EP 16: The Future of Talent Acquisition: Strategic, Lean, and AI-Driven

[00:01:37] Adriaan: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Leaders in Talent Podcast, where we explore what’s next in recruitment with the actual talent leaders shaping the future of the industry. Today, I’m joined by someone whose name often comes up when I speak to other top TA leaders—Rory Mullins. Rory led recruitment at companies like Uber, Trainline, Wise, and TransferGo. Rory is known for building and rebuilding TA functions from the ground…

[00:02:00] Adriaan: …up. In this episode, however, we’re not going to be talking about how to build recruitment teams from scratch because we’re going to be looking forward. What does the future of recruitment teams look like, and is it different from how we’ve always been running and building recruitment teams? We’re going to be talking about the shift from large in-house teams to blended models combining internal, embedded, and agency resources. Of course, we’ll touch upon AI and how AI could transform sourcing and recruitment, why fractional recruitment leadership is on the rise, and what it takes to run a more modern, scalable, and strategic TA function. Rory, welcome to the podcast.

[00:02:45] Rory: Thanks for having me, Adriaan. I’m going to steal that intro as well—it was perfect.

[00:02:50] Adriaan: Good, right? It’s all you—you make my life easy.

[00:02:55] Rory: Me?

[00:02:56] Adriaan: You make my life easy. Rory, let’s get right into this. Why is this topic so relevant for you?

[00:03:00] Rory: I think it’s relevant for me because I feel like I’ve lived it over the last 10 or 15 years. Whether that was building TA teams inside hyper-growth startups or working at scale in much larger global organizations, I just feel like the model is ripe for change. And I think we’re at this inflection point where the days of building huge internal teams and just throwing headcount at a problem are over, right? We’re at this place now where we need leaner, smarter, more adaptable ways of working. I think that means rethinking the mix that we now have in TA when we consider internal teams versus embedded agencies versus recruitment agencies. And I’ll say recruitment under the auspices of retained recruitment.

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[00:04:45] Rory: I think contingency recruitment is dead. Yeah, and we’ll talk about that as well. But actually, it’s also personal for me because I think I’m at this point now in my own career where I’m thinking about building a business around these ideas and how I think I can influence the industry a little bit. So yeah, I think it’s super relevant because I’ve been there and done it, and I think it’s super relevant because it’s what I think about on a daily basis—as sad as that may be.

[00:05:10] Adriaan: I don’t know if it’s sad. I love the recruitment industry. I love that we have such a profound impact in helping people find a meaningful job in something as important as someone’s career. And in the end, no matter how much AI we throw at problems, we’re still a people-centric industry. That’s why I love to talk to people like yourself who have been in this industry for so long and have seen so much. When we started this conversation, before we hit record, we talked a tiny bit about the boom-and-bust cycle, especially in the last couple of years. I’ve seen it with our clients. We’ve experienced it in our own service: crazy demand, no demand, crazy demand, no demand. Tell me a little bit more because I feel like you’ve seen it all. You definitely have a couple of war scars. Using that as context, what do you see for the future? What does a resilient, scalable TA team look like?

[00:06:00] Rory: I’ve definitely seen it. I’ve been part of teams that are in the multiples of hundreds. I’ve been in the hundred-person team. I’ve led teams of 30-odd recruiters in my own time. And I really feel like the future ideal talent acquisition state, or the way the team is shaped or looks, is that it’s smaller. It’s more strategic and more plugged into the business so that you end up with a future TA team that’s smaller in nature, supported by external plugins, whatever those plugins are—and we can talk about those. That team isn’t just about filling roles anymore. Your internal TA team is focused on hiring, yes, but it’s also focused on workforce planning, market mapping, storytelling—the storytelling of the company pitch, the growth story—and building systems and infrastructure around hiring. That core team can be focused on strategy, employer brand, and then you complement that with flexible layers. So you think about embedded partners that you can scale up and scale down for when you have scaling moments. Then you start to build out the agency layer—but it’s trusted agency partners.

