Everything I know about living a trusted advisor role

Around four years ago, one year after I started my career in recruitment (and my professional life at all), I was invited for a benchmarking meeting. It was unbelievable to me that I had knowledge to share, considering I was just hired as full time recruiter, with barely one year experience as an intern. With that being said, with SAP being the powerhouse that it is, it's understandable that smaller and national companies would want to learn about how we run our processes and best practices in general. Even if the message was delivered by the newbie recruiter - me :)

As we exchanged best practices and our personal perspectives on the recruiter role, I shared for the first time with an external audience the thing I loved the most about by job as recruiter, which was (and still is): basically everything that can't be (at least anytime soon) done by a robot. I told them that I didn't invested my time in becoming the best at any of the tasks that I imagined being automatized, like screening resumes and scheduling interviews, that's just not where I focused my energy towards. Even then, as "green" of a professional as I could be, I knew that what made me excited about my daily work was all the things that a robot could not do for me: being a strategic advisor to my hiring manager, delivering a great pitch to a candidate, to close a difficult offer by mastering negotiation and convince a superstar candidate to join us. I obviously was not as good at any of these things as I am today, but I was already passionate by this part of my job and that was exactly where I focused my energy on improving as a professional.

Why am I telling a story from four years ago just now? Well, I promise everything will make sense.

Something clicked and I remembered this benchmarking situation last week, when I was invited to speak in an internal event for people day at SAP, a day especially created for employees to focus on their own personal development. The main theme of this internal event, which was a global call for the whole talent attraction (recruitment) department at SAP, was "living the trusted advisor role in talent attraction". One of the slides shared by our global head mentioned the reasons to act as a trusted advisor, one of them being: the advances in TA/recruitment technology (aka automation).

Now you probably notice where I'm going with this. Four years ago, during that benchmarking, we didn’t have the AI tool for resume assessment that is available today, nor automated interview scheduling, and yet, I already used to focus my efforts in up-skilling on what today it's called "being a trusted advisor".

The first question I was asked during the event was:

What does being a trusted advisor means to you?

Well, to bring a talent attraction example (recruitment is my whole professional life, what can I say?). Imagine the following: myself, the hiring manager, the interviewers and whomever more is involved in the hiring process, we together make the hiring team. Each of us bring different skills, attributes and knowledge to the table. And together we can deliver the something neither of us can deliver individually, which is hiring the best talent to the company. So simply, I think we are trusted advisors when we are seen as an essential part of this hiring team, and when our stakeholders understand how much value we can bring to the table.

Sounds nice, right? But also sounds like the easiest thing ever, but it's not actually. I decided to start my article four years ago, because the most important piece is consistency. Consistently showing up for your customers and showing value in every interaction. There is that saying that is “trust is built in drops and lost in buckets” (Kevin Plank), and it's as accurate of a statement as it can be.

During the global call, I focused on sharing some lessons I've learned that I don't hear that often, my "secret tips" if you will. And I promise I will get through those. But first, let's lay down the foundation.

A few months ago I moved to my current role, and I developed a knowledge transfer plan to the team (of recruiters) I was leaving behind. I know now that it was actually my personal guidebook, the "becoming a trusted advisor 101" or something like that... So here follows the competencies I believe are key to be considered a trusted advisor:

• Business Acumen: My first knowledge transfer session to my former team was an overview of the lines of businesses the recruiters were going to cover, combined with "hiring managers map" and main profiles they would hire. This was all about business acumen, you can't be a trusted advisor if you don't know what you are talking about and who you are talking to…
• Stakeholder management: One of the chapters of this knowledge transfer was about best practices on building the relationship with the hiring managers. My main points covered were related to communication (responsiveness, assertiveness), keeping your promise and having a point of view when partnering in a hiring process. I have also shared the importance of building the bridges with other HR, TA, operations and any other teams highly connected with your daily work. This is a must to deliver an amazing end to end experience to these main customers we have. 
• Data-driven approach: I believe this is so instrumental that I delivered a full one hour session about it. Transforming data into insights and use this as part of your every work interaction is not that easy, but it's a turning point on becoming a trusted advisor. It's about anticipating needs and understanding challenges (and proposing solutions) based on data.
• Strategic thinking: This almost doesn’t require an explanation. How can you be a trusted advisor without understanding the strategy (the company's strategy, the department you are recruiting for, and from your own department?). But more than that, you need to be able to design a strategy to propose as a trusted advisor.

Now that we all understand the foundation - which, again, not as easy as it sounds - let me tell you what I presented in the global call to the recruitment organization at SAP. Closing this article with the lessons I learned which I also wanted to be the main takeaways from what I presented:

Lesson 1: The working relationship as the most powerful tool to drive change

A while back, I prepared and hosted monthly strategy meetings to the leadership team at my SAP office. We covered many important talent attraction topics and we used this sessions to drive adoption. The attendance rate was incredibly high.

In different timeframes, I have asked three manager I worked very close with, about their feedbacks on the content we presented and if they would join the next strategy meeting. All three of them said something in the lines of "I don't actually join the meeting because of the content, I join because you are the one that is leading it". One of these managers complemented saying that he knew how hard I worked to prepare that meeting and how important it was for me, and that's why he joined actually.

My first instinct was to be concerned, I thought maybe they didn’t care about the content, and that sounded like a problem I had to fix. When I asked, they then said that the content was a plus, made them continue to join and pay attention to the presentation, but what was driving them to join consistently, every month for more than a year, was our close working relationship. The driving factor was the fact that they saw me and respected me as a trusted advisor. The idea of "if you are inviting me to this meeting, regardless of what it's about, then it must be important".

I think that hosting and preparing these meetings can be seen as an example on how to act as a trusted advisor, or even my approach on asking for feedback to incorporate to the following sessions.

However, the most important lesson I took from this situation when I reflected about it, it's about how powerful the relationships we build with the business leaders are. This is by far the most relevant tool we have to drive and influence change in the business, and we should never dismiss its impact.

Lesson 2: Never underestimate any connection and its importance: (aka build yourself a safe network)

This was one the most important insights I had through a mentorship process. I had just been escalated, and a very influential leader fully supported me when that happened. Considering the escalation was from someone from his department, it was impressive to watch that leader "taking my side" and positioning so strongly as he ended up doing. As I discussed this situation with this mentor I had, he said it was a sign of trust, and we analyzed the trust building process that resulted in that situation. To this day, the following sentence from my mentor stays with me: "He started trusting you, because everyone that he trusts, already fully trusted you".

Even though I didn't noticed, he was completely right. I started building a trusting relationship with this leader's direct reports, HR business partner, executive assistant, stakeholders and colleagues, and after having a solid foundation, my trusting relationship with the leader developed almost naturally.

You should never underestimate any connection. Everyone has important and solid relationships with people that will be your future working partners (or even your own manager someday, who knows?). The way you position yourself and treat these people, will have a major impact to you. It doesn’t matter if it's the CEO or an intern, you should put effort into developing a trusting and collaborative relationship with everyone.