Retained / Project · Talent advisory
Talent advisory and talent acquisition consulting
A focused route into our Retained / Project model: talent acquisition consulting covering process design, ATS or HRIS work, technology transformation and inclusive hiring, scoped around a defined outcome.
New to this? Read the guide to building a talent acquisition strategy
What is talent advisory?
Talent advisory — also called talent acquisition consulting — is consulting work on the hiring function itself rather than on any individual vacancy. It covers how roles get defined and signed off, how candidates move through your process, which tools you use and how well they're configured, how your interviewers are trained, and how you measure whether any of it is working.
Most hiring problems presented as a sourcing problem aren't one. Roles stall because the scorecard was never agreed, because feedback takes nine days, because the ATS is set up to record activity rather than support decisions, or because the job advert describes an internal org chart rather than the work. Adding more candidates to a broken funnel produces more dropouts, not more hires.
Advisory engagements are scoped as projects or retainers with a defined output — a redesigned process, a configured and adopted ATS, a working interview kit library, a set of automated workflows, or a hiring strategy your leadership team has actually signed up to.
We're practitioners rather than pure consultants, which mostly shows up in the deliverables: things your team can use on Monday, rather than a slide deck about maturity models.
How it works
What an engagement actually looks like
Audit
We review your current hiring end to end — process, tooling, data, adverts, interview practice and candidate experience — and show you where it's leaking.
Prioritise
Not everything gets fixed at once. We agree the changes with the highest impact for your stage, and what's deliberately being left alone.
Design
New process, scorecards, structured interview kits, advert templates and the tooling configuration to support them.
Implement
ATS setup or migration, AI-enabled workflow automation, and integration into the tools your team already lives in.
Enable
Interviewer training and hiring manager coaching, so the new process survives contact with a busy quarter.
What's included
- Hiring process audit and redesign
- Employer brand and EVP review
- ATS selection, implementation and optimisation
- AI-enabled recruitment workflow automation
- Structured interview kits and scorecards
- Interviewer and hiring manager training
- Inclusive and accessible hiring advisory
- Recruitment metrics and reporting setup
- Job advert and careers content review
A good fit if
- You're hiring but can't explain why it's slow
- You're implementing or replacing an ATS
- Your interviewers are inconsistent and untrained
- You want AI in your hiring workflow without losing fairness
- You're building a talent function and want it built properly
Probably not if
- You need candidates this month and nothing else
- There's no internal owner to hand the new process to
FAQs
Common questions
It depends on scope, but engagements are always defined by an output rather than hours: a redesigned hiring process, a configured ATS your team has adopted, a library of structured interview kits, automated recruitment workflows, or a hiring strategy agreed with leadership.
Advisory changes how hiring works; RPO runs the hiring. Advisory is consulting and implementation with your team delivering afterwards. RPO is an embedded partner delivering the hiring itself. Some clients do advisory first and delivery later, or run both together.
Yes. We advise on selection based on your hiring volume, team structure and workflow, then handle implementation, configuration and rollout. We also work with vetted technology partners where a specific platform is the right fit.
We use AI to remove administrative load — drafting, structuring, scheduling, summarising — rather than to make selection decisions. Any automation we implement is documented, reviewable and designed so a human remains accountable for hiring decisions.
Advert language and accessibility, structured and consistent interviewing, adjustments as a default rather than an exception, panel composition, and reviewing where your funnel is losing candidates from particular groups.
Not sure this is the right model?
Tell us what you're hiring for and we'll tell you honestly which approach fits — even when the answer isn't us.