[00:07:00] Rory: I think they’re much more for niche hiring. So we’re not going, I think, anymore to the big players. You can see this because there’s been a downturn in revenue at the big players, and there’s a shift towards smaller, niche agencies that provide specialist services in specialist functions. And I think having those relationships and building those relationships is super important. So your internal TA team, I think, is now going to be less about volume because the volume will come from the external support. It’s going to become much more about orchestration around the talent infrastructure.

[00:08:00] Adriaan: So then how do you define what that right mix is? What would your advice be if you’re speaking to other TA leaders who are grappling with uncertainty, volatility in the markets, hiring internally versus externally, agencies, and of course, budgets—right? Budgets that are shrinking and getting smaller and smaller. How do you tie all those things together?

[00:08:30] Rory: I think for me, you’ve got to start with output. And I think—so this is counter to what I’ve just said around hiring being the only thing—but it’s starting with output. Where do we need to get to as a business by the end of the year? What percentage of that can I deliver with the existing internal TA team or a smaller TA team? Then I align that. I say, okay, let’s put a number on it. We’ll say, we’ll take 60% of hiring and place it with the internal TA team, and we’ll save 40% for external partners. Or it’s 100% with the internal TA team because actually we’re not doing a hell of a lot of hiring. But we know that if we turn the volume up, that additional hiring is going to come from external partners, and we’ll allocate budgets to that.

[00:09:00] Rory: Then I would look at what are the company-wide OKRs. What is the business focus for the next 12 months, the next quarter, and the next half? And then I would start to shape what my team is delivering from an OKR point of view that aligns with the wider company OKRs. So we’re focusing really purely on the business direction and supporting from that perspective. All of that project work starts to come from there.

[00:09:30] Rory: I think prior to that, I probably would have taken a step back. I’m a massive believer in building strong relationships with the finance team. Make the CFO your best friend, if that’s possible, yeah, and be very clear. I have a team this size. This is our output. This is what we can deliver for you. Our systems cost X, my salaries are Y, and Z is theoretical in the sense that at some point I’m going to bring in some extra support if I need to, but this is what it’s going to cost. So you start to capacity model around multiple scenarios. You start to be very clever around, okay, if you want 100 hires, this is how we do it. If you want 200 hires, this is how we’ll do it, and this is what it’s going to cost. And if you want 300 hires, this is what it’s going to cost and this is how we’re going to structure it.

[00:10:00] Rory: So you’ve got to start getting quite smart around scenario planning and really being clear on what you need to build. I think that scenario planning allows you to have a clear enough sense of your internal team—what it looks like and how it’s shaped—because ultimately they should be able to deliver all of your attritional hiring. So all of those backfills that come in, plus a certain percentage of growth. And that probably gives you a number. So let’s say we go for 10% growth plus attrition hiring. Do I cover that with my internal team? And then what are the models I need to use to deliver everything else if we start to turn the volume up on growth?

[00:11:00] Adriaan: Tell me a little bit more because I would love, and maybe you have some anecdotes or experiences on your dynamic with finance, and as Head of Recruitment or as a senior leader in recruitment, how that dynamic has helped you be successful. Or maybe share some of the learnings—why you said it’s one of the most important stakeholders in the organization.

[00:11:30] Rory: A great example—I won’t say where, it’s fine—but I inherited a TA team, and there was a very clear example where we were going to overspend by about 600 grand in the year. So I built out a projection model for the rest of the year. I said, look, we’re going to massively overspend here. Whoever had done the previous budget hadn’t factored in a number of elements. So I was very open and honest. I said, this is where we have an issue. But what I’m going to do is solve it by renegotiating our ATS, renegotiating our partnership with LinkedIn. We ended up signing up for much longer contracts, but I showed the savings that we were bringing in.

[00:12:00] Rory: So it was almost like, I’m showing you I’m willing. I’m showing you we have a problem. I’m not hiding behind it, and I’m getting to you before you come to me. I’m going to deliver savings, and this is how we’re going to do it. And actually, in this example, the core internal team was right-sized. I had a couple of vacancies that I cut, so we didn’t bring in additional heads. There was an existing embedded partnership in place, but what we were able to do was, once we started to ramp up capacity with the internal team, I started to very slowly reduce the number of embedded partners we had month on month until they were gone—and they were off-site two months early.

