Talent acquisition strategy: how to turn TA from a cost centre into a growth driver

A talent acquisition (TA) strategy is your organisation’s long-term plan for securing the skills its business plan depends on. It decides which roles to build, buy, borrow, bridge or automate, how you’ll attract and select people for them, and how success is measured: in business outcomes such as revenue enabled and vacancy cost avoided, not only in time to fill and cost per hire.

That’s the textbook answer, and it’s a fair one. But it skips the question that decides whether a TA strategy ever makes it off the slide deck: who is it for? Kevin Blair, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Ericsson when he joined our Hiring Excellence podcast, put it more bluntly than most: “Are the shareholders asking what our time to fill is? I don’t think a shareholder’s ever asked me that.”

He has a point, and an uncomfortable one if time to fill is the number your team reports every month. Nobody sets out to be a cost centre. It happens gradually, through the metrics you’re asked for and the ones you can get, until the business sees TA as something to trim when budgets tighten rather than something to fund when it wants to grow. This playbook is about reversing that, from the four pillars of a TA strategy and a 12-month roadmap to the metrics and business case that bring finance onto your side.

It helps to separate strategy from day-to-day recruiting first:

For a grounding in the function itself, see our glossary entry on talent acquisition.

Why TA strategy matters now: a loose market with tight skills

If you’ve been hiring over the last year, you’ll know the market feels contradictory. On paper it has cooled. UK vacancies fell to 691,000 in July to September 2026, the first time they’ve dipped below 700,000 since early 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics, and the US hires rate sat at 3.3% in August, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And yet ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Global Talent Shortage survey of more than 39,000 employers found 72% still struggling to fill roles, with AI model development and AI literacy topping the list of hardest-to-find skills for the first time.

So the shortage hasn’t gone away; it has changed shape. There are enough people, but not enough with the particular skills the business plan now depends on. In KPMG’s 2026 US CEO Outlook, 89% of CEOs expect to grow headcount over the next three years, but 60% expect that growth to be under 5%. At the same time, 53% are planning workforce reductions in some areas and 86% are redesigning roles around people and AI working together. Put together: fewer hires, in different places, with more riding on each one.

That’s a moment built for strategic TA, and an awkward one for transactional TA. When volume drops, a team measured on volume looks like spare capacity. A team that can tell leaders where the scarce skills will come from, what each gap is costing and which roles to build rather than buy is very hard to cut.

The trouble is that much of the C-suite hasn’t met that version of TA yet. In a 2025 survey of US HR leaders commissioned by iCIMS, only about a third (34%) said their organisation treats TA as a core strategic function. And while 88% of CHROs said they were driving strategic change, only 27% of the CIOs surveyed believed TA has a significant impact on business outcomes. Closing that gap is what a TA strategy is for.

Why cost-per-hire thinking keeps TA in the cost-centre box

It’s worth being honest about why so many TA leaders report cost per hire: it’s available, finance understands it, and in many organisations it’s the number the team was created to improve. Toby Culshaw, then Global Head of Pipeline Strategy & Intelligence at Amazon Worldwide Stores, speaking in a personal capacity on the Recruiting Future podcast, traced it back: “Most TA teams, in my humble opinion, were created initially to get rid of agency spend.” Cost per hire and time to hire became the scorecard, and, as he put it, “it’s all basing itself on the wrong premise of what our value is.”

Those metrics aren’t useless. But they describe what hiring costs, not what it’s worth, and a function that only ever reports its costs will be managed as a cost. The show’s host, Matt Alder, spelled out why that matters more now: AI “represents an existential threat to the survival of any business function seen as transactional and easy to automate.”

The measurement data shows how far there is to go. SHRM’s 2025 benchmarking found only 20% of US organisations track quality of hire, down from 27% in 2022. In the UK, CIPD’s Resourcing and talent planning 2026 report found just 19% of organisations measure the return on their recruitment. Of those, 70% use cost per hire and only 23% factor in what a vacant role costs, while a third of all organisations (33%) collect no recruitment data at all.

