[Reshare] Taking Recruiting Functions From Service Providers to Trusted Advisors with Adam Ward

What shifts when recruiting leaders show up as business leaders first?

Adam Ward, Founding Partner at Growth by Design Talent, joins Shannon to explore how recruiting teams can evolve from service providers to trusted advisors. With a background leading talent at Facebook, Qualcomm, and Pinterest through massive growth, Adam shows what stakeholder engagement looks like when done well.

He outlines four traits that define a talent advisor and shares how stronger cross-functional relationships lead to better outcomes for both recruiters and candidates.

The episode gets into the value of curiosity, the power of shared accountability, and why recruiting needs a seat at the business planning table, not just the hiring one.

Key takeaways:

1. Trusted advisors lead with data: Visualized insights, not just metrics, shape real conversations.
2. Shared accountability matters: Hiring goals should belong to leaders and recruiters alike.
3. Respect scales faster than likability: Influence grows when recruiting challenges assumptions with clarity and care.
4. Curiosity signals partnership: The best recruiters understand the business as well as the function they support.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction

(01:00) Meet Adam Ward

(02:44) Why stakeholder engagement sets teams apart

(04:15) Service provider versus trusted advisor

(07:28) The role of shared accountability

(09:53) Building relationships as a business leader

(12:05) How trusted leadership benefits recruiting teams

(15:43) Top challenges facing talent leaders

(20:52) Gaining influence by letting go of likability

(24:31) Managing your strengths without overcorrecting

(26:42) How to adapt your influence style to different stakeholders

Transcript

Adam Ward (00:00):

The starting point is helping realize that hiring is a business goal. It's a business outcome. Just like revenue or customer growth or customer experience, or user percentage, whatever it might be, recruiting has to be one of those top line goals and measure. And when you get it put into that echelon, you get the treatment and visualization in the same way.

Shannon Ogborn (00:22):

Welcome to Offer Accepted the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Aborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started. Hey everyone. Shannon Ogborn, your host here this summer. We have been resurfacing episodes that feel just as relevant today as when they first dropped, and we're closing it out with one of our very first episodes we ever released in this conversation with Adam Ward. From Growth by Design Talent, we dig into what it really means to be a trusted advisor in talent. Over the last two years, we've seen some real progress around recruiting seat at the table, but lately some of that momentum has started to slip with leaner teams juggling more roles and more inbound recruiters are getting less face time with hiring managers and it's harder than ever to show up as a true talent partner.

(01:22):

But being a trusted advisor never goes out of style. And in this episode, Adam breaks down exactly how to make that shift. He shares the four traits every recruiting leader needs to build credibility with stakeholders, how to influence with data and insight, and why earning respect will take you and your team further than just simply being liked. And something tells us, since Adam's still speaking on this topic two years later, it just is relevant for him now too. Alright, let's get into it. Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm your host Shannon Ogborn, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, an all-in-one recruiting solution for modern talent teams. I am here with our guest, Adam Ward, founding partner of Growth by design. GBD helps high growth companies develop recruiting fundamentals and support intentional business growth and alignment with their unique values and missions. Previous to co-founding GBD, Adam held a recruiting leadership role at Qualcomm, was one of the first recruiting leaders at Facebook where he saw them through IPO and led the recruiting function at Pinterest, scaling from 200 to 2000 and through IPO. Adam, thank you so much for joining us.

Adam Ward (02:29):

Thanks to Ashby and thanks to you, Shannon, for having me.

Shannon Ogborn (02:32):

Of course. So we'll just jump right in. You and I have had the opportunity to chat a lot about our topic today of stakeholder engagement. Tell me a little bit why this topic is so important to recruiting leadership and recruiting teams.