[00:12:45] Rory: By renegotiating some contract terms with suppliers and rethinking how we built the embedded model that we had in place, I didn’t upset the provider because I was really clear with them. I said, this is how we’re going to do it. They were like, yep, absolutely. It was within the terms of their contract. They were a little bit disappointed they were going to lose two months of revenue, but that’s fine. We kept the existing relationship, and we were able to bring them back in when we needed to. So I think a lot of it is about, and I think this is the trick to finance people in general—know your numbers. If you know your numbers, you have this great opportunity to have open conversations.

[00:13:30] Rory: That led to, actually, I want to spend some money on this over here, but what it’s going to give us is X, Y, and Z. And then you’re able to increase what you spend because you can show a return on investment over a three-month or even a three-year period. So yeah, I think that’s probably a good example.

[00:13:50] Adriaan: Great. Love that anecdote. Hey Rory, is this something you have a background in—finance? Is this something you learned over time, or is this something you’ve just put a lot of time, effort, and focus on?

[00:14:00] Rory: I’ve put time and effort, yes. I don’t have a background in finance at all. I’m a words guy. I’m not really a numbers guy. I do like data, and I think I get a little bit obsessive about it. But it actually comes back to the first time I led a team at Uber. I reported to somebody who was obsessed with capacity modeling, and they gave me an absolute grilling on my numbers in terms of the right-sizing of my team. I spent, I would say, five nights back and forth: “This isn’t right, this isn’t right, redo it.” Eventually, I got it right.

[00:14:30] Rory: Then I suddenly realized, okay, this person is quite senior. The way to this person’s heart and the way to build a relationship with them is to know my numbers. I think that kind of built an obsession with this. I felt that if I’m going to tell any story internally within a business, the narrative is going to be fed by data. But we’re not going to use the data just for data’s sake—we’re going to tell a story with the numbers. That, I think, really helps.

[00:15:00] Rory: The second reason is that I spent ten years in agency recruitment, and in agency recruitment, you live and die by your metrics—KPIs. I was talking to one of my old CEOs the other night, and he said, “Am I allowed to say KPIs?” And I’m like, it’s not a bad word. It’s okay to have KPIs. It’s about understanding that your input equals your output. That’s what recruitment is. There are many other things you can add to it, but in its purest form, recruitment is: whatever I put in, I will get a number out the other side. In those days, it used to be, if I send five CVs for a role, I’ll get three interviews, and I’ll get one hire. You work those metrics.

[00:15:45] Rory: I think that’s probably informed a lot of my decision-making over the years as well.

[00:15:50] Adriaan: I want to take one second because I find this fascinating. One of the things that keeps coming back when I speak to senior leaders in talent is the challenge of not always having a seat at the table. It’s the CHRO that represents recruitment, and it often becomes, “Okay, we’ve decided that recruitment needs to hire 300 people. Go. Just tell me when it’s realistic, when it’s going to be happening.” With your capacity plan, one of the things that I often see is that senior recruitment leaders fail to speak the language of business—which is finance. That’s why I’m asking you about this—really understanding from an overall company perspective how the company makes money, how the people function drives top-line revenue and profit, and how it can also free up working capital and therefore increase company value.

[00:16:45] Adriaan: When you were drilled on capacity planning with Uber, what were some of the drivers and levers that you were constantly challenged on? Because I’ve seen this is one of the hardest things in a recruitment function to get right.

[00:17:00] Rory: I think the first challenge in that scenario was actually that I wasn’t being ambitious enough. They wanted me to have a bigger team than I wanted, which is a great scenario to be in. Normally, you hear, “I want a huge team,” and someone pushes back. But this was the reverse—they were challenging me to be a little bit more ambitious. I came at it quite blindly. The learning in that scenario was that you’ve got to start with the endpoint and then work backwards.

