How to Be a Talent Advisor
At Recruiting Toolbox, we’ve listened to execs and hiring managers at hundreds of companies in 20+ countries, and almost ALL of them want their recruiters to step up and play more of a Talent Advisor role. With AI and automation poised to take over almost all of the transactional work of recruiters, it’s critical – for your own career and your ability to impact the business – that you and your recruiting teams are on the path to talent advising.
We’re here to help. Below are free recruiter resources to help ensure you and your team are going beyond an order taker to play a more strategic role around recruiting strategies, process leadership, insights, and education.
TALENT ADVISOR:
A strategic recruiting professional who delivers value beyond filling jobs. At their core, talent advisors are strategic influencers who see the company as their customer, the hiring manager as their partner, and quality hires and high-performer retention as their measures of success. They are experts at engaging the business and leveraging AI to solve the big root issues impacting speed, quality, conversion, fairness, candidate experience, and retention issues.
Talent Advisor Kit
How do you know if you and your team operate as Talent Advisors today? How is the role of recruiter evolving from transactional to Talent Advisor, to something beyond? What are the career paths for recruiters in a world of AI and automation? Our team here at Recruiting Toolbox is engaged by world-class companies to help elevate their recruiters to Talent Advisors, and as part of our work, we assess how effectively recruiters engage and influence hiring managers. Use this kit – as a recruiter or TA leader – to think through how the role of recruiter needs to show up inside your organization.
Evolution of the Recruiter Role
| TRANSACTIONAL RECRUITER: A recruiter who takes the order from their customer – the hiring manager, accommodates hiring manager preferences for ideal candidate profiles, interview team makeup, and candidate selection, and manages recruiting like a process, not a strategic opportunity.
Most communication is via email and through systems and forms. To the hiring manager, this role feels mostly like a customer service-y recruiter who manages a process. |
1995–2010 era Corporate Recruiter FocusPrimary measures of success: How well am I doing for my customer, the Hiring Manager? Metrics: Hiring Manager satisfaction, speed/time to fill, compliance with process, “noise” caused by open reqs. Primary Engagement with the Business: Intake meeting to take the order, to verify the job description is accurate, to fill the req. Focus on the hiring manager. Biggest Business Question They Can Handle Independently: “What’s the status of my open req and what can you do to get it filled?” |
| High risk of being replaced by RPO or AI with HM self-service. |
| TALENT ADVISOR 1.0: A strategic recruiting professional who delivers value beyond filling jobs. At their core, talent advisors are business-aligned, strategic influencers who see the company as their customer, the hiring manager as their partner, and speed, quality, and fairness as their measures of success.
Most communication is live, with a heavy focus on relationship building. To the hiring manager, this role feels mostly like a trusted executive recruiter. |
2010–2025+ era Corporate Recruiter FocusPrimary measures of success: How much does the Hiring Manager trust me to make good recommendations to get them the hires they need? Metrics: Hires vs plan/priorities, Hiring Manager partnership, hiring funnel effectiveness, time in stage effectiveness. Primary Engagement with the Business: Strategy meeting, to co-build the plan to hire the right external and internal talent. Focus on the hiring manager. Biggest Business Question They Can Handle Independently: “What do we need to do differently in the business to hire the kind of talent I need, and why should we invest the time in what you recommend?” |
| Medium risk of being replaced by RPO or AI, but we may employ way fewer of them than in the past (recruiters we employ will be Talent Advisor 1.0 or 2.0 in the future — no more transactional recruiters) |
| TALENT ADVISOR 2.0 / TALENT MANAGER: A strategic talent professional who operates more like an executive recruiter when working on priority reqs, a TA manager and talent management expert when engaging with business leaders about their org’s talent and skill needs, and a tech expert or analyst when reviewing outputs from automation/AI tools and coaching hiring managers who rely heavily on self-service AI tools to fill their easier, well-defined reqs. At their core, TA 2.0s are experts at translating business needs into talent implications, diagnosing root issues and fixing problems that impact the business’s organization health, redesigning jobs, coaching and driving change/adoption with hiring managers, and candidate coaching, assessment, and selling. They are AI-fluent, but still very relationship oriented.
