Recruitment is moving into a more sophisticated era and the role of Talent Advisor is a clear professional boundary that identifies them as something more than a Recruiter. A Talent Partner can mean many things across different organisations. When structured (and labelled!) correctly, Talent Advisors are a Commercial Hiring Coach offering high-value consulting and strategic decision support: helping leaders make informed workforce choices, challenge traditional and sometimes outdated hiring practices, and align talent decisions with business reality. While traditional recruitment predominantly focuses on external hiring, Talent Advisory adopts a comprehensive, multi-channel approach. This method integrates internal mobility, external recruitment, talent sharing and automation to devise optimum strategies to “get work done” and help drive business success.
Beyond hiring, a modern Advisor:
– Challenges whether the brief reflects the work that actually needs to be done, not just the role that has historically existed
– Coaches stakeholders to help them balance what the company wants with what the market can actually deliver
– Considers a Build, Borrow, Bot options before determining if the organisation needs to Buy (hire) talent
– Pushes and advises on assumptions such as all roles need to be full time or based where the Hiring Manager is located
– Connects hiring decisions to bigger organisational goals, ensuring salary offers, role design, and talent strategy support progress on issues such as the gender pay gap, age and or other potential biases
We asked Craig Brewer, Head of Talent Acquisition at Worley what he looks for in a Talent Advisor:
- A passion for complex problem solving: Hopefully the TA community agrees with me here! Every role that you work on and every person that you partner with, will have a different problem or challenge for you to help solve. Yes, we always want to be leveraging from a good set of fundamentals when it comes to a search however, we also need to be prepared to adjust to the specifics of the challenge that is in front of us, whether that be the stakeholder themselves or the target market of people that you are trying to hire, there’s no such thing as an easy role to fill.
- High level relationship management and stakeholder engagement skills: Having the ability to partner with hiring managers who have hired 100’s of times as well as those that have never hired someone before is vitally important for the 2025 TA Partner. Yes, things like AI and supercharged recruitment CRM’s are game changers however, the ability to develop strong working relationships and trust with your hiring managers will remain vitally important. Being a great relationship manager means you are willing to say no and or challenge your hiring managers, asking them to think differently about part or all of the process that they are suggesting. This takes some courage it’s certainly not for everyone, yet it’s vitally important if you are going to have a real impact on the business as a whole.
- Delivery focus with a partnership approach: TA is one of those area where we will always be measured (in some way) on a bunch of metrics that are dependent on your ability to deliver. Whether it’s a diversity target or time to fill, it’s all about your ability to deliver an outcome. The one thing that has changed is that this responsibility is shared between the TA Partner and your hiring managers. A successful outcome is just as dependent on the efforts of the TA Partner as it is the person(s) who are making the hiring decision. Great TA Partners understand this and enjoy working as part of a team and know that the team extends to the people they are working with outside of TA.
- A willingness to embrace Recruitment Technology: There’s a rumour that we are all going to be replaced by AI technology and recruitment “bots”. It’s simply not true. What is happening however is that AI and advancements in recruitment technology are here to stay. From what I can see, TA Tech is facilitating process improvements and making our lives easier, removing a lot of the heavy lifting from TA Partner’s roles. A willingness to embrace this movement in technology is really important as these changes are going to continue into the foreseeable future.
- Be comfortable with data: Data does or should form the foundation of any TA Partners approach to their role and their assignments. It’s how we explore and understand a talent market and it’s also going to form part of how you measure your success. The good news is that data is quite easy to access and develop a level of comfort with. I like people to be comfortable with this concept as it’s such a terrific starting point to any search or TA project. Knowing your market inside out via reliable data sources allows you to develop an approach that is reliable and solid, rather than going off what something thinks or a previous experience that someone has had that could be outdated.
As business expectations grow, more will be required from TA, particularly if we want to demonstrate value beyond what can be automated. The question is: are you still hiring against outdated Recruiter position descriptions, or have you redesigned the role so you can bring in people who are ready to deliver as true Talent Advisors?
