Steal Toggl’s 7-Step Talent Acquisition Strategy

Year after year, hiring teams complain about a lack of talent in the job market…while candidates vent about their ability to line up a new gig. Something doesn’t add up, right? 

While there are loads of external things we can blame (poor education systems, cut-throat competition, revenue decline), more often than not, a poor talent acquisition strategy is the culprit. 

The better news? Fixing your talent acquisition process doesn’t have to be an uphill battle, especially when you can skip the trial-and-error part and jump straight to hiring the best people for your roles. 

Over the past decade, Toggl’s PeopleOps team has been relentlessly working to optimize our talent attraction and retention capabilities. Just like others, we were tired of wasting money on poor fits but never had the luxury of unlimited time to screen candidates. 

So, what we’ll show you in detail is how to move from reactive, gut-driven hiring to a proactive, data-backed talent acquisition strategy that helps our talent acquisition team reduce time to hire by over 80%, reduce the odds of bad hires to almost zero, and keep candidate experience scores high.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• A talent acquisition strategy aligns immediate staffing needs with long-term workforce planning so you can always access your required competencies. This strategy also helps reduce cost and time per hire. 

• Our 7-step framework will help you whip your talent acquisition process into shape. You’ll conduct a brand audit and skills gaps analysis, evaluate your sourcing channels and screening process, and invest more in candidate experience, recruitment automation, and analytics tools. 

• Need some inspiration? Slack, Vodaphone, and Marriott have reduced time to hire and increased quality to hire by adopting pre-employment skills assessments, recruitment automation, and diversity recruitment practices. 

• If there’s just one thing you can fix today, our PeopleOps team encourages you to embed more data insights into the hiring process (tools like Toggl Hire can help a lot!), patch up your candidate experience, and invest in talent retention as much as in talent acquisition. 

Talent acquisition vs. recruitment

Talent acquisition and recruitment processes optimize for the same goal — supplying more qualified candidates to open roles. However, each process follows a different timeline and uses different methods. 

Recruitment focuses on immediate staffing needs. Your UX designer is leaving for another job — you need to recruit a replacement. Or you’re opening a new storefront and need to hire a lot of frontline staff.  

The usual process follows: Your recruitment team writes new job descriptions, posts them on job boards, screens applicants, and schedules interviews with hiring managers. Recruitment prioritizes speed and effectiveness in hiring the right talent for open roles, using job boards and standardized skills assessments to fill those quickly. 

In contrast, talent acquisition focuses on long-term workforce planning. Imagine three mid-managers are due for promotions this year, and you must replace two. You plan to launch a new product next year, and you’ll need an A+ sales team.  

Talent acquisition involves significant upfront investments from HR professionals — skills mapping, gap analysis, talent forecasting, employer branding, and candidate relationship management. You’re playing the long game to build a talent pipeline. 

Unlike recruitment, the talent acquisition process doesn’t end with job offer acceptance. It can also include succession planning, internal mobility programs, and ongoing organizational development activities. 

Companies often combine recruiting for immediate needs with talent acquisition for critical roles, requiring in-demand skills and future capacity planning. 

💡 If you’re a visual learner, here is a quick breakdown of the differences between recruitment and talent acquisition:

Recruitment is reactive, focusing on filling open job vacancies ASAP.	Talent acquisition is proactive. It involves nurturing relationships before hiring needs arise.
Recruitment’s scope is short-term and role-specific, targeting entry- and mid-level, and high-volume roles.	Talent acquisition’s scope is long-term and company-wide, targeting specialized, leadership, or hard-to-fill roles.
Most recruitment activities are transactional — posting job ads, candidate screening, and interview scheduling.	Most talent acquisition activities are strategic —  employer branding, workforce planning, and candidate relationship management.
Optimized metrics include time-to-hire, hiring volume, cost-of-hire, etc.	Optimized metrics include quality of hire, candidate engagement, employer brand strength, etc.

How to develop a talent acquisition strategy

A talent acquisition strategy is a set of repeatable steps you use to continuously attract top talent. 

At Toggl, we relied on seven steps to grow our workforce to 100+ people (and continue to do so!) while keeping all important recruitment metrics in the green. 

The beauty of our strategy is that it’s easy to replicate and reiterate to almost every business, which we encourage you to do! 

1. Audit your employer brand

An employer brand is all the information about your company online or through word of mouth. Nail it, and you’ll attract top talent like a magnet. Mess it up, and good luck with your talent pipeline.

68% of professionals say an employer brand and employer value proposition (EVP) have positively influenced their decision to continue with a job application.

