Every successful company needs a strong talent acquisition strategy. Whether you’re focused on building a robust pipeline, streamlining your onboarding process, or leveraging analytics to predict future needs, the right approach can drive sustainable growth and keep your organization competitive.
Below, Fast Company Executive Board members share how their talent acquisition strategies are shaping the future of their organizations. Here’s what they’ve found to work well and how you can apply these insights to your own talent acquisition efforts.
1. SEEK CANDIDATES WITH A GROWTH MINDSET.
Our talent and acquisition strategy is to focus on hiring people with an innovation and growth-oriented mindset. With technologies rapidly evolving, skills and expertise need to be constantly updated, and people who are forward-looking and adaptable to change set our organization and themselves up for long-term business success. – Rahul Mewawalla, Mawson Infrastructure Group (NASDAQ: MIGI)
2. DIVERSIFY THE CANDIDATE POOL.
As a team, we make a concerted effort to ensure that the process is as fair and unbiased as possible. I try to avoid the term “culture fit” because it is often misused to preserve homogeny. So instead, I’d say that we assess “not a culture fit,” but a “culture add.” This has been our biggest tool in fostering experiential, cognitive, and cultural diversity. – Pooja Vijay Kumar, Autodesk
3. DEVELOP A STRONG BRAND.
Our current talent acquisition strategy focuses on attracting diverse, skilled professionals through targeted outreach and a strong employer brand. It’s working well, evidenced by high retention and strong performance metrics. If improvements are needed, we’ll aim to enhance a data-driven approach to better identify and address talent gaps, ensuring continuous alignment with long-term business goals. – Maria Alonso, Fortune 206
4. CONSIDER YOUR FUTURE NEEDS.
The biggest part of it looks good. We’ve outlined who will be retiring over the next few years and are seeking out talent we can hire now and mold to fit those positions when the time comes. The part that isn’t working for me is the assurance that top talent for those roles will stay long enough to move into the selected slots. – Baruch Labunski, Rank Secure
5. ALIGN TALENT WITH BUSINESS GOALS.
Customers are making a seismic shift to unify talent acquisition and management teams into one strategic organization. In addition, working closely with the business ensures sustainability and growth through continuous learning, internal mobility, and employee engagement. Aligning talent strategies with business goals creates a dynamic, resilient workforce driving innovation and business success. – Cliff Jurkiewicz, Phenom
6. HIRE TO REDUCE SKILL GAPS.
Our talent acquisition strategy emphasizes hiring quality candidates and building a diverse pipeline, as well as fostering internal growth. We strive to identify skill gaps and align hiring with future needs. So far, this approach has resulted in high employee retention and engagement. As needed, we enhance predictive analytics to ensure sustained alignment with evolving business goals and market demands. – Dan Sorensen, Air National Guard
7. OFFER THOROUGH ONBOARDING.
We’re focused on securing the long-term business impact of our company by targeting recruitment, comprehensive onboarding, continuous development, and strong employee engagement. This approach resulted in high retention, indicating its effectiveness. We leverage analytics to predict hiring and use diverse channels to attract top talent. Our onboarding ensures new hires grow in the company. – Kristin Marquet, Marquet Media, LLC
8. CREATE A SECURE WORKFORCE.
The keyword here is “secure.” The more secure your workforce talent is, the more growth-profitable their performance contributions will be. The more secure an HR team is in knowing and executing the right job-to-talent-to-culture-fit, the more efficient the talent search and onboarding process will be, and the more powerfully it will speak to and attract the top talent your company needs to scale growth. – Jay Steven Levin, WinThinking
9. FOCUS ON HUMAN SUSTAINABILITY.
Adopting a strategy focused on human sustainability makes it possible to provide value to the workforce while shoring up an organization’s infrastructure. This approach works to navigate any changes that may arise and allows the business to pivot as needed. – Caitlin MacGregor, Plum
10. DEVELOP A STRONG CANDIDATE PIPELINE.
The challenge with long-term acquisition strategies is that, inevitably, when you’re ready to make a hire, the candidate you want to hire is already happily employed. But that shouldn’t stop you from networking and developing a pipeline for each critical role. Even if the person I want to hire is already working, they will know someone equally good who is available for employment. – Barry Lowenthal, Inuvo, Inc.
11. SUPPORT EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT.
Given the uncertainty in the economy, we are currently very cautious about hiring added headcount. We would rather try to expand our employee capabilities if possible. If rate cuts happen and economic indicators suggest an upturn, perhaps we can reevaluate this strategy, but for now, we are pausing all hiring. – Zain Jaffer, Zain Ventures
12. HIRE FOR THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE.
Our talent acquisition strategy focuses on hiring for both current needs and future growth, emphasizing diversity, skill alignment, and cultural fit. It’s effective because we’ve seen improved retention and innovation. However, we’re aiming to enhance our pipeline by leveraging AI for better candidate matching and expanding our outreach to underrepresented groups. – Stephen Nalley, Black Briar Advisors
13. PRIORITIZE INTERNAL MOBILITY PROGRAMS.
We’ve elevated internal mobility programs and established a robust talent marketplace resulting in deeper engagement and retention, talent optimization, skill utilization and development, organizational agility, cross-functional expertise, and an elevated employer brand for talent attraction. – Britton Bloch, Navy Federal