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

The mindset shifts as a recruiter moves into a Talent Advisor 1.0 or 2.0 role. It changes from how we best support the business to how we help shape the business and achieve business goals with talent. Talent advising is about transformation of the business.

How will competencies shift as recruiters move to more value add roles as talent advisors? Beyond the core skills of corporate recruiting - like sourcing, screening, closing, gather feedback, getting approvals, these are some of the key competencies I see as differentiators.

What do you think and see?

TRANSACTIONAL RECRUITER

• Customer focus (with hiring manager as my customer and the recruiter as order taker)
• Good communication and relationship building skills
• Good selling/influencing skills
• Multi-tasking and adaptability

TODAY’S TALENT ADVISOR 1.0

• Business acumen and curiosity
• Advanced selling, candidate engagement, and influencing skills
• Analytical root issue diagnosis, pattern matching, and problem solving
• Interpreting and leveraging external and internal metrics and insights to craft tailored recruiting strategy
• Influencing hiring managers
• Storytelling to complement data
• Coaching hiring managers on tradeoffs and consequences of bad recruiting strategies and processes
• Navigating through uncertainty and complex relationships
• Trust building
• AI-fluency (today, it’s mostly prompting and content creation focused)

Business acumen has always been a key competency of great recruiters, and an incredible differentiator when I've made promotion decisions to Sr Recruiter or Recruiting Manager as a practitioner. There's no question that curiosity and business acumen is key to credibility with the business, and credibility is key to building trust and influencing.

TOMORROW’S TALENT ADVISOR 2.0

All TA 1.0 plus…

• Holistic talent strategy: Org design, role design, career progressions, compensation, and talent reviews with buy, build, bot expertise
• Talent Intelligence: Leveraging AI to pattern match across large data sets to identify root issues, recommend solutions, and forecast
• Change management leadership
• Executive-level stakeholder management expertise
• Deep candidate assessment and decision-making leadership expertise, with a focus on hiring people who will complement the existing AI and talent on the team
• Leveraging AI to inspect and measure quality of candidates, new hires, and employees
• Candidate fraud detection
• Guardian of company-wide hiring principles (the “company way” of hiring -who we hire, how we hire)
• Expert influencing, framing, guiding/coaching, and training skills

For Talent Advisor 2.0s, the shift will be more towards holistic thinking, driving adoption, making human connections, and building and ensuring trust and fairness. If TA 1.0 was about guiding and pushing back on unrealistic hiring managers, delivering more insights, and pushing the WHAT of best practices – with a lens on speed – then TA 2.0 is much more about the “so what?” and “now what?” with a focus on quality, role design, org makeup, and talent capabilities.

General competencies all humans will need to succeed in most corporate jobs

In general, humans with high paying jobs – in any corporate function - will be great at:

• decision making with ambiguous or conflicting information,
• challenging underlying assumptions and avoiding groupthink, empathy, and human connection,
• giving meaning to the work and finding purpose,
• building trust,
• generating novel ideas and reframing problems in new ways,
• demonstrating curiosity and an always-learning mindset,
• driving alignment and leading people to focus on a common vision,
• making principled, ethical decisions,
• prioritizing investments of time and money based on big picture goals,
• creating stories that resonate emotionally, and
• gaining buy-in when data and logic alone doesn’t persuade.

Check out more free talent advisor role resources and download our free Talent Advisor kit at www.TalentAdvisor.com