Adriano Herdman

Scale hiring without lowering the bar.

For People & Talent leaders, sharper sourcing, stronger recruiters, and processes that stick.

Three services built for speed, quality, and lasting impact

✅ Embedded recruiters backed by playbooks, RecOps, and governance

✅ Sourcing engine with TAM analysis + outbound that cuts through

✅ Consultancy that builds structure, consistency, and TA enablement 

Co-Founder

Move deploys expert in-house talent acquisition squads to fast scaling companies. Our embedded talent service aligns us with your growth targets, giving you control and flexibility. Our talent acquisition specialists absorb your culture and refine your recruitment process. We’ve driven down cost-per-hire by 46% for the likes of Microsoft, Monese, Farewill, Travelex, SeedLegals, Spryker, Collibra, LaunchDarkly, Percent, Framestore

RESOURCE DROP: New Full TA book in one page 📌

18 actionable one pagers produced over 24 months

📍 UPDATE  - here is the link to get access as I wasn't able to get to all of you who commented

https://lnkd.in/e9_mKm6V


They are;

- The TA Machine 
- Talent Acquisition Maturity Checklist
- Email versus LinkedIn outreach
- How to optimise for the candidate journey
- Talent Acquisition Strategy 2026
- 21 Talent Acquisition Tactics Comparison
- Talent Acquisition: Impact pyramid
- TA Cheat Sheet: Interview upgrade
- TA Cheat Sheet: How to identify your TAM
- Careers page checklist 2026
- Cheat Sheet: Quality of Hire for TA Leaders
- Interviewer's Cheat Sheet: 2026
- TA Strategy: Early v Growth Stage
- Old School sourcing vs. Sourcing 2.0
- 4 Layers of TA problems
- Measuring Talent Market fit
- Transactional vs Transformational TA
- Recruiter Battle cards

📍 UPDATE  - here is the link to get access as I wasn't able to get to all of you who commented

https://lnkd.in/e9_mKm6V

Talent Solutions for Technology businesses

13 things a Head of Talent Acquisition needs to know to make 2026 a breakout year

1.	Your edge comes from better signal, not more effort.
Most teams are busy. Few are accurate. The best TA leaders obsess over how signal is generated, evaluated, and compared.

2.	Interview quality is the highest-leverage fix in hiring.
Most hiring failures trace back to vague role definition, weak scorecards, and untrained interviewers. 

3.	More process rarely means better outcomes.
Longer loops, extra interviews, and consensus theater create false confidence. Strong systems are simpler, faster, and harder to game.

4.	Storytelling has to become a real skill.
Not fluff, clarity about the work, the bar, the growth path, and what success actually looks like.

5. Think like a founder, not a recruiter.
Time, tools, sourcing lanes, assessment depth, everything has an opportunity cost. Move resources to where they compound.

6.	Nobody cares about time-to-fill in isolation.
What matters is business impact: quality, retention, ramp, and whether the team is stronger six months later.
	
7.	Skills-based hiring and internal mobility are becoming the operating model.
If you’re not designing for skills signals and internal movement, you’re leaving talent (and speed) on the table.

8.	AI isn’t a strategy. It’s a tool.
Use it to accelerate sourcing, research, comms, and coordination, but keep humans accountable for judgment.

9.	TA doesn’t “support growth.” It enables it.
When hiring slips, roadmaps slip. When quality drops, execution drops.
	
10. Be fluent in data, not addicted to dashboards.
Build simple models. Forecast capacity. Know your bottlenecks. Explain your funnel like a business case.
	
11.	You set the standard.
Role clarity, scorecards, interviewer quality, feedback discipline, candidate experience. standards slip quietly, then become culture.
	
12. TA has a rare advantage because there’s no universal best practice.
That’s the opportunity. The leaders who win have tried and tested principles and frameworks. 
	
