Allan Nunes Messias

From Selling a Product to Selling a Culture

His first move out of sport was into sales, chosen precisely because it promised friction and a scoreboard. What he found there surprised him. The persuading, the influencing, the reading of another person across a table: all of that lit him up. The product did not. He was drawn to a bigger and less tangible pitch. "I was more interested in selling a company, selling a company culture," he says.

A little research pointed him toward talent acquisition, where he saw the two instincts marry: the narrative building of sales and the resilience of sport, wrapped around the job of convincing someone to believe in what you believe in. He entered the field at a moment when many people treated it as a holding pattern, somewhere to sit until they figured out what they actually wanted to do. He did the opposite. He investigated the career path and the opportunities before he stepped in, and arrived already intending to build something.

Two Leaders, Two Opposite Educations

Ask him who shaped him and he does not reach for a long list. He names two, and what makes them significant is that they taught him nearly opposite things.

The first was one of his earliest TA leaders, a manager who led with empathy and handed out autonomy freely. From that person Nunes Messias learned the power of coaching over instruction. Give people the freedom to run and to make their own mistakes, he observed, and they respond by wanting to do better for the leader, not merely for the target. He also watched that leader resist the reflex most managers give in to, which is to lay the answer out for the team. Instead the questions came first. "Making people create their own path with the thinking instead of just laying it all out there for them" is how he describes the technique he still uses.

The second leader taught him the harder half of the job: being business minded. A TA leader occupies an unusual seat, he points out, between a team that needs clear expectations and a business whose needs the leader is uniquely positioned to understand. "We're all here to impact the business," he says. Sometimes that means making unpopular decisions and driving a team in a direction it finds uncomfortable. Holding both lessons at once, the empathy and the edge, is the version of leadership he practices now.

Optimize First, Automate Second

On artificial intelligence, Nunes Messias sees the market splitting into two camps. One is racing to embed the technology into every process it owns in pursuit of efficiency and reduced cost, and he readily concedes how powerful that can be for scheduling, note taking, and, in his own plain framing, "the things that simply cost time."

He places himself, and Adyen, on the other side. The approach there is to use AI first to optimize what already exists, moving bit by bit rather than letting it take everything over. That also means being disciplined about spending. The team deliberately chooses not to "invest too much in a lot of like new shiny tools," focusing instead on the systems it already runs and asking where automation can quietly earn back hours.

Behind that discipline is a judgment about what the technology cannot yet reach. Candidate experience sits at the forefront of everything his team does, and while tools can help assess a person's skills and what they can do, in his words it is "way harder to assess, for example, how people think" with AI. That is where the human touch earns its keep. The efficiency AI does deliver, in his model, is not banked and forgotten. It is reinvested into the parts of the job only people can do: business partnering, talking to the business, running calibrations, and holding a high bar so the company's culture is genuinely tested throughout the hiring process. The bar, he insists, does not budge in exchange for speed.

Building Talent Advisors, Not Layers

Asked what he would tell other talent leaders, he starts with authenticity. Find whoever can inspire you, he says, then combine those learnings with what is already in you. He urges leaders to invest real time in investigating not only who they are today but who they want to become, and then to check honestly whether their current actions and behavior mirror that person.

His second piece of advice is structural, and it is where he is most pointed: build inclusive and flexible teams. Many companies layer the TA function into researchers, sourcers, coordinators, and recruiters. Nunes Messias believes it is possible instead to build teams where people are all-round and well-versed, particularly now that so much of the time-consuming work can be automated. Specialists are valuable and often high impact, he acknowledges, but a team that can flex across different areas of the business protects itself for the long term. When one part of the company scales down or its hiring volume thins out, a flexible team redeploys rather than facing layoffs.

The destination he describes is a team of talent advisors capable of flexing into the HR business partnering space, people who can hold a real conversation with the business, look past what is right in front of them, and think about what the organization will need next.

From Time to Fill to Quality of Hire

He closes on a shift he has watched take hold across the market. A few years ago the conversation was dominated by speed: how fast can we hire, how do we compress time to fill and time to hire. Those questions have not disappeared, but he sees the center of gravity moving decisively toward quality of hire, and he thinks the finance case is on his side. Quality, he argues, is what ultimately defines real cost reduction, because hiring the right person means you are not paying over and over again to ramp up replacements.

That is also why he believes TA leaders have a standing obligation to challenge companies on how they are built. Cost will always be an important topic. But the culture of a company, and the value that culture creates, belongs in the same conversation. For a leader who entered the profession because he wanted to sell a company rather than a product, that is the bar he refuses to let budge.