What separates recruiters who are just filling roles from the ones driving strategic recruitment?
It’s not an easy question to answer. But as businesses continue to demand value for money and results from all areas, it’s one any good recruiter needs to understand before heading into 2026.
We sat down with some of the nominees for IHR’s 2025 “In-House Recruitment Leader” award to get their take on how recruitment can play a deeper role in driving business strategy and workforce planning in the next year — and they had thoughts.
We spoke to:
- Archie Hirson, Head of Talent Acquisition, Newmark
- Mark Kunaseelan, Head of Resourcing, University of the Arts London
- Gareth Bowley, Head of Talent Acquisition, Dorothy House Hospice
- Euan Mcnair, Director of Talent Acquisition, Employer Brand & Inclusion Director, Aegon UK
- Debbie Cole, Head of Resourcing, MBDA
- Charlotte Turton, Group Head of Talent & Onboarding, InHealth
- Trishna Dhillon, Head of Talent Acquisition, The Telegraph
Strategic recruitment doesn’t just happen by accident. Keep reading for five actionable insights you can incorporate into your 2026 plans (and beyond).
The case for strategic recruitment
A good strategic recruiter is worth their weight in gold. Why? Because they’re not just executing on a talent strategy — they’re shaping it.
While other areas of the business might be working on a weekly, quarterly, or yearly view, strategic recruitment is about spotting opportunities that might not be visible for months or years. As Archie put it, “We use data and partner with our business and key stakeholders to forecast those needs, and that shapes organisational capability.”
The impact that talent functions can have across a business is undeniable.
Make sure business goals and recruitment are working together
“Strategic recruitment means partnering with the business, understanding strategy, and bringing insights” said Debbie.
Recruiters don’t have a crystal ball, but they do have insights into what skills teams are going to need to execute on their goals. The best plans in the world fail if there’s no one to run them, and a solid team can make the difference between lackluster performance and big wins.
Reduce turnover and hiring waste
As exciting as it is to bring someone new into the business, it’s also expensive and time consuming for hiring managers and interviewers to take time away from their core tasks. You don’t want to do it more than you have to.
The job of a strategic recruiter is to not just look at hard skills, but for all the qualities that mean someone is going to thrive in the quirks of your organisation. They can also assess how skills might develop and meet business needs beyond the current role.
Strengthen employer brand
A good recruiter works to understand why someone would want to join their company, and builds it into a strong employee value proposition (EVP). They’re not just pitching perks, either — they’re crafting a narrative about why your company, and why right now.
They make sure the candidate experience is human-focused and consistently positive, and know how to work with candidates to make sure they feel seen and supported throughout the entire process.
Directly contribute to revenue
Traditionally, talent has been seen as a support function. But as we mentioned above, business success depends largely on the talent you’re hiring.
Whether you’re looking for innovative thinkers, results-driven individual contributors, or inspiring leaders, the right mix of talent can determine whether you succeed or fail.
4 steps to more strategic recruitment
“Recruitment stops being about filling roles and it starts being about shaping the organisation when you move away from transactional recruitment,” said Charlotte.
But how do you move from a “filling roles” mentality to a long-term view? Our nominees gave us five ways every recruitment team can be more strategic and level up their business contributions.
Let’s get into it.
1. Be proactive, not reactive
“I think the key difference is [strategic recruiters] not only proactively plan, but proactively network for the future,” said Trishna. “From an internal and external perspective, understanding your talent is key. Then, you can network out and build business resilience.”
For example: Anyone recruiting in the healthcare space knows that staff shortages are a serious problem for the wellbeing of patients and employees. Simply recruiting to fill existing gaps would have been a big enough challenge on its own.
But at Dorothy House Hospice, Gareth needed to make sure that leadership took a long-term view on staffing and skills. “It can be very hard for organisations to move away from reactionary recruitment and start going into more long-term workforce planning,” he said.
In 2026, “I think one of the biggest approaches will be employers focusing more on attributes-based hiring,” said Gareth. “We've seen this trend building for the last few years as organisations counter skill shortages by growing talent internally.”
He went on to point out the importance of working with leaders to better understand the difference between ‘desirable’ and ‘essential’ requirements for a role, which helped teams cast the net wider, develop skills in-house, and improve retention.
And it’s not just healthcare that can benefit. At MBDA, Debbie gave the example of looking at true skills over experience. When looking to recruit for certain attributes in manufacturing, they picked up on the need for fine motor skills and dexterity. That meant they could recruit and train hairdressers or nail technicians, for example, who had similar skills but deeply different experiences.
“Taking more inexperienced cohorts and re-training them also helps with diversity,” added Debbie. “Having the right influence and relationships with managers means you can propose alternate solutions.”