Our co-founder and CEO, Johnny Campbell, described the choice in early 2025:

“If you identify as a cost center, your trajectory is clear: relentless budget cuts, headcount reductions, and a shrinking role in the organization. But the alternative – identifying as a value creator – requires a bold shift.”

The rest of this playbook is about making that shift practical.

The four pillars of a talent acquisition strategy

There’s no single standard here. McLean & Company works with four foundational elements and AIHR with five. We find it simplest to think in four pillars, each framed as a question the business will eventually put to you.

1. Business alignment and workforce planning

Which skills does the business plan need, and where will they come from? Start from the revenue and operating plan rather than the requisition queue. For each critical role family, decide whether to build (develop your own people), buy (hire), borrow (contractors and partners), bridge (move people across from adjacent roles) or automate the work. That last option is missing from most frameworks, yet it’s now a live question in almost every workforce plan. Skills-based hiring and good talent intelligence make each of those calls sharper.

2. Attraction and employer brand

Can we reach the people we need, and will they want to join? When AI skills top the shortage lists, a generic careers page won’t do the job. Your employer brand should speak directly to the critical roles in your plan, and the candidate pipeline for those roles should exist before the requisition does.

3. Selection, hiring-manager capability and candidate experience

Are we choosing well, consistently and fairly? Hiring managers make most hiring decisions, so this pillar is as much about equipping them as it is about process: a proper hiring manager intake, structured interviews scored against agreed criteria, and a candidate experience that doesn’t lose good people halfway through. Assessment now has a security dimension too: in a 2025 Gartner survey, 6% of candidates admitted to interview fraud, and as Gartner’s Jamie Kohn put it: “Candidate fraud creates cybersecurity risks that can be far more serious than making a bad hire.”

4. Measurement, analytics and operating model

Can we prove it’s working, and are we organised to deliver it? This pillar covers the metrics that link hiring to business outcomes, the data behind them and how the team is set up, including which work AI should take on. It’s the pillar most teams neglect, and the one the rest of this playbook concentrates on, because it turns the other three into a story finance will believe. If you’re rethinking team design, our guide to a world-class TA structure is a useful companion.

How to build a talent acquisition strategy: a 12-month roadmap

Most TA strategies don’t fail on the page. They fail in the gap between the deck and the diary. A 12-month roadmap closes that gap with phases, owners and exit criteria. It’s our recommendation rather than an industry standard, and the timings will flex with the size of your organisation. What matters more than the dates is the order: diagnose before you align, align before you build, and don’t wait until year end to prove anything.

Your first 90 days

• Days 1–30: run the diagnosis. Pull your baselines, list the critical roles and agree with FP&A how you’ll value a vacancy.
• Days 31–60: build the hiring plan and budget, mapping every critical role to the revenue plan.
• Days 61–90: ship your first process fix (often the intake meeting), launch one AI pilot with a clear success measure and hold your first finance-language review, even if the numbers are still rough.

A one-page TA plan template

You don’t need a 40-slide deck. Copy these headings onto a single page, fill them in with your business leaders and finance partner, and revisit it every quarter:

• Business goal: the revenue or market target from the company plan.
• Talent implications: how many sellers, engineers or other critical roles that goal needs, and by when.
• Priority roles: the revenue- and risk-critical roles, in order.
• Sourcing decision: build, buy, borrow, bridge or automate, for each role family.
• Capacity and budget: requisitions per recruiter against plan, and the TA budget that supports it.
• Cost of vacancy: the daily figure finance has agreed for each critical role family.
• Process and AI changes: the intake, interviewing and automation changes you’ll make this year.
• Targets and review: plan attainment, time to fill on critical roles and quality of hire, reviewed quarterly with FP&A.

To gauge where your team sits before you begin, our Hiring Excellence maturity model sets out the stages most TA functions move through.