Communication is usually real-time, high-touch, relationship- and trust-oriented, but TA 2.0s also leverage AI self-service to reduce the need for transactional communication between humans. To the hiring manager, this role feels more like a TA manager with coaching mixed in. |
2026+ era Possible Corporate Recruiter EvolutionPrimary measures of success: Does the business have the talent/skills needed to deliver on our goals? Metrics: Overall org health (talent mix vs business needs), quality of hire, vacancy rates, regretted attrition, compensation ROI, onboarding effectiveness, internal mobility/talent flow success, succession plan effectiveness, development success (build ROI), hiring manager capability and change adoption, recruiter and HM compliance (bots will review calls and communication with internal and external candidates and provide feedback), people manager hours saved, fairness/trust. Primary Engagement with the Business: Org health review, with a focus on filling current skill gaps and future skill needs through buy, build, bind, and bot strategies. A much broader talent management focus — including leading or co-leading talent reviews with HRBPs — than just external talent acquisition focus. Less focus on individual hiring managers, with a bigger focus on the department or function VP-level leader and their overall org. Biggest Business Question They Can Handle Independently: “What do we need to do to ensure my org has the talent and skills needed now and in the future—via hiring or developing talent—to deliver on our business goals, and how do we do that realistically?” |
| Low risk of being replaced by RPO or AI |
What are the Triggers that Might Push or Pull Us from
Transactional to TA 1.0 to possibly TA 2.0?
What Impact Will AI and Automation and HM Self-service
Have On the Role of the Recruiter?
Assume today’s transactional recruiters are largely replaced with fewer, highly paid Talent Advisor recruiters. How will they spend their time differently?
Self Diagnose: Am I Doing the Things Talent Advisors Do?
How do you know if you and your recruiting colleagues are operating as Talent Advisors? Our team here at Recruiting Toolbox is engaged by world-class companies to help elevate their recruiters to Talent Advisors, and as part of our work, we assess how effectively recruiters engage and influence hiring managers. Leverage what we’ve learned to self-assess your capabilities with these free diagnostic guides – one uses the lens of today’s Talent Advisor, and the other uses the more future focused Talent Advisor 2.0/Talent Manager role, which is part recruiter, part talent management expert.
Reframe Your Thinking
Here are some great articles that’ll help you reframe how you think about your role.
- Who is your customer? (Hint: It’s not the Hiring Manager.)
- Stop calling it an intake form. Please. (Words matter, and that first meeting you have with the Hiring Manager sets the tone for the whole relationship.)
- Think through how AI may impact your role (Some candidates will be hired almost 100% through conversational AI)
Third, watch some recorded presentations filled with free recruiter resources to help you learn how to be a Talent Advisor. A lot of this is focused on strategy and being strategic – but it’s done in a way that’s more realistic for a practitioner like you (versus some high-level consultant’s or academic’s recommendations).
At Recruiting Toolbox, we see recruiters as so much more than req fillers. We’re on a mission to elevate our profession so that we’re all operating as Talent Advisors.
John Vlastelica, our founder, delivered a bunch of #1 rated presentations at conferences like LinkedIn TalentConnect, Unleash/HR Tech Europe, and RecFest, where he shares very practical best practices that he’s personally leveraged as a corporate recruiting leader plus best practices leveraged by Recruiting Toolbox clients. Warning: These presentations are PG-13 – he swears, sometimes a lot, so if kids are watching, wear headphones!
click to open
Talent Advisor Podcasts
How about some audio-only best practices?
Check out these podcast episodes that focus on hiring manager engagement and talent advising.
Talent Advisor Podcasts
How about some audio-only best practices?
Check out these podcast episodes that focus on hiring manager engagement and talent advising.
Critical Conversations
To effectively operate as a Talent Advisor, you have to be able to set and manage expectations, and then push-back when hiring managers are being unrealistic, right? Check out our advice on how to lead some key conversations with hiring managers.
Custom Training
by Recruiting Toolbox
“Feedback on the workshop was hugely positive. It was a fantastic refresh for some, new skills for others, but each person walked away from the workshop realizing that they can be better tomorrow as a recruiter than they were today because of this training.”
Electronic Arts
Leading the Interview Process
So much focus in talent acquisition is on sourcing. In fact, ask a hiring manager what the root issues are to their problems, and you’ll hear “more candidates” 75% of the time. But we know that to make the quality hires the business wants, we need to put just as much strategy into our interview and decision making process as our sourcing approach. Check out these resources below to get more strategic about the way you build and lead your interview process.
Address Candidate Fraud and Cheating
With candidate AI tools, identity fraud and cheating risks are high and serious. What role should Talent Advisors play to ensure the assessment process generates quality talent?
Process Leadership
Speed has been the love language of hiring managers for years, but since Covid’s scale up and AI’s arrival, most hiring managers now look to us to deliver recruiting processes that are focused on quality (bust still fast). Read more below to learn how to improve critical steps in the recruiting process.
Are our Hiring Managers effective?
