How to develop an effective talent acquisition strategy for large enterprises

June 11, 2025

 

Alex Oliver

10 min read

The bigger the company, the more complex hiring becomes. That’s why enterprise businesses need a foolproof talent acquisition strategy. One that can handle hiring for different roles in different countries while promoting and protecting your employer brand.

The good news is you can build, or refine, your strategy without tearing your hair out in the process. Let’s dig into the elements of an effective talent acquisition strategy that supports agile hiring.

Visit What is talent acquisition? for an in-depth look at its definition and benefits.

Employ data-driven talent acquisition with key metrics and KPIs

The best talent acquisition strategy tracks key metrics to understand what’s working and what isn’t. With the right data, you can focus your resources on the areas of your recruitment process that need improvement and drive better candidate outcomes.

The primary recruitment metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) you should track revolve around hiring efficiency, cost, talent quality and candidate experience.

• Time to hire: Measures the time between your job posting and hiring your new employee. Reducing this time helps you hire quickly while ensuring a smooth candidate experience.
• Time in process step: Determines the amount of time candidates spend in each process step. It allows you to pinpoint pipeline bottlenecks that increase your time to hire.
• Cost per hire: Calculates each hire’s total internal and external recruitment costs. Considering employee replacement costs anywhere from 50% to 200% of their annual salary, reducing this metric is critical in high-volume hiring.
• Quality of hire: Assesses the new employee’s value, usually measured by their performance evaluation, and is a critical measure of your talent acquisition strategy’s return on investment (ROI).
• Candidate experience score: Assesses candidates’ satisfaction with their hiring experience through voluntary surveys and identifies areas of the process needing improvement.

Most enterprise-grade recruitment platforms, such as iCIMS Talent Cloud, track these data points and even offer analysis tools, like chart visualizations, so you can adjust your processes in real time and enhance hiring agility.

Use AI-powered screening for intelligent candidate assessment

AI in modern recruiting software goes beyond résumé parsing by automating candidate assessments and surfacing top prospects for recruiters. It ranks candidates based on their skills and experience and reduces hiring biases around sex, ethnicity, nationality and other protected statuses.

This is a game changer for large corporations, as AI can identify the most qualified talent and automate the progression of candidates through various stages of the recruitment pipeline. Your recruiters and hiring managers can then focus on the most important part of the hiring process, evaluating and interviewing candidates for values fit, rather than spending time wading through piles of applications.

Did you know? 

Your recruitment software’s AI should follow domestic and international labor laws, including those on automatic decision-making. A responsible AI must include ethical guidelines, be trained on diverse datasets, promote transparency and ensure all decisions are human-led.

Luckily, iCIMS AI incorporates all of this and continues to innovate to align with regulations, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the EU AI Act. Check out how iCIMS built its responsible AI program.

Build scalable recruitment processes for high-volume hiring

Enterprises need to keep the human element of hiring alive while managing multiple job requisitions, a large volume of applications and complex role requirements. You can do this through staff training, role delegation and software that automates various recruitment processes at scale.

Staff training

Train recruitment staff on the ins and outs of your organization and its various roles. Recruiters who understand job requirements will work more efficiently with hiring managers and hold more knowledgeable and meaningful conversations with candidates interested in the job.

Role delegation

You should delegate recruitment tasks, allowing recruiters to advance talent through the pipeline, sourcers to engage passive candidates, and recruitment marketers to strengthen the employer brand through advertising campaigns. This simplifies high-volume hiring, as a specialized recruitment team enhances efficiency and the candidate experience.

Recruitment software

Pairing trained staff with the right recruitment software is essential when hiring at scale. With AI-powered tools, in-app collaboration, customizable assessments and workflows to automate rote functions like interview scheduling, your teams can handle large numbers of candidates without negatively affecting their experience.

Want more strategies specifically for high-volume hiring? Check out The High-Volume Hiring Strategies Top Companies Utilize.

Create an integrated recruitment tech stack

An integrated recruitment tech stack means you can find information and take action from the same place without losing data or repeating work. If you currently use multiple platforms for talent management acquisition, your recruitment team is losing out on effective collaboration, communication, productivity and — ultimately — your next great hire.

The Harvard Business Review even has a term for the time spent switching between multiple platforms that wastes time and energy: the toggle tax.

You can limit the negative effects of the toggle tax and save money with a centralized system that streamlines hiring. Recruiters use the same system to create marketing campaigns, source talent, track open requisitions, and assess and interview candidates.

iCIMS Talent Cloud, for example, combines recruitment marketing, candidate relationship management, applicant tracking, AI and employee onboarding in one solution. This not only improves the candidate experience, but it limits the loss of productivity from platform switching. It also integrates with most human capital management (HCM) systems for a seamless candidate-to-employee experience.

Is your tech stack equipped for modern enterprise recruiting? Learn about 10 tools every recruiting tech stack should have.

Design enterprise-level candidate engagement strategies

You can’t afford to ignore candidates who apply to your open roles. Nurturing candidates during hiring is crucial for your employer brand since it showcases your company culture. And how you treat your prospects during recruitment leaves a lasting impression and influences their willingness to stay long-term if hired.

