TL;DR: There is no TA transformation without clear goals and expectations. And goals and expectations are often ignored if there aren’t good accountability mechanisms. And there is no real accountability if you don’t also have good inspection mechanisms. 

Given the kind of work we do at Recruiting Toolbox — helping companies transform their TA teams to talent advisors — most of the heads of TA that I talk to are in the middle of a big journey. 

It’s usually a journey that includes some pretty major TA tech stack investments and changes. But the piece they bring us in to help with is around building skills and confidence in the recruiters and TA managers to show up, engage, diagnose, problem-solve, and influence the business (and often HR) better. To show up as more strategic, more focused on delivering speed, quality, diversity, and a candidate experience that’ll help the business get the talent it needs.

I wanted to share some of what I see in the organizations that are making big progress in their transformation journey. As I share, you’ll see how the “good intentions, but very little changes” outcome is — unfortunately — much too common. I’m going to primarily focus on the transformation from transactional recruiter to talent advisor, as that seems to be the biggest, most common transformation goal on the priority list of TA leaders right now, especially with all of the AI and automation tools coming into our space.

We have to clearly define what good looks like

First, there can be no transformation if it’s unclear to the recruiters what good looks like in the future-state TA org. 

We need to be sure to define what we mean — at each step in the process — when we say “be more strategic, operate as a talent advisor, don’t just be transactional.” 

So, obviously, change starts with defining what’s desired and identifying gaps and changes needed to get there. Goals and expectations are critical. We’ve got something that might help you here — it’s our talent advisor diagnostic tool, with eight specific expectations set for what it means to be a talent advisor recruiter at critical touch points with the business.

To ensure accountability, we must check in on everyday behavior

There will be almost zero change without some kind of accountability mechanism in place. If I’m a recruiter or TA manager who can nod my head, “Yes, boss, I hear ya — show up as a talent advisor — got it,” but not change my behaviors at all, keep my job, and even get my performance bonus, then something about this transformation isn’t working in the real world. 

We can redefine success, create new talent advisor competencies, and even embed those into our annual performance reviews, but if we don’t have mechanisms that are checking in on the everyday behavior changes then very little will change. 

We need to ensure that our teams are moving from customer-pleasing intake meetings to strategic kickoff meetings; pushing back on unrealistic hiring manager compensation expectations; influencing hiring managers to move away from ideal candidate profiles; and capturing critical data in the ATS/CRM around candidate dropout or offer decline reasons so they can use that data later to influence the business to, say, stop using 12-person interview teams or waiting three weeks to make a hiring decision.

There can be no accountability without inspection

Which leads me to my last point. There can be no (or very little) accountability without inspection. We need mechanisms in place to evaluate whether or not recruiters are showing up as talent advisors. We also need to evaluate whether or not they are leveraging the expensive tools we buy them, dispositioning candidates quickly, or focusing on diversity. 

You’re not a micromanager leader if you’re checking in to see if the behaviors you expect are actually happening. In fact, a bad manager sometimes manages by assumptions alone and then plays the victim when things don’t change (“I asked them to change, but we’re all so busy!”).

Tap into these four scalable inspection mechanisms to drive accountability around changes that are critical to your TA transformation

• Ask your recruiters to upload their notes from their kickoff meetings with hiring managers — including the target candidate profile info, sourcing plan priorities, interview structure with focus areas, and compensation expectations. This will allow you to spot-check to see if they’re having more strategic conversations and then, if they’re not, you can give them feedback.
• Change up your hiring manager survey questions so that they’re not measuring the old customer-service-y behaviors that sent a message that “pleasing your customer” was the expectation. If you’re asking recruiters to show up as talent advisors but measuring them as if they’re suppliers to the almighty hiring manager “customer” or HR rep, then you’re missing out on a way to get sharable feedback that can help you coach your recruiters with good data. And if you’re not surveying your recruiters on how effective their hiring managers are — as partners — then you’re missing out there too. (Check out my article on creating survey questions that reinforce the “hiring is a team sport” culture by asking questions such as “Did the hiring manager effectively engage their internal employees and external network to help generate leads, referrals, and candidates, and if not, why not?”)
• What gets measured, gets done, so take a look at which behaviors you reward and penalize in your recruiter performance metrics. Are you measuring all recruiters on the exact same metrics, with the same expectations, even though the different hiring teams your team supports may have very different priorities? For example, measuring recruiter A and B both on hitting a 45-day time-to-fill target is sending a very mixed message if your transformation journey includes more business-aligned goal-setting for TA, where you adapt the performance metrics to the priorities of the business. Imagine recruiter A is aligned to a VP in the business who just came off the worst attrition year in her life, after 18 months of “speed speed speed!” — now she’s all about quality of hire and doesn’t care about speed. While recruiter B is supporting a business that’s launching a new sales region this year and is all about speed and low vacancy rates. If you’re still holding recruiter A and B both to a hard-to-achieve speed (45-day TTF) metric, even though the business recruiter A supports absolutely would trade speed for quality, well, you’re not helping your transformation. In fact, you’re hurting it. Our metrics need to align to what the business needs and that probably means you need to move away from “one size fits all” federal-level metrics to more state-level (geo, department, function) specific recruiter performance metrics.
• Finally, if you’re looking to get your hiring managers to make better quality hiring decisions but you don’t have any visibility into the actual decision-making process because they 1) don’t have a debrief/decision meeting, or 2) they do, but your recruiters aren’t invited, or 3) they do, and your recruiters are invited, but all they do is listen for the decision and don’t play an active role in ensuring a fair, quality, fast decision is made, well, then you’re missing out on an inspection mechanism that can help you get the accountability needed to effect real change. And note: It doesn’t have to be the busy recruiter who sits in on every finalist candidate interview. For example, at Amazon, I built and led the bar raiser program, which put a quality-control person into every interview and hiring-decision meeting. You can learn more about pros and cons of programs like that at www.BarRaisers.com.

Final thoughts: Make sure your change plan includes inspection and accountability mechanisms

Real change, hard change — at scale — is a full-contact sport. If the stakes are high, you need to get the buy-in from execs and your boss and your team and the hiring teams. But you also need your own team of recruiters and all of the hiring managers and HR partners aligned and actually leveraging the new tools and processes you’re deploying while playing a bigger or different role in those processes. 

To make real change, there has to be accountability mechanisms. And to drive accountability, you need a way to inspect steps in the process to see if the changes are actually happening. If they’re not happening, course-correct and de-risk the transformation by — well — changing your change plan.

Trickle-down, high-trust, assumption-based change deployment doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for the 25-plus years I’ve been in TA. So, absolutely do all the high-level influencing and planning you need to do to get the change plan approved, funded, and teams aligned. But also build out your change implementation plan with inspection mechanisms and accountability mechanisms to ensure the change actually happens.

Do you have an inspection or accountability mechanism that works really well for recruiter, interviewer, or hiring manager change initiatives? Comment on my post about this on LinkedIn or DM me. I’d love to learn from you.

John Vlastelica is a former corporate recruiting leader 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. Additionally, if you’re going to attend LinkedIn Talent Connect in Phoenix in late October 2024, check out John’s two workshops for heads of TA on how AI will impact the size and makeup of our TA orgs. 

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