Talent Acquisition Recruiter for When the Business Needs to Hire Differently

Maybe hiring has suddenly doubled. Perhaps you're entering countries where nobody knows the company yet. Or your TA team is spending far too much time chasing hiring managers while the headcount plan keeps moving.

As a specialist talent acquisition recruiter, we hire senior TA leaders from Manager and Director through to VP and SVP. Tell us what you're trying to hire for, what's making it difficult and what you need this person to sort out — we'll start there.

TALK TO CARTER MORRIS ABOUT YOUR TALENT ACQUISITION SEARCH

A Bigger Hiring Target Doesn't Always Mean a Bigger TA Team Is Needed

“Hiring 3,000 people next year” tells us the size of the target. It doesn't tell us what kind of Talent Acquisition leader you'll need to hit it.

Are those hires spread evenly across established markets, or is half the growth going into two countries where the company has barely recruited before? Are you hiring 3,000 versions of roles the team already understands, or building completely new capabilities? And how much of that demand is genuinely planned rather than likely to move with the next forecast?

Those answers affect the TA leader you hire.

Someone who has delivered huge recruitment volumes through an established machine may be excellent at scale. That doesn't necessarily mean they're the person to build the machine somewhere new.

We'd want to know where the hiring was difficult — not just how much of it there was.

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Recent Successful Hires

How Much of the Hiring Process Can They Actually Change?

A senior TA leader can own recruitment without owning everything that determines whether recruitment works.

Accountable for time-to-hire

They might be accountable for time-to-hire but have no control over how quickly managers interview.

Not in control of the salary

They can improve candidate communication but can’t personally approve another £20k when the salary range is missing the market.

A brief that keeps changing

They can build a much better sourcing strategy, but that won’t help much if the business keeps changing what it wants halfway through the search.

So before we start looking, we'd want to know where this person will actually have room to move.

That could mean looking for:

A Senior Talent Acquisition Manager when you've already got the broader model in place and need someone to take proper ownership of a substantial team, market or hiring population.
A Talent Acquisition Director when the person needs enough authority to change how recruitment works across a business or region, rather than simply deliver against the process they've inherited.
A Global Talent Acquisition Director when you're trying to create some consistency across countries without pretending Germany, Singapore and the US are going to give you the same hiring problem.
A VP or SVP of Talent Acquisition when hiring demand is significant enough that TA needs a proper voice in conversations about workforce plans, investment and what the business can realistically deliver.
A Talent Management leader when acquisition genuinely sits within a broader talent remit — although we'd want to establish how much of their experience has involved actually leading TA.
An HRBP leader in the occasional brief where substantial hiring ownership has sat unusually close to the business. We'd be careful here: being TA's biggest internal customer isn't the same as knowing how to run it.
A CPO or CHRO when you keep adding things to the brief and eventually realise the person is being asked to solve considerably more than Talent Acquisition.

That last distinction is worth making early. If the new hire will be judged on something, we'd like to know whether they'll have the authority to change it or not.

Don't Let a Great Hiring Year Fool You

This is where we'd get quite nosy.

Candidate one

Increased hiring by 40% while reducing agency spend. Great. Now imagine the company had just become one of the hottest employers in its sector, applications were pouring in and hiring managers had been given additional interview support.

Candidate two

Delivered a smaller improvement while opening a new market, with almost no employer recognition and a hiring team they were still building.

Those are not remotely the same achievement.

With senior TA candidates, we'd want to understand what the market was giving them for free. Were candidates already interested? Were salaries competitive? Did hiring managers prioritise recruitment?

The numbers still matter. We just want to know how much work the TA leader had to do to create them.

  
        The Result Sounds Good
        What We’d Still Want to Know
      
        Reduced time-to-hire
        Where was the time actually taken out — sourcing, interviews, approvals or offers?
      
        Cut agency spend
        Did they build internal sourcing capability, negotiate differently or simply recruit less that year?
      
        Increased hiring volume
        Did the existing team become more productive, did headcount increase or did the hiring itself become easier?
      
        Improved offer acceptance
        What changed — candidate management, compensation, speed or the proposition itself?
      
        Rolled out a new ATS
        What became measurably easier or better once it was live?

A percentage without the story behind it can make two very different TA leaders look remarkably similar.

