Hold Still While I Talent Advise You

This post first appeared on John’s Try Harder is Not a Strategy LinkedIn Newsletter. 

For years, the most savvy TA leaders I know have been telling recruiters they need to become Talent Advisors.

Be more strategic. Understand the business. Challenge assumptions. Bring insights. Influence hiring decisions. Don’t just take orders.

I’m obviously a believer.

But I think many of us have overlooked a pretty important part of this transformation:

• What if hiring managers don’t know what strategic advice looks like?
• What if hiring managers don’t know how to leverage a Talent Advisor?
• What if hiring managers don’t actually want advising – what if they just want transactional, req-filling support?

My team and I have led focus groups with thousands of hiring managers and business execs over the last 20 years, with a big focus on gaps between what they need, what they want, and what value they’re actually getting from their recruiters. And often, when I ask what “strategy” or higher-value support from a recruiter looks like, I hear a lot of the same things.

• Market insights.
• Better sourced talent.
• Plans to go after passive talent.
• Helping with a difficult close.

Those are all valuable. But they’re mostly still req-level recruiting services. They’re things the recruiter does for the hiring manager.

What’s often missing is the recruiter helping the hiring manager think differently or make a better decision. Why? Many business leaders have simply never experienced recruiting that way.

If you're a hiring manager, and every recruiter you’ve worked with has asked for a job description, scheduled an intake meeting, sent you candidates, coordinated interviews and asked for feedback, that’s what recruiting is to you.

You can’t order off a menu you’ve never seen.

Hold still while I talent advise you :)

This creates an interesting problem when organizations decide they want their recruiters to become more strategic. We’ve trained thousands of recruiters in over 20 countries to be Talent Advisors – custom workshops that train recruiters to lead, guide, advise, and show up as a problem solver. Many of the conversational approaches we teach focus on how to challenge assumptions, push back, reframe things so that the HM cares and will invest her time, push back when they’re unrealistic, and advise on hiring decisions.

And then we send them back into the business. And sometimes, this is what plays out when the recruiter engages the hiring manager differently.

The recruiter says: “I’d like to understand the business problem we’re trying to solve.”

The hiring manager says: “It’s in the job description.”

Recruiter: “Can we identify which of these requirements really predict success – what’s really a must have, what’s trainable, what’s realistic?”

HM: “They’re all required.”

R: “OK, well, I’m worried – this req is likely to stay open much longer than you want if we’re going to this market with that salary and this long list of requirements…”

HM: “Yeah, ok. How many candidates can I expect to get from you this week? Do we already have any resumes for me to review? I've got a meeting in 15 minutes, so I'd like to just get a sense of next steps."

At some point it starts to feel to the recruiter like: Hold still while I Talent Advise you.

We tend to interpret that resistance as a recruiter capability problem. And sure, maybe the recruiter needs more confidence and skill. (It takes many reps to get great at talent advising conversations.). Maybe they need to go in with more business acumen, better insights, more tactics for improving speed and quality, and more courage.

But I think there’s another problem hiding in plain sight. Talent advising has an adoption problem.

How much time have we invested teaching the business what they should expect from a great recruiter? Do hiring managers even know what to expect? And if we offer it, will they “hold still” while we engage in more strategic conversations?

I think hiring managers tend to fall into a few different categories.

Some really do just want candidates and req process support. “Here’s my opening. Go find me people to interview.” They may actively resist anything that feels like the recruiter wandering outside that expectation-lane.

Others aren’t resistant at all. They’ve just never seen anything different. These are the hiring managers who experience a great Talent Advisor and essentially say: “I didn’t know recruiters could do that. Wow, this is great!”

And then there’s another level. My fantasy-level. The world I want to live in.

The hiring manager that regularly pulls the recruiter into the conversation.

• “I don’t want to make this decision until I hear what my recruiter thinks.”
• “There are a lot of tradeoffs here. Let’s get recruiting into this conversation.”
• “We’re not doing a good enough job selecting talent. Can you help us figure out what’s happening?”

That, to me, is one of the most important signals that a recruiter is actually talent advising, and is seen as a Talent Advisor by the business. Not whether recruiters have completed Talent Advisor training. Not whether they’re producing market insights. Not whether they’ve changed their intake meeting template. Not whether they’ve changed their job title to Talent Advisor or Strategic Business Partner or Talent Architect.

Does the business seek out their judgment because it believes involving the recruiter will lead to a better decision?

That’s a much higher bar.

This is where I think TA leaders have an opportunity. We need to show business leaders what great Talent Advising looks like. We need to help them understand what they should expect from recruiters beyond sourcing and process management. And when a recruiter does some value-add talent advising – value that the business comments on, proof that the recruiter is adding real value beyond just getting reqs filled – we need to celebrate that. And similarly, if a recruiter has a really challenging HM who is not receptive, we need to coach the recruiter on how to better engage that HM. We need our recruiters to get their reps in to get better at this, and make it safe for them to operate as talent advisors.

Because we can’t simply announce that recruiters are now strategic partners and expect hiring managers to play along.

On some level, Talent Advisor isn’t a title we get to give ourselves. It’s based on value we deliver. It’s a relationship we earn with our business leaders.

Note: I got 20x better at Talent Advising when I had high-expectation hiring managers — and, frankly, really difficult hiring managers with wildly unrealistic expectations of me, candidates, compensation, and and and…(Thank you, Amazon!). They forced me to get better.

Maybe the next phase of the Talent Advisor movement isn’t just teaching recruiters how to advise. Maybe it’s teaching the business what good Talent Advising looks like — so recruiters never have to say: “Hold still while I Talent Advise you.” :)

P.S. Want a laptop sticker like the image in this post? Come see me at Recfest in Nashville in September 2026, and I'll give you one.

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