Talent Maturity Level: Strategic

Discover what it means to have a Strategic talent acquisition strategy — and how your organization can ‘advance’ to the next stage of recruiting and hiring maturity and more easily and efficiently achieve your growth goals.

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MMA strategic graphic

At the Strategic level, you have a streamlined, smooth recruiting and hiring process in place and deliberately push new boundaries as it relates to candidate relationship management (CRM).

Compared to other recruiting orgs, your talent team thinks more strategically about your TA program and how you can outperform companies for high-quality candidates. That said, you often need assistance and additional insights to realize the broad business impact you desire.

You ended up with a Strategic talent maturity level primarily because you:

  • Have only human resources and recruiting involved in strategic talent decisions
  • Lack complete flexibility and agility with your team’s talent acquisition processes
  • Spend too much time and focus on near-term tasks (e.g., newly approved job requisitions and other recruiting demands as opposed to long-term goals)
  • Define your talent acquisition goals based mostly on your hiring and HR metrics instead of the desired business outcomes you intend to achieve with your TA efforts
  • Focus solely on short-term DEI hiring goals as opposed to the long-term initiative
  • Use an ATS that isn’t fully integrated with organizational systems beyond TA

The good news: Your current TA strategy has helped you start to compete with some of the best and biggest brands around today for premier talent. 

To achieve sustainable growth with your organization’s hiring efforts and fill those roles quickly with high-quality candidates who will help contribute to your business’s operational excellence, you need talent acquisition tech (and related processes) that helps you:

  • Engage executives with people data so they can see your recruiting and hiring progress and understand your progress with meeting long-term business goals
  • Facilitate just-in-time placement and agile talent acquisition processes, which, in turn, enables more highly competitive and flexible recruiting capabilities
  • More consistently match active opportunities’ skills to jobs at your organization as well as more actively, effectively, and quickly rediscover internal talent
  • Monitor business-level metrics and apply the findings to recruiting and hiring
  • Embed DEI into TA decision-making to build an even more diverse workforce
  • Connect talent acquisition technologies and related recruiting and communications tools to all other pertinent business systems, such as a total ERP solution

Next steps: A strategic talent maturity level is ideal. If you want to achieve ‘transformational’ status, though (i.e., build future-forward recruiting hiring practices that position you as one of the top companies at which to work today) you need tech that helps your team take its productivity to even greater heights — and helps you attract the highest-quality candidates on the market.

Save these results to share with your team

We’ve compiled these insights and recommendations in a handy checklist you can share with the rest of your team as well as your leadership to get on your way to evolving and adapting your talent strategy.

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Get more insights into the Strategic level

Our blog explains what it means to have a Strategic talent strategy — and how you can continue to improve your organization’s recruiting and hiring effectiveness in the weeks, months, and year ahead.

Learn about the other talent maturity levels

Check out our in-depth eBook to learn about the five ‘tiers’ of talent maturity we believe organizations fall into today — and what each stage entails.

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Get expert insights and advice

Want to learn more about your talent maturity level (and how you can advance your recruiting strategy in the months ahead)? Chat with the Lever team today.