Employees are every organization’s greatest investment — their single greatest line item on every annual statement. But when talent acquisition sits on the sidelines of the business, it doesn’t just mean that organizations will struggle to get the best talent — they’ll struggle to achieve strategic objectives, period.

So why is this happening? Because talent is seen as a service provider to the business acting on hiring directives, rather than as a strategic partner with a seat at the table. Let’s look at the stats:

• A 2024 report by SHRM found that over three quarters of organizations struggled with recruiting for permanent positions from 2022 to 2023. 
• 2023 data from Accenture found that while 89% of CEOs consider talent a key driver of growth and innovation, only 45% are actually creating the conditions to enable it.
• PwC’s 2024 CEO survey found that 40% of CEOs consider hiring as a time-inefficient, administrative process, ranked equally to responding to emails and reviewing expenses.

Business leaders recognize the strategic power of a high-quality workforce. But what they don’t see is talent acquisition’s role in getting them there. And because talent is a holistic process, this is leading to downstream challenges that hamper organizations’ ability to retain high-performers, maintain quality of hire, and attract key talent. This is compounded by the lingering double whammy of a global talent shortage and macroeconomic instability — meaning that now’s the time for organizations to lean on talent acquisition to lead the way.

4 actions to get talent on the strategic agenda

Gaining belief and buy-in for talent as a strategic partner relies on shifting long-held perspectives of talent as a doer, not a leader — and that’s no easy task. But there are some muscles talent acquisition teams can hone to gain a better foothold and inform on strategy.

Sharpening your business wits, data fluency, and alignment to the business are the best places to start.

When talent exists as a sideline to the rest of the business, its impact begins and ends with someone getting hired. But with employees as an organization’s single biggest investment, talent needs to be able to follow that money and show that the investment is paying off long-term. 

We’re not saying you need to get an MBA overnight — but you do need to understand how the talent function as a whole is delivering value to the rest of the business. This doesn’t mean looking at role placement success at an individual level, but instead taking a holistic view of the cradle-to-grave employee lifecycle. You need to be able to understand the long-term impact of the talent you’re bringing in, and how it’s contributing to revenue, profit, and product innovation:

• What are our greatest successes as a function? 
• Where is talent delivering the strongest value to the organization?
• Are there any critical breaks in the value chain — for example, are we struggling to retain mid-level engineers due to a lack of development?
• Are there any patterns or themes that link talent to broader business outcomes?

Talent teams have a lot of data at their fingertips — but a lack of data literacy and confidence prevents them from leveraging it to its full potential. 

While a knowledge of statistics and math never hurts, it’s much more impactful for teams to learn how to use data analytics tooling to interpret data and identify the insights within, rather than running endless data analysis. And most importantly of all, teams need to learn how to use that data to inform more effective decision-making. 

In practical terms, this involves continuous, hands-on access to talent analytics and business intelligence tooling, so that teams can learn the basics of comparing, segmenting, and manipulating data. But long-term, being data-driven needs to be baked into every talent process as a baseline — whether that’s A/B testing candidate outreach emails, segmenting your recruiting funnel to identify bottlenecks, or analyzing the impact of an external talent supplier.

Overlaying this data with insights from the global macroeconomic landscape and competitor hiring intel will help teams beef up strategic muscle here, building a talent intelligence center that helps map talent trends to real-world prevailing winds.

Talent is about people — and people are the entire foundation of the organization. But often, talent teams’ goals can seem siloed and separate from the rest of the organization. And if there’s one thing that sets leading talent teams apart today, it’s their ability to see things from the business perspective, and make sure that goals always connect back to the business.

Understanding talent’s business impact hinges on moving beyond thinking of talent acquisition as an input-focused function. Instead, you need to take a more holistic view of hiring and the broader employee experience as strategic levers to accomplish company goals:

• What are the current and future goals and vision for the business? Are we looking to win in new markets, become the market leader in our category, launch a new product offering, or go public with an IPO? 
• What are our key talent challenges that threaten these goals?
• Do we have any cross-functional dependencies that we need to align on?
• What are our current objectives and challenges at a business unit level? What are departmental leaders’ biggest talent bottlenecks?
• How can we support those goals and priorities through people and talent? Do we need to index for talent density, hire 300 engineers in a new market, or diversify skills?

Talent is about people — and people are the entire foundation of the organization. But often, talent teams’ goals can seem siloed and separate from the rest of the organization. And if there’s one thing that sets leading talent teams apart today, it’s their ability to see things from the business perspective, and make sure that goals always connect back to the business.

Once you have data to show the success of your strategy, you need to be able to show its positive impact on the business. This is the part where so many talent leaders struggle — because they’re focused on outputs and results, rather than the business impact. 

In simple terms, it’s one thing to have impressive cost-per-hire and quality of hire metrics. But presenting this data as a slew of percentages and dollar values without connecting it to the context of what your business cares most about means you miss the opportunity to build a narrative that highlights your success. This is especially critical when framing challenges where leadership buy-in and resources are required.

Instead of saying that you’re struggling to attract engineering talent in a key market due to limited budget, for example, quantify how this talent shortfall will impact product launch timelines, market value, and the organization’s ability to meet board targets. Quantify the impact of acting — or not acting.

Talent acquisition is a function that keeps organizations’ lights on — it’s critical for long-term survival. But repositioning talent from a role-filler to a strategic powerhouse requires teams to think critically about how they’re perceived by the rest of the business, and redefine how they show their value long-term. We’re talking going beyond time-to-hire and quality of hire, and understanding how talent acquisition has a direct impact on your organization’s ability to succeed as a business. 

Building greater capability in data literacy and fluency is one of the building blocks to this effort — but teams must also couple data with business acumen, crafting narratives that speak to, and quantify, their impact.

Talent acquisition is a function that keeps organizations’ lights on — it’s critical for long-term survival. But repositioning talent from a role-filler to a strategic powerhouse requires teams to think critically about how they’re perceived by the rest of the business, and redefine how they show their value long-term. We’re talking going beyond time-to-hire and quality of hire, and understanding how talent acquisition has a direct impact on your organization’s ability to succeed as a business. 

Building greater capability in data literacy and fluency is one of the building blocks to this effort — but teams must also couple data with business acumen, crafting narratives that speak to, and quantify, their impact.