10 Talent Acquisition Smart Goals for 2024

Today’s job seekers have high expectations that go above and beyond a competitive salary and "cool" company culture. To hire, grow, and retain talent, TA teams must embrace new strategies aimed at creating a better overall talent experience for candidates and employees.

Here are 10 talent acquisition goals your teams can set to improve your recruitment marketing efforts in the new year:

1. Focus on skills

Everyone is talking about skills. How to capture them, how to hone them, and how to use them. And skills are just as important for TA as they are for talent management.

When TA teams create job requisitions, job descriptions, or review candidates, they need to keep in mind what skills they’re looking for that will fill the role best. They’re also necessary to consider when deciding whether to look internally or externally to fill an open role. If the skills already exist internally — or they can offer employees opportunities to upskill them in order to gain those skills — recruiters can help employees who are looking to stay at the company find their next best opportunity.

The problem with skills, however, is that many companies don’t have the right technology to truly take advantage of all they have to offer. As we look toward 2024 for our talent acquisition goals, organizations must consider how to bring skills technology to the forefront in order to attract, grow, and retain their workforce.

2. Partner with marketing to build your employer brand

A company's employer brand is incredibly important. Why? You want to grow your employee base with people who align with your company’s vision and purpose.

When your employer brand is firmly established and accurately reflected on your career site, through email campaigns, and during recruiting events, applicants that resonate with it will come pouring in — providing phenomenal talent who turn into long-term employees.

The common denominator of companies with a stellar employer brand? A strong partnership between their HR and marketing teams, creating a unified force that’s focused on achieving your recruitment goals. Recruitment marketing is your first shout-out to your next employees. By collaborating with marketing-savvy colleagues across your organization, you can better target candidates, create compelling content, and hone in on the best channel for active and ongoing engagement.

3. Nurture relationships with “silver medal” candidates

Candidates who don’t make the first cut for a particular req are often a great fit for another role. Yet many recruiters are quick to move on to other opportunities without re-engaging “silver medalists” in their CRM. This is a big mistake.

These job seekers are just as valuable as the rest of your candidate pipeline. Connect with them through hyper-personalized email and SMS campaigns to keep the lines of communication open.

Presenting relevant opportunities by skill set, job experience, and location is a great strategy — especially if you feature dynamic content like video job descriptions and employee testimonials.

4. Diversify your candidate pipeline

It’s important to ensure your candidate pool is diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity — the last thing you want is to lose an entire demographic off the bat with biased content. If there’s a pattern of attracting only men aged 30-35 or women aged 22-32, for example, it’s time to take a closer look at your hiring strategy and recruitment goals for 2024.

But now is also the time to consider the diversity of sources for acquiring skills. Badges, proficiency certificates, internships, and apprenticeships can provide today's job seekers with qualifications for hybrid or net-new job roles.

Job descriptions and employer brand are strong indicators of who will apply to your roles. Make sure all content is unbiased and revisit goal #2 by looping in your marketing team to compose compelling content that attracts instead of ostracizes.

Related resource: Uncover Hidden Bias in Recruiting

5. Hone your employee referral program

Attraction and retention must be high on the priority list for your talent acquisition goals — especially in today's labor market. If the only focus is on getting career site traffic to jobs postings, you’re losing half the battle.

New hires may envision themselves at a company long-term — but only if they connect with its purpose, feel valued and challenged, see room for career growth, and are fairly compensated. Today's candidates and employees want it all, so give it to them.

You can leverage your employee networks by asking coworkers if they have anyone in mind who’s ready for a career move that’s suitable for the role you’re filling. They have first-hand knowledge regarding company culture, after all.

With the right tech to support an employee referrals program, it's easy for employees to refer their professional networks to open roles. A good tool will let employees link directly to open positions on your career site, and enable them to post to social media.

With tracking capabilities, you can also keep everyone in the loop regarding hiring status — and recognize employees for their contribution to getting new talent in the door.

Apply the same candidate experience ideology to your employee experience to improve retention and foster loyal brand advocates.

6. Improve internal sourcing and mobility with a talent marketplace

The best-fit candidate for an open position might already be part of your organization. Upskilling existing talent is a great way to support internal mobility and employee development while meeting company needs.

