Talent Advisory Business Partner

A Talent Advisory and Workforce Partner
Reports To: Head of Talent & Workforce
Role Type: Approximately 50% Talent Advisory and Workforce Partnership and 50% Talent Acquisition Delivery

Context

Organisations are experiencing unprecedented workforce disruption driven by skill shortages, changing employee expectations, advances in AI and automation, and new ways of accessing talent and capability.

As a result, recruitment is evolving beyond filling vacancies to helping organisations understand workforce challenges, anticipate future capability requirements and make informed workforce decisions.  Expectations have shifted to:

  • Head of People & Culture – I need a workforce configuration that delivers the capability our organisation requires to accomplish business objectives.
  • Head of Talent Acquisition – I need to evolve to a strategic, influential and relevant function that adds true value.
  • Business Leaders and Hiring Managers – I need help solving workforce problems.
  • Recruiters – I need to remain relevant, be a true business partner and grow my career.

“I don’t need to stop being a recruiter. I need to broaden how I think and the value I bring.”

Role Purpose

The Talent Business Partner partners with leaders to understand workforce challenges and deliver practical workforce configuration solutions that assist in accomplishing business objectives.

How the Talent Advisor Role is Measured

Lead Measures

Workforce configuration discussions facilitated.

Workforce and market intelligence briefings delivered.

Hiring manager consideration of Build, Buy, Borrow and Bot options.

Roles assessed for internal mobility and capability development.

Repeat requests for workforce advice and strategic partnership.

Lag Measures

Percentage of workforce challenges addressed through Build, Buy, Borrow and Bot solutions.

Percentage of approved positions avoided, redesigned or solved differently.

Critical capability gaps closed.

Capability requirements addressed without permanent recruitment.

Recruitment delivery outcomes including time-to-fill, hiring manager satisfaction, candidate experience and quality of hire.


Key Requirements for the Role

Outlined below are some considerations in terms of role requirements

Criteria

Definition

Indicative Previous Experience

Strategic Thinking

 

The ability to understand business objectives, anticipate future workforce requirements and connect talent decisions to organisational outcomes.

Identified future hiring requirements by analysing business plans, growth initiatives and workforce trends, enabling proactive workforce planning and talent pipelines to be developed.

Influencing

The ability to build trust, challenge thinking and guide leaders towards informed workforce and talent decisions.

Influenced a hiring manager to reconsider role requirements, refine capability needs and explore internal talent before proceeding with external recruitment.

Market Intelligence

The ability to gather, interpret and communicate workforce and market insights that support evidence-based workforce and talent decisions.

Presented market information on talent availability, salary expectations and competitor activity to help leaders determine an appropriate recruitment strategy and workforce approach.

Curiosity

The desire to understand the underlying business and workforce challenge by asking questions, seeking insight and exploring opportunities beyond the initial request.

Explored why a role had become vacant and identified opportunities to redesign responsibilities and develop internal capability before commencing recruitment.

Insightfulness

The ability to synthesise information from multiple sources and identify workforce implications, risks and opportunities that may not be immediately obvious.

Identified that repeated recruitment for similar positions indicated an underlying capability gap and recommended changes to talent attraction and capability development approaches.

Collaboration

The ability to build trusted relationships and work effectively with leaders and stakeholders to co-design and implement workforce and talent solutions.

Partnered with hiring managers and People & Culture colleagues to develop a talent solution involving recruitment and internal mobility opportunities to address a critical capability need.

Solutioning

The ability to work strategically with leaders to understand business problems, diagnose workforce needs, develop practical talent and workforce solutions, and gain commitment to implement those solutions.

Partnered with a business leader to understand a capability challenge, analysed workforce and market information, developed recommendations involving recruitment and internal mobility options, and secured agreement to implement the recommended solution.

If you want to understand your Talent Advisor Persona or How do you or your Team Perform as a Talent Advisor take the assessments.

 

Implementing Talent Advisory: The First 120 Days

90 Days – Understand and Introduce

  • Assess team strengths and Talent Advisory capability gaps.
  • Identify leaders open to broader workforce discussions.
  • Segment roles into critical, scarce, repeat and augmentation opportunities.
  • Review requisition and approval processes.
  • Introduce workforce questions:
    • What problem are we solving?
    • What capability is required?
    • How could this work get done?
  • Begin introducing workforce and market intelligence into discussions.

120 Days – Embed and Demonstrate Value

  • Embed workforce configuration discussions into selected hiring conversations.
  • Consider internal mobility before automatically recruiting externally.
  • Regularly share workforce and market insights with leaders.
  • Develop strategic thinking, influencing and workforce partnering capability.
  • Share examples of Build, Buy, Borrow and Bot solutions.
  • Measure and communicate early wins and workforce outcomes.

The Evolution of the Role

Today

Emerging

Future

Filling vacancies

Solving workforce challenges

Configuring workforce capability

Managing requisitions

Facilitating workforce discussions

Determining how work gets done

External recruitment focus

Workforce insights and market intelligence

Workforce configuration leadership

Candidate pipelines

Build, Buy, Borrow and Bot thinking

Capability and business outcomes

Transactional partnership

Strategic workforce partnership

Trusted organisational advisor