[00:17:30] Rory: I was thinking, I’ll add three or four heads, and three or four heads will mean this. There was no thought put into the fact that there’s a ramp period. Naively, as a new manager, I didn’t consider that. Actually, there’s a ramp period—they’re not going to do anything for two months. They’re only going to make their first hires after that. So you start to change the numbers and realize they’re going to cost me X before they produce.

[00:18:00] Rory: Then it really started to center on, what’s the impact of this team on product growth? Because in this case, we were hiring product, data, design, and engineering roles. We were building product. A product isn’t going to be delivered if you don’t hire these teams. Making that correlation and that connection was super important. It was pretty simplistic in its nature, but over time that evolved into, for example, workforce planning at a company like Wise.

[00:18:30] Rory: We didn’t have people partners at the time—they do now, but when I was there, we didn’t. So I sat with FP&A, and we plotted out when we were going to put bums on seats. When is this engineer going to land in Tallinn? When is this engineer going to land in Budapest? We genuinely worked through it and got a sense of what the delivery number would need to be. That way, my team became much clearer on when they needed to be ramped up in hiring because this person needed to land, and here’s the time to hire, time to fill, and time to start. We started to work on those metrics, bringing some TA metrics into workforce planning to get a better sense of that.

[00:19:15] Rory: I think the finance piece—speaking the language—starts with cost per hire. It’s so simple, but actually understanding all of the metrics that go into creating a cost per hire is key. From there, try and carve out and shave 20%. Figure out where that 20% is, and finance will love you because you’re showing where you can save 20%. You probably already know going into the conversation where that saving is coming from—make it a thing. I think that’s super, super important, and I think it really helps.

[00:19:50] Rory: The other factor, and this is something we often forget, is that you need a wider appreciation of performance. This is where talent becomes more than just talent acquisition. What’s the stickability of those hires? Okay, it costs 7,000 euros per head to hire. Great, fantastic. It’s going to cost me a couple of million a year to make these hires—fine. But if we’re not retaining 95% of those new hires, I’m actually costing you way more. So it’s about understanding the drainage on the other side of that acquisition funnel and getting a sense of the retention of new hires in the previous 12 months and where we can make improvements.

[00:20:30] Rory: Then you start to say, not only am I having an impact at the front end by adding more people so we’re moving quicker, selling more product, and building more product—we’re better for finance—but we’re also not losing money at the back end because we’re retaining this talent. At least for the first 12 months. After 12 months, it’s not really my responsibility. That’s when the business has done something wrong. But I like to see my teams be really focused on actually achieving a 12-month stickability rate, so we get a real sense of what the performance is like.

[00:21:00] Adriaan: Love this. Rory, coming back to the TA teams—you’ve come into different teams, different types of sizes, some well-run, some where you really had to build things from the ground up again. Tell me, what do your first 90 days look like? What are the first things that you do or look at to see what the problem or the opportunity is? And can you maybe give me some anecdotes on what actions you’ve taken in those first 90 days?

[00:21:30] Rory: First 90 days—there are a couple of things I do at every company. The first is listen. I talk, and then I listen. But essentially, I over-index on meetings. I’m inheriting a team or creating a team that is going to support all of the functional leaders in the business. So the first people I need to meet, aside from the team, of course, are the functional leaders I’m going to support. I ask them, how has the team performed previously? What’s gone well? What’s gone badly? What would you like to see more of? What are your hiring plans over the next 12 months? Very simple questions—open-ended—give them room to speak and just pick up tons of information. Because you’re new, right?

[00:22:15] Rory: Even though you’re only the TA leader and you’re talking to a Chief Product Officer or a CTO, they still want to impress you. They still want to show you that you’ve joined a really good business. So they’ll tell you all the good stuff. But then over time, as the conversation draws on, they’ll start to tell you some of the bad stuff and some of the things that haven’t gone so well. For me, it’s about bringing all that together. Because the brief for me, primarily, is to fix hiring. You’ve hired a new TA leader because somebody’s resigned or they’ve been let go or whatever—it’s ultimately to fix hiring. But you don’t know what the root cause is. Is it process? Is it bad leadership alignment? Is it an unclear EVP?