As Charlotte put it, “Recruiters who are able to actually get under the skin of the business understand that it's not just about filling roles: It's about capability. It's about workforce planning and getting away from vacancy-by-vacancy thinking.”
Communicating this to leadership isn’t always easy, though. Using data, business outcomes, and strategic thinking to speak the same language as key decision-makers can go a long way to positioning your work as not just a support function, but central to the business.
2. Prioritise candidate experience
Hiring is an innately human thing, as all of our nominees emphasised.
But Mark and his team have started to experiment by taking an alternative path to making the interview process more human by not resorting to automatic interview scheduling by default. “We have started to try and call candidates to invite them for an interview where possible, which turns the experience into a personal touch that creates candidate loyalty. Candidates have spoken highly of this approach as they may not always be checking their emails or it might end up in their junk folder.”
Euan took the same approach. “We ran a project on human-centred design, which was about asking managers what they want, asking recruiters what they want, and asking candidates what they want. One of the moments that matter for all three parties is arranging interviews.” Now, his team organises every single interview manually to give candidates that human touch.
“What works is understanding what candidates need to hear more of, and what’s going to motivate them,” said Euan. “For me, it’s understanding what they want and speaking to people as human beings.”
Charlotte said, “Even with the rise of AI and HR automation tools, getting the balance right between tech and people is vital for a brilliant candidate experience. We shouldn’t have to justify keeping a strong human touch in the process. There’s so much AI can do to help to save time and tidy up admin, but when it comes to actually dealing with people, people are still your best bet.”
3. Understand the candidate market, your business, and your industry
When we asked our nominees what their best piece of advice was for new recruiters, most of them agreed: knowing what you’re working with is the key to success.
“Learn your business before you learn the ATS,” said Charlotte. “You often get thrown into it straight away, which fuels that transactional feeling.”
Debbie said something similar: her advice was to “truly partner with the business.” In her eyes, that means looking at data, trends, and getting your best influencing skills ready. “Underlying all of that is honesty and integrity,” she said, “and really demonstrating worth to the business.”
“We have to find even more innovative ways to support business strategy,” said Trishna. “I think there’s going to be more and more focus for in-house teams, and I think we’re just getting better and more embedded.”
But it’s not just your business that you need to keep an eye on. “Learn about the labour market,”
said Gareth. “It can sometimes come across as quite overwhelming, but trying to understand the wider economic, socioeconomic, and psychological factors that influence role mobility and how, why, and when people move in different industries. It’s completely invaluable for recruiters to know.”
“Good recruiters are curious about candidate behaviour,” said Euan.
4. Think differently about how, when, and who you’re hiring
With an unpredictable candidate market (you’re either buried under a pile of AI CVs or nothing’s coming in for the skill set you need), future-proofing your recruitment process should be one of the number one priorities for strategic recruiters.
“At a basic level, it’s about making sure all our content is clear and up-to-date,” said Archie. “But actually, it’s around using creativity to engage communities and talent that we know we’re going to need, even if it’s not the type of talent we may have hired before.”
And with a shift to skills-based hiring, recruiters like Euan are turning the process even more on its head. “When we’re hiring for our call centre or any early careers, we’ve removed the CV from the process,” he said. Instead of a CV, they run candidates through testing and an immersive assessment, where they work in teams to stop an art heist.
“It’s all mapped back to the behaviours we have as an organisation and skills required to be successful in the role,” said Euan. “We used to hire 100% of our talent from other finance organisations, and now we hire 40% of our talent from outside of the sector. We’ve completely removed barriers to enable us to do that.”
At MBDA, being predominantly engineering based with industry restrictions, means the team have struggled to recruit women or increase diversity to the levels desired. To help with this they partner with various organisations, for example Code First Girls who help women change careers to be re-trained as software engineers. “We’re trying to educate managers to understand a different route to recruitment, which not only develops harder to reach skills but can also help with diversity," said Debbie.
“You can’t say no to anything that’s new in the market,” said Trishna. “You need to test and try, because you never know what could add value. Skepticism doesn’t live in the land of talent acquisition — it’s okay to try something, fail, and move on.”
Final thoughts: Building a strategic recruitment function
Maybe you’re a team of one, or one of many recruiters. Wherever you’re at in your career, thinking strategically about the work you’re doing is the best way to deliver results and invest in the people that you’re bringing into the organisation.
“When I first got into recruitment, I was just filling roles as quickly as possible,” said Mark. “But when I look back I see there were lots of opportunities for me to be strategic.”
The secret?
“It’s not a numbers game, it’s a quality game,” said Mark. And when you’re focused on quality and the wider needs of the business, that’s where recruitment really shines.