Adam Ward (02:48):

Yeah, thanks Shannon. I think, I mean it's a very interesting time for companies in recruiting leaders where some companies are taking stock and absorbing all those that hiring they've made adjusting to markets. And so what we're seeing is that companies are looking for a different level of partnership with their recruiting and talent leaders. And so it's something that we've seen been brewing for some time here, but I think it's coming to a bit of a ahead as the markets have shifted and companies are looking to adjust in the current environment. And so it's always been important that recruiting has had that seat at the table with the executives and leaders. But we've often found historically that actually recruiting leaders and recruiting teams weren't prepared to show up at the same level of depth accuracy data and insights that maybe sales or finance or engineering leaders have. And so this gap has been growing over time and has come to this point

Shannon Ogborn (03:55):

Definitely. And I've noticed over my career as well that other folks in other parts of the organization seem to have maybe a little bit better mentorship throughout their career on really getting that business knowledge to get their seat at the table and be prepared for it. So really excited to be talking about this today. One of the things that we had talked about is really being a trusted advisor versus a service provider and how that really leads to stakeholder engagement and that seat at the table. Can you help us understand what is the difference between a trusted advisor and a service provider?

Adam Ward (04:34):

A service provider might be seen as a recruiting team, might be seen more of a staffing organization, a rec fulfillment operation, and where a lot of the influence and decision-making happens with the hiring manager alone and the recruiting team is really just shepherding a process or moving candidates through a process that might be a service provider. If recruiting gets handed a headcount number at the beginning of the year, you might be a service provider if recruiting is in the room talking about here's our capacity, here's what the market looks like, here's some of the challenges, here's what we feel like we can deliver. And helping get to an aligned goal of hiring and cadence, you might be more of a trusted advisor. And so it's a change in kind of framing and conversation between the two, but there's a lot of work and a lot of inputs to get from service to trusted.

Shannon Ogborn (05:32):

Super helpful. I am curious, have you ever worked at an organization where you stepped into a role and you felt like, okay, where our organization is at, we're a service provider, I want to move to a trusted advisor. Has that ever happened? And if so, what were kind of the tactical ways that you brought the organization to be seen as trusted advisors

Adam Ward (05:56):

For? We've really boiled it down to four key things that we think that it takes to be able to make a talent leader a trusted advisor. And you just talked about one, which is influences with data. And it's not just enough to lead with data, but the ability to synthesize, organize, and visualize the data into a compelling narrative. So bringing the data to say, Hey, here's what our recruiting capacity is, but actually being able to show that in a visual of, Hey, if we want this many SDRs in the building at the end of Q1, here's the work it's going to take and here's the gap in capacity we have today and then actually bringing actual solutions. And here's three things we could do to close that gap. That's a trusted advisor conversation where you're like, Hey, we are committed to helping you get the right sales leaders and helping drive the business, but here's where we need help. Here's the things we're going to need to do in advance of that. The second would be thinking about market insights. So a leader who a trusted advisor has a formal and informal network of peers in the relationships that they can tap into to bring real time insights and benchmarking data to the executive or to the leader. A trusted advisor is continually building relationships and networks with peers and other companies and other organizations like GBD and others so they can get those real-time insights and benchmarking data.

Shannon Ogborn (07:18):

So we have influences with data market insights. What other attributes do you see that are really important for this?

Adam Ward (07:26):

And we're kind of going into more around shared accountability. So we're big fans of the phrase of what gets measured gets done. And if you've ever been in a organization or a recruiting team where recruiting a loan holds the goal for hiring, then you might be more of a service provider versus trusted advisor. Shared accountability means we had the same goal around making these X number of hires in the first half of the year. There's no scenario where we miss or make the goal. And recruiting alone gets the rewards or the punishment or impact of that. We're in it together, we're mutually aligned, the outcome is the same for us. So if recruiting alone is holding the goals and these goals can cascade down into managers and individual contributors, things like that, but if there aren't those shared goals and shared accountability, then it's going to be really hard to make progress. So you need to create these tethering or anchors around shared accountability.

Shannon Ogborn (08:20):

How much of that shared accountability and the culture around that comes from the top down? Where have been the struggles in the challenges in getting that shared accountability if from the top they're not buying in?

