What is talent intelligence consulting?

The Illuminate service covers four specific areas.

Talent market mapping identifies who exists in the market for a specific role, in a specific location or remote configuration. It answers: how many qualified people are there, where do they work now, and how available are they? This is not a list of names to cold-message. It is a research output that tells you whether the search is feasible before you begin.

Compensation benchmarking answers what the market pays for the roles you need. Not what job boards say, and not what you paid for the last person who did something adjacent. What qualified candidates are actually earning today, in your geography and at your company stage. This matters because candidates drop out when the offer is below market, and many companies do not know they are below market until they lose three finalists in a row.

Competitive hiring intelligence examines what the companies competing for the same candidates are doing. Which of your competitors have been actively hiring for this role? Where are they sourcing? What does their employer value proposition look like to candidates? This is useful both as a threat assessment and as a sourcing opportunity: companies that just laid people off in a function you need are active inbound territory.

Hiring strategy recommendations connect the research to a plan. The deliverable is not just data. It is an answer to: given what we found, here is how we suggest you run the search, set the compensation range, and frame the pitch to candidates.

Three situations call for this kind of work.

Before opening a new office or expanding to a new geography: you need to know whether the talent exists before you sign a lease or commit to a headcount plan. A market map in Austin before you open an Austin office costs a fraction of what it costs to discover that the engineering talent you need is 40% more expensive there than in the city you are leaving.

Before hiring a leadership team role: executive and senior leadership searches are high-stakes and long. Running a market map before the search tells you what the realistic candidate pool looks like, what the comp expectation is at the level you need, and what your company looks like to that population. It also tells you how competitive the search will be, so you can decide whether to run it internally or use a search firm.

When your recruiters are coming back empty-handed: if sourcing efforts are not producing qualified candidates, the cause is either the sourcing strategy or the market. Talent intelligence tells you which. If the pool is thin, that changes the search strategy. If the pool is deeper than your sourcing reached, that changes the tactics.

Adam Kovacs built the Talent Intelligence function at Amazon Web Services, one of the largest and most complex talent organizations in the technology sector. At AWS, that function produced market maps, compensation analysis, and competitive hiring intelligence for roles across engineering, operations, and leadership globally.

Since founding The Talent Foundation, he has applied that methodology at the growth-stage company scale: companies with 30-300 employees who need the research outputs without the enterprise budget or the six-month engagement timeline. The Talent Foundation's Illuminate engagements are designed to deliver a complete research package in two to four weeks, with a set of actionable recommendations attached.

He has trained 850+ recruiters on talent intelligence methodology across multiple organizations.