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The impossible job of being a standalone Talent Lead
There’s a particular kind of job that looks great on paper. You’re the FIRST Talent hire. You’ve got a seat at the table, a mandate to build something from scratch and the opportunity to shape how a business hires as it grows.
It’s exciting. It’s strategic. It’s exactly the kind of challenge plenty of experienced recruiters want.
Until, of course, you realise you’re also the recruitment team, the hiring strategy, the ATS administrator, the employer brand specialist, the workforce planner, the hiring manager coach and, more often than not, the person chasing everyone else to do their jobs. You're doing this all at once, with no team, and usually with a hiring target that assumes none of these other things take time.
Welcome to being a standalone Talent Lead.
One person, about twelve different jobs
When a business hires its first Talent Manager or Head of Talent, it’s often because hiring has become a problem.
The business is growing and Founders are stretched. Hiring managers are frustrated, agencies are expensive, roles are taking too long to fill and nobody really knows what’s happening across the hiring pipeline. Something needs to change, so the business brings in someone to take ownership. Which makes sense.
But there's often a pretty big gap between what the business needs and what it actually gives that person the time, resources or authority to deliver. They’re expected to fill roles, reduce agency spend, improve quality of hire, build a repeatable hiring process, introduce structure, coach hiring managers, improve the candidate experience and somehow make the whole thing more efficient. Oh, and they need to do it quickly.
The trouble is, these things aren’t separate jobs that can be neatly ticked off one by one. They all compete for the same finite hours in the day. Every hour spent rebuilding a broken interview process is an hour not spent sourcing candidates. Every hiring manager who needs coaching takes time away from actually hiring. Every new role that lands unexpectedly changes the priorities for the week. When hiring is urgent, the strategic work is almost always the first thing to go.
You're building the engine while driving the car
Here’s where it gets particularly difficult.
Most standalone Talent hires aren’t walking into a genuinely blank canvas. They’re walking into a business that has already developed its own ways of working, whether those ways make sense or not.
Hiring managers have their own interview questions
Founders have their own preferred ways of making decisions
Job descriptions are inconsistent
Nobody agrees on what good looks like
Feedback takes a week
Roles get opened without a clear brief, and priorities change halfway through the process.
Sometimes there’s an ATS or sometimes there’s a spreadsheet held together by hope and a few questionable formulas.
And now it’s your job to fix ALL OF IT while keeping hiring moving.
You can’t simply pause recruitment for three months while you design a better process. The business still needs people, revenue targets still exist and teams are still stretched. The CEO still wants to know why that critical role hasn’t been filled. So now you’re trying to improve the system while working inside it, often without the authority to change the behaviours causing the problems in the first place. It’s a hard job and not because the person doing it isn’t capable, but because the conditions make it unnecessarily difficult.
The expectations don't always match the reality
There’s often an assumption that hiring someone experienced enough to lead Talent means the business can hand over the problem and move on. But hiring expertise doesn't automatically fix a lack of clarity around headcount, slow decision-making, unrealistic salary budgets or hiring managers who don't prioritise interviews.
Talent can influence these things. It can build processes to make them easier to manage, it can challenge assumptions, bring data to the table and help leaders make better decisions.
But it cannot do everything alone.
You can build the most beautifully structured hiring process in the world, but if interviewers don't show up, feedback isn't submitted and nobody can agree on the brief, it won't save you.
You can create brilliant workforce plans, but they won't mean much if leadership changes its mind about hiring priorities every fortnight.
You can reduce agency spend, but not if the business expects you to deliver twice as many hires with half the budget and no additional support.
At some point, the business has to take responsibility for the parts of hiring that belong to the business. Talent isn't a service desk where everyone submits a request and waits for a hire to appear. It’s a partnership and partnerships require participation.
You can't be strategic and reactive all day
This is probably one of the biggest frustrations of the standalone Talent role.
