What makes a successful talent acquisition strategy?

In a competitive job market, HR leaders may need to get creative to attract talent.

That’s how Jacqui Canney, chief people officer at HR tech company ServiceNow, said she helped her organization increase job applications for full-time roles to 1 million in 2023—up 58% YOY and its highest-ever level.

Canney spoke with HR Brew about what makes a winning talent strategy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What does ServiceNow’s talent acquisition strategy look like?

We’ve moved our talent acquisition strategy from being quite reactive, as we grow, to more transformative, by creating a place where we have smarter opportunities to recruit…Operationally, like six years ago, we were in a place where if we knew we could hire X number, we could deliver on our plan. So, there was a great focus on delivering a number, and not necessarily being as strategic as we are now.

As we moved into 2024, we’ve been using more generative AI to streamline that whole end-to-end process to make the time you spend as either a hiring manager or a recruiter much more effective and then yielding higher quality candidates. We’re constantly monitoring where we hire from and how they perform when they are here so that we can learn and get smarter as we tackle the market.

What factors contribute to a successful talent strategy?

To be successful in any talent strategy, you have to be in a company with strong values and a strong purpose. Having that at your core is key. Having a CEO that is aligned with those values and purpose is also very important. When they’re misaligned, it’s very difficult to be the CHRO.

Having a very integrated people strategy with the business strategy is job number one, you can’t have one off to the right and one off to the left. They have to be integrated. And if the business leaders that run P&Ls don’t speak about talent the way that I speak about talent, there’s a disconnect.

The second thing you need to have is a strong value proposition.

What is ServiceNow’s value proposition?

We built something called the “people pact,” which is aligned on three things. If you come to ServiceNow, you can live your best life, you can do your best work, and we’ll fulfill our purpose together. So, communicating that to our people, but then showing how we deliver on that in every moment that we can is really important and that’s the hard work.

My team works on laying the pipe to make those outcomes on the people pact come to life. That includes great learning and development experiences. There’s a framework that we put together that creates a learning and development organization because our people are insatiably curious so that they can grow.

We also have worked very hard on enabling our managers. I think the most complicated job right now in companies is how to manage people. So, we built a series of required enablement classes to deliver to them capabilities that make them more confident [to be people leaders].