How Talent Advisors Help Organizations Improve Hiring

Key Takeaways:

• Talent advisors provide guidance, market-driven insights, and targeted action to help organizations navigate the talent landscape and attract high-quality candidates.
• Partnering with a talent advisor helps hiring professionals develop recruitment plans that align with organizational staffing goals.
• Talent advisors improve recruitment efficiency and return on investment by offering suggestions for better candidate relationship management and smarter hiring decisions.

As the job market continues to evolve, it’s essential for recruitment professionals to meet organizational hiring needs. Keeping pace with emerging trends, engaging candidates on social media, and looking for better ways to build more robust talent pipelines is crucial.

Helping organizations attract, hire, and retain talent more effectively can be a challenge, even for seasoned recruiters. This is why partnering with a talent advisor can help companies gain new insights about what it takes to compete for talent successfully in a challenging and ever-changing job market.

What is a Talent Advisor?

As the name implies, talent advisors offer guidance, market-driven insights, and targeted action to help organizations navigate the talent landscape and attract high-quality candidates.

The talent advisor role is the logical next step in the evolution of recruitment professionals, as many already possess deep knowledge about what today’s candidates are looking for in their next job. They communicate with hiring managers and applicants every day, so they understand many of the challenges and opportunities organizations face when seeking to attract talent. With the help of talent advisors, companies can leverage their culture and strategic plans to identify the candidates most likely to add value as future employees.

Tip: Finding a partner with the historical data and the ability to help track the data is crucial when reaching hiring goals. With this visibility, companies can identify what's working and what's not, and adjust their strategies to maximize ROI.

• As companies integrate talent advisors into their team, they take on the following job duties and responsibilities:
• Develop hiring plans to meet organizational staffing goals.
  Work with hiring managers and department heads to understand hiring needs, manage expectations, and advise on the most effective ways to fill each role.
• Build and execute recruitment marketing strategies for engaging candidates and maintaining their interest in the organization.
• Offer information and advice to candidates so they can make informed decisions in their job search.
• Analyze key hiring and retention metrics to determine the effectiveness of different recruitment strategies.

What Talent Advisors Deliver to Organizations

Partnering with a talent advisor is a great way to approach and fill open positions and can be a game-changer for organizations. It can mean the difference between feeling like recruitment is a constant uphill battle and consistently finding the right people to fill the right roles at the right time.

In a 2023 LinkedIn survey of recruitment professionals, 87% said their function had become more strategic in the last year. Talent advisors can help organizations to continue on that trajectory.

Here are the key benefits organizations can realize with the help of talent advisors:

1. A Proactive Approach to Talent Acquisition

Talent advisors proactively assess the organization’s talent needs and consider several possible solutions and strategies, often before a job requisition is opened and approved. They also nurture talent pipelines by communicating with candidates even when there isn’t a current open position to match a candidate’s interests and skills.

By synthesizing multiple information sources and keeping candidates engaged, talent advisors help organizations fill open positions and improve the overall approach to talent acquisition. Here are a few actions that help them deliver value more proactively:

• Conversations with hiring managers, HR, and department leaders about hiring goals, talent gaps, and new ways to reach candidates.
• Analysis of the job market to identify potential obstacles, such as geographic limitations and new competition.
• Continuous review of existing talent pools, including the availability of internal candidates who may be a fit for open roles.

Tip: A lot can happen between the time a candidate becomes aware of a job opportunity and the time they (hopefully) apply. Recruitics can help provide support and solutions to fill the gap to help companies nurture and engage candidates throughout the candidate journey – so they feel ready and excited to apply.

2. A Tailor-Made Approach to Each Open Position

As many organizations have already learned, there is no “one-size-fits-all” process that fits every hiring need. For example, some roles require a high-volume hiring strategy, while others require a strategy that enables location-specific recruitment. Talent advisors leverage their recruitment expertise and actionable insights to help organizations pivot quickly, so they can recruit the way they need to for each open position.

Talent advisors understand organizational hiring goals and the job market so well that they can recommend a variety of custom approaches to achieve even the most challenging hiring goals. Some of the personalized solutions they may recommend include:

• Position-specific landing pages and job alerts directed at specific talent pool segments.
• Employer branding messaging and events that target passive candidates and those with limited brand awareness.
• Conventional and outside-the-box job advertising solutions, such as programmatic advertising, out-of-home marketing, and job ads on niche platforms.  

3. Hiring Decisions That Boost Employee Retention 

Making a bad hire can cost multiples of the person’s salary, not to mention the cost of lost productivity and potential damage to organizational culture. But when organizations source higher quality candidates and make better hiring decisions, they not only realize the productivity and culture benefits; they also enjoy higher employee retention.

Partnering with a talent advisor supports higher employee retention by helping hiring managers identify talent that is ultimately a better fit for the organization. They assess the external labor market and internal talent pipelines, and also leverage historical data that helps leaders understand the types of hires that have had the most success and longevity in the organization.

Tip: Understanding the data and having the ability to track it ensures companies stay aligned with their hiring goals. With visibility on the analytics, companies gain a comprehensive view of their efforts – which helps them make data-driven decisions to optimize their recruitment campaigns.

4. Higher Recruitment Efficiency and ROI

Given their recruitment experience, talent advisors are able to take a holistic view of the organization and identify opportunities to increase efficiency in recruiting processes and workflows. For example, talent advisors can offer suggestions for integrating the company applicant tracking system (ATS) for better candidate relationship management. And because they’ve experienced the highs and lows of the job market, they know how to maintain progress against hiring goals even when operating on a modest recruitment budget.

Here are just a few ways talent advisors can use analytics to help the organization make smarter recruitment marketing and hiring decisions:

• Track marketing campaign ROI and metrics such as cost-per-application, quality of hire, and applicant conversion rate.
• Get real-time insights into job ad performance, enabling quicker decisions on which campaigns to pause or continue.
• Improve competitive benchmarking with integrated data from third parties such as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Tip: The right data analytics platform can help organizations determine where to deploy recruitment investments (and how much). With the ability to customize recruitment data and reporting, organizations can use analytics to quickly identify exactly what’s working and what isn’t in their recruitment program.

Meet Recruitment Targets With Trusted Advisors

Given the recruitment headwinds organizations face today – talent scarcity, changing candidate expectations, and a fluctuating job market – it’s no wonder so many struggle to find enough of the quality applicants they need for growth. However, by leveraging market knowledge and technology for better recruitment results, organizations can unlock new opportunities to find and engage the talent they need.

Fusion by Recruitics helps organizations enhance hiring with the powerful combination of human expertise and technology. The complete end-to-end hiring solution delivers a smoother candidate experience by enabling and supporting talent acquisition teams to drive, nurture, and convert candidates into applicants more efficiently. Expert talent advisors add a human touch, making the hiring process more seamless and engaging for candidates every step of the way.

For help with improving talent sourcing and applicant conversion, the team at Recruitics is here to help! The Recruitics Talent Advisory solution helps organizations optimize their employer brand, boost recruitment program efficiency, and engage applicants throughout the entire candidate journey.