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Flexibility is now one of the top priorities shaping team structures.

89%

of TA leaders expect talent acquisition to evolve into a broader, cross-functional HR and talent role by 2029.

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And while 2026 may bring more of the same, it also offers a rare opportunity: to reset, refocus, and reassert the strategic value of talent acquisition.

“Much of the mounting pressure stems from an uncertain economic environment where we are experiencing ‘no hire, no fire’ but still endure the pressures to produce corporate results,” said Doug Leeby, CEO of extended workforce platform Beeline.

The answer isn’t doubling down on your spend or poring over your balance sheet — it’s reframing that spend in what creates lasting value and moves the business forward.

 

 

Positioning TA as a growth driver: Value, longevity, and adaptive capacity

When leadership views TA as a leaky pipeline—people in, people out—it becomes harder to show its true strategic value. Talent isn’t just a cost line anymore, especially not in the outdated cost-per-hire, seat-filling sense. It’s a growth engine—and it deserves to be recognised as one.

That starts with reframing TA as a growth driver across three interconnected principles: how it delivers value for the business, the capability that compounds over time, and its ability to adapt when business conditions change.

Each one strengthens the others — which is why a future-forward TA function in 2026 needs to hone all three simultaneously to become a true growth driver to the business.

“We’re in a time when TA could be seen as a nice-to-have for the business,” said Rachel Scott, global head of talent acquisition at IDX. “We’re a cost to the business. We need to center any value-driven discussion around cost. But TA is an investment — a long-term one. And in the quieter moments, that’s where we build capability, and show every hire, every pipeline, and every internal move protects the business from future hiring costs and keeps the organization on track with its priorities.”

This, says Leeby, is where TA needs to change tack from measuring outputs to impact: “It starts with changing the lens from volume to value,” he noted. “Headcount doesn’t tell the story of what TA delivers anymore. Outcomes do.”

“The conversation needs to shift to how quickly and effectively teams can get the right skills to the right place,” he added. “For example, rather than reporting how many hires were made, they’re showing how quickly the right talent was deployed to meet project demands, or how contingent resources reduced time-to-productivity in critical initiatives. They’re also leveraging data to surface insights that drive decisions: which sourcing channels deliver the best ROI, which departments are overspending, where talent is sitting idle, and where redeployment can save costs.

The fix, he says, is building the infrastructure so that teams think beyond internal headcount and treat different types of talent as part of the same talent ecosystem that works together to meet business objectives. And it’s not just about being able to pivot on talent type — but also how that talent is sourced, deployed, and developed over time.

This is as much an internal TA challenge as an organization-wide one — because according to our HIGHER’s 2025 State of Talent Acquisition:

  • – TA teams ranked team capacity as their biggest challenge in 2025
  • – Flexibility is now one of the top priorities shaping team structures, and 78% of TA teams said they planned to work with external providers to ease capacity challenges
  • – Quality of hire has risen 68% in priority since 2019.

This tells us that the future of TA isn’t about headcount — it’s about range. The smartest TA leaders are putting their investment in building greater flexibility and elasticity — building functions that can flex capacity, retain knowledge, and compound measurable business value over time. 

Where smart TA teams are investing in 2026

It’s one thing to know that the TA function is evolving to meet new market demands. But where are teams placing their bets to build a function that can flex with business needs in 2026?

We think the most successful teams will be investing in three key strategic levers to build a more strategic, adaptable talent function: people, technology, and intelligence.

1

People: Elevating TA as a strategic business partner

Creating leverage within the team relies on how the TA function as a whole reshapes itself to increase agility, capacity, capability, and skills breadth. 

This means shifting away from narrow specialisms or surface-level generalism, and toward developing well-rounded TA professionals with both breadth and depth — people who can move fluidly across tasks, roles, and business needs.

HIGHER’s 2025 research shows that leading teams are already prioritizing more TA-agnostic skills. AI and automation, along with data-driven decision-making, are the top must-have capabilities expected over the next five to ten years. At the same time, roles are evolving in a way that mirrors this skills shift, with growing demand for 360 recruiters, talent advisors, and TA managers who can operate with a strategic lens rather than purely executing processes.

But it’s as much a mindset shift as a skills one — and this needs to trickle down to the entire team.

“TA leaders need to encourage their team members to be accountable for their own performance and learning,” Scott said. “You’re coaching the mindset that teams don’t just wait for their manager — they need to think like business partners and the value they’re delivering. They need to set their own expectations, and keep their own receipts.”

For leaders, this means building teams that understand how their day-to-day translates directly into business outcomes — how sourcing efficiency affects revenue timelines, how candidate experience shapes employer brand reputation, and how redeployment or retention saves cost.

For leaders, this means building teams that understand how their day-to-day translates directly into business outcomes — how sourcing efficiency affects revenue timelines, how candidate experience shapes employer brand reputation, and how redeployment or retention saves cost.

“TA leaders need to encourage their team members to be accountable for their own performance and learning,” Scott said. “You’re coaching the mindset that teams don’t just wait for their manager — they need to think like business partners and the value they’re delivering. They need to set their own expectations, and keep their own receipts.”

For leaders, this means building teams that understand how their day-to-day translates directly into business outcomes — how sourcing efficiency affects revenue timelines, how candidate experience shapes employer brand reputation, and how redeployment or retention saves cost.