Potential candidates usually rank company reputation and stability as the top factors, followed by culture and employee wellness initiatives, a KMA Human Resources Consulting survey found. When they find not-so-savory bits, many choose not to apply. 

To test the sentiment about your company:

• Conduct an internal survey on employee engagement and satisfaction. If there are issues with employee experiences or the work environment, fix them before they become public.

• Evaluate your online reputation. Review Glassdoor, Indeed, and LinkedIn company pages for critical feedback. Ask current employees for reviews.

• Refresh your employee value proposition to better reflect your organization’s culture, mission, and values, plus speak to the right candidates. 

• Review your recruitment marketing activities, which include things like tone of voice, messaging, EVP representation, employee testimonials, and storytelling content. 

• Start collecting feedback during exit interviews to better understand employer brand weaknesses and prioritize improvement areas. 

• Track employer brand performance metrics like quality of hire, application rates, candidate experience scores, and offer acceptance rate to sharpen your strategy. 

Strong employer brands attract candidates organically, reducing recruitment costs by 50% and receiving twice as many top candidates per position.

2. Assess current skills and future needs

Talent acquisition aims to close workforce skill gaps before they become an operational nuisance. Since 2016, 25% of job skills have changed, and by 2030, another 65% will adapt, meaning talent shortages will become more apparent and talent competition will be fiercer.

By performing a talent gap analysis, you can identify disparities between current workforce capabilities and future skill requirements to align your recruitment efforts with business goals. This way, you can: 

• Prioritize hiring for high-impact but hard-to-source roles 
• Forecast hiring budgets and recruitment costs better
• Launch internal learning and development initiatives 
• Build a talent pool proactively to fulfill future demands 

Start with an internal skills matrix, mapping your people’s current capabilities and development potential. Then, develop a skill taxonomy — an overarching representation of key competencies, skill sets, and sub-skills required for each role now and in the future.

Finally, reconcile the present and the future by modeling a workforce plan. Detail:

• Skills gaps and skills mismatch levels among different teams and business units

• Ideal recruitment levels, based on different revenue forecasts, capacity needs, and wider job market changes

• Organizational development initiatives to meet current and future skill requirements

• Succession plans detailing horizontal and vertical growth opportunities for employees eager to take on new responsibilities

Grounding your talent acquisition in skills lets you switch from reactive (re: rushed and expensive) hiring to proactive, paced, and lower-cost acquisition at the perfect timing.

With skills-based hiring, companies from any sector — education, manufacturing, financial services, or technology — can reach 10X to 20X bigger talent pools.  

LinkedIn

3. Choose the right sourcing channels

Recruiters use a medley of channels to attract more applicants to open roles, including niche job boards, LinkedIn, job aggregators, events, and social media.

Use at least three active sourcing channels to reach diverse candidates and compare costs, quality of hire, and time-to-fill. Also, try some creative sourcing strategies to engage passive candidates and grow your talent pool. These might include: 

• Sponsoring an industry newsletter, read by your ideal candidate profile. Some creators curate daily or weekly job ops in a specific industry (e.g., content, marketing) or position type (e.g., remote work or fractional role).

• Leveling up your TikTok game. TikTok now gets more traffic than Google, and its content has evolved beyond lipsync videos. Companies like The Washington Post and Cisco are killing it with employer branding content aimed at showcasing company culture and building relationships with potential candidates.  

• Creating an internal candidate mart. You may have the right internal talent for open roles. Start matching your people to open roles, as Salesforce does with its new internal talent platform. Any employee can create a LinkedIn-style profile, auto-populated with their data, and get matched with a roster of open roles, temporary assignments, and learning opportunities based on their core and transferable skills. 

4. Streamline the candidate screening process

Any new employee selection process can be equally frustrating for candidates and hiring managers if it lacks objectivity. This is especially true with legacy applicant tracking systems, that solely screen for keywords or outdated credentials like ‘years of experience’ or ‘degree.’

Here are some better ways to screen candidates objectively: 

• Pre-employment skills assessments to verify core competencies, technical skills, and people skills

• Case studies and technical interviews to test the candidates’ core knowledge and professional chops on mock problems 

• Homework assignments as an alternative to evaluating practical skills and problem-solving in an async way

• Structured behavioral interviews to assess workplace competencies, leadership attributes, and collaboration skills 

At Toggl, we use pre-employment skills as the first step in shortlisting candidates for all open roles. Our approach is time-effective for everyone. Most initial assessments take 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the role.

With Toggl Hire, you can set an automatic pass rate for tested skills (e.g., a minimum of 80% correct answers) to quickly identify the best talent. Candidates receive immediate feedback (instead of radio silence for weeks!) while hiring managers can easily view the best candidate profiles with verified real-world competencies. It’s a win-win. 