Adam Ward (08:32):

Yeah, it does start with the top, but the starting point is helping realize that hiring is a business goal, it's a business outcome. Just like revenue or customer growth, recruiting has to be one of those top line goals and measured. And when you get it put into that echelon, you get the treatment and visualization in the same way. But it's also important to be measuring those goals in the same way and in the same cadence, in the same format that you would any other business goal. So if you think about sales being really important to a company, they probably have a really clear cascading of goals into the organization. Recruiting is no different. And so you want be thinking about recruiting being reported and progress being reported at the same cadence and in the same way, in the same room as any other key business goal. But where things really fall apart in companies and organization is at the line manager level because often individual decisions are being made at the hiring manager level. And so if there isn't a clear set of manager effectiveness expectations in your company, that's a great starting point

Shannon Ogborn (09:40):

For sure. And it's surprising how many organizations don't set their managers up for success. There's no interview training, there's no hiring training, there's no real resources for these managers to be successful. So I feel like that's a big part of it too, which is often unfortunately missed. But I think getting better. So we have influence with data market insights, shared accountability, what is the fourth attribute here?

Adam Ward (10:08):

And these are in no particular order, but someone who's really effective at building relationships. If the recruiting and talent leader is a business leader first and a talent leader second, all business leaders work and collaboratively to drive business outcomes. So that means that they're putting what the hat they're wearing first in the room on these conversations is how is this talent and how can we help unlock or drive business? How can recruiting help? What part do we play in that? It's not the defensive of we can't do that, you should do that. This is broken. It's more of how can we enable your goals and how can we help the business be successful? That's the lens through which you're operating. And thinking about that, again, we are on the same side of the table versus across the table.

(10:55):

And so one thing that we see often with recruiting leaders who are more service providers is that they're overly defensive or protective of their team. And one of the really important skills to learn as a recruiting leader is the judgment of what information do you let through to your team and what information do you protect or block your team from? When are you defensive of your team and when are you critical of your team? And so a true business leader is thinking objectively and critically at all times around the business and including their team. And we see often recruiting leaders regardless of user's experience, plateau at the director level if you will, because they are defensive of their team and other teams see that. And then you get put into the, alright, I'm going to fill out this rec, you go fill that rec for me. You're a staffing organization to me, you're not a talent advisor to me.

Shannon Ogborn (11:48):

That actually kind of brings up a follow-up question I had of how does your leader, your recruiting leader being a trusted advisor help your IC recruiters, rcs, sourcers, mid-level managers on the team? How have you seen that play out in the past?

Adam Ward (12:06):

Cool. I love this question. Lemme give you a tactical and a strategic way.

Shannon Ogborn (12:11):

Great.

Adam Ward (12:13):

The strategic way is it just sets a tone for how they operate as well. So people inevitably mirror aspects of their leader. So if you as a trusted advisor are really curious about the business, you understand how the company makes money, you really are asking and sitting side by side with an engineer to understand the tech stack. What is it you do as an manager? Can I shadow you for a day? That curiosity and understanding is not only going to make you a better recruiter, but you're going to be seen as someone who really cares about engineering in that example. So your team, your sourcers will start and your recruiters will start to actually mirror that, right? And so they'll be more curious about the business, they'll be more engaged with their hiring managers and teams because they feel like a part of a single team versus two different functions.

(13:00):

So one strategically they'll start mirroring your behavior. Pragmatically is as a trusted advisor, you're going to be in more conversations, you're going to have access to more information ahead of time that's going to prepare your recruiting team. So let's just go back to this sales example of if you are a service provider, which we were at that time when Pinterest says we got handed a number, that means we weren't in conversations in September, October, November to know this is the year of monetization. We're going to need to staff up an H one if we are more in a trusted advisor spot, I would had access information that I could start to share with my team and start resourcing my team ahead of plan or have more contingency levers I could pull to quickly ramp up our team. So that access information one gives more business insight to what's happening in the business and the why, but also prepares the team for these shifts in business conditions. And so that helps. The information is power and that helps the recruiting team feel more valued when you're giving them insights to the business in more conversation as trusted advisor.

