Ask a TA leader to describe his or her talent acquisition strategy and you might receive a response that involves a long, blink-filled, blank stare.

But, you can't really blame them.  Who has time to build a TA strategy?  What, with hundreds of reqs open, hiring managers demanding candidates, employees clamoring for promotions, HR partners gunning for better quality hires . . . and then there's measurement and technology and branding and vendor management.  There's never a pause in the action long enough to go the bathroom, much less strategize.

But operating without a TA strategy can actually make your life more complicated, believe it or not.  How can this be?  A strategy, after all, is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal.  From strategy comes operations, and from operations come tactics.  Without a strategy, the tactical focus becomes handling the issues causing the most noise, or the ones we find easiest to deal with, or the ones that we think make sense to work on.  Results end up a hodgepodge of outcomes which may or may not add value to the business.  And we can find ourselves running ragged in the meantime, constantly trying to keep up and manage the issues as they come in.

What should a TA strategy look like?  How does one build a TA strategy?  Here is some food for thought:

- What is the strategy of your business?  What are the business plans for the next 2-5 years?  How will growth come about?  How will the business evolve?

- How will HR support the business in its quest to achieve these goals?  What kind of talent management strategy and goals exist?  What talent is needed throughout the business over the next 2-5 years?  What percentage of that will come from within, versus from the outside?

- What will TA need to deliver in order to support the larger talent and business goals?  What types of candidate pipelines will need to be built or managed?  What kind of candidate experience does the company need to deliver?  What programs (college, intern, rotational, alumni, etc.) will support the business goals?  What infrastructure (branding, marketing, technology, etc.) will be needed?  

And there you have it - the beginning of a TA strategy.   Once that's outlined, you can create the operational and tactical goals necessary to achieve the overall strategy.  It's pretty simple.  That is, assuming you can find time to go to the bathroom.

Other articles you may be interested in:

What Great Talent Acquisition Looks Like

But I've Always Done It This Way: Taking A New Approach to TA

The Best Talent Acquisition Metric is Quality of Hire