13. TA is a sandbox function, use it that way.
Leadership usually just wants great people in. How you get them often comes with autonomy. Experiment, iterate, measure, keep what works, kill what doesn’t.

Thoughts?

I’ve worked in recruiting for years.

This is one of the most common (and most surprising) questions I still hear:

“Can we skip to the candidates part?”

It usually comes right after a conversation about hiring strategy, role definition, or market realities.

And it’s the moment you realise something important.

Recruiting is often perceived as a magic button.

Press a button → get candidates
 
Post a job → fill a role

But when you work in talent acquisition, you know the truth:

- Recruiting is about design before delivery.
- Strategy before sourcing.
- Clarity before volume.
- It’s defining the right profile.
- Understanding the real talent market.
- Crafting messaging that actually resonates.
- And doing all of that consistently 
- while still being asked to fill an urgent role yesterday.

No button.

Just systems, trade-offs, and iteration.

That’s the gap between how recruiting is perceived… and how it actually works.

Shout out to Pierre Herubel for post inspo

We’ve run thousands of intake meetings.

And most of them suffer from the same problems:

Vague role definitions
Inconsistent documentation between recruiters
We’ll figure it out as we go” requirements
Screening questions that don’t actually screen
So we built something to fix that.

I’m giving it away for FREE ↓

After sitting in thousands of intake meetings across teams, functions, and geographies, we started to see the pattern:

Good hiring doesn’t fail at interview.

It fails at intake.

So we built 'Intake Architect'.

A GPT that turns messy intake conversations into recruiter-ready hiring assets, instantly.

The team and I have spent years refining how great intakes actually work in practice.

And we’ve poured all of that experience into a single tool.

Intake Architect is designed to take a raw intake transcript and produce:

✅ Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP)
Clear sourcing blueprint. No fluff. No guesswork.

✅ Structured Requirements
Must-have vs nice-to-have — written exactly how recruiters need it.

✅ Essential Screening Framework
Admin questions, role-specific scorecard, and closing questions — standardised and ready to use.

Everything is:
 _ Concise
 - Scannable
 - Recruiter-friendly
 - Grounded only in what the hiring manager actually said

No extra questions.
No invented requirements.
No “AI interpretation.”
Just clean hiring signal.

If your recruiters are documenting roles differently, screening differently, and interpreting “requirements” differently, you don’t have a hiring process.

Intake Architect makes it easier than ever to:

- Get every recruiter to the same starting line
- Speed up role kickoff
- Improve screening quality
- Reduce downstream rework
- And it takes minutes.

If you’re a Head of TA, TA Lead, or Manager and want your team moving faster without sacrificing quality, this is for you.

📍 Update, due to the volume of the comments, I'm leaving the link to access the GPT here:  

https://lnkd.in/efPDYduT

The best Talent Acquisition teams don’t just fill roles, they map the market first. Here's how ✌️

Most hiring plans are reactive. A role opens → the scramble begins. 

But elite TA teams flip the script: they start with the total addressable market. 

By looking at the talent market up front, they can: 

- Anticipate which roles will be hardest to fill 
- Spot skill gaps before they bottleneck growth 
- Prioritise hiring where impact will be greatest 
- Give leaders confidence with data-backed plans 

This is where TAM thinking comes in. Not just a number, but a framework to connect talent planning to the bigger picture. 

👉 here we break this down in a simple way for. 

Take a look and see how mapping the opportunity can make hiring quicker & more strategic.

Sizing the market

These are the 12 Talent Acquisition metrics I’ve found useful. 

They're less about activity, more about leverage.

1. Time to alignment
Measures how quickly role clarity is achieved. A strong predictor of downstream speed and quality.

2. Number of outbound messages
A check on top-of-funnel pressure. Only meaningful when viewed alongside response and pass-through rates.

3.Positive response rate
Signals whether targeting and messaging resonate with the market you’re hiring from.

4.Response-to-screening pass-through
Shows how much initial interest converts into viable candidates. Exposes early quality gaps.

