John Vlastelica recently wrote an insightful blog piece for LinkedIn entitled ‘5 Signals That You’re Operating as a Talent Advisor’ which we found to resonate with our research and thoughts. John has written a lot about what it means to be a talent advisor, how recruiters can turn their role into one that’s more strategic, and which methods are best to engage and influence hiring managers so that they’re better at their jobs, but felt it was time to touch on the signals that tell you,
“Yes – now you’re operating as a true talent advisor.”
We believe that talent is becoming more and more strategic and this is being seen in an increasing number of companies across the globe as recruiters become talent advisors.
Here are some examples of Talent Advisor signals, pulled from John’s real-world discussions with hundreds of hiring managers and talent acquisition leaders, who regularly give feedback about corporate recruiter performance.
Trust
The first key signal is trust. You are trusted for your judgment, and usually this can be seen when hiring managers insist you are on the interviewing board or at least highly involved in the process, as they want your input on the decision and see it as valuable. You will also be given ownership and responsibility when it comes to making important process decisions, for example, a hiring manager will allow you to make the call if after phone screening them you feel they’d be a good fit for the role, you have the freedom to move them to interview stage and organise that interview without consulting or waiting for their CV review and feedback.
This trust has been earned as you have demonstrated technical and organisational knowledge to evaluate candidates, pipelines and market conditions.
Meeting, meeting, meeting
Next you’ll notice you are involved in more cross-functional and collaborative meetings, which again comes down to your input being viewed as valuable. Talent Advisors should expect to be asked to share overarching talent strategies, diversity wins, training opportunities, and deep dives into metrics.They regularly get pulled into director-level meetings for business reviews, and are trusted to bring insights into conversations with HR while being expected to help shape the overall talent strategy.
This ramp up in meetings will come about because talent advisors are seen as at least an equal to their HR partner, and are pulled in to help build the plan and manage expectations against aggressive or unrealistic timelines.
Admin becomes a thing of the past
Talent advisors have managers that work hard to get admin work off their plate, and business leaders will usually ask if their team can help with things like scheduling or planning a recruiting event to free up the Talent Advisor as they will be needed to do more high-value sourcing, screening, and closing work.
With Trust, Comes Responsibility
The transition to Talent Advisor brings with it excess responsibility and ownership over key tasks and decisions. Talent acquisition managers, HR partners, and other peers seek your help to lead internal projects and programs. They want feedback and insights about recruiting of course, but also to hear about the hiring teams they support, the markets they recruit from, and the diversity, compensation, and interviewer capacity issues they face.
As a result of this built trust and responsibility, you’ll also become a role model and mentor to other recruiters, demonstrating the sought out talent advisor approach.
If all of these signals ring a bell for you, you are operating as a Talent Advisor. If you are not quite there yet but on the road, the best way to achieve this transition to becoming a talent advisor in our mind is to arm yourself with knowledge and market insight.
