Talent Attraction: Is L&D Your Secret Weapon? 

While there are signs that the Great Resignation is over, the war for talent is still raging, especially when it comes to attracting talent with must-have technology skillsets or the brightest and best of Gen Z.
How, in a world where advances in technology are outpacing skills acquisition, can organisations keep up? 
Waiting for universities to produce graduates with the right skillset is too slow and the opportunity cost is too great. Outbidding competitors for must-have skills is expensive, and if pay is the only differentiator it leaves organisations vulnerable to having talent poached. 

What if there was a way to mitigate these risks, attract and acquire talent faster, retain the right people, boost productivity and keep payroll costs down?

There is – by connecting L&D’s offer with your acquisition strategies.

This is especially important for organisations looking at how to attract Gen Z talent and global talent attraction. There are already more Gen Z workers in the US and UK workforces than Baby Boomers. And recruiting globally is now an opportunity for all organisations that embrace remote working, not just multinationals.

In this blog we’ll explore why organisations should embrace L&D as a key partner in their plans for securing top talent; how L&D can help talent acquisition colleagues surmount the challenges we’re seeing in 2025; and how to leverage L&D’s help in crafting a talent strategy that attracts the right people at the right time. 

Some things never change. Attracting top talent remains at the top of Talent Acquisition’s agenda in 2025. 

What has changed is how Talent Acquisition are predicted to attract top talent. While most outlets cite AI-augmented hiring as the first trend to watch in 2025, the role L&D plays in talent attraction and acquisition is usually second or third.

To understand where, when and why Talent Acquisition should leverage L&D’s expertise, it helps to break down the differences between attraction and acquisition.

Talent Attraction and Talent Acquisition – the similarities and differences 

Talent Attraction is the discipline of creating conditions that make hiring top talent easier, faster and ideally cheaper. Talent Acquisition is the active part of the hiring process – everything from creating job ads, sourcing candidates, setting up and running interviews to making the offer. Talent Acquisition has more tangible, concrete steps.

While both disciplines can sit within HR’s remit for smaller organisations, once a business has reached 150 or so employees it will likely need a dedicated Talent Acquisition function – professionals whose job it is to find the right people for the right roles at the right time and bring them on board. Being good at talent attraction makes it easier to find qualified candidates and faster to hire them. However, implementing a successful talent attraction strategy is not solely the responsibility of Talent Acquisition teams.

A robust talent attraction strategy supports talent acquisition by: 

• Cultivating a bigger, active pool of candidates who know your organisation and are interested in joining it;
• Engaging diverse candidates from a wider range of talent pools, meaning that the organisation could benefit from a greater diversity of thinking;
• Reducing the time it takes to hire people;
• Increasing recognition in your employer brand; and,
• Showcasing the employee experience. 

Conversely, not having a strategy focused on attracting talent comes with a cost. With the proliferation of employee review platforms like Glassdoor people can form an impression of your organisation whether you are actively working on a talent attraction strategy or not. And prospective candidates are more likely to trust reviews by current and former employees over employer branding efforts.

Using L&D as part of employer branding 

Employers can create employee value propositions (EVPs) in the same way marketing teams create customer value propositions. Conducting their own employee pulse checks and benchmarking against others (for example, Randstad’s WorkMonitor report, LinkedIn’s Workforce report, Glassdoor and Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies survey) can help HR stay ahead of trends and incorporate the most relevant ones into their own talent attraction strategies. 

The emphasis today’s talent places on learning and development clearly mandates that L&D should be part of every organisation’s employee value proposition. However, citing L&D as part of your EVP will backfire if it isn’t supported by evidence. If employees can’t access training easily, struggle to find eLearning resources or are discouraged from spending any time learning, they will shout about it on the very platforms employers rely on to attract talent. So, if you intend to add continuous learning to your employee value proposition it’s critical that L&D have the resources to make this a reality. 