Talent acquisition strategy examples

Ask for a talent acquisition strategy example and you’ll usually be shown an employer-brand campaign. What those rarely show is how a hiring decision gets tied to a number the business already cares about. Here are two real cases and a worked example to adapt.

Kevin Blair: 14 recruiters and a $94 million answer

On our Hiring Excellence podcast, Kevin Blair described a budget round in which his TA team was funded for 86 recruiters when it needed 100. Rather than argue on workload, he modelled what the missing 14 would mean for the business: across roughly 3,000 to 3,500 consulting hires, hiring would take around eight or nine days longer. He took that to the CFO, whose own calculation put the value of those days at an extra $94 million in revenue. The CFO offered to fund the 14.

Blair presented a business outcome, in terms finance could test, and then let finance do the final sum. In Blair’s words, TA should see itself as “a value creating services organization.”

Joshua Secrest: what one short-staffed shift costs

As Johnny Campbell recounted in January 2025, Joshua Secrest, formerly Head of Global Talent Acquisition and Talent Strategy at McDonald’s, showed that being just one person short cost each restaurant hundreds of dollars a day, because longer queues drove some customers to walk away. Across the business, that added up to millions in lost revenue a year. Secrest, now at Paradox, has since made the same point on the record: “For high-volume retail, speed isn’t just about efficiency—it can be a direct line to revenue.”

A worked example (hypothetical)

Here’s how you might build the same case for a sales team. The numbers are illustrative, so swap in your own. Say each seller carries a $500,000 annual quota: about $1,370 per calendar day, or roughly $2,000 per working day. If eight of those seats are open and each takes 60 days to fill, around $657,000 of quota has nobody carrying it. Cut the average by 15 days and you’ve brought roughly $164,000 of quota coverage forward.

Two cautions keep the maths honest. Quota is a target, not banked revenue, and new sellers rarely hit full quota in their first months, so finance may apply a ramp factor that halves the figure. And keep your units consistent: time to fill is usually counted in calendar days, so use the calendar-day figure. Neither caution weakens the case. They turn it into a number your CFO can sign off.

TA metrics that prove business impact

Here’s the fair concession to finance: time to fill and cost per hire are legitimate measures. They just don’t tell you what the hire was for. So pair each efficiency measure with the business outcome it stands in for, in terms finance already recognises. Here’s a starting set.

Quality of hire deserves a special mention, because it’s the metric most teams agree matters and the fewest measure well. In LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025 research, the most common inputs were new-hire performance ratings (66%), new-hire retention (60%) and hiring-manager satisfaction (44%). Start with whichever you can get reliably, agree the definition with your HR business partners, and resist building a perfect composite score before you’ve reported a single quarter. Our articles on quality of hire as a measure of success and recruiting KPIs go deeper.

How to build a TA analytics function that scales

The phrase “analytics function” tends to make people reach for a headcount request and a data scientist. A TA analytics function that scales with growth starts far smaller than that. You need four things, and the first is the hardest:

• Joined-up data. Connect your ATS to your HRIS, so you can follow hires into performance and retention, and to finance, so you can put a value on vacancies. Most of the hard work is agreeing definitions, not buying tools.
• An owner and a rhythm. Give one person in TA ops ownership of the numbers, with a monthly operating review and a quarterly business review with FP&A in the diary. Without the rhythm, the dashboard gets built once and admired twice.
• A starter dashboard. Five measures are plenty: hiring-plan attainment, time to fill on critical roles, cost of vacancy, quality of hire and hiring manager satisfaction.
• A finance-ready story. Report in the language of the plan: roles in seat against target, revenue brought forward, vacancy cost avoided.

Gartner lists “activate recruiting insights” among recruiting leaders’ top priorities for 2026. But be wary of anyone promising a precise return on analytics maturity; we haven’t found a solid recent study that measures one. The value comes from the decisions the data lets you make, such as moving recruiters onto the roles that cost most while they sit empty.

