Wak Solis didn't just rebuild a talent acquisition team at Deloitte Southeast Asia, she redefined it. With over 20 years in recruitment spanning banking, professional services, and consulting, she's learned something most TA leaders are still figuring out: recruitment isn't a support function. It's a growth function. And it can't do that job alone.
In a recent VideoMy Pod episode, he revealed why employer brand must be embedded in TA from day one, why metrics like "time to fill" are missing the real picture, and how to build the business case for investment through data.
"After COVID, there was a big shift in the market space. It used to be always employer-led, but after COVID it was more of candidates demanding. They had more choices. They realised they could actually work anywhere and be productive anywhere," Wak observes. Suddenly, candidates stopped asking just about compensation. They wanted to know about flexibility, culture, leadership and learning opportunities.
This shift elevated employer brand from a nice-to-have to a business imperative. "Employer brand made a big impact on organisations to make sure that there is a shift of how employers attract that talent." But here's the critical insight: recruiters are the first human touchpoint with candidates. Which means they're delivering the employer brand experience before anything else happens. Align them, or your brand promise falls apart at the moment of truth.
Wak's framework is deceptively simple: "Employer brand is mainly candidate experience. It's clarity of what you communicate to candidates in terms of the role, clarity in terms of the expectations throughout the process, and clarity in terms of the timeline. Because at the end of the day an individual will feel attached to the brand because they had a good feeling."
But this only works if TA and employer brand sit at the same table from the beginning. "If it's a newly developed function, definitely employer brand, HR, everyone else should be sitting in one table and say this is our aspiration in a year or two years. This is how we would like to grow. This is the help that we need from each of the functions."
When that doesn't happen? "There will come a time when that experience would change if the business is not aligned."
Most TA teams treat all hiring the same way. Wak rejects that approach. "The strategy in employer brand should be different from campus. It should be different from experience. And it should be different also for high level or C-suite types of individuals."
This isn't just theoretical. Different talent pools have different needs, different concerns, and different criteria for evaluating a company. The messaging for campus graduates simply won't resonate with a senior executive evaluating a new opportunity.
Here's where Wak challenges the entire traditional TA model: "Decades ago, a recruiter will fill a role. That's it. I'd like recruiters to be advisors to the business, which means whether your business is hiring or not, you are having a relationship with the hiring manager."
Advisors understand the business strategy. They ask what companies the organisation is pitching to, what investments are being made, what talent might be available to solve future problems. "When you understand what their business plans are, you might say, 'Hey, by the way, I have a set of talent that's readily available. You could probably sell this kind of solution.'"
This requires a fundamental mindset shift. And it requires the business to listen. "My role probably is to make sure that we have one goal, but at the same time each of us has a shared responsibility."
Most TA teams measure time to fill, conversion rates, offer acceptance rates. Wak measures something radically different: "At the end of each fiscal year, I would ask, have you met your target?" More importantly, "I measure the people that we hire after a year. How do you do that? I wanted to see their performance rating because from there I could also get some value."
His team evolved the metric over time. First: are they still here after a year? Second: what's their performance rating? Then: which recruiters and hiring managers were involved in successful placements? The pattern reveals what actually works.
"Your responsibility is to bring back the ROI, and that ROI could be one year or two years. And the moment that individual leaves, your responsibility is to replace that at the same level or better."
Finally, Wak emphasised something most organisations neglect: getting unfiltered candidate feedback. "Conduct an FGD (focus group discussion) by an external party. Not by someone part of the team that got them there." Independent voices feel safer sharing the truth. And they're not incentivised to make the process look better than it is.
"Every year your business plan changes. A year or two years from now it's a different kind of skill set that you're hiring for. So continuous feedback from candidates, the business, and recruiters needs to be intertwined all the time."