In the past, L&D may have been seen as something that happens ‘after’ people join the organisation, a way to get new hires up to speed or keep employees ‘fit for the future’. But employees’ priorities have shifted in an uncertain future of work – along with flexible working and work-life balance, 72% of workers think ongoing training and development is very important (compared to 57% that think career progression is very important ).

Consequently, a comprehensive L&D offer is a way to attract top talent, especially from the younger parts of the workforce. Fully 83% of millennials and 79% of Gen Z say they are more likely to choose an employer that prioritises learning and development opportunities . 

Having a robust L&D offer is a key driver for talent retention too. Korn Ferry’s latest Workforce Survey found that 67% of employees would stay at a company that offered opportunities for upskilling and advancement—even if they hated their job. Conversely, a lack of career growth is the second biggest reason people leave.

Offering continuous learning and development is a win-win for organisations and talent, particularly the younger generations. Having grown up or come of age in a digital world and felt the effects of the 2008 economic crash, the idea of working in a job or even industry for life seems antiquated. Gen Z and millennials can expect to have at least 7-12 jobs during their working years according to the World Economic Forum . Subsequently they expect to keep upskilling throughout their careers  and expect employers to help – especially when the organisation will directly benefit from their learning. 

How to Harness the Power of L&D in Talent Attraction

Given the importance of continuous learning to attract top talent, it’s no wonder that 84% of recruiters said they wanted to partner with L&D in 2024. But most organisations have yet to leverage L&D ‘s expertise fully.

The opportunity and risk in using L&D to attract fresh talent is that any assertions about learning and development during recruitment must be backed up by the real employee experience.

Fortunately, embedding or enhancing continuous learning in your organisation can be done faster with the right tech. The rise of MACH (micro-services, API first, cloud-based, headless) approaches to L&D software means many new solutions simply plug-and-play into the existing environment. Newer learning tech which includes AI can help L&D create learning content at speed and scale by leveraging in-house subject matter experts. And some L&D software, such as a Learning Management System (LMS), automatically tracks learners’ progress, meaning manually updating learner records is a thing of the past.

Freed from the more tactical, administrative aspects of managing an organisation’s learning and development, L&D have more capacity to do the strategic, collaborative work such as helping Talent Acquisition colleagues pivot to a skills-based hiring approach and building an irresistible employee value proposition, with L&D programmes as a vital component.

All demographics are important to the global workforce, and all feel positively about learning at work. 72% of workers – no matter which generation they’re from – say training on the job is very important. But two employee populations merit particular focus – Gen Z and global talent.

Attracting Gen Z Talent

Developed economies must pay attention to Gen Z workers because they have comparatively few of them. In Europe, the UK and US, the latest generation to enter the workforce is much smaller than older generations, meaning organisations are already fighting over a smaller talent pool. Despite this, there are already more Gen Zs than Baby Boomers at work. By 2022 there were 4.3 million "Zoomers" in work compared to 3.7 million Boomers in the UK alone . 

Structural talent scarcity aside, attracting Gen Z talent is tricky due to their high expectations from organisations. As well as prioritising work-life balance, growth opportunities, flexible working patterns and good compensation, a multi-year research project led by former Stanford scholar Roberta Katz found that:

• Gen Z expects to experience and to be part of constant change. While this gives them a high baseline of resilience and agility, as well as predisposing them to continuous learning, some Gen Zers will hold their employers accountable to the causes that matter to them. 
• Gen Z talent is pragmatic, collaborative and has high levels of agency. Having grown up with the internet in the palm of their hand, they are used to accessing answers instantly and crowd-sourcing solutions.
• Authenticity is key – Gen Z will not be fooled by employee value propositions that aren’t matched by the employee experience. That’s why, if the organisation wishes to attract Gen Z talent using its L&D offer, the offer must match the employee experience.
• Digital by default: Gen Z are digital natives and have never known a pre-internet world. They expect seamless, consumer-grade experiences because that’s all they’ve known. That expectation extends to applicant tracking systems and onboarding processes.