TA budget planning and the business case for hiring investment

How much should TA cost? SHRM’s 2025 benchmarking found US organisations put an average of 26% of their HR budget into recruiting, with a median of 20%. In the UK, CIPD found slightly more organisations expect recruitment budgets to rise (20%) than fall (17%) in 2026/27. Treat those as context, not targets. The budget conversation that works is the one Kevin Blair had: here’s what the plan needs, here’s what a gap costs and here’s what closing it is worth.

That means building a cost-of-vacancy model with finance rather than borrowing a headline figure. There’s no reliable, current benchmark for what a vacancy costs, and many of the numbers that circulate online don’t trace back to a primary source. A simple, defensible version is daily revenue or margin per role × days open × an impact factor you agree together. Slow hiring has a measurable cost, too: a study of Swiss and German employers published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics found firms that couldn’t fill a role within eight weeks paid between 58% and 75% more in hiring costs, depending on the survey year.

Do the same for the cost of a hire that doesn’t work out. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee can cost between half and twice their annual salary, so early attrition belongs in the case as well. For help structuring the pitch, see David Weinstock’s tips on building TA business cases, our look at the ROI of talent advisors and the basic hiring ROI calculation.

AI in your TA operating model: automate, augment or keep human

AI is in every TA strategy conversation now, but adoption is patchier than the noise suggests. SHRM’s State of AI in HR 2026 found 27% of US organisations using AI in recruiting, and CIPD’s figures suggest more than half of UK organisations still don’t use it there. Meanwhile, Gem’s analysis of 1.2 million hires found recruiters handling 93% more applications than in 2021, while recruiting headcount fell 14%. Yet only 28% of employers in ManpowerGroup’s latest outlook survey said they were hiring faster than a year earlier.

So the useful question isn’t whether to use AI but which work to hand it, task by task:

• Automate high-volume, rules-based work where mistakes are cheap to catch: scheduling, reminders, status updates and candidate FAQs.
• Augment judgement-heavy work where AI makes a person faster or better informed: sourcing research, screening support with human review, interview preparation and first drafts of job ads.
• Keep human the moments that carry the most risk or trust: final selection decisions, offers and any conversation a candidate would reasonably expect a person to have.

Start with scheduling rather than screening: screening is where the volume hurts, but also where a mistake is expensive, hard to spot and, in several markets, regulated. As Gartner’s Jamie Kohn puts it: “Redesigning the recruiter role isn’t just about understanding what technology can do; it’s about understanding how recruiting itself is changing.” Give every pilot a success measure and a named person accountable for it, and check your obligations in each market you hire in. Our pieces on building an operating model with AI and the future TA team take this further.

What the shift asks of TA leaders, executives and recruiters

A TA strategy changes the job for everyone involved in hiring, and most TA teams were never trained for the new parts of it.

• TA leaders turn the business plan into a hiring plan, own the metrics and run the quarterly review with finance. That takes financial literacy (reading a P&L and building a cost-of-vacancy case) and data storytelling: leading with the business outcome, not the recruiting metric. Our guide to elevating TA leadership covers the shift in more depth.
• Executives and HR leaders fund TA against outcomes rather than activity, give it a seat in workforce and revenue planning, and ask for outcome reporting in return.
• Recruiters move from taking orders to consulting: challenging a brief, bringing market data to the intake meeting and explaining the trade-offs. Our talent advisor playbook and guide to partnering with the business show what that looks like day to day.

Our hiring training programme covers both sides of the process. Recruiting training builds these skills for recruiters and TA leaders, and interview training helps hiring managers hold up their side, from intake to structured interviews.

Where to start

So, back to the question Kevin Blair puts to TA leaders: what does your TA organisation identify as? If the honest answer is “a cost centre”, you’re in good company, and you don’t have to fix it in one go.