5. Offer a great candidate experience

When applicants have several employment offers, they usually choose companies that offer a better candidate experience. 

Not sure how you track? Start measuring candidate NPS with one quick question after the job application: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our hiring process to others?” Low results indicate you need to do some ‘debugging.’

Implement small but impactful gestures to create a positive candidate experience: 

• Provide updates on application status. Most recruitment platforms let you configure auto-email dispatches, explaining the current status, decision timelines, and next steps. 

• Eliminate redundant fields from an application form. 65% of candidates say the application process is too long or has too many requirements. Shrink the form size by removing redundant (e.g., years of experience) or irrelevant (e.g., GPA, highest degree) fields. 

• Give feedback after interviews. It can be a short, personalized summary based on the interviewer’s notes. At Toggl, we do that for every candidate who had a face-to-face interview as a sign of respect for committing their time (it honestly should be the bare minimum, though). 

The better you treat people through the recruitment and selection stage — the higher your chances of getting them into your talent pool. At Toggl, we maintain a database of the best candidates for most of the open positions. When we’re ready to hire again, we’ve already got a great list of candidates for outreach. 

6. Make data-driven hiring decisions

It’s 2025, and many hiring teams still rely on ‘hunches’ or ‘vast personal experiences’ to determine a candidate’s fit….despite knowing all too well the costs and consequences of bad hires. 

At Toggl, we don’t like to play ‘guessing games’ when it comes to talent management. We prefer hard evidence instead. Hiring decision-making in our company is rooted in:

• Test scores from several types of assessments (technical skills sets, soft skills assessments, homework assignments). 

• Candidate scorecards from different interview rounds, assessing all applicants against the same grading criteria. 

• Post-interview evaluations based on a deeper assessment of each candidate’s qualifications, work experience, certifications, leadership potential, and overall attitude. 

• Paid test day/week performance — a realistic job preview we host with final round candidates to give a sense of our work culture and verify their chops in a real-time setting. 

As part of a wider talent acquisition strategy, we also track recruiting metrics like time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and quality-of-hire to refine our talent management strategy. 

An increasing time-to-hire for some roles can signal several problems: talent shortages, salary growth (beyond what we can offer), sourcing channel exhaustion, or poor role definition (e.g., asking too much from one person). 

7. Use technology to automate processes

An effective talent acquisition strategy requires contributions from many stakeholders, from company leadership to hiring managers and TAs. Naturally, there can be a lot of back-and-forth about key decisions. Which skills acquisition do we prioritize?

How do we give personalized feedback to 10 candidates? Recruitment automation can sort a lot of menial work, freeing our team up to focus on things that matter — like giving good feedback to candidates who have taken the time to apply for roles at our company:

• AI-powered resume screening tools match applicants to open requisitions based on contextual resume analysis rather than pre-defined rules. 

• Recruitment platforms streamline job description creation and job postings across selected channels. 

• Integrated candidate relationship management tools automate application status updates, personalize communication, and enable talent pooling. 

Implemented correctly, recruitment technology transforms communication chaos at the back end into predictable, repeatable, and data-driven hiring cycles. 

Examples of successful talent acquisition strategies

Need some more inspo to get started? Here are three companies with ultra-effective talent acquisition strategies.

Slack 

Everyone’s favorite workplace chat app needs a large back-end engineering workforce to keep its product running. To hire pros, Slack’s recruiters gave extensive take-home assignments and then conducted technical interviews with certain candidates. Unfortunately, this process wasn’t scalable because it was too time-heavy for job seekers and hiring managers. 

To speed up the hiring cycle, Slack’s hiring team pivoted to two exercises — an API design and a code review exercise — completed within two hours. Although short, both assignments tested candidates for essential technical and interpersonal qualities: code quality, design skills, thorough testing, security awareness, maintainability, and performance optimization. 

Results? Slack’s time-to-hire dropped from an average of 200 days to below 83 days. Candidates and hiring managers also gave positive feedback. 

Marriott 

Marriott, consistently voted as the ‘Best Place to Work’, aims to excel in diversity hiring. Andrew Newmark, Chief Human Resources Officer at Marriott International, Asia Pacific, believes that DEI helps attract top talent and also supplies the company with important skill sets like cultural competence, adaptability, empathy, innovative thinking, and collaborative skills.  

The hotel chain recently partnered with Sarthak Education Trust and the Helen Keller Foundation in Southeast Asia to improve its recruitment and onboarding processes for people with disabilities. The change to how the company engages and markets to candidates with additional needs led to a 180% increase in its disability inclusion workforce in 2023. 