Teams can build greater skills breadth and capability in a few ways:

  • Cross-training to across regions and roles to develop secondary and tertiary skill sets within the TA function
  • Seconding TA team members through business analytics projects or other functions including HR, L&D, DEIB, and Finance to develop greater business acumen on how TA impacts the business
  • Pairing team members with hiring managers as internal specialists to drive growth and expertise in specific critical business functions
  • Creating internal mobility pathways within TA to proactively identify and nurture capability.

2

Technology: Tools that deliver outcomes, not vanity metrics

If there’s one thing we know about 2026, it’s that it’ll be defined by tech minimalism, not tech maximalism. Gone are the days of the bloated tech stack: Lattice’s State of People Strategy 2026 report found that 55% of HR professionals feel somewhat or significantly under pressure to consolidate their tools into a streamlined machine.

Talent acquisition teams are right in the middle of this shift — and that’s a good thing. Digital recruiting workflows have evolved rapidly, but complexity doesn’t always equal capability. With AI accelerating change, TA teams are under pressure to move fast, automate smartly, and stay focused on what actually delivers business impact. It’s not about doing more — it’s about doing what matters, better.

As Leeby puts it: “The best teams are investing where it creates leverage, not just automation for automation’s sake.

“AI is challenging organizations, and TA in particular, to figure out how best to optimize and respond,” he added. “On the one hand, TA is under pressure from the C-suite to discern which tasks are ripe for automation, and on the other, they are being charged with sourcing AI talent to drive change within the organization.”

For Leeby, this means focusing on where tech actually delivers outcomes, rather than getting distracted by shiny new features.

“When you are resource-constrained, technology should make your team more strategic,” he said. “This gives back hours to focus on workforce planning, relationships, and the initiatives that actually move the business forward.”

Good in theory — but what does that mean in practice?

  • Start with core business goals and priorities, identifying what your organization is trying to achieve in the near- and long-term. Is it about increasing market share, launching a new product, improving customer loyalty, or driving revenue?
  • Align talent team goals and processes to these objectives, defining how TA contributes to each, and which metrics will act as proof points.
  • Map talent team processes to your tech stack, evaluating how each tool supports better decisions, quantifies TA contributions, and helps you to deliver what the business actually values. 
  • Audit your tech stack for gaps or overlaps to identify where tech can solve critical workflow challenges — or where you can consolidate tooling.

3

Intelligence: Data-led workforce planning and market insights

Having the right tech creates visibility. And that leads us to TA’s final biggest investment for 2026: intelligence.

In a volatile market for business and talent alike, talent teams can only do so much to increase internal capability from a skills perspective. Having greater visibility across broader people and talent data — and the ability to overlay market data and build competitive intelligence — is how talent teams plan to stay ahead.

“Growth today isn’t just about adding headcount; it’s about using talent strategically,” Leeby said. “TA sits at the intersection of data, technology, and human relationships, and when leaders are given visibility into the whole workforce picture, they are better informed to decide where they build skills internally, where to bring in external expertise, and how to scale projects efficiently. That’s how TA drives growth: by anticipating needs before they hit the business and enabling leaders to execute with confidence.”

Leeby added that TA and HR leaders are prioritizing platforms that unify data across the entire talent ecosystem — enabling teams to track beyond spend and identify skills gaps and monitor performance. 

Investing in labor market analytics tooling like Talent Neuron, Loxo, or Eightfold can remove some of this heavy lift here — helping teams run competitor and market analyses, see where organizations are growing, and gain insight into how their talent organization is working.

 

But intelligence isn’t just about building a great data dashboard or having new tools to play with, Scott says. Talent teams also need to hone their internal intelligence skills to act as a strategic partner to the organization, and look for patterns before someone asks for them — whether that’s a pipeline gap, shifts in candidate expectations, or process inefficiencies.

“Talent leaders need to help their team spot where the gaps are and what they can add,” she said. “Start with looking for trends in your data — and have honest conversations with hiring managers and senior leaders. If you find out from a hiring manager that you’re losing candidates because your hiring process is too long or unclear, it’s data that helps you build a case study.”

Talent teams can boost internal intelligence signals by:

  • Improving data interoperability and insights across people and talent tooling — so that talent can connect recruiting metrics into longer-term measurable proof that strategy is working, like retention or engagement.
  • Role rotation that pairs talent team members with department and functional heads, to specialize in core talent challenges and needs across the broader business beyond just filling requisitions.
  • Monitoring competitor hiring activity and expansion — including new office locations, new critical hires, and new product launches.

From playing budget defense to strategic offense

In 2026, the investment case for TA is less about defending the lines on a balance sheet or budget for budget’s sake. Instead, it’s about demonstrating that talent acquisition — when structured and measured strategically — is a central business function that organizations can’t afford to underinvest in.

The teams that will thrive in this environment are the ones prioritizing value, longevity, and the ability to evolve across their team model, tech, and intelligence-gathering pillars. These are the functions that are reframing the entire talent function as a strategic business partner — seeing their success as holistic of the entire organization’s success, and viewing their contribution in terms of outcomes, not outputs. 

For most organizations, talent acquisition is not an optional spend. But by the same token, neither is building a function that can prove its value consistently, measurably, and strategically.

The challenge is that building that kind of function requires exactly what most TA teams don’t have: capacity, flexibility, and runway to invest in long-term capability while still delivering on immediate hiring demands.

And this is where Talentful can help. Our embedded RPO model helps organizations including Atlassian, Wayve, and Asana build the agility and strategic muscle they need without sacrificing control. Our team of experts works as an extension of your team to help you scale hiring fast, access specialized and localized expertise, and build intelligence on your business.


Find out more by speaking to our team.