You're hired to think strategically, but your day is dictated by whatever is most urgent. You want to analyse hiring data, identify where the process is breaking down, improve forecasting and work with leadership on future workforce needs. Instead, you're sourcing for three difficult roles, rearranging interviews, chasing feedback, briefing an agency, fixing a job advert and explaining to a hiring manager why they can't add another five interview stages.
By the time you get to the strategic work, it's 6pm and tomorrow, the cycle starts again.
Then, a few months later, someone asks why the business hasn't made more progress on its Talent strategy. It's a frustrating position to be in because the person doing the job can see exactly what needs to change but they simply don't have the capacity to do it all at once. The more capable they are, the easier it can be for the business to keep piling things on. Problems get solved, so more problems get handed over. The person becomes the go-to for everything vaguely related to hiring, and the gap between their remit and their actual workload gets wider.
Being good at your job shouldn't mean becoming the permanent solution to a resourcing problem.
So, what does a standalone Talent Lead actually need?
Well, it’s not necessarily a big team, nor an expensive tech stack and certainly not another 40-page strategy document. They need the conditions to do the job properly.
1. A realistic brief.
What does the business actually need Talent to achieve over the next six to twelve months? How much hiring is expected? What needs fixing first? What can wait? You cannot prioritise everything equally. Leadership needs to be clear about what matters most and accept the trade-offs that come with that.
2. Leadership buy-in.
If the brief is to improve hiring, leaders and hiring managers need to be willing to change how they work. That means clearer briefs, timely decisions, useful feedback and realistic expectations. The Talent Lead shouldn't have to fight for basic participation every time a role opens.
3. Time to build, not just deliver.
If you want a scalable hiring function, you need to invest in the things that make hiring easier over time: consistent processes, useful data, better planning, clear decision-making and capable hiring managers. That investment takes time upfront. The payoff comes later, when the business can hire more consistently without relying on one person to hold every detail together.
4. Support where it's needed.
Sometimes that means a coordinator to take on the administration. Sometimes it means temporary sourcing support during a busy period. Sometimes it's an experienced People or Talent partner who can help shape the strategy, challenge priorities or build the infrastructure alongside them. Support doesn't always have to mean another permanent hire. But the assumption that one person can cover every need indefinitely and immediately isn't a strategy.
5. A voice in the decisions that affect hiring.
If Talent is accountable for delivery, it needs to be involved in the decisions that determine whether delivery is possible. Headcount planning, salary budgets, role prioritisation and changes to business strategy all have an impact on hiring. Talent needs to be part of those conversations before the brief becomes “get this done by next month”.
And if you're the person doing the job?
First, recognise that the difficulty isn't necessarily a reflection of your ability. You might be an excellent recruiter and a thoughtful strategic partner, and still struggle to make progress when you're expected to deliver immediate hiring results while building an entire function around them.
Be honest about capacity. Make the trade-offs visible. If filling the current roles means the hiring process project gets pushed back, say so. If a target isn't achievable with the available resources, explain why.
And don't let every problem in the business quietly become your problem to solve.
You can be proactive, commercially minded and brilliant at finding solutions without taking sole responsibility for things that require wider organisational change. The best standalone Talent Leads don't succeed because they somehow manage to do the work of an entire team, they succeed when they can get the business working with them.
The first Talent hire shouldn't have to do it all alone
Bringing in your first Talent Lead is an important step in a company's growth. It signals that hiring needs more ownership, more thought and more structure but the hire itself isn't the solution to every hiring problem the business has accumulated.
That person needs a clear remit, realistic priorities, leadership support and enough breathing room to build something that works beyond the next urgent vacancy. And sometimes, they need a bit of experienced support around them.
At Morrigan Talent, we work with growing businesses and their People and Talent teams on exactly this kind of challenge. That might mean helping a standalone Talent Lead develop the strategy and infrastructure they've never had time to build, providing hands-on hiring support during a busy period, OR working with leadership to get the bigger picture into shape before your perm People or TA person steps in.
It’s not to take over or add another layer of process, it’s just to give the person holding everything together a bit more room to do their job properly. If you've hired someone to build a Talent function, they need the capacity to actually build it.
