Craft an Effective Recruiting Strategy to Hire Top Talent in 2025

The pace of change around organizations’ skills needs shows no signs of slowing. This impacts the way HR leaders approach recruiting strategy and talent acquisition. Faced with a range of talent options — from building to buying to borrowing — a clear view of cost, time, competitiveness, talent availability and cultural fit is essential.

Use labor market intelligence to choose the best recruiting strategy for current business needs. Labor market intelligence moves beyond simple data trends by telling the story behind the data so you can compare resources (like talent supply), candidate sourcing, competition rates and hiring difficulty when deciding on your recruiting strategy. 

Use labor market intelligence to define critical skills needs

When resources are limited, identify the skills needs of critical business units and help leaders meet them by adding the following actions to your recruiting strategy:

• Gather “good-enough” skills data. Gather enough information to inform skills decisions today rather than waiting too long for comprehensive skills data. This will enable you to keep up with changing skills, align with HR’s strategy and better meet your organization’s needs.

• Balance frontline and leader perspectives on skills. Combine your expertise on talent with internal feedback from a diverse set of stakeholders to get a more accurate view of skills needs.

• Use market intelligence for skills context. External market data fills in gaps that arise from “good-enough” skills data collection. By using diverse data sources, you’ll gain a more well-rounded view of your organization’s and industry’s skills needs, enhancing employer branding.

• Course-correct regularly. Commit to regular, consistent check-ins with a cross-organizational network of skills stakeholders to incorporate viewpoints from throughout the business and HR. This will allow you to proactively identify changes in workforce needs and respond effectively, and improve the candidate experience.

Use labor market intelligence to analyze internal versus external skills markets

Shaping your recruiting strategy around critical skills requires a broad overview of internal skills assets — both temporary and permanent — and external markets for labor, services and technologies.

Internal skills market: Build a “good-enough” inventory of critical skills across the organization and update it regularly. Use available information sources to attribute skills to employees. Possible information sources include:

• Self-assessments

• Analysis of talent data (job moves, talent profiles and résumés)

• Employees’ professional profiles on external sites (such as LinkedIn)

• Manager performance reviews or observations

• 360-degree assessments

• Surveys or vendor-provided assessments

External skills markets: Use labor market intelligence to assess the external labor market for the availability of critical skills. Explore the following:

• Skills adjacencies (i.e., skills closely related to a critical skill) to help assess the feasibility of developing or redeploying talent

• Talent supply to assess the availability of skills in the external market

• Location analysis to review the feasibility at current and alternative locations of buying talent

• Competitive pressure to gauge the feasibility of competing for and hiring critical talent

• Hiring difficulty to estimate the time frame required to fulfill talent needs

Seventy-six percent of HR leaders anticipate cost-saving measures in the next three months, underscoring the need to build a recruiting strategy with more efficient, responsive forms of staffing. For recruitment functions looking to standardize or scale, a recruiting center of excellence (COE) can be a highly effective solution. 

A recruiting COE is staffed with employees who have specific expertise in key capabilities. The COE consolidates their specialized knowledge, defines how things should operate in its specialist areas and provides the infrastructure to help this happen.

Consider a COE when you want to:

• Reduce duplication of the same activities

• Increase specialization in areas that are harder for generalists to pick up on

• Ensure consistent delivery

• Take distracting work off a recruiter’s plate

To introduce a COE into your recruiting strategy, begin by doing the following:

Step 1: Define purpose and scope

Purpose: COEs typically start out small and reactive and then evolve into a larger team with a broader scope and more agile support. Start by asking:

• What will the COE achieve, and how is it aligned to recruiting strategy?

• What capabilities need additional expertise and development?

• What can the COE realistically achieve over the short term?

• What is the long-term vision, and how will the COE evolve?

Next anticipate risks and challenges and determine how you will address them by asking these questions:

• What could impede the COE’s success? 

• Is the needed staffing expertise available?

• Can internal partners implement the new standards on their own, or will they need help?

Scope: Identify and catalog the capabilities that the COE will own, what elements of each capability will be managed by the COE, and what activities will take place in decentralized teams. Determine how the success of the COE will be measured both in terms of the COE’s objectives and its impact on recruitment metrics. 

Step 2: Determine structure and staffing

Most COEs fall within three archetype structures, and staffing corresponds to the type:

• Network/dispersed structures set standards for implementation, but those standards are carried out by localized specialists across business units or countries. 

• Hybrid model: A small team of specialists in the COE sets the standards and works with/supplements a team of COE business partners or regional leads who are explicitly accountable for supporting implementation.

• Full-service model: The COE takes complete responsibility for end-to-end delivery of the specialist service as both standard-setter and implementer. Specialist recruiters may be distributed throughout the business, but their work is directed by the central COE. 

Step 3: Proactively manage stakeholder expectations

Concerns about cost and service drive the majority of stakeholder pushback around COEs, so focus on setting expectations around these factors and helping stakeholders think through the value the COE will bring to the business.

• Partner with key stakeholders to determine what talent, recruitment technology and facilities are needed to launch and run the COE. 

• Many business leaders prefer a more decentralized approach because they believe it offers them a more personalized service. To effectively manage pushback, lay out the types and levels of service business leaders can expect from the COE.