How is the recruiter role evolving

By John Vlastelica

As we celebrate International Recruiters Day, it’s good to pause and reflect on the journey of the corporate recruiter.  We’re at an inflection point, for sure.  It’s an exciting time to be alive in the world of recruitment – automation, candidate fraud, a focus on quality, and AI’s expected impact on business transformation is creating incredible demand for more than the traditional, transactional recruiter role. 

How will competencies shift as recruiters move from transactional to more value-add roles as talent advisors? Beyond the core skills of corporate recruiting – like sourcing, screening, closing, gathering feedback, getting approvals – these are some of the key competencies we’ve seen as differentiators after working with hundreds of corporate recruiting teams around the world.

 

TODAY’S TALENT ADVISOR 1.0 COMPETENCIES

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

The mindset shifts as a recruiter moves into a Talent Advisor or Talent Manager 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.

 

TOMORROW’S TALENT ADVISOR 2.0 / TALENT MANAGER COMPETENCIES

 

All of 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 (driving adoption) 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.

 

If you’re a recruiter or TA leader reading this, you probably feel the pressure at work to demonstrate your value.  As businesses continue to invest more in capital/AI over people, it’ll be more important than ever that we run to the fire, and choose paths that demonstrate our value to our CHROs and business leaders. 

So many heads of TA that I meet with are deep in the process of redefining what good looks like for corporate recruiters now that the tools (including AI) are beginning to go beyond sourcing and scheduling.  Now is the time to ensure we’re delivering more than just transactional value. 

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 and help raise the bar on who they hire and how they hire.

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