5. Weekly submissions
Indicates whether recruiter effort is translating into hiring-manager-ready candidates.

6. Submission-to-1st interview pass-through
A direct read on recruiter judgment and hiring manager alignment.

7. 1st-to-2nd interview pass-through
Tests whether screening is raising the bar or simply passing volume forward.

8. Candidates interviewed per offer
Highlights decision quality and interview efficiency. Over-interviewing shows up here fast.

9. Time-in-stage
Pinpoints exactly where momentum stalls and where leadership intervention creates leverage.

10. Offer acceptance rate
Reflects offer competitiveness and overall candidate experience.

11. Offer acceptance by source
Shows which channels produce conviction, not just conversion.

12. Recruiter load vs. output
Compares open reqs per recruiter to hires delivered. Distinguishes capacity constraints from execution issues.

Any I've missed?

Recruiters, before you open a req, you should understand the size of the talent market.

Here’s why:
Most TA teams start by listing job requirements and skills. But by the time you’re there, you’ve skipped the bigger question, 'how big is the talent market you’re actually drawing from?'

That’s where TAM (Total Addressable Market) comes in:

There are 2 Tiers of TAM: 

Tier 1: The smaller group that are the real ICP match. Strong fit, right orgs, right domains.
Tier 2: The wider pool of candidates with the right qualifications.

When you start with the market, not the req, you:

1. Set realistic expectations with hiring managers.
2. Align outreach goals to the actual size of the pool.
3. Capacity plan with evidence, not guesswork.
4. Improve your offer before hitting send.
5. Insights for future hiring, not just this search.
6. Recruiting shifts from reactive to proactive.

If you’re a TA / People leader who wants a sourcing engine that actually maps, works, and reports on your market, this is the system we run for our partners.

P.S. TA pros do you start with the req, or the market?

Most hiring problems aren’t execution problems.

They’re design problems.

Post the role.
Source more candidates.
Push the process faster.

What’s harder to see is everything that determines whether those actions work at all.

- The strategy behind the role.
- The trade-offs in how capacity is allocated.
- The decisions about sourcing, automation, and process.
- The operational discipline that runs week after week.

When those pieces aren’t aligned, hiring feels chaotic, even when teams are working hard.

We put this together to show talent acquisition as a system, not a checklist. (Shout out to Pierre Herubel for post inspo) 

Because better hiring doesn’t start with doing more.
 
It starts with building a better machine.

Hiring in 2021 was about volume.
Hiring in 2026 is about precision.

2021

“We built a recruiting machine. 800 hires in 12 months.”
Brand pulled talent in. Demand was never the problem.
Headcount was the scoreboard. Growth = more people.
TA was intake → scheduling → offer letter.
JDs were boilerplate. Interviews were mostly vibes.
Retention? An afterthought.
Bad hires got lost in the bloat.
“We’ll just hire more. There’s budget.”

2026

“We built a company. $100M ARR with 50 people.”
Every hire = a bet you can’t afford to miss.
“Lean” isn’t a buzzword—it’s survival.
TA is strategic, embedded, trusted by leadership.
Positioning is sharp. Scorecards are tight. Bar is firm.
Interviewing is structured and operator-owned.
Great hires = leverage. A bad hire = system failure.

The premium on top 1% talent has never been higher.

The best companies are scaling impact with zero waste, and precision execution.

If your TA still feels like the first one , time to adapt.

😵 Most interviews fail before they even start.

Not because of the candidate. Because the interviewer isn’t prepared.

AI can screen and score, but the human in the loop makes or breaks the process. 

The best interviewers know how to balance evaluation with genuine conversation.

TA Interviewing Cheat Sheet for 2026:

- Pre-interview checklist
- Interview no-nos
- Top tips for better questions
- Key traits of strong interviewers
- Balanced interview phases

If every interviewer followed one simple rule, what would it be?