Shannon Ogborn (14:10):

And I can definitely say as someone who has done a lot of recruiting, it's very frustrating to just be handed a goal or to be expected to fulfill what seems like oh super wildly out of this world number of hires. And you're like, it's really discouraging and demotivating when you get your number and your first thought is there's literally no way. And I think having your leader be a good trusted advisor to the business, that would minimize some of that frustration. And I presume probably recruiters would want to stay longer, they'd be more motivated to work, they're excited to work with the business. And when you think about recruiters being the face of candidate experience and candidate attraction, it really helps bring candidates in and makes them feel like, oh, this person really loves working here. So I think all those things can really contribute to better outcomes for the recruiting teams.

Adam Ward (15:09):

And maybe just to say that in a different way is we know recruiting is tip of the spear and if your recruiting team isn't engaged and fired up and believers, it's really hard for them to be effective. And so to your point, this makes the team more not only engaged but more successful in what they do.

Shannon Ogborn (15:29):

One other question I had for you before we jump into a little bit of how strong stakeholder engagement and talent advisory has really accelerated your career. What conversations have come up the most recently with talent leaders?

Adam Ward (15:43):

Yeah, there's a couple things top of mind right now for talent leaders. One that I think we're hearing a lot from is this concept of talent density. And it's not just in the recruiting side of things alone, it's also within the existing employees that you have. But it's pretty interesting because talent density is essentially quality of hire in a lower volume hiring environment, in a high volume hiring environment we know is quality of hire. And so it's really tough to be a CEO because you're always afraid of the quality of people coming into your company and high volume. You're like, wow, we're hiring a lot. I'm worried that we are lowering the bar to meet a hiring number when they are low hiring a hiring, you're like, wow, we have a lot of people interested in coming to work here, a lot of referrals, a lot of inbound.

(16:36):

How do I know that we're seeing the entire market that we're hiring the best one? So it's like damned if you do and damned if you don't. It's a tough way to live, but that's what it is. And the recruiting leader is often the beneficiary of that anxiety. So a lot of the companies we're talking to who think really critically about talent are thinking about this concept of talent density and how do we have surety that we're hiring the best person when it's a more favorable market than it was. A lot of the times it does come back to really structured interviewing and really getting clear on what you are looking for in a candidate. We see larger companies spending time and resources into these job analysis. Job analysis is a real deep io psych approach to thinking about and studying the actual employees in the company of what success looks like, what are the characteristics, what are the transferable skills that make someone really good at that specific job?

(17:32):

And then pulling that back into the assessment process. That's a larger company concept and a great one. And most companies that think really critically talent will eventually get there. But for smaller companies, they're really thinking about back to that early first step of scoping a role as a trusted advisor, really helping a higher emerge critically of what the work is going to be, what success looks like, how do we conjugate those into actual competencies, experiences and skills, and how are we creating focus areas for interviewers with question banks and rubrics so we get better interrater reliability around what grade looks like. By the way, all that information is super helpful for your sourcing strategy and outreach strategy too, but it also helps you make sure you're getting to the outcome that drives the business need from the start.

Shannon Ogborn (18:15):

Totally. What I've found too is that when companies don't do that on the intake because they're trying to save time or move fast or any of those kind of reasons, they end up having to redo a lot of the work and it's costing them time, it's costing them money, it's costing them someone starting the job and getting ramped up. So for anyone out there listening, don't skim put the time in upfront. It's a super, super important part because the more time you have to spend doing it later, you're just creating a bottleneck really for yourself.

