Broadly speaking when you look at your recruitment, strategy is what you need to do to achieve your goals, and tactics are how you go about doing it.

Even if your vacancy tactics are good, if they support a weak strategy, you’ll struggle in a candidate short market, because they likely aren't fit for purpose.

It’s a given that developing a clear and robust strategy should be a priority if you consistently find it difficult to recruit. If you don’t know what your start and endpoints are, there’s little point in picking a direction.

Strategy is split between employer level and campaign level - that is the consistent endeavours all parts of your business does when recruiting, and the things that are specific to a certain type of vacancy (which may be a specialism such as front end web development, a level of seniority, or a function such as shop floor operators).

Get these in order first, then you can form the tactics of how to get your seemingly impossible vacancies filled.

Just as good – this balance of good strategy and tactics will fill your less difficult vacancies with better candidates.

It starts with getting the basics right.

For the employer you’ll need to answer these questions and more:

- What is your position in the market?
- What is your employment value proposition?
- What can you do to overcome your DEI blind spots to provide better access to candidates?
- What are your real organisational and departmental cultures and how will new employees add to them?

For the campaign, you’ll need to answer these questions and more:

- What does the employment market look like for these roles?
- What happens if the vacancy doesn’t get filled?
- What do you need to do to ensure your documentation is accurate, representative and appealing to the right candidates? This is such a common area of failure in recruitment, yet most employers don’t realise it
- What does good really look like in the candidate? See above
- What does the compensation & benefits package need to be to attract the right candidates, while balancing affordability and sustainability?
- What does the critical path recruitment process look like, balancing suitable assessment with pulling the right candidates forward (not pushing them away with bloat)
- What are the appropriate channels to market to find the right candidate? Adverts will work for some, LinkedIn for more, headhunting for others – every vacancy has different needs.

There are so many other “what” questions to ask to get your strategy in order to give you the best odds of filling any or all of your vacancies.

What’s more, if you have a critical vacancy and talk to transactional agency suppliers or stakeholders that don’t challenge you with these questions, you may get no closer to filling that vacancy and find more time and money slipping away.

You may think it is the fault of the agency, but really it’s on you for assuming they’ll transact you a miracle.