AI and automation will make transactional recruiters largely obsolete in the coming years. It will become more critical than ever that as recruiting leaders and recruiters we 1) deliver value as Talent Advisors and 2) articulate our value — as humans adding insights, guiding hiring teams, and creating high-touch experiences — to our bosses and internal stakeholders.

For the last 19 years, as a consultant to many of the most interesting, most complex companies around the world, my team and I have been on a mission to help recruiters and hiring managers improve speed and quality. Here are 25 links to free resources to help you deliver a Talent Advisor experience as a corporate recruiter.

What good looks like

1. What is a Talent Advisor, anyway?: I differentiate the Talent Advisor recruiter from the transactional recruiter here.

2. How to evaluate your own performance as a Talent Advisor: I built this Talent Advisor Diagnostic Tool to drive self-awareness. It’s been downloaded thousands of times by recruiters and TA leaders looking to better define what good looks like as a Talent Advisor. I’m working on an update to capture Talent Advisor 2.0 in a world of bots and AI, but for now this classic still sets the bar high for our profession. You can read more about it here. 

3. Three things to stop doing if you want to be seen as a Talent Advisor: I admit it: I used to do all three of these things as a corporate recruiter.

4. Five signals you’re operating as a Talent Advisor: On the flip side, here are five things I see when recruiters are operating as true talent advisors. You’re probably going to hate No. 2, and No. 5 may be hard to swallow — at first.

Creating a culture of recruiting

5. How to create a culture of recruiting: The secret sauce to the most successful hiring teams is — ready for this? — hiring managers who see recruiting as part of their day jobs not as a favor to TA. Check out this webinar hosted by SocialTalent where I share some of the keys to creating a culture of high hiring manager ownership. I also interview Dani Monaghan, the head of TA for Expedia, on her hiring culture goals and challenges. 

6. Reframe from “hiring manager as customer” to “hiring manager as partner”: One of the biggest shifts we need to make in TA is to move to a partnership relationship with the hiring manager. This is hard to do for many, especially people-pleasers. Learn more about my journey from “hiring manager as my customer” to something else.

7. How to evaluate hiring manager performance: I built the hiring manager maturity model to help TA leaders diagnose why hiring managers and hiring teams were — or weren’t — operating as the kind of HMs that attract and close top talent. You can download the tool here. Note the reframing of why HMs need to step up on page 3.

8. Examples of best practices leveraged in a culture of recruiting: Want some examples of what companies who have this kind of culture do differently? The Talent Blog captured best practices from my No. 1–rated workshops at Talent Connect 2023 with 150 TA leaders. 

9. Holding HMs accountable: You know the kind of TA world I want to live in? One where HMs are measured and rewarded for being great HMs. How can we do this? For starters, check out this resource, where I’ve shared the 10 questions you can — and should — use in a survey to get feedback on hiring manager performance. 

Building skills as a talent advisor

10. How to engage and influence hiring managers: Here’s a podcast on the keys to partnering effectively with hiring managers. A leader at Amazon made this required listening for his new TA manager hires. It’s loaded with practical tips for engaging hiring managers as a Talent Advisor. 

11. How to give HMs what they really want (speed and quality): The folks at Recfest recorded my No. 1–rated talk in the U.K. on specific tactical best practices for helping hiring teams get more speed and quality.

12. How to lead seven essential conversations with hiring managers: In this virtual presentation recording, I talk through seven critical conversations in which I see recruiters needing to move from notetaker and order-taker to leader and Talent Advisor.

13. Nine ways to become a strategic Talent Advisor: The Talent Blog captured the highlights of my session at Talent Connect 2019 in which I walked through very specific examples of how we can show up more strategically in the real world. Their post includes a video of my talk and key slides. I was on a lot of cold medication that day and I do swear more than normal. :) So, please wear headphones if you’re watching this at work or have kids around. The video on YouTube has over 130k views with lots of comments reminding me that not all people appreciate my language or talking speed. :) 

14. How to curate and demonstrate curiosity: We’ve done live focus groups with 2,000+ hiring managers across hundreds of companies in more than 20 countries and one of the most frequent requests we hear is: “I want my recruiter to know my business better.” I’ve hired many corporate recruiters and recruiting leaders in my corporate career and I coach heads of TA now on building great TA functions. When we get to talking about what makes great recruiters great, all kinds of competencies float toward the top of the list but the one that must be present is curiosity. I’ve pulled together some great questions to help you improve how you engage hiring managers, learn, and demonstrate your investment in knowing more than keywords and target companies when sourcing. 

15. How to drive alignment: Misalignment is the root of all evil in recruiting, especially when it’s between the HM and the recruiter. We can waste so much time chasing what good looks like, wasting everyone’s time, including candidate time. In this Talent Blog article, I suggest we focus more on driving this by measuring a brand new metric: Time to Alignment. 

16. How to build a recruiting plan when hiring needs change all the time: This has got to be one of the most frustrating parts of trying to lead — the goalposts moving constantly. So, how do you build a hiring plan when the business’s hiring needs evolve quarter to quarter? Check out some tactics for contingency planning.

