Dear Anonymous124,
You’re probably not doing as much wrong as you think. But a few things are working against you, and once you understand them, the whole picture starts to make a lot more sense.
Firstly, these roles are scarce. Brands building serious in-house talent functions are still far from the norm, and when those jobs do surface, the competition is fierce, and it is hard to get a look in. I appreciate that certain talent management professionals crave a change from direct talent representation, but alternatives are not straightforward.
Also, brand-side / in-house talent teams grow, shrink, and cease on a routinly, cyclical basis. A brand decides to bring talent teams in-house, hires someone, runs it internally for a couple of years, and then quietly hands it back to an agency when the reality of managing it proves more complex or costly than expected. Then the cycle starts again. This happens more regularly than most people realise, which means the market for these roles is even thinner than it appears. It’s not a reason to give up on the idea, but it is a reason to go in with realistic expectations.
Your CV is probably not landing the way you think it is:
Talent agency CVs are written in a language that most brand-side hiring managers, and almost every ATS system they use, simply don’t recognise. Terms like “talent roster management”, “brand partnership negotiation” and “talent strategy” mean everything to people who’ve worked in this world. To a brand’s HR team or an algorithm scanning for keywords, they can read as vague, jargon-heavy, or just unfamiliar enough to get filtered out before anyone with real knowledge of the space has even laid eyes on your application. It’s a translation problem, and it’s fixable.
The other thing to get your head around is why brands want people with your background in the first place. The proposition is obvious when you spell it out: someone who already has the talent relationships and knows how the agency world works can bring those partnerships in-house, reduce dependency on external agencies, and save the brand a significant amount of money. Hiring someone like you does make sense. But your CV needs to make that argument clearly and explicitly. You can’t leave it to a hiring manager to join the dots themselves, because most of the time they won’t.
A few things that actually help:
- Be specific about similar brands you’ve worked with and what those relationships produced about size – it’s about cultural fit.
- Reframe your experience in outcome-led, commercial language. Not “managed talent partnerships” but “drove £Xm in brand revenue through talent-led campaigns”
- Strip out or rewrite agency-specific terminology that won’t survive an ATS filter
Hope this helps x
Got a career dilemma of your own? Send it to the Talent Times Agony Aunt – all questions are completely anonymous.