When “We Need a Better Employer Brand” Isn't Really the Answer

Senior TA briefs often pick up employer brands somewhere along the way.

Sometimes that's exactly right. If you're entering a new market and nobody knows who you are, the TA leader may need to build awareness and give good people a reason to take the first call.

But employer brand can also become a convenient explanation for a hiring process candidates simply don't enjoy.

If someone has completed six interviews, repeated the same information to four people and then waited two weeks for a decision, a better careers page probably isn't the first fix.

We'd want a TA leader who can tell the difference — and who has enough influence with the business to do something about the second one.

Building TA While You're Already Hiring

Carter Morris has seen this problem in practice.

A hyper-growth startup needed a Global VP of Talent Acquisition while preparing to double its workforce in a year. There wasn't the luxury of building the perfect TA function first and then switching the hiring on.

The remit included building a global TA team and recruitment framework, introducing an ATS and reporting analytics, developing the employer brand and engaging third-party sourcing. At the same time, the business needed immediate hiring results in markets where it had little brand equity and, in some cases, no physical presence.

There was another complication: the incoming VP would inherit a geographically dispersed and overworked team with varying levels of capability, while introducing greater consistency, compliance and performance measurement without flattening the entrepreneurial culture that had helped the company grow.

Finding Someone Who Could Do Both

And the candidate market was narrower than the initial interest suggested. The business wanted somebody who could operate hands-on immediately but build towards a more strategic model, with experience spanning established corporates and greenfield startups. The salary budget was just a bit below market too.

Carter Morris identified and recommended four professionals within two weeks. The appointed VP subsequently joined the ExCo and continued to be highly regarded by the leadership team.

That's the sort of TA search where “built a recruitment function” needs considerably more explanation. Building it while the company is doubling, the team is already stretched and today's vacancies still need filling is a different job.

Read the Global VP Talent Acquisition case study.

Three Points of Consideration That Tell Us More About a TA Leader

At this level, we'd rather spend interview time on the decisions behind the hiring numbers than have somebody walk us through the recruitment lifecycle.

When Did You Push Back on a Hiring Plan?

This can tell you more than another story about filling a difficult role.

Did the candidate ever challenge a hiring plan because demand wasn’t credible, combine roles that were competing for the same talent or persuade the business that a vacancy didn’t need replacing at all?

A TA leader who’s measured only by hires can become very good at producing hires. A senior TA leader should also know when recruiting harder is the wrong answer.

Which Hiring Manager Changed How They Worked Because of You?

Most senior TA leaders can tell you they’ve “partnered with the business”. We’d rather hear what changed because of that partnership.

Did a leader stop insisting on an unrealistic candidate profile? Did interview feedback start arriving in 24 hours instead of a week? Did a business unit change its assessment process after losing candidates at the same stage repeatedly?

If nothing changed on the business side, we’d want to understand how much influence TA really had.

What Happened When the Forecast Moved?

A TA plan built in January can look quite different by April.

Perhaps one country suddenly needs twice the headcount. A product launch moves. An acquisition lands. Or Finance takes a red pen to half the vacancies.

We’d like to explore more about what the candidate did next. Which resources moved, what did they stop doing and how quickly could they give leadership an honest view of what was still deliverable?

When Recruiting a Recruiter Gets Interesting

Senior TA candidates spend their working lives around recruiters. They've heard the pitch, know the questions and can spot fairly quickly when the person interviewing them doesn't really understand their job.

That's where being an HR-only search firm becomes particularly useful. We don't need the first half of the conversation to explain what Talent Acquisition does. We can spend it working out how somebody actually led it.

If you still have lingering questions on the retention front, you can learn more about our Talent Retention & Consulting services here.

We Know When Your Hiring Metric Is Hiding the Real Problem

A TA dashboard can tell you that time-to-hire has increased. It can't tell you whether sourcing slowed down, interview availability disappeared or five requisitions spent three weeks waiting for somebody to approve them.

We'd want that context before deciding what your new TA leader needs to fix.

It also stops us looking for someone with a brilliant record against a metric that was produced in completely different circumstances.

We Can Talk Recruitment With Recruiters

Senior TA candidates will notice fairly quickly if the person approaching them can't get beyond team size, hiring volume and a list of systems.

