Talent Advisement

who can get certified

For Organizations

We partner with organizations to create and assess their Talent Advisement strategy as part of their larger organizational strategy, values, mission, and goals. 

Our process of helping you source and evaluate candidates disrupts most traditional approaches. Ours is grounded in the belief that employees don’t need to “fit in,” but rather are invited as partners to create, evolve, and add value to your organization’s culture. 

At every point of contact, we are not just screening, interviewing, or testing a candidate, but we are building a relationship with them. That relationship is our priority, regardless of how long they engage in the hiring process. And so every custom Talent Advisement system we build starts with Human-Centered Practices

Talent Advisement isn’t recruiting. Because hiring a candidate is not our ultimate goal, we don’t plan backward from a desired start date, which often results in false urgency and prioritizing speed over relationships and equity. Instead, we aim to build you a system, with processes that match your values, to create a human-centered and partnership-based hiring experience for the candidate and the organization. 

Our Talent Advisement Approach

The Job Description

Standard hiring practices default to using the job description of the person who vacated the position. Or creating a description for a “unicorn” who is expected to produce results on Day 1 without any training or onboarding. 

We create job descriptions with values-based competencies.

Most importantly, we create the job description in collaboration with the hiring manager and other departments, so the role is designed in the context of the whole team’s functions. Sometimes, this pushes organizations to update multiple job descriptions and better understand individual roles and cross functions. Often, a thorough and values-aligned job description becomes part of the performance management process.

This is one way we create a functional hiring system and not just fill a role.

The Job Posting

More than a list of duties, the job posting is where you share your organization’s story and values, and compensation for the role.

A job posting that attracts a diverse pool of applicants may include your compensation philosophy, benefits, culture description, growth opportunities, onboarding plan, and more. All this helps candidates make an informed decision to apply.

Compensation

Any role’s salary and compensation package should be driven by a compensation philosophy. This requires a holistic understanding of compensation across the organization, including market analysis and examining pay equity among current employees.

A compensation philosophy also details how promotions and bonuses are decided, benefits, and many other factors. A salary doesn’t exist in isolation–it’s part of the organization’s strategy and impacts other employees.

Sourcing & Attracting Candidates

A common belief we see in standard hiring practices is a bias toward external candidates. As part of your Talent Advisement system, we help you examine how and whether you train and promote internally, how you can cross-train, and how you plan for succession. An equitable and human-centered hiring system should provide opportunities for current employees too.

Evaluating Candidates

An evaluation system involves training interviewers on navigating the subjective process of evaluating candidates, which is crucial for an equitable process.

We train interviewers to fully understand the role and the evaluative measures for scoring or ranking candidates, hold interviews with a consistent format, understand the shared language of competencies, hold equity-focused debriefs and discussions, and disrupt their conscious and unconscious biases.

We also help create interview questions grounded in the agreed-upon competencies and organizational values. 

Onboarding for Belonging

No employee is ready to do their job fully on Day 1.

We prioritize creating time and systems for new employee training (to learn their jobs) and onboarding (to learn the culture).

These both help build belonging, empower, set expectations, and invite employees to add value and participate in the culture, not just adapt to it. 

Contact us to start creating your Talent Advisement system.

document with image

For Candidates

We champion your growth and ambitions as you build autonomy and creativity—the keys to a truly fulfilling career. We help you fully understand and present your value, align with your career goals, and match with the opportunity or company where you will thrive.

 

We can help you:

 

      • Review and strengthen your resume
      • Find positions and organizations that align with your goals, strengths, and values
      • Prepare for the interview
      • Reflect and grow with coaching and mentoring

Read More about Hiring, Recruitment, and Retention

HANDOUT: Building Partnership Through Feedback Presentation

Thank you for attending our PHIRA Long Beach Chapter presentation, "Building Partnership Through Feedback" with Kim Ho and MJ Mathis at Leverage to Lead. Please click below to access the accompanying handout: View as a Google Doc: Handout as Read-Only Google Doc...

HANDOUT: Pay Equity Presentation

Thank you for attending our PHIRA Long Beach Chapter presentation, "Creating an Equitable Compensation System" with Kim Ho and Dione Lee at Leverage to Lead. Please click below to access the accompanying handout: View as a Google Doc: Handout as Read-Only Google Doc...

HR Shouldn’t Shield Us from Each Other

When clients come to us wanting to hire, they discover that our Human Resources and Talent Advisement processes go beyond finding and selecting candidates.  We consider hiring as one part of a larger set of supportive structures and processes, and a reflection of...

Why Affinity Groups Need Cultural Competency

If you’ve ever been part of an affinity group, you’ve seen how much diversity exists among people who share one identity marker. Opting into an affinity group can be a welcome relief, a place to be seen, where you don’t feel the need to explain yourself. But, like...

What Team Onboarding Did to Our HR Processes

This is the fourth and final article in our series on team onboarding, a practice at Leverage to Lead where we go beyond traditional onboarding and decide to evolve as a team, together, when a new colleague joins us. Read about the origins of team onboarding here,...

Our Team Onboarding Evolution

Welcome to our series on team onboarding, a practice at Leverage to Lead where we go beyond traditional onboarding and decide to evolve as a team, together, when a new colleague joins us.  A common challenge we see when helping organizations operationalize their...

Why We Have DEI Working Agreements

When we see aspects of white supremacy culture arise during DEI work (perfectionism; assimilation; presumption of comfort, safety, and power; individualism), it’s rarely in the form of overt bigotry or discrimination. We’ve all been socialized with white supremacy...

Reframing Burnout

We have to talk about burnout.  Not only because it’s cited as one of the main causes of the Great Resignation, which may permanently reshape how we work, and not only because it’s widespread (can we ever use the metaphor of “epidemic” again?) across workplaces. We...

Is Your Organization Ready to Support Employee Resource Groups?

There may be a group of exhausted employees within your organization.  They may have begun gathering on their own time to offer each other support, networking, and a space for their shared identity. We’ve seen these groups form because employees need a space to be...

Transforming Recruitment, Placement, and Human Resources

In 2021, Leverage to Lead expanded its offerings in two ways. In addition to individual coaching and organizational transformation, we now have Aubrey Jones as our Head of Talent Advisement, and Kim Ho as our Head of HR. We are grateful for the depth and range they...