Developing your points of view on TA-critical topics

I’m not here to tell you how to think like me. But there are definitely some topics on which you should have a strong point of view. Below I share resources that highlight different ways of thinking about some traditional recruiting topics. I float a few ideas like Bar Raisers that are definitely not something I’d recommend for everyone.

17. It’s time to end the ideal candidate profile: I’m embarrassed to say that I used to use this language in kickoff meetings, and I let the hiring manager treat me like an order-taker there to capture their ideal candidate profile. I didn’t offer much in the way of education or pushback if they were getting too narrow and missing out on great talent. Why did I change my point of view on this? Learn more here.

18. Stop calling it an intake: OK, this may seem minor, but language does matter. My team and I are on a mission to move our profession away from “intakes” — which sound so “order-taker-y” — to something that captures the true intention: a co-built strategy for getting the business top talent. Learn more about the importance of framing up this critical meeting here.

19. Pros and cons of interviewing models from companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft: If you have hiring managers from some of the tech giants, it’s likely they’ll eventually talk to you about the great interviewing and hiring decision process they had at their big tech employer in the past. They may even push you to put something like Bar Raisers or hiring committees in place. Should you do it? Maybe. Learn about the pros and cons of programs like this. I built, led, and scaled Bar Raisers at Amazon and helped a big tech company implement Google-style hiring committees. And I learned a lot. You should know about these programs too. Watch my pros and cons webinar video and download slides here.

20. Why new hires shouldn’t hit the ground running: I love this article that talks about LinkedIn COO Dan Shapero’s shift away from “hit the ground running” to “hit the ground learning.” I wish I’d come up with this. His POV has been a game-changer for how I talk to hiring managers and it ties nicely with my ideal candidate article above. 

21. How to fix four of the biggest blockers to recruiting success: I’ve worked with so many companies in my 19 years as a consultant and I know — as a former head of TA — that so many of our blockers are not our talent competitors, our ATS, or our bad employer brand. They’re actually internal issues that we have a lot more control over than we think. This talk from Talent Connect 2018 was a bit controversial because I was calling BS on some of our profession’s victim mentality around compensation and things that slow us down. What do you think? 

22. Is the future of TA actually talent management?: I can’t believe how much my point of view has changed on the role of the recruiting team. Twenty years ago I wasn’t sure TA even belonged in HR. Now I think we need to bring the band back together and be much more holistic. Agree? Watch the video and download slides here.

23. Can TA build culture? Yes!: Dr. Tana Session, one of LinkedIn Learning’s most popular instructors, led a conversation with me about the pivotal role we in TA play in building culture. We talk about how culture risk can be mitigated if we intervene when hiring managers want to hire the same profile of talent — with that “hit the ground running” requirement — over and over again. Check out my video recorded conversation with her here.

24. What impact will AI have on recruiters?: I’ve been doing a lot of reading, workshopping, listening, and researching into the impact of AI on the role of the recruiter. Check out this recent Recruiting Future podcast with Matt Alder in which we explored the impact of AI on who we recruit for, our roles as recruiters, and the role and expectations of hiring managers . . . plus learn how companies like FedEx are hiring hundreds of thousands of people with no humans! 

25. We need a point of view on candidate cheating: Over 40,000 interviewers and hiring managers from around the world have participated in our live or online training and despite improvements in behavioral and evidence-based interviewing, I’m worried. I’m worried because the AI-powered tools candidates have access to will make it even harder for us to verify skills. Is it cheating for a candidate to leverage AI to prepare answers to questions real-time? Whatever your take is, you need to develop a company-wide point of view around this. What cheating is and isn’t shouldn’t be up to each hiring manager in your company. Read more about this important leadership opportunity here.

Final thoughts: The days of the transactional recruiter are numbered

I hope you find value in the free resources above. I’m not one to lead with a fear narrative but I do think it’s never been more important for us to level up our skills for influencing, coaching, and diagnosing and solving problems as well as elevating our credibility in the business (hiring manager) facing part of our jobs as recruiters. 

Showing up as a Talent Advisor has been a top-three priority for every head of TA we’ve worked with over the past 19 years, but there’s an urgency now that AI is taking over a lot of the transactional elements and HR tech vendors are beginning to build a lot more hiring manager self-service tools. The transactional recruiter, who order-takes and doesn’t lead and influence, will struggle to find a high-paying role inside corporations soon. 

I want you to win in your job and I share these resources in that spirit. 

If you have additional resources you find particularly useful, I’d love to get links from you on my LinkedIn post about this article. Please find me and add your voice and suggestions.

John Vlastelica is a former corporate recruiting leader with Amazon and Expedia turned consultant. He and his team at Recruiting Toolbox are hired by world-class companies to train hiring managers and recruiters, coach and train TA leaders, and help raise the bar on who they hire and how they hire. If you’re seeking more best practices, check out the free resources for recruiters at TalentAdvisor.com and for recruiting leaders at RecruitingLeadership.com. And if you’re a head of TA from a large company, check out www.RLL50.com for info on our special workshop just for senior recruiting leaders, where we’ll dig into the impact of AI on our TA orgs, redefine the role of the recruiter, and dig into best practices for driving adoption of new tech and role expectations with our recruiters and hiring managers. 

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