding new employee
Recruitment software like an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) enables this type of automaton. Other tools include chatbots, for responding to FAQs from candidates, and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) tools that can automate communications.
Tip:
Tip:
Learn about the 9 manual tasks in recruitment that you can automate.
8. Measure and analyze your progress
Strategic recruitment is an ongoing exercise in experimentation and refinement. It’s essential to continuously measure and optimize your recruitment process to find areas of improvement.
To do so, determine what KPIs you’d like to track, such as time per hire and candidate close ration. Actively track all metrics that help you understand how each part of your strategic recruitment process is performing.
With Recruitee, for example, you can find information about things like drop-off rate on application forms, and the number of applications per channel.
Tip:
Tip:
Discover how you can optimize your careers site to get more candidates withRecruitee's careers site analytics.
In addition to analytics, you can also ask candidates and hiring managers for feedback on a regular basis. Between this qualitative feedback, and the quantitative data mentioned earlier, you’ll have enough ongoing insights to continuously improve your strategic recruitment strategy.
Proactive and strategic recruitment will win going forward
In a talent market where in-demand skills come at a premium, companies need to think proactively and strategically about their recruitment efforts. Strategic recruitment is a mindset that hiring teams can adopt to ensure they continuously stay ahead of the curve—and the competition—when identifying talent needs and sourcing suitable candidates.
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