Adam Ward (18:47):

It behooves you to do it upfront, otherwise you are accumulating a lot of recruiting debt that ultimately cascades into a whole reset and change management process. Often that's a change of recruiting leadership. That's a change of recruiting tool. It's really heavy to do all those things and very costly, so better do up front. The second thing I think that happens as a result of that is leaders put in these speed bumps or checks and balances or safety nets because they don't trust the process. Bars are razor programs, hiring committees, CEO, reviewing every offer or packet. You've seen these stop gap measures that sometimes just become ubiquitous in the company or it can be short-term things because that leader is concerned about the process. And so you can do these fixes or you could change the system. And we find the most scalable long-term solution is actually to make the company effective at hiring not just specific people or small pods of people or one or two leaders at it because it actually will be a blocker at some point. And when you think about creating a culture of talent and recruiting, what message is that sending to your interviewers or hiring managers if you're removing influence or decision making into the hiring for their team? It is done by a third party. That's an interesting message. I think it sends back to the system. Obviously companies have been wildly successful with these programs or maybe they've been wildly successful despite these programs. It's hard to say

Shannon Ogborn (20:17):

For sure. Yes, I did work at a company where most of those things were in play and it's very, I mean it made the process probably a lot longer than needed to be. And we lost I think a lot out on a lot of great talent because we were too slow. And

Adam Ward (20:31):

It's a hard thing to measure. It does make sense to take time to make the right hire, but it's hard to think about the false negatives or false positives that might've happened or what would the opportunity cost might've been in those. It's a hard thing to measure, but I do think if you're a founder or a leader thinking about what culture do I want to create here in terms of talent, it's an early design decision. I think it's important to make commit to

Shannon Ogborn (20:53):

Exactly. And then at any time a new hiring manager, a new director in a different business unit could step in and say, okay, I know exactly what I'm doing here. There's a clear process. I feel confident and trust this process because it's been working and the other leaders have bought in and believe in it. So that's important too. Amazing. Well, I would love to hear just a little bit more about how strong stakeholder engagement and being a talent advisor has really helped you accelerate your personal career trajectory.

Adam Ward (21:24):

And I feel like it was a lesson I wish I had learned earlier. I feel like earlier on in my career, I felt more of a pull to agree in the room. So Adam, we'd be recruiting to hire 200 people. I'm like, great. And then I'd go back to my desk, how are we going to do that? And I think what I learned over time was actually thoughtfully thinking about how to push back or bring insights and have a conversation around that actually helped me gain more value with them and value from my team. So maybe said more concretely, the more confidence I had in my craft and what I knew and the more clearly and crispy and data backed I was able to make that framing for them. The more and more information I got, the more and more meanings I was in, the more and more success we had as a team. And so it almost felt like early on in my career, they'll like me or they'll think highly of recruiting if we agree to what they do. And being liked is not a pathway to getting respect. Getting respect can be a pathway to also being liked. And I had this, when you think about how people's personalities are driven or if you think about strengths finders, things like that, a lot of recruiting leaders are in this, woo might be a strengths finders one protagonist. That's

Shannon Ogborn (22:49):

My number one, 60% Woo is my number one.

Adam Ward (22:52):

And so think about Woo is and why you're kind of maybe drawn to be in recruiting is love working with people and love meeting new people. But part of it's also like insatiable need to be liked. And what I learned through mistakes that it wasn't enough to be liked wasn't a path to success or gaining influence, but building respect was. And so respect was meaning understanding my craft, being a business leader, being self-critical. Also knowing, having first principles and being structured thinker and knowing when to anchor in and hold the line on certain things and why and not for moral reasons or any other reason, but principally that's what you believed and felt was the right thing to do. Got me a lot further than, and almost like not caring if people like me actually led to being more respected and probably liked than just being as he's a nice guy, that's a nice team. And that feels a little bit like let's put baby in a corner.

Shannon Ogborn (23:53):

It's such a tough balance because like I said, woo is my number one Clifton strength, but I also felt myself maybe being a little bit too chippy at trying to overcorrect. I would get really immediately frustrated. I would try to fight back a little bit too hard for that respect. And so there's definitely a really fine balance. And it's exactly what you're saying. It's like you one, gain respect by giving respect and understanding someone else's craft and trade. But the more curious you are about someone else and their role and their side of the business and things like that, I think the better off you're going to be and the more curious they're going to become about what you're doing and what you're bringing to the table.

