Most organizations that are struggling with talent acquisition strategy have already tried to fix it. They bought a new ATS, added integrations, brought in more vendors, maybe hired a new VP of TA. The problems persist anyway, and the instinct is to keep layering on solutions rather than stopping to ask whether the foundation underneath them is sound.
Linda Brenner has seen this cycle play out hundreds of times across enterprise organizations, and her diagnosis is consistent: the technology was never the problem.
She is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Talent Growth Advistors, a consulting firm that audits enterprise talent acquisition functions and builds the business case to redesign them. She spent years inside companies like Gap, Pepsi, and Home Depot before turning that experience into a practice dedicated to fixing what most organizations keep getting wrong.
On this episode of Don't Get Played, Linda joins host Sarah O'Melia to talk about where talent acquisition strategy actually breaks down and what it takes to build something that holds.
The reason hiring doesn't work in most organizations, Linda argues, has nothing to do with the software. It has to do with the absence of strategy, process design, and clearly defined roles and responsibilities underneath the software. Until those foundations exist, no technology investment changes the outcome.
When hiring is broken, the ATS is usually the first thing that gets blamed. Linda has watched this pattern repeat itself across organizations of every size. A company grows frustrated with the recruiting software, convinces itself that a different platform would solve the problem, and begins an RFP process to replace it. Her firm won't take that engagement.
"If you're looking for a consulting firm to come in and say, pull Workday Recruiting out and let us do an RFP for a new ATS, we're not your guy. We will not be successful."
The issue in nearly every case is not what the technology can or cannot do. It's that the technology was implemented without anyone answering the foundational questions first: why are we buying this, who is going to use it, what data goes in, what do we expect to get out, and what does good actually look like?
The enthusiasm around a new platform's features tends to overtake the logic required to deploy it well. She says that commonly used software has capabilities most TA leaders haven't come close to using. It’s not because the features aren't there, but because the strategy for using them was never built.
If there's a single dysfunction that shows up in almost every audit Talent Growth Advisors conducts, it's this: each hiring manager is running their own process. They dictate how applications should be received, whether candidates get screened, how many interviews happen, and what format those interviews take. None of it is based on data. All of it is based on beliefs, habits, or whims.
The result is a recruiting team working on 20 or 30 different processes simultaneously, with nothing optimized and no technology capable of compensating for the structural chaos beneath it.
The deeper problem is a conditioning issue that runs through the entire HR profession. "Those of us that grew up in HR have been conditioned to believe that hiring managers, managers in the business are our customers. They are not. The customer is the top talent in the marketplace that we have to win, and we have to work in partnership with the hiring manager to win that talent."
Recruiting process design should be built around what it takes to attract and convert the best candidates, not around what a given hiring manager prefers to see on their calendar. There is no other function in the business, Linda points out, where a manager can dictate operational processes based on personal preference. This reality is degrading employers’ ability to recruit effectively.
Linda is direct about the limits of what a TA leader can accomplish working alone. Talent Growth Advisors won't conduct an audit without an executive steering committee in place first, a requirement the firm developed after years of watching well-designed recommendations die on the vine because the people who needed to act on them weren't in the room.
"Without the CHRO and his or her peers involved, it remains an HR problem." With a team of executive stakeholders, it becomes a business problem. And business problems get funded.
The financial case for that conversation is almost always larger than anyone expects. The business impact of recruiting isn’t captured by KPIs like time to fill and cost per hire. The business impact is reflected in real costs such as unplanned overtime, contingent labor spend, external search fees, and revenue lost when key roles remained open.
When Linda's team pulls those figures together and presents them to an executive steering committee, the reaction is almost always the same: leadership knew it was bad, but they'd never seen the total.
That visibility is what converts hiring from an HR headache into a strategic priority worth solving properly. Once known, the timeline for finding a solution is often shorter than most organizations assume. An audit takes 60 days, future-state process design takes another 60, and a pilot run with a single supportive executive leader can show meaningful results within six months.
When it does, other parts of the business want to get on board. That’s the point when a talent acquisition strategy becomes something the organization is pulling toward rather than something HR is pushing alone.
Linda is right: throwing more technology at the problem doesn’t lead to recruiting success. Learning to translate the value of recruiting into the language of the business does.