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well Doesn't work for me.

It all depend of your level of difficulty. Now I haven't played this game in weeks (months), so please bear with me.

I reckon I've never been able to make up a working strategy for the hardest difficulty setting. But I've been able to work with the difficulty before the last one fine. The first thing you need to do is make sure you don't die of starvation. That is usually easily done with a scavengers looking for food along with a small escort. Obviously, try to reclaim nearby small farms for a quick net gain here. Once you balance out you should be fine on this area.

You will need to know very fast what is around your town at the beginning. You will need food to scavenge and need to know where your recruitment pools are. Sometimes you might even want to push in a given direction more because of the people you can recruit in that direction rather than focus on specific buildings. If you don't need the people right now but know you'll need them soon, it make sense to coordinate your reclaim efforts with the time you'll be able to send your leaders for the recruit missions. Ideally, you want the recruit missions to end exactly one day after you have more living space available in your town. Since it is far more efficient to have your guards clear up blocks of zombies and then have a single leader with 0% chance to get eaten on the same block the following day, then have your reclaimers move in to reclaim a block which is still free of zombies once the recruitment mission is done, you will need a very high amount of coordination on your part here. Even more so since some missions will eventually fail and send sand in your otherwise perfectly oiled clockwork engine. Expect to have to adjust every day and do for the best.

The second biggest problem in the higher difficulty settings is the rate at which you lose people. There is such a higher amount of basic zombies everywhere that it will not only hinder your movements and increase the chance you lose people in every mission, you will also risk getting overwhelmed almost from the very start. To try to overcome this, you will need lots and lots of soldiers for everything: guard duty (guard bonus), escort (you'll need do to this to make sure you don't lose people you need stupidly, like scavengers and sometimes even leaders) and of course to reclaim blocks.

To get new soldiers you are probably used to train people at school. At the very start of the game you don't have a school available and, even in the rare case in which you can reclaim a nearby school early on, you won't have the time and the manpower to spare training anyways. What you will need to do is exploit to the maximum one of the features of this game: plain people sent on guard duty have a chance to turn into a guard every night.

So what you should do every day as far as manpower is concerned is this: use soldiers to reclaim what you really need or to push in a direction you really need to go to get what you want (need). You really need to play the numbers in the highest settings because you will never have enough manpower for everything since you really need to rush so play it a little lower than "safe": 10% and above chances here are fine since you can't spare the extra soldiers to push the % down as low as possible. Just expect your guards to die off once in a while, meaning you will need to replace them. This mean having to be able to recruit more people all the time, and not obligatorily in border blocks already clear of zombies (you will need a guard escort here again).

Once the kill zombies missions are decided and set, you will need to keep a few guards for escort for the reclaim. Try to use your builders there in priority, one builder and one guard for each reclaim. This should assure you a rather safe mission and cut down on reclaim time. If you don't have a builder ready, use any other unneeded staff who are not plain people (white). Again, the plain (white) people are to be kept until the very end to be sent to the guard house. At the beginning of the game, you'll have a scientist twiddling his fingers around doing nothing important until you get a lab. Use him! He would have the same efficiency than the plain people as guard duty without the chance to upgrade anyways. Same for your leader(s) if you are to the max and don't expect to recruit in the next four days. Or if you have a lot of them, which can happen. Just make sure you have one available pretty much at all time if you can... But at the beginning you need to stretch your resources thin. Remember: if you have no leader you can't recruit anymore. If you can't recruit, you lose.

Don't forget to keep your scavengers for scouting duty if they are not actively scavenging already. They have a way higher chance to succeed scout missions than other people.

Try to find a lab pretty early. Because you are relying so heavily on guards mean that upping their efficiency will help tremendously. The first research you should ever do is the zombie study which make every guard on mission more effective. This mean you can either stretch your men even further or make missions safer. It is really a win/win scenario here. It can be done fairly fast even if you only have a single scientist. Who you already have at the beginning.

Third and last most important problem in higher difficulties: hordes. They come early, they come big and they come fast. There is several things you can do to make your life easier.
1) Try to take up only buildings you really need. The idea here is to try to maximize the amount of time the horde need to get to you. If you take a lot of buildings in a given direction you'll end up realizing that you've just cut the time before the horde reach you by one day or sometimes even more. You want to be ready when they hit you, don't get hit by surprise.
1.1) Sometimes you'll notice the hordes always come from a given direction: that is because there is a minimum space required for them to spawn and if you are too close of a border of the map then they will be way, way more likely to appear on the other side. If you are very close to a city limit then expand on that direction until you cover most or all of it. If you can manage to reclaim a whole corner or even a whole side of the city then the horde will never attack you from that side again. Note, however, that reclaiming a line either vertically or horizontally will both not work and be a really bad idea here: the hordes can still spawn in corners of the unreclaimed map and having a line of reclaimed building in the middle of nowhere only up your chances to get hit earlier from that direction.
2) You will most likely hover around 20-40% chance to get overwhelmed every normal day. Having every people as guard duty don't get you benefits, don't upgrade your town and won't even get you down to 0% anyways. When the horde strike, you'll probably hover around 20%-50% chances even with all your people in active guard duty. Plan accordingly and make sure most if not all of your people can be there to defend the town the day the horde hit you. This obviously mean not sending people on missions which take longer than the time needed for the horde to reach you. Once it says "2 days before the horde hit us", this also obviously mean no kill zombies, no reclaim, no scavenge for food, no recruit missions. Which of course all take two days to complete. Plan accordingly: you really want a max amount of guards at the gate here.
2.1) This might sound stupid, but it is a reality and it is only too easy to fall in this kind of situation: if you reclaim a block in the direction the zombies are coming, you are cutting the clock short of one day! If you don't pay attention, claiming a big building like a mall or a big farm will even cut the clock short two days. It is easy not to play attention and reclaim the building basically in the face of the zombies or to overshoot with a big building and fall in the same trap. Again, plan accordingly. Pay attention. Even if you didn't scout in the general area of the horde, their current location should be noted on your map. Just scroll around until you see it.

There is also many small tips I could give you but I think those three points cover the biggest problems. Giving you more pointers would be like a walkthru, and cutting short all the fun.