We’ve trained and led focus groups with thousands of hiring managers all over the world. As part of that work, we’ve seen hiring managers range from passive participants in an interviewing process who are quick to complain to full-on talent champions, leading workaround candidate attraction, interviewing strategy, diversity, selling, and training. What is the makeup of your hiring manager community? How do you make your hiring managers better? Check out The Hiring Manager Maturity Model to evaluate your current mix and identify how to create a culture of recruiting, where everyone operates as an extension of the recruiting team, for your company.
John Vlastelica: The 5 biggest lessons I learned from my smartest hiring managers
Our founder, John Vlastelica, shared 5 of the biggest lessons he learned from his smartest hiring managers while working as a TA leader at companies like Amazon and Expedia. You can either read the blog post, written by the host, Social Talent, outlining what he shared, or listen to the conversation with Johnny Campbell live, on the video here on this page.
Create a Culture of Recruiting
Talent Advisors need to know how to engage, train, measure, and give feedback to hiring managers on their capabilities as hiring managers. Check out these articles below for how-to best practices when you’re trying to get HMs to play more than a resume reviewer and interviewer role.
Get curious. Really curious.
Great Talent Advisors are curious. And that curiosity makes them more valuable, more interesting, more insightful, and more aligned to the business needs. John Vlastelica wrote this article for LinkedIn’s Talent Blog, where he makes the case that curiosity may be the most important characteristic of great recruiters, and shares some of the key questions every recruiter should ask to get smarter.
How do we keep getting smarter? Here are suggested blogs and newsletters to read to stay sharp on all things talent and business:
Recruiting Toolbox Services
Looking for more Talent Advisor
best practices?
Hope you enjoyed all the free recruiter resources above! Looking for more best practices? Sign up to get our every week-or-two posts from our blog, like us on Facebook, and connect with us on LinkedIn to get updates on best practice white papers, how-to guides, presentation content, and webinars/podcasts we like or produce.
If you’re part of a corporate recruiting team with at least 12 recruiters, check out our custom-built Talent Advisor training. It’s been leveraged by hundreds of recruiters at all kinds of companies, including Recruiting Toolbox client companies like Disney, Walmart, Target, TripAdvisor, Nike, USAA, Nestle, Salesforce, Autodesk, Northrop Grumman, Google, and Atlassian.
If you’re part of a smaller team, or work as a solo recruiter, we have some of our best Talent Advisor training content online, available to purchase through our online training partner. It’s also good for companies with massive scale – companies like Intel, Uber, Oracle, IBM, and hundreds of other companies love our online Talent Advisor content. Contact us to learn more.
And, if you’re thinking – this is GREAT, but let’s say I’m operating as a Talent Advisor – now how do I get my hiring managers to be better at their jobs? We got you. Check out our Hiring Manager Maturity Model, and then check out our custom hiring manager training. 50% of our business is helping companies define their hiring standards/bar, and then building custom hiring manager training workshops, with a focus on sourcing and engagement, interviewing and selection, selling and candidate experience, process leadership and speed, and more. Learn more about why companies like LinkedIn, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Booking, Epic Games, Nubank, Dolby, Pokemon, Electronic Arts, Pinterest, and Target engage us – and trust us – to train their hiring managers and interviewers.
If you’re a head of TA on the transformation journey, check out these critical questions you should be asking yourself as you think about how your team evolves.
Will we have any junior Talent Advisors?
How will my new Talent Advisors overlap with HRBP roles?
Do we trust our HMs to leverage HM self service without TA handholding?
Are my Recruiters good at assessing talent, and will they have incentives to be keepers of a high hiring bar, with push back if candidate quality isn’t high enough?
Will the business trust us enough to offer up TA 2.0 recommendations that go beyond hiring external talent?
Do we have a well-defined set of hiring principles to inform AI so that it can ensure we hire the right talent and make the right tradeoffs when it coaches us and our HMs?
How do I get my recruiters today the exposure they need to the business to earn the Talent Advisor role with our business leaders?
If HMs have self service, what kind of candidates might slip through the cracks? Internals, silver medalists, candidates from the "wrong" schools or companies?
What do you do with the recruiters - even the good ones - who don't want to be talent advisors? Do you let them opt in and out?
If curiosity is key to recruiter success and adaptability, can you teach it to someone who doesn't have it?
How will the timing of the tech/AI I implement line up with the readiness of my TA team to move into these new roles? If the tech comes too early, then what happens to my team?
Where will my TA 1.0s and 2.0s come from? Will I be able to afford to buy and/or build them fast enough? Am I being realistic about my ability to build them from my current pool of recruiters?