True, keeping candidates engaged throughout the hiring process seems daunting, especially with the number of applicants rolling in daily. But with the right technology, you can personalize candidate engagement without limiting your team’s productivity. Try the following:

• Automated messages: Send emails or texts at every touchpoint of the recruitment process to keep candidates engaged and informed without the additional load on your recruitment team.
• Personalized outreach: Keep candidates interested in the process with outreach tailored to them, from sharing related open roles to highlighting video testimonials from current employees. Use GenAI to create personalized candidate messages at scale.
• Candidate portals: Allow candidates to view their progress in your recruitment pipeline, apply for other open roles, complete assessments and learn more about your company at their convenience.
• Accessible tools: Make the hiring experience accessible for all candidates by providing multiple ways to apply (desktop, mobile, in-person), allowing them to select their preferred name and pronouns, and using tech that offers options for folks with disabilities, like special video interviewing software.
• Candidate experience surveys: Allow candidates to provide feedback on their experience, regardless of the hiring outcome, to identify areas for improvement in your recruitment process.

Engage your candidates at scale with even more targeted strategies. Check out iCIMS’ candidate engagement platform.

Define a strong employer value proposition

A robust employer value proposition (EVP) attracts talent and increases the likelihood they stay long-term. Gartner research even shows that companies that effectively deliver on their EVP decrease annual employee turnover by 69% and increase new hire commitment by nearly 30%.

Your EVP reflects not only your compensation and benefits package but also your company’s work-life balance, culture, values and career opportunities. It is the cornerstone of a strong employer brand that transforms employees into company advocates who bring in customers and new talent.

Effective employer branding highlights your EVP during every stage of the hiring process, from your job description to the interview, onboarding and beyond.

For example, EagleView Technologies, a geospatial software company, uses iCIMS’ ATS and CRM capabilities to level up its recruitment marketing. With iCIMS’ Video Studio, EagleView creates videos on what it’s like to work in various roles, so prospects can determine if the job is right for them. This alone drove a 5.5% increase in candidate applications at EagleView.

Engage talent before they apply

Recruitment marketing is also an effective way to engage with passive candidates. The more you advertise your company’s values, benefits, training and recruitment process, the more likely top talent will consider you for their next career move.

Multimedia

Multimedia campaigns are a great strategy since they market to talent on various fronts. Some examples include:

• LinkedIn and other social media platforms for posting stories about your company culture.
• Email drip campaigns to keep silver medalists — your second-choice candidates who didn’t make the hiring cut — informed and excited about future opportunities.
• A devoted career site for talent to search for jobs matching their interests and read candidate success stories.

Internal recruiting

Leveraging internal recruiting practices is a great way to take advantage of current talent to fill critical positions quickly. For example, internal job boards and opportunity marketplaces enable employees to explore, train for and apply to new roles that match their skills and interests.

Internal recruitment also reduces hiring costs while keeping staff engaged in their career development.

Want to lower your recruitment costs even more? Have your employees source qualified candidates for you with an employee referral program.

Leveraging metrics for continuous optimization

It’s not enough just to track time to hire, cost per hire, quality of hire and other key talent acquisition metrics. You also have to act on them to make your recruitment process better.

Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals for your recruiters is one step toward optimizing your recruitment strategies.

For example, if you notice candidates get stuck in your phone screen stage, work with your recruiters to identify an achievable goal to reduce the time spent in this stage. This may involve decreasing the number of candidates progressing to this stage or using AI to assist with the initial screening.

The more data you collect, the more you can optimize your recruitment process, such as increasing collaboration between recruiting stakeholders and simplifying the candidate experience. And the more you improve, the more likely you’ll find and keep that talent long-term.

How enterprise businesses implement AI into their recruiting strategies

AI tools have moved from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” recruitment software feature for enterprises. Modern technology makes it easy for qualified talent worldwide to apply for open roles. To manage a large number of applicants, you need AI to help organize them into something your recruitment team can handle.

But beyond sorting and surfacing top candidates with the most relevant skills and experience, AI can also:

• Nurture candidates with automated email drip campaigns and career site outreach.
• Source candidates by scanning millions of résumés and inviting the best to apply.
• Screen candidates through traditional application questions and video assessments.
• Prepare recruiters by generating interview questions, automatically taking meeting notes and training them on structured hiring tactics that minimize unconscious biases.
• Predict and analyze recruitment trends, like time to hire, so you can make informed hiring decisions proactively.

Wendy’s, for example, enhanced hiring with AI by using iCIMS’s Role Fit feature to rank top candidates and reduce the time recruiters spent evaluating each application. This enabled restaurant managers to find talent faster during their often chaotic day-to-day.

Achieve talent acquisition success with iCIMS solutions

Enterprise-level recruitment requires an enterprise-grade recruitment platform. That means: 

• Robust analytics and dashboards to track and enhance the recruitment process.
• AI tools to manage high-volume hiring.
• Candidate engagement features to keep talent invested.
• Recruitment marketing to attract talent and strengthen your brand.
• An all-in-one system to streamline recruitment from candidate attraction to onboarding.

Don’t settle for disparate solutions that increase costs and reduce your recruitment team’s effectiveness. Start building a more efficient and data-driven talent acquisition strategy today with iCIMS Hire.