Vodafone 

Vodafone leaned heavily into AI and automation tools to overhaul its talent acquisition process. The company receives over 500,000 applications for its jobs, and automation provides greater insights into candidate profiles while elevating the candidate experience. 

By streamlining more steps in the hiring process and adding better feedback mechanisms, the company went from a negative candidate satisfaction to a +86 NPS score, according to  Carl Clarke, Vodafone’s Director of Talent. Moreover, automation saves recruiters about 16 hours per week in sourcing, giving them more time to focus on candidate relationship nurturing. 

Tips from Toggl’s talent team

Ready to zhuzh up your talent acquisition strategy? Here are a few extra tips from our PeopleOps team and hiring managers who recently hired for open roles. 

Use the right hiring tools

You’re bound to make hiring mistakes if you lack a structured process to test and compare candidates. We’ve learned that lesson the hard way when we spend hundreds of hours (and euros) on recruiting software engineers, only to let go of those new hires in several weeks. 

So we ‘fixed that’ by creating Toggl Hire, a full-cycle recruitment platform that gives us irrefutable proof of candidates’ credentials while automating loads of menial tasks along the way.

Pipeline design, candidate tracking, collaboration on candidate shortlisting, and post-application feedback — we can create and replicate the same workflow steps in several clicks. 

Lean on data as much as possible

Every stage of our hiring cycle is backed by data from skill tests, video intros, structured interviews, and homework assessments. By anchoring every progression decision in data, we eliminate (un)conscious bias and doubts over candidates ‘lack of seniority’ or ‘career history gaps.’ 

That said, the hiring team also values the ‘human factor.’ After face-to-face interviews, we always ask questions like: “Do you feel the candidate will add immediate value to Toggl?” If there’s one ‘maybe’ or ‘no’, the candidate isn’t a good match for us, at least now.  

For broader workforce planning, our TAs always hawk over recruitment metrics like time-to-hire, cost-of-hire, quality of hire, and candidate NPS. We also track wider workforce trends to detect skills mismatches within our company, shifts in skills supply, and recruitment channel performance to inform our strategy. 

Focus on retaining your best employees

Talent retention always beats talent acquisition when it comes to costs and impacts. 

Satisfied workers are more productive, meaning better business outcomes. And they’re also your biggest brand advocates. Year after year, employee referrals remain one of the most effective talent attraction methods for us and other businesses. 

Candidates trust the company’s employees 3x more than the employer itself to provide credible information on what it’s like to work there.

LinkedIn

Employee retention is a key part of Toggl’s talent acquisition strategy. We invest heavily in internal mobility, effective succession planning, and all sorts of employee well-being initiatives — from a paid annual learning budget and health-related perks to an RAFT (Results and Accountability First) framework, which gives people full control over their schedule as long as they meet professional goals. 

Don’t forget about candidate experience

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that companies with high candidate experience scores do six things differently: 

1. Hold recruiters accountable for good candidate experience 
2. Use some form of automation and AI recruiting technologies
3. Aim to make screening decisions (pass/fail) within 3-5 days 
4. Complete the entire recruitment cycle in 60 days or less 
5. Follow a structured interview process and train interviewers in fairness 
6. Always give post-interview feedback to finalists 

At Toggl, we stand for the same principles. By implementing automation where it’s needed, we give hiring managers more ‘headroom’ for precise decision-making and TAs — the ability to have authentic interactions with more applicants. 

An effective talent acquisition strategy starts with Toggl Hire

At the end of the day, a good talent acquisition strategy is all about fixing what’s broken — aka the current talent market. 

Too often, companies focus on what they need instead of what they can offer to candidates, treating people as numbers (because they’re overloaded and behind on hiring goals). 

By switching from a reactive to proactive talent acquisition, you can dial down on the immediate pressure of ‘just getting as many people into the funnel’ and focus on choosing the best fits from a pre-vetted talent pool. 

With Toggl Hire, you get a cost-effective way to build a smarter, faster, and more human talent acquisition strategy. You’ll: 

• Filter, track, and organize hiring pipelines however you see fit, supply data for faster decision-making, and streamline candidate feedback. 

• Include skills assessments at any stage of a recruitment cycle to reveal true candidate aptitude and potential.

• Practice collaborative hiring with convenient dashboards and in-app messaging to capture everyone’s insights and feedback. 

• Save time on candidate screening, prioritization, and scheduling to accelerate your hiring cycles. 

Get a free Toggl Hire demo to see all the above in action!