Designing a high-performing recruitment organization: 3 strategies for 2025

If there’s one thing recruiting teams have learned during the last few years, it’s that even the most carefully-laid strategy can get steamrollered within a day. With budget, headcount, team capacity, and overall business survival in continual flux, planning has become impossible as recruiters have had to adjust strategy to meet a moving target.

With 56% of talent teams feeling unable to plan more than three to six months ahead (and 11% unable to plan at all), execution of long-term strategy has been put on the backburner in favor of near-term, reactive thinking as business priorities shift on a dime. Uncertainty is now just part of the way we work — and the key to building a more efficient recruiting function in 2025 lies in how teams adapt their skills and operations to better match this new environment.

What flexibility looks like for recruiting teams in 2025

• Cross-train skills across the recruiting and talent acquisition functions to build more well-rounded, agile skill sets that prime the team for flexibility, agility, and adaptability.
• Evaluate contingency strategies around business-critical roles and succession planning for key roles. Consider which roles (or skills and jobs) your business needs to keep functioning in the event of new layoffs or economic downturn — and build out your sourcing and pipeline strategies for each.
• Evaluate your current skill pools and create and manage new talent pipelines that address future needs according to future business direction and sector and how the talent market is progressing.

Between 2023 and 2024, talent team headcount, much like the rest of the organization, has by and large stayed static across organizations of all sizes — with 75% of teams not planning to hire in new team members. 

This leaner, meaner TA team model is one we expect to continue into 2025 as teams continue to experiment with AI, and organizations pare back on headcount spending in favor of economic recovery. But smaller teams can still pack a punch with the right strategy.

The rise of flexible talent team models that blend internal resources with strategic outsourcing has become an increasingly popular way to get more bang for your proverbial buck while keeping operations lean (and the bottom line healthy).

For near-term hiring needs, freelance recruiters and contractors are one avenue organizations can explore here. But they can be hard to source, vet, and manage effectively. And because they usually work on a time-limited project basis, it can be hard to drive the strategic alignment needed for future hires.

But for longer-term needs, teams can maximize capacity with embedded recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), where an external expert works alongside your recruitment team. Recruitment teams can scale this provision up or down at the point of need, delivering faster time-to-value and stronger strategic alignment for future hires.

How to build an integrated recruitment team for 2025

• Review your current team skills and capacity gaps to identify what kind of support will fit your team best.
• Contract in specialized support — either market specialists, or discipline specialists — for key hires or segments where you need specific expertise. For example, bring in local external partners when expanding to a new market to source pipeline more efficiently.
• Create structured onboarding processes for all external partners to ramp them as quickly as possible to your hiring processes and culture.
• For long-term partnerships with providers like embedded RPOs, consider a more rotational model that delivers support where needed across the end-to-end recruitment process, rather than on a specific project or task.

Leaner teams means fewer hands to pick up the slack. And with 64% of teams at or over capacity right now, workload is going to become a critical challenge once hiring picks up again without some creative workarounds. 

Much has been made of the potential for AI and automation to make talent teams’ lives easier — but the trouble is, most teams are still stuck viewing the technology as a task manager. Instead of solving business-critical challenges, they’re applying AI and automation primarily to generate job descriptions and rattle through data.

But to get the best from this tech, recruiting teams need to move away from thinking in terms of task-based applications, and instead use systems thinking to think more broadly as to how AI and automation can solve business-critical challenges within end-to-end talent processes.

Forward-thinking recruiting functions are already baking this into their current operations and processes, and aligning key use cases with business goals. They’re using the technology to develop algorithms that help them match the right role to the right candidate, assess for bias, and scale rapid training for outsourcing partners. And it’s here that the rubber meets the road on AI to truly power up the recruitment function.

How recruiting teams can leverage AI and automation in 2025

• Map out end-to-end recruiting processes to identify bottlenecks that are hindering efficiency, speed, or talent quality outcomes, or other high-volume, low-impact processes where AI and automation can lighten the load.
• Review KPIs and other business-critical data points to highlight which areas are of greatest impact to the business.
• Map these opportunities and challenges to potential AI use cases. For example, if slow decision-making is hindering your ability to snag A-player candidates before they accept another offer, consider whether or not automating interview transcription and insights can help speed this process up.
• Conduct a feasibility study to evaluate solution impact, potential setbacks, and resources needed — for example, do you need to build a tool or algorithm, or can you buy a platform to support your needs?

Create best practices and guidelines for the recruiting function that reflect how you plan to use AI and automation — as well as how not to use it.

As recruitment teams look ahead to the coming year, one thing is clear: Fortune will favor those who have taken steps to embed agility and flexibility within their day-to-day operations and processes. Adaptability with skills, strategy, and contingency planning will help teams feel better equipped to navigate uncertainty in the near-term, while embedding AI and automation into everyday processes will help leaner teams manage surging workloads when the budget for an extra pair of hands isn’t available. But longer term, blended, flexible team structures will help recruiting functions maximize expertise while keeping permanent headcount down. A great talent partner is essential here — and we’ve got you covered on that score.

Talentful is an embedded RPO that partners with some of the world’s most ambitious organizations to help them scale their teams and their impact. Counting Atlassian, Google, Microsoft and more among our clients, we embed our fully-trained talent acquisition professionals directly into your organization’s team to supercharge your hiring efficiency, quality, and speed.

Find out more here.