# Trevor Vas

Trevor Vas works on talent acquisition and talent advisory. They co-founded the Australasian Talent Conference (ATC) and write about how talent teams can help businesses make broader workforce decisions, including whether to build, buy, borrow or automate skills.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/trevor-vas/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorvas
- LinkedIn followers: 9,574
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, recruiting, talent-acquisition
- Based on 12 dated posts, latest 2026-10-01

## Summary

Trevor Vas is most useful for explaining talent advisory and workforce configuration to enterprise talent teams.

- Best for: Recruitment technology brands selling workforce planning or skills intelligence to enterprise talent teams in Australia and New Zealand.
- Not for: High-volume hiring platforms for hospitality, retail or logistics, or short-form video campaigns.
- Check first: Confirm ATC sponsor policy, audience data and official partnership terms first.

### Takeaways

- Talent advisory changes how a talent function operates; it is not a retitled job.
- Workforce configuration: decide build, buy, borrow or bot mix before recruiting.
- Artificial intelligence is a workforce-design input, with the human kept in the loop.

## Main ideas

- **Talent advisory changes how a talent function operates; it is not a retitled job**: Vas argues that becoming a talent advisor takes more than changing a job title. Organisations must rethink how they measure success, the capabilities of their talent teams, their operating model, their use of workforce and market intelligence, and how AI is changing the work itself. The central question, as they put it, is no longer "Who do we hire?" but "How should this work get done?" That reframing separates advisory work from strategic recruitment in their account.
- **Workforce configuration: decide the build, buy, borrow or bot mix before recruiting**: Vas predicts that talent acquisition will evolve into what they call workforce configuration: helping an organisation determine the best combination of build, buy, borrow and bot before defaulting to recruitment. They argue that talent acquisition is best placed to lead that decision because it already sits closest to how workforce needs are translated into hiring. They present this as the next step beyond talent advisory, not a relabelling of it.
- **Blunt on adoption: talking about advisory is not doing it**: Vas treats the gap between awareness and adoption as a change-management problem, not a terminology problem, and identifies it as a reason advisory work stalls. Organisations assume everyone else has already made the change, making it easier to defer the harder internal work of measurement, capability and operating model. They link the gap directly to how success is measured and how the function is structured.
- **Artificial intelligence as a workforce-design input, with the human kept in the loop**: Vas frames AI as something that changes the shape of work, not just a tool for recruiting faster. They connect agentic AI and automation to internal mobility, skills-based hiring, borderless talent and AI agents working alongside recruiters, and describe the current task as keeping the human in the loop. The practical question is how a talent function should decide the mix of people and agents, not simply whether to adopt a tool.
- **The Australasian Talent Conference: a community where the argument gets tested**: ATC is the platform Vas built around these ideas, and they use its programme to show how the regional market has changed. Their account of the event also makes a case about where expertise now sits: the first conference brought in keynote speakers from overseas, while the current Australia-and-New Zealand-led programme reflects a more mature local market. The 2026 programme carries the advisory and workforce-planning themes they write about.
- **Publishing with named collaborators and inviting readers to respond**: Vas writes as part of a group, not as a solo commentator. The ideas are presented through jointly published frameworks, named contributors and posts that often ask readers a direct question or tag practitioners for their views. The arguments come with working resources — white papers, article trails and conference sessions — rather than standing as opinion alone.

## Work to read

- [20 years of the Australasian Talent Conference](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trevorvas_atc2026-agenda-atc-events-media-activity-7511571369692717056-3rjo)
- [Talent Advisory has a Problem!](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trevorvas_talent-advisory-in-2026-activity-7477962074434899968-sPCU)
- [So you are Implementing Talent Advisory](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trevorvas_talentacquisition-talentadvisory-tastrategy-activity-7480010233256480769-sKoF)
- [Brilliant and thought provoking blog Martin Warren](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trevorvas_brilliant-and-thought-provoking-blog-martin-activity-7480110400491900928-Pe1K)
- [Hello All, love to catch you at the ATC2026](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trevorvas_hello-all-love-to-catch-you-at-the-atc2026-activity-7501048108248829952-uoer)

## Brand relationships

- **Australasian Talent Conference** (owned_business)

## Partnerships

Trevor Vas’s posts document two partnership routes around the Australasian Talent Conference: event sponsorship and an innovation lab used to help launch start-ups and overseas-based vendors. ATC has had long-standing sponsors, regularly draws more than 400 people, and grew online events to around 1,200 during the COVID years, with roughly 10,000 attendances over 20 years. Ask ATC for its current sponsor policy, prospectus, inventory, pricing, deadlines, audience specifications and official partnership inquiry route before planning deliverables or budget.

## Alternatives

- Eric Buntin: Choose Buntin over Vas when a campaign must solve the credibility problem inside a talent function before selling an operating model. The two posts make the case that accountability — owning outcomes, mistakes and difficult conversations — earns talent acquisition a seat at the strategy table, and that global consistency and governance across regions can be built without flattening local nuance. The second post offers a specific sector example: manufacturing's perception problem among early-career candidates, with concrete moves such as rebranding the work, mobile-first apply processes, transparent pay, and high-school or apprenticeship pipelines. This suits a webinar or paper aimed at helping a TA leader win the internal argument for a role in workforce decisions, or reaching an audience where the obstacle is how an industry is perceived rather than how a team is structured.
- Gabrielle Carlson, M.Ed., PHR: Choose Carlson over Vas when the room is made up of CEOs, CHROs or CFOs who need hiring translated into money. The posts argue that structure enables speed, workforce planning beats requisition management, the right metrics create accountability with leaders, and hiring managers are the biggest variable in whether outcomes hold. The second post goes further: hiring speed affects revenue velocity, time-to-productivity affects customer outcomes, talent gaps carry an opportunity cost, and TA leaders should be able to answer questions such as what revenue is at risk if they do not hire. For a campaign session aimed at justifying budget for advisory work at the top of the house, rather than explaining how an advisory function operates day to day, Carlson is the stronger choice.
- Melinda Stallings, SHRM-SCP, CPPC: Choose Stallings over Vas when the objective is a seat at an existing United States talent event rather than an ANZ enterprise program. The two posts promote TalentNet Live in Austin on 13 March 2026, where Stallings co-leads a session called Leading Change Without Burning Out with Jim Durbin. They also list a practitioner line-up including Craig Fisher, David Armano, Elaine Orler and Jess Miller-Merrell. This suits a vendor seeking event-based reach, a people-side theme around change and burnout, and a ready-made panel of speakers to share a stage with in a market the campaign does not otherwise touch.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/