Pick one critical role family. Agree with finance what an empty seat in it costs. Report against that number for a quarter.

That one conversation can do more for how the business sees TA than any rebrand, because it gives finance a reason to treat your team as an investment rather than an expense.

Frequently asked questions

What is a talent acquisition strategy?

A talent acquisition strategy is a long-term plan for securing the skills your business plan depends on. Unlike day-to-day recruitment, it starts from the business plan, decides how each critical role will be filled (build, buy, borrow, bridge or automate) and measures success in business outcomes as well as hiring efficiency.

What does TA mean in business?

TA stands for talent acquisition: the function responsible for finding, attracting and hiring the people an organisation needs. Our glossary entry on talent acquisition explains the term in more detail.

What are the four pillars of talent acquisition?

Frameworks vary. We use four: business alignment and workforce planning; attraction and employer brand; selection, hiring-manager capability and candidate experience; and measurement, analytics and operating model.

What is an example of a talent acquisition strategy?

One example comes from Kevin Blair, Global Head of TA at Ericsson when he told the story on our podcast. His TA team was funded for 86 of the 100 recruiters it needed. He showed how much longer hiring would take without the other 14, the CFO valued that time at about $94 million in revenue, and the CFO offered to fund them.

How do you build a talent acquisition roadmap?

Work in four phases, each with a named owner and exit criteria: diagnose (baseline your metrics and agree vacancy costs with finance), align (turn the business plan into a hiring plan and budget), build (fix the process, train hiring managers and pilot AI) and prove and scale (report outcomes to finance every quarter).

How do you measure whether TA improvements translate into business outcomes?

Pair each efficiency metric with an outcome finance has agreed to, such as time to fill with the daily cost of vacancy, and review the numbers with FP&A every quarter. Few organisations do this yet: CIPD found only 19% of UK organisations measure recruitment ROI.

How much should you budget for talent acquisition, and how do you justify it to the CFO?

There’s no universal figure; SHRM found US organisations spend an average of 26% of their HR budget on recruiting (median 20%). The stronger justification is a cost-of-vacancy model built with finance, showing what unfilled critical roles cost and what extra TA capacity would bring forward.

References

• Office for National Statistics (20 October 2026). Vacancies and jobs in the UK: October 2026.
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics (29 September 2026). Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, August 2026.
• ManpowerGroup (26 February 2026). Global Talent Shortage 2026.
• ManpowerGroup (8 September 2026). Employment Outlook Survey, Q4 2026.
• KPMG (2026). 2026 US CEO Outlook.
• iCIMS (4 June 2025). 2025 State of the CHRO report. Survey of US CHROs and CIOs conducted by Censuswide.
• Recruiting Future (12 September 2024). Ep 640: What is the value of TA? Matt Alder with Toby Culshaw.
• SHRM (15 October 2025). 2025 recruiting benchmarking reports.
• SHRM (2026). Recruiting executives benchmarking: executive summary.
• SHRM (31 March 2026). State of AI in HR 2026: executive summary.
• CIPD (2026). Resourcing and talent planning 2026.
• Campbell, J. (15 January 2025). Redefining talent acquisition. SocialTalent blog (archived copy).
• SocialTalent (22 January 2025). Hiring Excellence podcast, Ep 161: Reimagining talent acquisition with Kevin Blair.
• Workday (23 January 2026). Joining the NRF Foundation board and transforming how retail thinks about AI.
• Gartner (31 July 2025). Survey shows just 26% of job applicants trust AI will fairly evaluate them.
• Gartner (7 October 2025). Top four trends for talent acquisition in 2026.
• Gartner (2026). Top priorities for recruiting leaders in 2026.
• LinkedIn (2025). Future of Recruiting 2025.
• Gem. 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks Report.
• IZA Institute of Labor Economics (April 2024). Discussion Paper No. 16919.
• Gallup (13 March 2019). This fixable problem costs U.S. businesses $1 trillion.