Adam Ward (24:39):

Can we dig in there? I have two things, three things. So one would be when you have a soaring strength, you often try to counter ball with too harsh of a flip. And so under duress, Shannon, I imagine you got super chippy, right? So there's this adjusted style that you have as a leader that is an overcorrection to a strength of yours. And so we often do this exercise in our leadership training academies is like at your best day, how are you showing up

(25:09):

Exactly on your worst day, how you're showing up? And I imagine you and I on our worst day would show up as very curt chippy, little grumpy short with people. And that was an overcorrection to when you fall off the cliff of woo, right? There's like an underbelly of this. You're over wooed, you're over wooed. So which is underwhelming for everyone. And so what you understanding your strengths and is really important, but also understanding the dark side of it. And then the second point is as you're building teams or surrounding yourself with other, how are you finding complimentary pieces to yourself? And we often, early hiring managers, early recruiting leaders hire people who are shades of themselves. And so you end up building a team that's high woo, and that's bad for everyone. And so how you think about your team as a puzzle by start understanding your strengths and what are complimentary pieces is really important.

(26:02):

The third is thinking about really understanding yourself. And when you think about being a trusted advisor is understanding influencing styles. So no different than when you're a manager. One thing that early managers learn the hard way is people need to be managed in a way that they need to be managed, not in a way that you would want to be managed. And if you're an early manager, we're probably all laughing ourselves like, oh my gosh, I was such an idiot early on as a manager, I was recognizing people in front of their peers because that's how I like to be recognized. But oh my gosh, that could

Shannon Ogborn (26:30):

Be exactly. It's like the love languages.

Adam Ward (26:32):

Yes. So understanding your influencing style is really important, but also understanding how your leaders or stakeholders need to be influenced is really important. So there's three influencing styles. There's rational, social and emotional. So rational means that you're using logic and using data to persuade you appeal, authority. Negotiating or trade-offs is really important to them. So its rational social is like you really get to know them, you kind of build rapport, you want to leverage that rapport in a relationship you're seeking their consult. Tell me like, oh, I'd really love to know your opinion on this, or you seem to be an expert in this area. Can you tell me more? Can you give me some advice on this? That's social emotional is appealing to someone's values or modeling ways you'd like others to behave. Like, hey, I know this topic is really important to you personally. I know this is a core value for you. That's why I think this. And so understanding and actually mapping out before you go into a conversation with a leader, what influential style might they be? And then what information you use, how you use it, that helps inform that so you get to the outcome that you want.

Shannon Ogborn (27:40):

And for any of our listeners that are on the individual contributor side, the same is true for managing up to your recruiting leader or people, operations leader or manager. The more that you can meet someone where they're at and play to how they want to be communicated to, it's just you're going to be in such a better off situation. So definitely amazing insight there. So I think we're coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and GBD?

Adam Ward (28:10):

Yeah, a lot about GBD can be found on our website or our company LinkedIn page. But our website is gbd talent.com. There's information on all of our trainings that we do, our advisory works, all of our search work. We have a blog off of there as well where we share a lot of these findings and frameworks and things that you can leverage either as a recruiter, emerging leader, or current recruiting leader. There's a lot of great information there. And obviously you can follow us on our company in LinkedIn page. We have a monthly community newsletter that we publish with information around this and really great topics along other industry news. So I would definitely invite you to follow us and become a part of our recruiting community.

Shannon Ogborn (28:54):

Amazing. And how about you? Just in case people want to follow you directly.

Adam Ward (28:59):

Oh yeah, you can follow me on LinkedIn. It's Adam Ward, hopefully easy to find. Adam P. Ward is the handle on that, and that's generally where I'm sharing most information and insights and happy to connect well with all of you there.

Shannon Ogborn (29:12):

Awesome. Well, Adam, thanks again. We really appreciate you spending some time with us today. It was great having you on Offer Accepted, and thank you all for listening. We'll see you next time.

Adam Ward (29:22):

Thank you for having me.

Shannon Ogborn (29:25):

This episode was brought to you by Ashby. What an ATS should be, a scalable all-in-one tool that combines powerful analytics with your ATS, scheduling, sourcing, and CRM. To never miss an episode, subscribe to our newsletter at www.ashbyhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.