Gen Z's high expectations make them a challenging demographic to attract. However, attracting them by offering continuous learning opportunities doesn’t require a huge overhaul of your current learning strategies. Options include:

• Provide day-one access to eLearning training– whether on an owned LMS (Learning Management System) or by subscribing to a digital learning solution.
• Create hyper-personalised digital training. Some learning tools can even help L&D create organisation-specific learning content . L&D can leverage internal SMEs and experts to create hyper-relevant digital training that helps Gen Z talent develop in line with the organisation’s goals. They can do this even faster with AI enabled solutions.
• Make career progression easily visible and actionable. Look for digital learning solutions that allow L&D to tailor learning pathways for certain roles or employee populations (such as graduates); some auto-suggest learning content based on job role or training already completed. Make sure people can take charge of their own learning journey from day one.

Global talent attraction is important not just for multinational companies but also for the growing range of organisations that recruit from a remote talent pool.

The benefits to offering remote positions are clear in a post-pandemic world: wider, more diverse talent pools; opportunity to foster cognitive diversity; access to skills that would otherwise be difficult to acquire; potentially a lower payroll bill.

Unlike Gen Z, it is impossible to generalise what global, remote talent values as a group. 
For companies that want to take advantage of the normalisation of hybrid and remote working, how can L&D support a global talent attraction and acquisition strategy?

• Offering learning opportunities remotely that would be hard for talent to access in person – for example, acquiring or commissioning e-courses by a ‘rock star’ professor in a relevant field.
• Reducing friction when onboarding new hires: hiring remote talent requires compliance with all applicable employment laws in the country of residence. With the right tech, Talent Acquisition can authenticate remote workers’ credentials quickly and easily and L&D can set them up for success in your organisation.
• Helping remote hires become demonstrably compliant, quickly: Using a learning system that automatically tracks learners’ progress against regulatory and legislative training  reduces the administration burden and risks of manual recording. It also makes it simpler to demonstrate a compliance culture to auditors.  
• Collaborating with Employee Engagement colleagues to create training that helps global talent acclimate to the organisation’s culture, even if they don’t work in-person with anyone else.
• Making sure eLearning is available in all spoken business languages – consider learning content libraries that support a wide range of languages.
• Offering training for majority and minority employee populations to learn more about each others’ cultures and ways of working, helping foster an inclusive, respectful global workplace.  

Embedding these practices in your organisation will help make it an attractive place for top talent to join you – wherever they are in the world.

Ensuring L&D are connected to your talent attraction strategy opens up bigger, distributed and diverse talent pools, and can reduce both time to hire and potentially payroll bills too. But perhaps most importantly, in a world where the most senior members of the workforce are leaving and there are fewer younger ones coming in to replace them, L&D can help attract the skills and abilities organisations will need now and in the future. 

Key lessons everyone involved in building a talent pipeline should take away: 

• Talent wants training: 72% of workers across all demographics described getting training on the job as ‘very important’.
• Talent expects support to grow : The entire workforce, especially Gen Z and millennials  expect to have to adapt and change throughout their careers. Consequently they expect their organisations to help them do so with continuous training, unfettered access to learning, upskilling and reskilling.
• Talent won’t accept empty promises: Talent can verify employer value propositions within a few clicks. If organisations wish to leverage the power of L&D in to attract talent, they must ensure L&D’s offer matches the real employee experience.

As the secret weapon in the war for talent, a robust L&D strategy should be a core part of every organisation’s plans for attracting new employees. To successfully, consistently acquire and keep top talent, Talent Acquisition professionals must partner with L&D beyond recruitment. It’s imperative that Talent Acquisition and L&D support each other’s  agendas to make sure there’s no gap between who the organisation says it is and who it really is. Allied together, Talent Acquisition and L&D can make the entire workforce stronger and more successful.

Ready to help top talent do the best work of their lives in your organisation, not a competitors? Download the full guide now .