The #1 difference between great Heads of Talent Acquisition and average ones (in my opinion) is their ability to reduce hiring risk for founders.

Not by slowing things down.
Not by adding more process.

But by making the real trade-offs in a hiring decision clear early.

The best Heads of TA can answer a few questions before hiring gets going:

1. Strength of the offering
Can this company realistically attract the profile it says it wants, or will this take longer, cost more, or require compromise?

2. Process and maturity
Is the interview process, decision-making speed, and leadership maturity actually strong enough to land this person, or will we lose them halfway through?

3. Role clarity and team fit
Have we scoped this role in a way that gives someone a real chance to succeed, or are we hiring into ambiguity and hoping it works out?

Average TA leaders sense these things but don’t name them.

Great ones surface them early.

Hiring is one of the highest-risk decisions a company makes.

It’s about removing as much uncertainty as possible before a company commits.

Old-school sourcing vs sourcing 2.0

Old-school sourcing 💾:

– Scope: Relying on network
– A limited view of the talent market
– Shortlists built on gut feel
– One single message, cross fingers 
– spray and pray messaging 
– Manual inbox + LinkedIn workflows
– Hard to repeat. Harder to scale.

Sourcing 2.0 🔥:

– Full market visibility through structured market analysis
– Persona-led search with data-backed candidate profiles
– Messaging that’s tested, not guessed
– Multi-touch sequences instead of one-and-done outreach
– Segment-led value propositions, not generic templates
– Clear tooling, dashboards, and feedback loops
– A repeatable, playbook-driven sourcing engine

The real shift isn’t tools.

It’s mindset.

Sourcing has moved from: 

Intuition → infrastructure
From heroics → systems
From hope → signal

And the teams that get this will out-hire the ones that don’t.

In 2026, Talent Acquisition teams will face two broad options.

(This choice quietly shapes everything that follows.)

Option 1: Spend most of the energy responding to whatever feels new, fast, or visible.

Option 2: Keep investing in foundations, while adjusting for what actually matters in 2026.

Both show up in most TA functions to some degree.

The difference is usually where attention lands most often.

Here’s one way to think about the priorities underneath that choice.

🎩 Surface level: what will make noise

- AI recruiting tools
- Automation across the funnel
- New sourcing hacks
- Faster screening and assessment tools
- Ever-expanding tech stacks
- Employer brand moments designed to travel well

All part of the conversation. Not always the main event.

⚖️ What will really matter

- Better use of talent market signals
- Hiring workflows that scale beyond individual recruiters
- Warm pipelines and ongoing candidate relationships
- Stronger hiring manager capability
- Recruiters with visible, credible personal brands
- Partnerships that feel closer to the business
- A more joined-up approach to inbound and outbound hiring

This is where many teams focus once the basics are in place.

👷🏻‍♀️ Foundations: what never really changes

- A clear employer value proposition
- Honest role and career narratives
- Deep understanding of the talent ICP
- Consistent candidate messaging
- Feedback loops with candidates and new hires
- Ongoing market research
- Discipline around how and when roles are opened

But the real winners of 2026 start from two places.

First, they keep building and iterating on the foundations.

Second, they adapt how they operate based on what matters in 2026.

And of course, they’ll still invest some time testing new ideas.

The difference is usually where that experimentation sits, not whether it happens at all.

One message is a gamble. Multi-touch is a system.

This one pager compares multi-touch email sourcing with one-off LinkedIn outreach across the things that actually drive response rates:

- How timing risk is handled
- How optionality is created (or lost)
- How each approach scales
- and why one method compounds results while the other resets every time

Multi-touch outreach creates responses.

One-off outreach depends on them.

Many talent acquisition teams try to fix hiring problems by turning up the volume.

More job boards.
More tools.
More outbound.
More campaigns.

And sometimes that works, briefly.

But when hiring really stalls, the issue is rarely effort.

