When pushing best practices isn't enough

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

During my Recruiting Leadership Workshops the past year, I've been a little animated when describing how we - as corporate recruiters or TA leaders - need to do a lot more than just push recruiting best practices onto the hiring teams. Some folks - maybe even including me 15 years ago - thought this is what Talent Advising meant. Learning best practices around candidate engagement, interviewing, negotiation, etc. and then "pushing" those onto the hiring managers we support.

But great talent advising has always been about more than just knowing and communicating best practices, of course.

The hardest part has always been driving adoption, leading the change, creating inspection and accountability mechanisms to ensure the right practices stick and lead to improvements in speed, quality, fairness, capacity, etc.

And now, a big change has arrived. I believe 99% of general TA best practices are now a 30-second ChatGPT prompt away. And I predict that talent vendors - many building tools for recruiters and hiring managers to leverage - will embed well known best practices into all of their tools and AI-driven recommendations.

So, the recruiter who's been relying on knowledge of best practices to demonstrate their credibility - for example, the right number of interviewers for a software engineering role, or the right way to personalize a candidate outreach - will need to leverage and demonstrate that they can give the business more than just the best practice.

The business will want and need more situation-specific ("Right Practice" vs "Best Practice"), business-specific recommendations, and most importantly, help implementing and driving adoption across their teams. The “What” of TA best practices is now super accessible to everyone – the hard part will be the “How.”

To me, this is at the center of what will make a great Talent Advisor and TA leader in the future - super business acumen + super root issue identification + super problem solving + super influencing (driving adoption) skills, with the ability to implement or leverage inspection and accountability mechanisms.

What do you think? Am I overreacting? I mean, we've had many platforms for sharing best practices in TA since the early 2000s, so they've always been a google search away, right?