[00:23:00] Rory: So it’s almost like I go on a listening tour—founders, C-suite, hiring managers, talk to the team, talk to people who are leaving. I’ve done this in a few cases, either someone is about to exit or, in my previous gig, recruiters had joined in the interim period before I started. So I went and spoke to those recruiters because they left the business. I asked, why did you leave? I was joining, so what was the issue? Then I figure out where those problems are.

[00:23:30] Rory: I genuinely sit down, compile all of that, and present it back to the team. I say, this is your scorecard—this is what you do well, this is what you do badly, this is what the business thinks about you. Within three or four weeks, they get a really clear sense of what we’re going to build over the next three to six months. I give them a chance to defend it because sometimes the feedback you get is anecdotal and not actually true. You’ve got to go and investigate and figure it out. So you go through it piece by piece, present it to people, and give the team space to respond to what the business has said about them.

[00:24:15] Rory: Then I get really clear on my expectations. I’m not a harsh leader, I’m not a difficult leader, but there’s a moment in time when I join a company where I get very clear on this is what we are going to do, and this is how we are going to work. I have this—I’ve said this before in other conversations—I have a no dickhead policy, which I’m really clear on.

[00:24:45] Adriaan: It’s a good policy.

[00:24:47] Rory: I like that policy. It’s a thing. It’s actually from the All Blacks rugby team—no dickheads in the dressing room. But essentially, that is my general ethos about how I expect teams to work. I’m really clear about it, and I spell that out on day one—or maybe not day one, probably week three. I’ve had people resign because of it, which is actually really good because you know immediately, okay, they weren’t right for me, they weren’t right for the team, and this is what we need to get to.

[00:25:30] Rory: You have to then create—and I think by presenting everybody with their positives and their failings—you immediately create a sense of culture and a sense of team. Then it’s like, right, as a team, we’re going to go and fix this. So I’ve taken the company voice, I’ve taken your voice, and now together, let’s go and build this and fix it. If I get that done in the first 90 days, I’m happy.

[00:25:55] Rory: Oh, and I genuinely want to make at least two to three hires myself in the first 90 days.

[00:26:00] Adriaan: Showing you can still do it?

[00:26:02] Rory: Exactly. I’ll go out and hire an engineer or hire a product person.

[00:26:10] Adriaan: Oh wow. Not for your own team, but actually go and do the hiring yourself?

[00:26:15] Rory: Yes, because the only way to really know the process and how it works is to actually do it. You map the process from start to finish, which is brilliant because then you know: this is how finance responds, this is how interviewers respond, here’s our scorecard. You work through all of those things. No matter how big the team you inherit, go and do the day job as a recruiter for a period of time. I think it’s super important and super relevant.

[00:26:45] Rory: And if you can, which I think is always really important, I’d say this to any leader—not just in TA—go and work with the Customer Support (CS) team for a day. Understand what customers say when they’re complaining, when they’re angry, when they’re annoyed. You really need to get a sense of how the business operates, and the CS team will tell you more about where your business is at than any other meeting you’ll go to. You’ll get a real sense of what people think about you externally.

[00:27:15] Adriaan: Do you have an example of a company where you did this?

[00:27:18] Rory: Yeah, I’ve done it at Wise. I sat with the CS team and actually answered call center calls, which was quite fun—not fun actually, when people are asking, “Where’s my money?” and it’s being held for legitimate reasons, but they don’t necessarily understand why.

[00:27:35] Rory: And at Uber, we were very big on either working as a delivery driver or riding delivery bikes, or working in the office where the drivers would come in to talk about issues with their car, their licenses, or various different things. It’s really helpful. It gives you a great appreciation of where you are as a business.

[00:28:00] Adriaan: Oh, so good. I love it. Talking about Wise and Uber, right? You’ve worked in those organizations as a senior talent leader—big teams. Why do you think big teams are something of the past?