Career pathing powered by artificial intelligence can highlight skills gaps, identify internal talent for future openings, and help TA teams determine when they should look externally to fill critical positions.

Once internal employees are identified, managers can recommend learning courses or gigs — short-term projects within an organization — so they can get hands-on experience and acquire new skills. Gigs also enable employers to reallocate talent to in-demand or critical areas of the business.

A talent marketplace can also help track and measure employee engagement, and managers can use that data to identify gaps in growth or retention. It not only powers career pathing and internal mobility, but it can also match employees to the right learning and development opportunities, gigs or short-term projects, mentors, and networking groups.

Resource: How Kuehne+Nagel Empowers Employees To Own & Grow Their Careers

7. Implement automation technology to remove repetitive admin work

The definition of recruiting is to enroll someone in an organization for a cause. As a recruiter, this is your job, along with all the repetitive work that comes with it. But we live in the age where automation tools can handle the bulk of the administrative workload so recruiters can focus on high-level tasks and building candidate relationships.

Scheduling a single candidate interview, let alone multiple interviews, can be a recruiter’s most time-consuming responsibility. Automated screening and scheduling, however, can help you book interviews at scale, coordinate with internal teams, provide a remarkable candidate experience, and win back your day.

With additional technology like one-way interviews, TA teams can streamline the screening process for recruiters, save time for hiring managers, and deliver great first impressions for candidates via video, audio, and text responses. One-way interviews are able to be completed by candidates and reviewed by hiring teams on their own time, giving everyone time back in their day.

Related reading: 4 Ways to Improve the Interview Experience

8. Ensure consistent communication with candidates

Some miscommunication during the talent journey is inevitable. But major communication gaps are unacceptable according to today's talent — which makes this key revelation from our 2023 State of Candidate Experience Report particularly concerning: 0% of companies communicated the status of the application to the candidate using email, text, etc. beyond the initial email confirming submission. This is a shocking statistic for a practice that can be easily automated and reinforce a positive candidate experience.

Advice to live by: Always let candidates know you appreciate their application, and answer their questions about its status. If they progress to an interview, explain the process and set clear expectations.

For candidates who aren't hired, express your appreciation of their time and encourage them to look out for future roles by joining your talent community. Continue engaging and nurturing them based on the content they interact with most — this is where intelligent talent analytics can underpin a truly personalized recruitment marketing strategy.

Frequent, expeditious communication between recruiters and hiring managers also impacts the candidate experience, so make sure these key talent stakeholders are also empowered to collaborate as seamlessly as possible.

Related resource: The Definitive Guide to the Candidate Experience

9. Enable hiring managers as recruiting partners

The ability to quickly acquire best-fit talent — and deliver an amazing candidate experience — hinges on the relationship between recruiters and managers. Friction between the two can decrease productivity, increase costs, and hinder progress toward your talent acquisition goals

It’s important that recruiters accept input from on-site facility managers in terms of coordinated interview scheduling, criteria listed in job descriptions, and more. You can reduce feedback loops between recruiters and managers by using tools that streamline decision-making and move hiring forward, accelerating how these key stakeholders work together to achieve recruitment goals

10. Increase conversion rates with AI-driven technology

Artificial intelligence for recruiting, converting, developing, and retaining talent is here to stay. So take advantage of it to connect with best-fit talent faster — increasing your speed, volume, and quality of hire.

Generative Artificial Intelligence — GenAI for short — is also on the rise. GenAI can help companies generate text, images, or other media, using smart technology. GenAI essentially learns the patterns and structure of an organization’s data and generates new information based on it.

The Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform is one of those AI-powered solutions that offers white-glove delivery of engaged candidates right to your desktop...or mobile. Do your research and implement a platform that boosts your recruitment strategies for 2024!

Setting recruitment goals for 2024 like these will help improve your candidate experience and retain your employees for the long haul — ultimately boosting company morale and ROI.

See what an AI-powered candidate experience can do for your company: Check out our Definitive Guide to Candidate Experience.

Kasey Lynch

Kasey is a content marketing writer, focused on highlighting the importance of positive experiences. She's passionate about SEO strategy, collaboration, and data analytics. In her free time, she enjoys camping, cooking, exercising, and spending time with her loved ones — including her dog, Rocky.