How are talent teams and recruiters geared for the year ahead?

The Talent Labs Annual Report 2026 Launch

To help navigate the year ahead, the Talent Labs has released its Annual Survey that explores the challenges and priorities for Talent Acquisition (TA) Teams in 2026.

The survey findings cover everything from Candidate Experience, Employer Branding, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Attraction & Sourcing, Applicant Tracking Systems, Artificial Intelligence and more.

Key strategies to succeed

The survey results confirm that Talent Acquisition (TA) teams, similar to the findings from last year, are still being asked to do more with less. Typically, due to constraints in capability, resources, or budget, all of which have taken a hit in the current economic climate.

In order to meet their recruitment goals, TA teams are turning to these key strategies:

• TA teams are turning to key strategies such as using AI & Automation tools to drive efficiency and reduce manual effort in sourcing and selection.
• Talent Pooling & Employee Referral programs being leveraged as low-cost sources that help TAs source high quality candidates.
• Investing in Strategic Workforce Planning, allowing TAs to anticipate skills needs and proactively build pipelines, doing more proactive recruitment with fewer resources. Demand Planning/Forecasting was also cited as a priority for 30% of in-house recruitment teams who participated in the UK Candidate Attraction Report 2025 Survey.
• Selective Outsourcing of recruitment to scale capacity up or down without adding permanent headcount, though cost considerations mean outsourcing is used sparingly by most organisations.

There has also been a visible shift in the Talent Acquisition priorities cited by recruitment professionals who participated in the Talent Labs survey. While Candidate Experience is still an important focus, it has been overtaken by you guessed it……Automation & AI as the number one Talent Acquisition priority for 2026.

Candidate Experience was cited by 44% of respondents this year (down from 54%), making it the second-highest priority for TA teams in 2026.

Third place on the list is taken by EVP & EB, cited by 31%. Meanwhile, a huge shift in prioritising ED&I has been cited by TAs, dropping from 35% last year to just 12% - its lowest level since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In short, TA teams appear to be refocusing on immediate operational challenges (like workload and technology) and deprioritising longer-term culture initiatives like ED&I, at least for now!

Newly emerged TA priorities require strong tools to tackle them

What we can garner from this research, and other research from the likes of G2 (Buyer Behaviour Report) and Fosway Group (Talent Acquisition Realities Report), is that to deliver and lead on the end-to-end talent experience, you need the right data and insight to stay ahead in a time of never-ending change. That is where an Applicant Tracking System becomes the backbone of your strategy.

Eploy have a host of webinars to help you break down choosing and delivering the right recruitment platform down into a manageable plan.

As a closing note, Eploy is pleased to share that within The Talent Labs Survey, for the third consecutive year, Eploy is ranked as the top ATS in the report and mirrors customer reviews of Eploy’s ATS on G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace. The report findings reveal that ‘Eploy is by far the most popular ATS’, used by 22% of responding organisations. And that is something we are proud of.

You can download a copy of the Talent Labs Annual Report here, and if you are interested in becoming a member of The Talent Labs Community, contact them for details: info@thetalentlabs.com.