[00:28:15] Rory: I do think they are something of the past. I think because people are frustrated by the boom-and-bust cycles, first of all. I know firsthand that a number of recruiters have left the industry because they’ve been laid off, or they’ve struggled to get another job because teams aren’t hiring at the same level. Or they go through that cycle: big company layoff, three months off, big company layoff again, and you see it continuously.

[00:28:45] Rory: I think there’s an element of attrition bleeding into the TA space. I think there’s frustration. Marketing and TA are always the first two teams to be looked at when you’re making cuts, and I think people are just annoyed—they’re pissed off with it. So I think that’s the first thing.

[00:29:00] Rory: I think secondly, TA leaders are far more conscious now about not building big teams. I’m always a little bit dubious when someone says, “I’m going to hire 50 recruiters.” I’m like, why? What problem are you solving? Because the biggest headache you’re giving yourself is that you’re going to have to let 25 of them go in 18 months’ time. That’s not great. So I think that’s the first thing.

[00:29:30] Rory: The second thing is, we now have, I feel, a really good blend in the market of tools and plugins that can support and augment existing internal TA teams. There’s a sense of bringing in specialist agencies, bringing in embedded partners who really know your business and spend time with you, and buying the right AI tools that can complement your existing team.

[00:29:55] Rory: I’ve been playing with a few of these tools—I obsessively play with them. I liken it to when I worked in an agency. If you were a good recruiter, you had a sourcer. Maybe you had two sourcers. Now I see, if you’re a really good internal recruiter, let me give you a couple of AI sourcing tools to support you. I think that’s where we’re getting to now: where there’s a coexisting model that allows you to have an internal core TA team that’s focused on hiring, yes, but also on hiring improvements.

[00:30:30] Rory: One of the challenges you have when you build big TA teams and big companies is that within six to twelve months, a recruiter will come to you and say, “I want to do more projects.” If I have more tools and more external support, there’s more space for internal recruiters to work on meaningful projects. I think we’re at this point now where teams don’t need to be as bloated as they were previously. I think they can be far more effective by purchasing the right tools.

[00:31:00] Rory: We’re only at the start of this, by the way. Genuinely, I think what we have today we’ll probably look back on as almost innocent in terms of where I think TA tools are going to go in the next 18 months to two years.

[00:31:15] Adriaan: Talk a little bit about AI and process, tooling, workflows, etc. Any thoughts on the role of the recruiter, the impact of some of the tooling you’ve already seen, and where you think the industry is heading?

[00:31:30] Rory: I think the role of the recruiter is going to change. I think the individual recruiter can become more effective and deliver more. They can spend less time sourcing and more time talking to candidates. They’ll probably spend less time filtering through irrelevant CVs because a lot of those will get filtered out up front. They’ll have more impactful conversations.

[00:31:55] Rory: I think the individual recruiter over time is going to become more involved in employer branding, more involved in workforce planning, and more involved in succession planning conversations. In many ways, we’re going to see smaller teams with elevated recruiters who have much more responsibility in the wider talent ecosystem. We’ll be able to deliver that because we’re going to buy the right tools or provide the right services that give them the space to do that.

[00:32:30] Rory: So all of the basic administrative work that recruiters do, I think, will be gone in the next year. Scheduling, CV sifting, sourcing, rejections, back-and-forth with diaries—all of these things, I think, will go out the window. Many of them already are.

[00:32:50] Rory: I think even when you look at volume hiring, a lot of the early-stage yes or no screening will be gone as well because AI can handle that. It’s simple for AI to do, and it can be done on WhatsApp, on email, or in chat—whatever channel the candidate prefers. That’s going to be very easy to automate.

[00:33:10] Rory: I’m still a little put off by the concept of being interviewed by a digital recruiter on video—I’m not quite there yet. But some of the text-based solutions are already easy and working. We’re already there. I do think that’s where we’re going to see the evolution of the recruiter—or let’s call them talent partners—because they’re probably more than recruiters now in that sense.