Because HR is our whole market, we can talk properly about the things that make a senior TA role interesting: where workforce planning meets reality, how much authority the function truly has and what the business expects TA to own when hiring starts going off-plan.

That's useful for assessment. It's also useful when the person we'd like you to meet is perfectly happy where they are.

The Person Taking Your Brief Doesn't Disappear Afterward

Carter Morris is deliberately small. Our senior people who know the nuances behind the brief stay involved in the search rather than passing it down once the work has been won.

That's also one of the distinctions Carter Morris makes when comparing the best executive search firms for Human Resources: the same experienced consultant remains involved from the first conversation through the search.

For a TA search, that continuity matters. If the market keeps questioning the same part of the remit, compensation isn't landing or the candidates you expected to attract aren't interested, you want that information coming back quickly — preferably from someone who knows enough about TA to tell you what it means.

What Customers Say About Working With Carter Morris

  
        “...they came up with 3 exceptional people,
        fully screened and qualified, in just 14 days
        from taking the brief...proved to be a
        brilliant hire.”
      
          CEO, Europe
        
          Manufacturing
        
        “I don’t know how they did it, but they
        gave me a shortlist of 4 exceptional people
        in under 10 days from taking the brief.”
      
          SVP for HR
        
          Latin America, Global Pharma
        
        “On the rare occasions we have needed
        to conduct package negotiations.......I
        never feel like I’m being held to ransom....”
      
          SVP Compensation & Benefits
        
          Global Consumer Goods

Give Us the Hiring Problem

You don't need to turn it into a polished TA brief before speaking to us.

Tell us what the business is planning, where hiring starts getting difficult and what you're expecting the new leader to make better. If we think you're describing a different hire from the one on paper, we'll tell you. Honesty and transparency are core pillars of our process.

And if the brief makes sense, we'll get on with finding the people who can actually do it.

TALK TO CARTER MORRIS

Frequently Asked Questions About Hiring a Talent Acquisition Recruiter

At Carter Morris, we find and assess senior HR professionals who lead Talent Acquisition, from Managers and Directors through to Global Directors, VPs and SVPs.
We're interested in more than finding someone with the right title. We want to know who can actually deliver what your business needs.
With a network of over 89,000 HR professionals across 94 countries, we can reach experienced TA leaders who aren't necessarily looking for their next role but might be exactly who you need.
Start with the hiring environment they'll be responsible for instead of just another generic TA checklist.
A business entering unfamiliar markets may need somebody who's built sourcing capability and employer recognition from very little. An established global employer with a large TA team may care much more about the operating model, leadership, analytics or improving how the business works with TA.
Yes. Carter Morris recruits senior HR professionals internationally and Talent Acquisition is one of the HR disciplines we cover.
The Global VP Talent Acquisition case study we referenced involved a hyper-growth company building a global TA function while preparing to double workforce numbers within a year.
We'd get behind the headline hiring numbers.
That means understanding the talent market they were recruiting into, how much influence they had with hiring leaders, what infrastructure already existed and what they personally changed when hiring wasn't working as planned.
Sometimes it matters considerably. Sometimes the harder part of the brief is elsewhere.
If the real challenge is building a TA function across unfamiliar countries, for example, somebody who has done that successfully in an adjacent sector may be more relevant than a candidate who knows your industry but has only operated inside a mature recruitment model.
We'd decide where industry knowledge is genuinely essential before making it a search constraint.
Yes. Carter Morris regularly works across borders. For example, we've supported US-headquartered businesses that initially came to us because they were struggling to hire in Europe. Those relationships later expanded, with the same businesses asking us to support hiring in the Americas too.
For a senior TA appointment, we'd want to understand whether you need somebody who already knows that particular talent market or somebody who's proved they can build recruitment capability somewhere new.
Usually when the accountability you're describing has moved substantially beyond acquisition.
If the person needs to own the wider people strategy, organisational design or multiple HR disciplines alongside TA, it may be worth asking whether you're actually describing a CPO or CHRO.
Because the person you're hiring knows recruitment extremely well.
A specialist should be able to get beyond hiring volume and familiar TA terminology and understand how the candidate actually ran the function, where the business made their job harder and what they did about it.