It’s usually focus.

That doesn’t mean tactics don’t matter, they do.

It just means tactics can’t compensate for weak foundations.

If you don’t have:

- clarity on who you’re actually trying to hire
- a compelling, differentiated reason someone would choose you
- and a process that supports good decision-making

then more activity just creates more noise.

You can add better tooling, automate outreach, increase volume, but without alignment underneath, all you’re doing is moving faster without getting closer to the outcome.

This is where teams often get stuck. They optimise what’s visible and measurable, because it feels productive.

But the real blockers tend to live in the less obvious places:

- fuzzy candidate profiles
- generic messaging
- unclear ownership of hiring strategy
- processes that look fine on paper but break in reality

When those aren’t addressed, recruiters feel busy but ineffective. Hiring managers feel frustrated. Candidates feel the disconnect.

Before adding another tool, channel, or campaign, it’s worth pausing and asking:
Are we clear on who this role is really for?

Do we know why someone would choose us over alternatives?

Is our process helping people make better decisions, or just move faster?

Volume amplifies what already exists. If the foundations are weak, it amplifies the problem.

People & Talent Leaders: most hiring processes aren’t calibrated to the level you’re trying to attract.

And that mismatch quietly costs you great candidates.

Because hiring for more accessible roles and competing for high-bar talent are fundamentally different games.

For high-volume or less specialised roles, the process often is just interviews:

- Screening Call
- Hiring Manager Interview
- Final Interview
- Offer
→ Candidate Accepted

But when you’re hiring senior, niche, or high-impact talent, the process can’t be reduced to “more interviews.” And it shouldn’t be.

High-bar hiring is really a sequence of explicit validations and agreements, for example:

- Problem Alignment: why this role exists and how success is defined
- Value Alignment: mission, EVP, team, and trajectory make sense to the candidate
- Skill Validation: structured assessment of real, role-relevant skills
- Stakeholder Alignment: cross-functional buy-in on the hire
- Decision & Offer Alignment: timing, motivators, competing options

Each stage has a purpose, with clear entry and exit criteria.

Take Skill Validation:

Entry
- Candidate aligned on role scope and direction
- Willing to invest time

Actions
- Structured, practical assessment
- Consistent scoring rubric
- Calibration against benchmarks

Exit
- Clear agreement on whether the bar is met
- Documented rationale

👉 The trade-off is always the same: depth vs speed.

Too deep → you lose candidates to faster teams
Too fast → you lose signal and make expensive mistakes

The best teamsdesign stages that are rigorous but lightweight, for example:

- Short live working sessions instead of generic take-homes
- One well-run panel instead of multiple stakeholder loops
- Pre-alignment on must-haves vs nice-to-haves to avoid drag

How are you balancing speed with depth?

Today’s hiring models are becoming outdated.

AI is reshaping the kind of talent companies need.

Talent Acquisition will be forced to evolve alongside it.

The direction is clear. Smaller teams. Higher leverage.

What that means in practice:

1. Hiring for leverage, not capacity
As AI absorbs execution, the most valuable hires will amplify output through judgment and AI orchestration. Talent Acquisition will shift from filling roles to identifying people who multiply impact.

2. Hiring for outcomes, not job descriptions
Static roles will matter less. AI will own the playbooks. Humans will be hired for taste, accountability, and the ability to navigate ambiguity when the path is unclear.

4. Hiring for adaptability, not perfect fit
Teams will continue to flatten as coordination becomes cheaper. The strongest hires will switch context easily, wear multiple hats, and operate without heavy structure.

5. Hiring builders, not coordinators
As AI reduces coordination overhead, demand will move toward people who build, test, and ship. Speed of innovation will matter more than alignment rituals.

6. One signal will stand out
The best talent will know when to trust AI and when to challenge it. Acting as a quality filter will become a core skill.

