Katie Wagner

The Advisory Model at TBD Collective

Today Wagner is the founder of TBD Collective, an advisory firm that deliberately does not run searches. Her team does embedded operator engagements, working inside companies as practitioners rather than pitching requisitions from the outside. It is a positioning choice that reflects her broader argument about where talent acquisition belongs in a business: closer to strategy, further from order taking.

The firm also maintains partnerships across the talent technology landscape, and it puts vendors under real scrutiny. Wagner's team is currently running an A/B test across eight different AI sourcing tools, evaluating them side by side, and she is direct about sharing what comes back. Positive or constructive, both go in the report. For operators who have to live with a purchase decision long after the demo ends, that kind of comparative evidence is rare and useful.

Two Leaders Who Shaped Her

Ask Wagner who made her, and she names Tammy Floden first. Floden was her manager at DoorDash, and what she offered was trust: room to run, room to be creative, and room to attempt something that looked unreasonable on paper. Under that mandate Wagner helped expand the business into a new country and went from zero to a thousand hires in six months. The habit she built during that stretch has outlasted the project. She learned never to say a flat no, but to say yes, and here is what would need to be true for this to happen. It is a small reframe with outsized consequences for how a talent leader is received in a room full of executives.

The second name is Ellie Tatter, her leader the first time she stepped into a management role. Tatter taught her the full arc of leading a team, including the parts nobody puts in a keynote: performance management, and the difficult conversations that come with it. What Wagner took from her was not just competence but tone. Tatter coached her to handle the hard things in a kind way, and to become the leader she actually wanted to be rather than a defensive imitation of one.

From Service Provider to Talent Advisor

Wagner's read on the past year in recruiting is not really about tools. It is about job descriptions. "I think the biggest thing that we've seen is this shift happening with basically the job description of the talent acquisition team as a whole, and especially a recruiter," she says. Talent teams, in her telling, have always been trying to prove themselves as advisors to the business. Most of the time they have been treated as service providers instead.

The efficiencies now being built into the funnel change that math. As the mechanical work compresses, the recruiter's remit widens, and the advisory responsibilities the profession has long argued for become part of the actual role. Wagner is specific about what that looks like in practice: a recruiter who functions as a genuine business partner to hiring managers, someone equipped to advise them rather than, in her words, just fill roles and that's it.

Start With the Problem

Her advice to other talent leaders is one line, and she prefaces it by admitting she is going to sound like a broken record, because she has said it in other rooms before. Start with the problem. "You can get a lot further," she says, "with getting buy-in from your stakeholders, with building trust with your team, with advising executive leadership and founders, by starting with the business problem and understanding their point of view and putting yourself in their shoes and building backwards from there." She calls it a product driven approach to recruiting.

There is one more thing worth noting about her. Wagner is candid that public recognition sits outside her comfort zone, and that she is deliberately challenging herself to put herself out there anyway. Given how much of the industry's conversation gets set by its loudest voices, the field is better served when the people doing rigorous, unglamorous, evidence-based work decide to speak.

And when she does speak, what comes out is the same discipline she learned before she ever opened a requisition. Define the outcome. Understand the person on the other side. Work backwards to the intervention. Wagner has been applying an instructional designer's method to talent acquisition for her entire career, which is why it holds up across settings as different as a brewery training floor, a thousand hires in six months, and a controlled test of eight AI sourcing platforms.