Frequently Asked Questions
Who do you typically work with?
CHROs, CEOs, and boards at mid-sized and growth-stage organizations, along with mission-driven and nonprofit organizations navigating a senior leadership transition or building out their talent function for the first time.
How is ADVON different from a typical HR consulting firm?
Most consultants have advised from one side of the table. I have built and run talent acquisition functions from the inside, including scaling a team from one recruiter to fourteen at a 14,000 person organization, and I have also delivered retained search from the outside across four executive search firms. That combination changes what I look for in an assessment and what I flag as risk in a hiring or succession decision, because I have lived both sides of the outcome.
What does ADVON Leadership Advisors actually do?
ADVON helps organizations make better decisions about their senior talent. That covers leadership assessment, talent strategy, succession planning, and advisory work on how AI is changing hiring and workforce decisions. The practice is built on two decades split between running talent functions inside organizations and advising them from the outside, including retained executive search.
Our hiring tools already use AI. What do you actually do about that?
Most ATS and HRIS platforms already have AI embedded in them, often without HR or legal having fully audited how it's being used. Part of the advisory work is helping organizations inventory where AI is already screening or scoring candidates, understand the legal exposure that comes with it, and build the documentation and human review steps that hold up if a hiring decision is ever challenged. This applies to your own hiring process and, if you use retained search, to whether your search partners are creating exposure you haven't accounted for.
We are growing fast and do not have a mature talent acquisition function yet. Can you help with that?
Yes. Part of the practice is advising organizations on whether to build an in-house TA function or continue relying on external search, and how to structure that function if you build it. This draws directly on having built enterprise TA models from zero at more than one organization.
Our CEO is planning to retire in the next two years and we don't have a bench. Where do we start?
Start with an honest assessment of who you actually have, not just who has been in the room the longest. That means applying the same structured, evidence-based frameworks used in search, Hogan, PROPHET, and Korn Ferry Leadership Architect, to your current leaders, identifying the real gap between where they are and where the CEO role would ask them to be, and building a development plan against that gap with enough runway before the transition becomes urgent. Two years is workable. Two months is a crisis. The earlier this starts, the more options your board actually has.
Will our board or current leadership know we're talking to you before we're ready to announce anything?
No. Confidentiality is built into how the work is structured, not just a policy statement. That means limiting who is looped in as a stakeholder to the group you designate, conducting outreach and assessment discreetly, and putting nothing in writing that becomes distributable until you decide it should be. If this is a sensitive succession or replacement search, that discretion is the default I work under, not something you have to ask for.
Are you based in a specific region, or do you work nationally?
Based in the Washington DC area, with a strong network across the national security, government-adjacent, and nonprofit sectors there. The practice works with organizations nationally, in person where useful and remotely otherwise.
What actually happens on our first call?
The first call is 30 to 45 minutes, and the goal is simple: understand what's actually driving the need. That means walking through what happened, a departure, a growth stage, a board request, a hiring process that isn't working, who else is involved in the decision, what's already been tried, and how much time pressure you're under.
From there, I put together a short written scope, what the engagement actually covers, what it doesn't, a realistic timeline, and how we'll know it worked. You see that before anything is signed.
If it's a search, the next step is a formal profile of the role and the success criteria, built with you, before I start identifying candidates. If it's assessment or succession work, the next step is usually a conversation with the leaders or the bench you're evaluating. Either way, you're not signing up for a black box. You know what the next milestone is before we start.
What assessment tools do you use, and why does that matter?
Hogan, PROPHET, and Korn Ferry Leadership Architect. These are structured, evidence-based frameworks rather than gut-feel evaluation, which matters most at the senior level where a bad read on a candidate or a successor is expensive and hard to reverse. The goal is a documented, defensible basis for a leadership decision, not just an interview impression.
We are growing fast and do not have a mature talent acquisition function yet. Can you help with that?
Yes. Part of the practice is advising organizations on whether to build an in-house TA function or continue relying on external search, and how to structure that function if you build it. This draws directly on having built enterprise TA models from zero at more than one organization.
Why work with you instead of a large firm like Korn Ferry or Heidrick?
Because you get me, not a team whose composition changes halfway through the engagement. At large firms, a senior partner often runs the pitch and hands the actual work to an associate a few weeks in. I've sat on the client side of that handoff and felt the difference in quality.
There's also a structural issue most clients don't find out about until they're already in a search. Large firms carry off limits agreements with their existing clients, meaning they can't recruit from any company they've already done work for, often for a year or more after the engagement ends. The more clients a firm has, and the big firms have thousands, the more of the talent market becomes untouchable to them. As an independent practice with a small client roster, that restriction barely exists here. When I build a target list, I'm not quietly working around a list of companies I'm not allowed to call.
Every engagement is run directly by the person you spoke to on the first call, with full access to the market, informed by having built talent functions from the inside as well as delivered retained search from the outside, which is a combination most search consultants don't have.