7. The TA teams that win will go beyond adding AI to job specs.
They will redesign how companies hire, structure teams, and define excellence.

The question is are you hiring for the future, or for work that is already disappearing?

Pre-AI → Post-AI: TA & Company Design

We’re entering the biggest shift in hiring and org design we’ll see in our careers.

AI is changing what roles exist, how teams should be structured, and what “good hiring” actually means. A lot of our current models were built for a world that no longer exists.

Pre-AI → Post-AI

1. Hiring for functions → Hiring for outcomes

2. Titles define work → Impact defines work

3. Managers manage people → Leaders manage leverage

4. Teams coordinate → Teams create

5. Org charts are fixed → Org design is fluid

6. Specialization first → Interdisciplinary by default

7. Handoffs everywhere → One team, end-to-end

8. Job descriptions list tasks → Job descriptions define impact

9. Hire for skills → Hire for taste & judgment

10. Delegation is hard → Delegation is default

11. Headcount = progress → Output = progress

12. Knowledge is power → Judgment is power

these changes have direct implications for org design, job specs, and the skills we prioritise next. 

How are you preparing for this?

10 ways we’re thinking about helping our team adopt AI (without forcing it):

1. Start with proof, not vision
No decks. No manifestos.
Just one moment of: “Wait, you already used that on a real role?”

2. Belief beats policy
Recruiters don’t care about AI strategy.
They care if it helps them fill this role faster.

3. Recruit the curious
One trusted recruiter adopting AI beats broad rollout.
Energy before scale.
Momentum > mandate.

4. Show live. Share async. Repeat.
Live = confidence (“watch me prep this outreach”)
Async = compounding (“here’s the prompt I used”)

5. Miss one and it dies.
Make play acceptable
Early AI use should feel like experimentation, not audit.
 
6. Fun lowers fear. Fear kills adoption.
Clarity accelerates
What’s allowed. What’s safe. What never touches candidate data.
Ambiguity = zero usage or shadow workflows.

7. Demos beat arguments
A better sourcing angle.
More human outreach.
Cleaner shortlist rationale.

8. Teach just enough depth
Recruiters don’t need to be technical.
They need to direct AI without outsourcing judgment to it.

9. Measure signal, not vibes
Time saved.
Response quality.
Shortlist confidence.
Stories > dashboards.

10. Optimise for leverage, not tools
Tools churn. Markets shift.
Learning speed is the moat.

How are you thinking about encouraging AI in your teams?

10 contrarian leadership takes worth thinking about if you lead talent acquisition.

I pulled these from a recent Lenny Rachitsky episode with Matt MacInnis, Chief Product Officer at Rippling, and they cut directly against a lot of healthy leadership mantras.

The 10 takes:

1. Deliberately understaff projects, overstaffing breeds politics and waste.

2. Comfort at work is a warning sign, exceptional outcomes require discomfort.

3. People can rest, but the organisation can’t, competition fills every gap.

4. Extraordinary effort is necessary, even if it’s not sufficient.

5. You learn more from winning than losing, success teaches repeatable patterns.

6. Leaders must enter the mess, no executive commentary from the balcony.

7. Process exists to reduce volatility, too much process kills upside.

8. Intensity decays with every layer from the founder, leaders must mirror it.

9. Escalations and blunt feedback are gifts, withholding feedback is selfish.

10.	“Never quit” is often VC propaganda, reset sooner.

Which of these do you agree / disagree with most?

Through Behind The Mask, I create brave, intimate, safe spaces where People & Culture leaders unmask and flip the narrative on what it means to bring your full self to work can connect, share, and tackle real challenges in mental health, neurodiversity, inclusion, and wellbeing.

With Unmasked Collective, I design and deliver curated, high-touch executive experiences breakfasts, dinners, and full-day sessions connecting partners directly to the ideal customer and leaders shaping the future of work. Every experience is carefully crafted for insight, connection, and impact

Leaders: join a community where you can reflect, learn, and lead with courage.
Partners: collaborate with us to engage your ideal executive audience in meaningful, high-value experiences.