[00:33:40] Rory: So I believe we’ll have smaller teams with more elevated roles, closer to the seat at the table. I think recruiters have a real opportunity to lead from the front. But TA leaders need to make these decisions themselves. The mistake will be letting the business decide for you, like, “By the way, we bought you this tech. By the way, you can reduce your team by 40%.” That’s where frustration will come in. I think TA leaders need to lead from the front and be really open on this. They should say, “I need a smaller team, but with a smaller team, I’m going to have this and this.”

[00:34:15] Adriaan: Amazing. Rory, you also played the role of Interim CPO. What did that experience teach you about the intersection of talent and the broader people leadership side?

[00:34:30] Rory: Oh, it was very short—it was only three or four months.

[00:34:35] Adriaan: Doesn’t matter. It’s fascinating.

[00:34:37] Rory: I think what it taught me is something I already suspected, but I saw it firsthand: it’s all interconnected. In many ways, talent acquisition is the starting point of the people function. There is often a delineation in many companies where talent is over here, and people are over there, and they don’t necessarily talk to each other. In some companies, they do, but in others, they don’t.

[00:35:00] Rory: You can’t fix hiring if your onboarding is broken. You can’t build a pipeline if your EVP is weak or fuzzy, or if your values don’t show up in performance reviews, because then that stickability piece doesn’t carry through. You start to see how talent bleeds into culture, bleeds into L&D, bleeds into leadership. It gave me a much better appreciation of how important recruitment is in the overall people process and how important talent acquisition is.

[00:35:30] Rory: It gave me a very clear sense of how talent acquisition and people partnering, in particular, need to build really strong relationships. I also got to learn a ton about the People Ops side, which I had never really considered before. It’s nice to get a sense of that. But it also gave me a much better understanding of how tough the role is.

[00:35:55] Rory: In many ways, it reminded me that even though the people team technically has a seat at the table through the CHRO or the Chief People Officer, you’ve still got to shout really loud to get your voice heard. Your agenda is not the first agenda, and you’ve got to work really hard to get it there because you’re still seen as a cost center. You’re still seen as a centralized function, not necessarily building product. These things are difficult, especially in scale-up environments.

[00:36:30] Rory: I got an appreciation of how hard the job really is.

[00:36:35] Adriaan: So good. What a valuable experience, even if it was only for three months.

[00:36:40] Rory: Correct, yeah. I really enjoyed it. Loved it.

[00:36:45] Rory: Probably the biggest challenge was actually having to manage my peers and do their performance reviews. That was just weird, but good nonetheless.

[00:36:55] Adriaan: I remember the first time I became a manager and had to do the same. I felt so awkward. I remember this very well. My second boss—Sidney—I really looked up to him. He was a really young guy but always had time for me and was able to articulate things in a very clear and precise way. I remember calling him because I’d recently been promoted and had two direct reports. I asked him, “Do you have any advice for me as a new manager?”

[00:37:30] Adriaan: He told me, “Never be afraid to be the boss.” To this day, it stuck with me. Even though these people are your peers or maybe even your seniors by definition of your job title and how the hierarchy is structured, you are the boss—and that’s absolutely fine. But if you don’t own that title, nothing is going to move forward. Never be afraid to be the boss. Don’t be afraid to tell people how things should be or how you think you should lead. It stuck with me—don’t be afraid to be the boss.

[00:38:10] Rory: I like that. I’m going to take that as well. I’m going to steal that along with your intro. That’s going to be my other takeaway.

[00:38:20] Adriaan: Great. Let’s do that. That’s a beautiful way to wrap things up, Rory. What’s the best way for people to connect with you?

[00:38:30] Rory: Find me on LinkedIn. That’s the best way. I’ve become a bit of a prolific poster there.

[00:38:40] Adriaan: I love it. And that’s how we got connected, right? We were connected, but I saw your post and I thought, I’ve got to get Rory on the podcast. I also heard great things from other TA folks about you. And here we are—you absolutely delivered on that promise. I really enjoyed the conversation. Rory, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

[00:39:10] Rory: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.

[00:39:15] Adriaan: Awesome. Cheers.