Talent

Hiring Overview

Most firms treat hiring as a funnel — résumés in one end, employees out the other. We don't. We treat it as a capability the firm builds, owned by Talent and executed across Talent, Practices, and Account Leadership. This page walks that capability at four levels of zoom, from the widest view to the most concrete.

The Short Version

Talent owns the whole hiring domain end-to-end, but it does not execute every step alone. Once a person becomes a Candidate, Practices and Accounts must participate — by design. The function closest to the work decides whether someone can do it; Talent keeps the flow moving and holds the bar consistent across every Opening.

The Four Views

This page walks the same picture at four levels of zoom. Read top to bottom, they move from the most stable — capabilities rarely change — to the most operational — who is doing what this week. A change low in the stack, like adding a recruiting partner, shouldn't require redrawing the capability map. That stability is the point.

  1. 1

    Capability

    What is Talent Acquisition actually able to do?

  2. 2

    Domains

    How is that capability bounded — what's inside the work, and what surrounds it?

  3. 3

    Stages

    What is the end-to-end flow a hire moves through?

  4. 4

    Doing

    Who executes each step, and where do other clusters plug in?

View 1 · Capability

At the widest level, Talent Acquisition is one capability made of five sub-capabilities. These are abilities, not steps — they describe what the function is competent to do, independent of any single hire. Capabilities are durable; stages and tools change. A weak coordination capability is the most common silent failure mode in hiring — good sourcing and good interviewers, but candidates drop because no one owns the flow.

Sourcing

Finding people who could plausibly do the work — primarily crowd-sourced and channel-agnostic.

Recruiting

Engaging and converting sourced people through a relationship owned by a recruiter. The marketing of our firm to the prospect.

Interviewing

Running the structured evaluation that decides whether someone is qualified for our position(s).

Coordination

Orchestrating the flow — scheduling, tooling, hand-offs, keeping the pipeline moving. A first-class capability, not invisible glue.

Consulting

Advising the rest of the firm — and our clients — on how to hire well, offered as a service.

View 2 · Domains

The Domains view bounds Talent Acquisition into three domains. The key insight is nesting: Interviewing is not a peer of Hiring — it lives inside it. Teams that conflate "hiring" with "interviewing" under-invest in intake, sourcing, and triage — the stages that determine whether the interview was ever worth running.

Industry Knowledge

The market, talent landscape, and domain fluency that makes sourcing and triage credible. Supporting context — it feeds the work.

Hiring

The end-to-end act of bringing someone in. Contains Interviewing as a nested sub-domain — because the interview is downstream of decisions already made. The core of the function.

Consulting on Talent Acquisition (TAAS)

Advising clients and internal teams on how to build their own talent function — hiring as a service. An outbound domain: capability sold, not just used. It also signals that our internal process has to be good enough to sell.

View 3 · Stages

This is the backbone. Every hire moves through five stages, left to right. What makes the LiminalArc model distinctive is that we track the thing being worked on as it transforms — what we call the token. The token changes identity as it advances, and each change is a real gate, not a label. The Prospect → Candidate conversion is the precise moment Talent can no longer do everything alone.

  1. Opening
  2. Prospect Pool
  3. Prospect
  4. Candidate
  5. Employee
1

1 · Intake & Prioritization

Token: Opening

The Portfolio / Account cluster submits a weekly intake of openings. Talent classifies each, matches it to a Position (or triggers Position Description authoring if the Position is new), and runs a weekly prioritization dialogue. Monday.com is the system of record for the demand signal.

2

2 · Sourcing & Cold Outreach

Token: Prospect Pool

Talent's sourcing team builds a pool of possible prospects against the Position Description. LinkedIn is today's primary channel, but sourcing is channel-agnostic — referrals and other channels coexist.

3

3 · Triage

Token: Prospect

The sourcing team reviews each possible prospect against the specific Position Description with a fine-tooth comb. Survivors are promoted to Prospects; rejections are logged with reasons.

4

4 · Interviewing

Token: Candidate

The richest stage — six ordered sub-stages. The cultural interview converts a Prospect into a formal Candidate, then the full evaluation runs.

5

5 · Hiring Approvals

Token: Employee

Talent convenes an internal deliberation across all interview signals, then extends and closes the offer. On acceptance, the Opening on the Monday.com board is closed and the Candidate becomes an Employee.

Inside the Interview

Stage 4 is six ordered sub-stages. Up to the Prospect → Candidate gate, Talent can act alone; after it, the work is necessarily cross-cluster. Decision authority follows the executor — Talent orchestrates everything but does not override an interview decision made by a Practice or Account.

  1. 1

    Cultural

    Fit for the LiminalArc way of working. This interview anchors the Prospect → Candidate conversion.

    Talent Team
  2. 2

    Person(ality) Assessments

    Standardized signal used to calibrate the later stages. People Ops and Practices provide the target assessment profiles and rubric.

    People Ops
  3. 3

    Async Skills Assessment

    A web-based baseline skills check tuned to the Position Description.

    Practices
  4. 4

    Skills-Based Interview

    A live paired working session — how the candidate actually works. Practices provide approved interviewers and the success criteria.

    Practices
  5. 5

    Practice Alignment

    Fit with the practice's norms and way of working, run by the Practice leader or a delegated lead.

    Practice Leader
  6. 6

    Account Alignment

    A final review for fit against the specific near-term Role. Account Leadership participates.

    Account Leadership

View 4 · Doing

The Stages view shows what happens. The Doing view shows who — and this is where the operating model is decided. Talent owns the domain everywhere; execution is shared. A third-party recruiting partner is a dependency, not a capability — pools of prospects can be sourced externally, but triage stays in-house so the quality gate stays under LiminalArc control.

1 · Intake & Prioritization

LiminalArc Talent Team

The Portfolio / Account cluster provides intake and collaborates on prioritization.

2 · Sourcing & Cold Outreach

LiminalArc Talent Team

A third-party recruiting partner may be given specific positions to source, providing pools of prospects.

3 · Triage

LiminalArc Talent Team

Reviewed in-house against the specific Position — the quality gate Talent does not outsource.

4 · Interviewing

Talent orchestrates; executors vary

Talent runs the Cultural and Person assessments; Practices and Accounts execute the skills and alignment interviews. See Inside the Interview above.

5 · Hiring Approvals

Talent Team + Ops Leadership

Final approval authority is shared. More eyes and a firm-level view raise the bar on a hire — worth watching as a potential bottleneck as volume scales.

Glossary

The fuller dictionary lives in the Lexicon tab of the Hiring Process Reference Architecture. The terms you must know:

Opening
A specific, unique instance of a Position applied to an Account as a Role. The thing Talent actually hires for.
Possible Prospect
Raw sourcing output — identified but not yet reviewed against a Position Description.
Prospect
A possible prospect who has passed triage against a specific Position Description.
Candidate
A Prospect converted into the formal interview process. The conversion gate sits after the Cultural interview.
Position
The practice-owned, durable shape of the work. (Greenhouse calls this a "Job.")
Role
What an Account calls the work it needs filled — the account's framing of an Opening.
Interviewer
Anyone conducting an interview sub-stage. Comes from Talent, a Practice, or an Account.
Token
The unit of work as it transforms through the stages: Opening → Prospect Pool → Prospect → Candidate → Employee.
Triage
The sourcing team's Position Description-based review that converts a possible prospect into a Prospect.
Intake
The weekly demand signal from the Portfolio / Account cluster that starts the process.
Definition of Done (DoD)
The explicit, verifiable exit criteria for a stage or sub-stage.

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