Marie Chaproniere

January has been a month of repair and quiet reintegration.

The AI era is moving fast. In TA & HR, it’s a constant stream of webinars, new communities, free events, 1000s of attendees, it's exciting, but overwhelming and easy to feel like if you don’t keep up, you fall behind.

A very human response to moving at the speed of something not built for humans.

In 2026, Behind The Mask Community will be built around intention, meaningful connection, and real humanness not racing to keep up, but creating trusted spaces for honest leadership conversations.

This quiet reintegration has looked like slowly returning energy, candid connection, gentle rebuilding, meeting new faces.

Exciting concepts are coming this year, with partnerships already underway. I can’t wait to share what’s ahead.

Thank you to everyone in my calendar this month your time, insight, and trust have genuinely shaped what’s ahead.

Founder, Community Strategist, Curator @ Behind the Mask | Curating Human Leadership Experiences

she was planning a wedding.
venue visits between meetings.
guest lists drafted late at night.
no one at work knew how exhausted she was.

he was finalising a divorce.
sleeping in the spare room.
learning how to parent differently.
still leading a team.

they were grieving.
coming in early.
leaving late.
preferring the predictability of work to the quiet at home.

they were starting over.
not because it was easy.
because it was necessary.

the mask stayed on.

none of this belonged in the workplace.
and yet, all of it showed up every day.

on 19th february, we’re hosting a private dinner in amsterdam
for people & culture professionals navigating love, loss, transitions. 

this dinner is simply an expression that losing parts of ourselves can even leave us grieving who we were. 

not to bring everything to work.
but to acknowledge what’s already carried.

unmasking: love, loss & transitions. an evening to shed what no longer serves us.

members + invite only.

Unmasking Dinner: People + Culture Leaders showing up as they are.

February 18th, 6PM, we’re hosting an small, intimate, invite only dinner in Amsterdam

DM me if you’d like a seat at the table.

unmasking changed my life.

and it’s why i started behind the mask.

but there’s a detail i want to lift from zoe kleinman’s story that i think matters even more than the topic of menopause.

it wasn’t just that she spoke about brain fog.

it was that she owned the mask in public.

she didn’t “bring her full self to work.”

she did something I'd love to see more of by leaders at work:

she admitted a limitation out of her control without disappearing.
she held notes on live tv.

and guess what? the world kept turning.
no one fired her.

and she didn’t ask for expectations to be lowered.
she simply showed up as she was.

i think that’s the missing piece in leadership today.
workplaces are either pushing for vulnerability or punishing it.

anything that disrupts the story of “we are in control.”
so people hide.

the mask goes on
they “manage” their emotions, their brains, their bodies.

and everyone else learns to do the same.

what we need is more leaders who can own their masks.

not by “being vulnerable” on demand.
but by being real without fear of judgement. 

when leaders do that, the whole culture changes.

and that’s what unmasking is really about.

Finally got my hands on the Shapes (formerly DreamTeam) Book of Bold Predictions from some of the most forward thinking HR minds and seeing my name alongside leaders I’ve long admired was a real honour.

The book points out that HR sits at the crossroads of massive change AI is reshaping how we work, startups are redefining structure, and organisations are under constant pressure to adapt.

2026 will test how we evolve, but what still matters is how we connect, make sense of change, and support one another through it. That’s why Behind The Mask Community exists for the conversations that sit beneath the surface.

I’ll be sharing some of my favourite predictions from the book soon. 

And later this week, we’ll be announcing our first Unmasking Dinner of the year for People & Culture professionals an evening for those navigating love, loss, transitions, and the quiet things we often carry at work.

Sign up for free to the community for early access to in‑person events and upcoming dinners. https://lnkd.in/diKhTVzg 🖤

Happy new year to my late bloomers.

