Is Talent Engineering Bullshit?!?

Ok you gorgeous cadre of people warriors…Meet Gary. Gary has been a Recruiter, a Talent Acquisition Specialist, a Talent Partner and a Talent Advisor. Gary has never changed jobs. Gary’s LinkedIn headline has had more glow-ups than the Kardashian’s collective bottoms. And this month, Gary has big news. He’s a Talent Engineer now! We’ve all got a bit of Gary in us. (I definitely have. I once spent a full afternoon deciding between “Talent Acquisition” and “Recruiting”) And I think there’s a reason for it. When recruiters aren’t empowered, we fiddle with the stuff we can control. You can’t fix the hiring manager who takes ten days to submit feedback, or the comp bands, or headcount planning. But you CAN update your LinkedIn headline in about fourteen seconds. It’s a bit like a bunch of engineers sat round a car, arguing over what colour to paint it to make it go faster. That being said, there is the exciting new space opening up in Talent that is more software centric. So let’s ask the question. Is Talent Engineering Bullshit??  

1. What is talent engineering?

Most roads lead back to the irrepressible Viet Nguyen, Head of TA at AirOps (ex Netflix and Vercel). He’d been writing about “Talent Engineering” for donkeys years. His idea is that LLMs, MCPs and open APIs finally let you rebuild recruiting like a product, replacing the duct-taped mess of ATS + CRM + Slack + Airtable + Zapier. His build list was:

• Sourcing bots that generate qualified pipeline
• A market intelligence system tracking competitor moves
• An internal referral and backchannel database
• AI-powered candidate prep that doesn’t feel robotic

And one of the requirements was at least a year as a full-time sourcer or recruiter. Metaview split TA into three seats: Talent Partners (relationships and closing), Talent Ops (process, data, compliance) and Talent Engineers (AI, automation, building). Gem described it as a product manager for TA processes. And a16z launched a whole Talent Engineer Fellowship, an eight-week cohort with Dan McCarthy, Senior Talent Engineer at Zapier, among the faces. So the rough consensus definition is someone who builds the systems, automations and AI workflows that make a talent team faster, and checks whether they’re actually working. Sounds great. Genuinely. I’d hire that person tomorrow. The trouble starts when you ask

that person actually is.

Metaview, one of the role’s biggest cheerleaders, says that without AI, a talent engineer is “just a fancy ATS admin.” The data folk have had a look too. Pave’s Hot Jobs Index sorted the explosion of “X - Engineer” titles into three buckets. AI Engineer is established. GTM Engineer and FDE are genuinely new functions. Talent Engineer landed in the third bucket with Marketing Engineer and Legal Engineer, the “re-designed roles”. Pave’s test for a real emerging job is whether it spreads across more and more companies over time. Talent Engineer doesn’t pass that test…yet. Full Stack Recruiter made the same point from the other side. They’ve watched teams rename everyone “partners” whilst the job underneath stayed identical: take the req, post it, source, chase feedback, close, repeat. One thing worth noting if you are interested in Talent engineering as a career next step. Pave reckons pay inside these bolted-on engineer titles will spread wider and wider, because some companies mean a real systems builder and others mean rebranded ops. Benchmark a “Talent Engineer” salary right now and you’re not comparing apples to oranges. You’re comparing apples to …I don’t know…Simon Bolivar’s 1813 campaign to liberate Gran-Colombia.

2. Where does it fit in a recruitment team?

If your talent engineer is a recruiter building software to make recruitment better for themselves and their team, that’s a software-centric, AI-enabled recruiter. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. That’s just recruitment getting better. Give it five years and we’ll just call it “recruiter”. There’s one case where a separate role makes sense: the person does no recruiting at all and builds and runs internal tooling for the talent team full time. Even then, it belongs under talent ops? maybe? I love Dan and Viet and I’m overdue a proper chinwag about this. This table is just my current internal classification in my mind. not gospel.

If you have an ambiguous role and want to know if you’re still a Recruiter, drown out the noise and ask yourself this : Will I own any reqs?” IF Yes Will I get canned for not hiring those reqs, irrespective of my output in other areas like tooling? IF Yes = You’re a recruiter. Not a bad thing! what a recruiter actually does is up for grabs, and being more AI enables and software centric is a core part of that. Dan McCarthy is Zapier’s Senior Talent Engineer and lands in a similar spot. In his operator’s guide he argues your first talent hire should come with deep recruiting experience, and that a talent engineer works best levelling up a team of experienced recruiters.

TL;DR - Is Talent Engineering Bullshit?

Its too early to tell. The term is up for grabs. There are people in our community building a really exciting version of talent functions like Viet & Dan, and companies backing these new software centric ways of finding talent like Metaview. But theres also people using Talent Engineer as a nice new title for LinkedIn. I’m totally there for talent engineering as a term, but whatever you call yourself, please please please make sure you are CLEAR on your own roles ACTUAL responsibilities in this shiny new machine world. Well... that's issue Eighty four! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.