Who is Amandine?

From recruiter to Talent Manager

When I started, the role of Talent Manager did not exist here. But I knew early on that I did not want to recruit for very long. Not because I disliked it, but because a relationship with a candidate is short by nature, and I wanted to know what happened after the signature.

As a recruiter, my job ended with the deal. That changed when I became Talent Acquisition Lead for Life Sciences. Accountable for continuous delivery at pharmaceutical clients, I was confronted with something a recruiter does not necessarily see: the person you hire has a career that runs on long after the contract is signed. Projects end, the next one has to genuinely fit, and someone has to be thinking about that person the whole way through. That is when the HR perspective arrived next to the business one, and it never left.

That step taught me what this job actually is. A Talent Manager stands in the middle. Between business and HR, and between the consultant and the client. The art is holding all of that at once without losing sight of the person in front of you When we tell consultants they can grow at Pauwels, I can speak from personal experience.

What talent management means to me

My family and friends genuinely have no idea what I do, so at a party I keep it simple. I follow up the consultants who are already at work, usually from their first day. I make sure they are comfortable in their role, that they have the information they need, that they have somewhere safe to say whatever needs saying, and that they keep growing.

People ask what a good follow up looks like in a week when nothing is wrong. It is a conversation that drifts into personal territory within five minutes. That is not a wasted call, that is the relationship doing its work. The other kind is the one where I am genuinely needed.

"There are as many kinds of problems as there are projects."

Sometimes the tasks are not right: too boring, too demanding, or not what someone was hired for. Sometimes a project has changed so much that a consultant no longer recognises themselves in it. Sometimes it is human: a manager you cannot find your footing with, or a team that never fully integrates you. And sometimes it is simply: my project ends in ten days, what now?

None of that means something has gone wrong. It is what happens when people work in real organisations, and most of it is fixable long before it turns into a problem. What matters is that you do not have to carry it alone, and that the person you tell can actually act: adjust a scope, open a conversation with your manager, arrange a training, or start looking at what comes next.

What makes me end a call thinking this is why I do this is simple: seeing that it mattered. Sometimes it is passing on difficult feedback and watching someone decide to grow out of it. Sometimes I did nothing but listen, and you can still hear the difference between the beginning and the end of the call. I want to see people move forward. That is also why I once wanted to teach.

Never a number

When I stepped into this role I did not start with an empty list. My consultants were already at work on a project, and they already had a Talent Manager before me. They moved to me for one reason: so that their follow up would happen in their own language. Changing Talent Manager is the exception here, not the rhythm, and that was the one reason worth making an exception for. It also meant the relationship was already there and I had to earn my place in it.

So the first thing I did was introduce myself properly to each of them, on site where I could and otherwise in a long Teams call, and I gave people the time to introduce themselves to me. From each of those conversations I kept one specific thing. Sometimes about their work, sometimes entirely personal. One anchor per person.

Our systems help, and I would not want to work without them. But if you lean only on a database, your follow up feels like a database. Recently I was on site and ran into a consultant I had not planned to see. His face came with the anchor attached: anything to do with the sun fascinates him, and there was an eclipse two days later. So I asked whether he had his glasses ready. A small thing, and it also told him he is a person to me and not a line in a system.

Ask my consultants what is typically me, and I think they would say two things. That I am responsive: if I cannot answer you today I will say so, and I will say when I can. And if I am hard to reach because I am on site all day, send me a WhatsApp and you will hear from me after my meeting. The second thing is that I am honest, including when honesty means admitting I do not have the answer yet.

Speaking the language, knowing the region

My consultants work at pharma and biotech clients in Brussels and Wallonia, from some of the largest sites in the region to smaller companies. It is one sector, with functions that could hardly differ more: administrative assistants, HR profiles, scientists in the lab, project managers and a lot of engineers.

Then there is the language. My colleagues built strong relationships with these consultants long before I arrived, and I want to be clear about that. But it is simply easier to build a relationship in the language you both actually live in. And it is not only about words. Language carries culture, and culture carries references: idioms, humour, the nuance under a sentence. When two people meet in a third language, some of that quietly goes missing, in both directions. Flanders and Wallonia are two cultures, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

Studying languages is what taught me why. A language is not a set of labels stuck onto one shared reality. If you think about a dog in English and a hond in Dutch, you do not picture the same dog. We all look at the same world, and we all see it differently.

That goes much further than French, Dutch or English. An engineer and a lab technician do not speak the same language either, even when both of them speak French. And as a Talent Manager I speak none of my consultants' professional languages. I am not a scientist and I am not an engineer. So my work is to understand the reality the person in front of me lives in. That is what my studies gave me, and I use it every day.

Two stories from practice

One consultant told me she did not feel part of her team. Her colleagues spoke their own language among themselves and did not switch to a common one, so she spent her days at the edge of every conversation. That is isolating, and it is exactly the kind of thing that quietly decides whether someone stays. Because she told me, we could put it on the table.

The second story ends with someone leaving, and I still think it is the right one to tell. I took the file over from a colleague. She was looking for her next step, and nothing we put on the table felt like the right one to her. We had several conversations about it, and they were not easy, for her or for us. Then in one of them an old dream came out: to stop, move abroad and build something there. We never push anyone in a direction, that is not how this works. But saying something out loud sometimes lets people hear themselves. That is what she did, and she found work there. She no longer works for us, and I am glad we were the company she could think out loud with. Most of these conversations end with someone staying and finding their next step here. This one did not, and it was still the right one.

Why this makes a difference for consultant and client

Our market is tight. According to the essenscia employment barometer, chemistry and life sciences companies in Wallonia and Brussels plan around 1,600 recruitments in 2026, and more than half of those companies say hiring is no easier than in previous years. In a market like that, finding people is half the work. Keeping them well supported once they are in place is the other half.

For a consultant, that half is concrete. You have one person, from day one, who speaks your language, knows your region and your sector, and answers you. I would rather say that I support people than that I help them. Helping suggests someone could not manage alone. Supporting is what I actually do.

For a client, the effect is quieter but real. A consultant who has somewhere to go with a problem does not carry that problem into the project, and small signals get picked up while they are still small. For four years I carried delivery responsibility for clients like these, so I know what a project looks like from their chair too.

What I hope you take from this, and from the four of us together, is simple. Whatever comes up on your project, there is a name and a phone number that belong to you, and someone at the other end who knows who you are before you start explaining. That is what we mean when we say you will not be a number. And with me, you can say it in your own language.

"As a recruiter I promised people they would not be a number we send to a client. Now I am the person who has to keep that promise. That is the best job I have had here."

Amandine is one of several Talent Managers at Pauwels Consulting. Els Roesems describes what the role looks like day to day, Debbie Croonen helped build the role from scratch in the Kempen pharma cluster, and Annick Stevens explains how a background in change management shapes her approach.