Article 1 of 6: You Cannot Train Someone Into Becoming a Talent Advisor

This article is part of a 6-piece TA Leadership Series: From Operational Recruiter to Strategic Talent Advisor. Link to the next article.

If you want your recruiters to become more strategic, you have to change how you lead them

For years, Talent Acquisition leaders have talked about moving recruiters from operational recruitment toward becoming strategic talent advisors. We invest in stakeholder-management training, business-acumen programmes, better job intake frameworks, structured interviewing, data capabilities and increasingly sophisticated technology. We tell recruiters that they should understand the business, challenge hiring managers, use data and operate more proactively. All of those things matter, but there is a fundamental limitation to what training can achieve if the environment people return to after the training continues to treat them as operational executors.

This is where I think many TA leadership teams create a contradiction without realising it. We tell recruiters that we want them to become strategic, but the TA leader continues to have the strategic conversations. The TA leader owns the change projects, makes the difficult decisions, solves escalated problems and presents the results to leadership. Recruiters may be invited to participate, but their primary role remains the execution of recruitment activities around individual jobs. We should not be surprised when people who spend most of their working lives receiving and executing tasks continue to think operationally.

The transition from operational recruiter to strategic talent advisor requires knowledge, but it also requires a change in the level at which someone is expected to think and take responsibility. Strategic thinking develops when people repeatedly have to understand a situation, interpret what is happening, make choices, consider consequences and take responsibility for an outcome. You cannot fully recreate that experience in a classroom. At some point, the actual work has to change.

This is also why becoming more structured should never be confused with becoming more strategic. A TA function can have a beautifully documented recruitment process, strong technology, consistent meetings and excellent dashboards while remaining completely reactive. If the team still starts thinking when a requisition arrives and stops thinking when that requisition closes, it may be a very well organised operational function, but it is still operational. Strategic Talent Acquisition starts when people understand how their work connects to broader business needs and begin taking responsibility beyond the next activity in the process.

In practice, I believe TA leaders can accelerate that transition through five leadership behaviours:

• Make people the kings and queens of their own domains by giving them real decision-making authority and the safety to learn when things do not go as planned.
• Lift their exposure by giving them responsibility for conversations with more senior business leaders and broader business areas.
• Stop owning every improvement project yourself and give people genuine end-to-end ownership of change initiatives.
• Never accept only a problem; expect people to investigate what is happening, develop a point of view and propose possible solutions or clearly define what support they need.
• Apply the CEO test to the work they produce by asking whether they would be comfortable putting their name on it and showing it directly to the CEO.

These are not five tricks for making recruiters appear more strategic. They are five changes in the way a TA leader distributes authority, exposure and responsibility across a team. Together they shift the basic relationship between the leader and the people working for them.

The leadership environment is stronger than any training programme

Training is still important. If you want recruiters to conduct strong job intake meetings, challenge a profile based on the actual success drivers of the role or facilitate a structured hiring decision, you should absolutely teach them how to do it. Strong processes are equally important because they create repeatable ways of working, and technology should support those processes rather than force people to work around them.

However, those things form the infrastructure around behaviour; they do not replace the behaviour itself. A recruiter can attend an excellent business-partnering programme on Monday and return on Tuesday to a leader who still takes over every important stakeholder conversation. In that environment, the lesson being taught by the operating model is stronger than the lesson taught in the classroom.

The same applies to accountability. You can tell someone that they are responsible for a business area, but if every meaningful decision needs to be approved by you, the person is not actually responsible for it. You can tell someone that you want them to think strategically, but if they are given tasks instead of outcomes, they will naturally focus on completing those tasks. You can encourage innovation, but if the first failed experiment results in blame or authority being taken away, people will quickly learn that avoiding mistakes is safer than taking ownership.

This is fundamentally a leadership question. The behaviour you want from the team has to be reflected in the environment you create around them.

What changes when you lead differently

When you genuinely give people ownership, the questions they ask begin to change. Instead of asking what they should do next, they start asking what outcome they are trying to achieve. Instead of reporting that something is going wrong, they start thinking about why it is happening and what could be changed. Instead of waiting for a project plan, they begin creating one. Instead of relying on the TA leader to manage senior stakeholders, they develop their own relationships with the business.

This transition matters because achieving Recruiting Excellence ultimately requires a TA function that can consistently deliver the right talent when the business needs it. That cannot depend on one strategic TA leader personally connecting every operational activity to the wider business strategy. The capability has to exist throughout the function.

Imagine a TA leader with ten recruiters who is the only person capable of discussing workforce plans with leadership, challenging a divisional leader on talent risk, building an improvement initiative or presenting a recommendation based on recruitment data. That leader may personally be very strategic, but the TA function is not. It remains dependent on one individual to translate between the business and the recruitment operation.

Now imagine the same team six or twelve months later when individual recruiters understand the business areas they support, regularly speak with leaders about future needs, own improvement initiatives and make decisions within clearly defined domains. The TA leader has not become less important. The opposite has happened: the leader has built strategic capability into the organisation rather than keeping it concentrated in one role.

Your job is to make yourself less operationally necessary

This can be uncomfortable because the work you need to start giving away is often exactly the work that helped you become a TA leader in the first place. You may be excellent at stakeholder management, presenting to executives, solving escalations or designing new recruitment initiatives. Those are visible activities and they can become part of your professional identity.

However, leadership changes the purpose of those capabilities. The question is no longer only whether you can do them well; the question becomes whether you can develop other people who can do them well without you.

That means progressively giving away conversations, decisions, projects and visibility. It does not mean abandoning the team or removing yourself completely. It means changing from being the person who does the strategic work to the person who creates the conditions in which strategic work can happen throughout the team.

This series explores those five leadership behaviours in more depth:

• Article 2, “Make Them Kings and Queens of Their Domain,” looks at authority, decision-making and what real ownership actually means.
• Article 3, “Stop Having the Strategic Conversations for Them,” explores why recruiters need exposure above requisition level.
• Article 4, “Stop Owning Every Change Project Yourself,” looks at using real project ownership as a development mechanism.
• Article 5, “Never Accept Only a Problem,” focuses on teaching people to investigate, recommend and take responsibility for moving issues forward. Finally,
• Article 6, “Would You Show This to the CEO Right Now?” looks at how to develop outcome thinking in the everyday work people produce.

The underlying principle across all six articles is simple. If you want people to become strategic talent advisors, do not only explain what a strategic talent advisor should do. Build a working environment in which strategic behaviour is required, supported and expected.