Who else is feeling wonderful stepping into the new month?

This video is waffle, just testing the algorithm, but if you're new here, if you just joined the community, hello, howdy, how's it going and THANK YOU, it's great to meet you. 

More from me to come. 🤠

Connection is easy to say. Harder to build properly.

Behind The Mask Community is for people who want to move the needle and show up unmasked while doing it.

It’s about bringing together people with different lived experiences, in rooms where you rarely see the same group twice and where connection doesn’t stop when the dinner ends.

Over time, this community has led to:
 • People being invited to speak
 • Real friendships
 • Business opportunities
 • People finding the courage to start something of their own

For this dinner, we’re keeping it intentionally simple.

Just 14 seats and curating high quality experiences and diverse perspectives around the table.

The room is already starting to take shape, and I can’t wait to see who joins next.

Unmasking Dinner: Feb 18, Amsterdam 6PM

Early bird extended until early next week

DM me if you'd like to join the table.

If your leaders don’t feel safe, the rest of your organisation doesn’t feel safe.

Gallup’s latest data shows engagement at 21% worldwide and it’s dropped to levels we haven’t seen since the start of the pandemic.

Managers matter. They shape 70% of team engagement, and when they lack clarity, connection and support, teams follow suit.

So here’s what we know:
>Culture isn’t fixed by policies
>Inclusion isn’t fixed by a single workshop 
>Leadership behaviour isn’t fixed by a statement on the wall 
>Culture is a continuous leadership practice.

It needs spaces where people can show up honestly, be heard without judgement, and build trust without pretending.

At Behind The Mask Community, we build those spaces because strategy and human experience cannot be separated if you want culture that actually works.

What’s one thing your organisation does to “create safety” (name the stuff that changes behaviour?)👇

the (peri)menopause mask

a few months ago zoe kleinman, a journalist for the BBC went viral on linkedin.

not for a news story but for naming her brain fog and choosing to hold notes on live tv.

the story is still getting covered. 

it wasn’t just he notes. although it mattered. 

it was the tension that is named. 

professional pride vs a body that doesn’t always cooperate.
and she didn’t quit.
she didn't get fired either.
and the world still spun. 

she didn’t say she couldn’t do the job.
she didn’t ask for expectations to be lowered.
she knew she was capable.

she just didn’t know she was allowed to show up that way. 

it was fear and professional pride that often held her back vs humiliating herself in front of the nation due to something out of her control. hormones.
so she chose the notes and to name it publicly

when she did it, hundreds of people felt seen.

she even said she’ll probably do it more from now on, and we'll now know why.

the response was huge. and it brought up more debates and conversations from people talking about peri, meno, adhd, chronic fatigue, brain fog.

different experiences, same masking. she didn't name it that, but this what it was. 

i’m bringing this up now because the conversation is still growing. there was another bbc article on it just last week. and that matters.

it makes me think about how much energy we spend masking competence instead of creating safety for ourselves.

i think it mattered more  because it was broadcasting, but also someone in a position of leadership, power, authority, someone visible 

it teaches us that when we give ourselves permission to unmask, we don't fail, we don't lose competence, we create safety for ourselves + others.

thanks Zoe Kleinman for reminding us why we do this work at Behind The Mask Community.

Voices from Behind The Mask

Leadership is strategy and human experience.

The stories we carry don’t disappear when we walk into work they shape how we lead.

This dinner was built from burnout and turned into strength.

A space where you can be seen without being fixed.

You don’t need to share. You just need to show up.
You’ll leave lighter, steadier, and more connected.

Tickets are now open for:
An Unmasking Table: Love, Loss & Transitions

👉 https://lnkd.in/eY7_DCjz

If you’re on the platform and work in People & Culture, you’re invited.

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Marie Chaproniere

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The Battle

Adriano Herdman

Marie Chaproniere

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Adriano Herdman's LinkedIn Performance

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