How Talent Acquisition and HR Leaders Get Interviewed and Quoted as Expert Sources
Getting quoted or interviewed as a hiring assessment expert almost always comes down to the same thing: a specific, firsthand claim, offered to the right outlet, at the right time. Titles and years of experience help you get a reply, but a concrete point of view is what gets you booked.
What Editors Are Actually Looking For
Editors covering hiring assessment and evidence-based selection aren't looking for someone willing to comment generally on "hiring" or "HR." They want the person who actually redesigned the selection process, validated the assessment, or made the call to drop a hiring signal that did not predict performance, and can describe what happened in specific, attributable terms.
The main avenues
- Responding to journalist queries. Services like Connectively (formerly HARO), Qwoted, and SourceBottle send daily requests from reporters looking for sources, including hiring and talent queries.
- A strong, specific LinkedIn presence. Editors search LinkedIn for people already talking publicly about hiring assessment and selection decisions, not just company news.
- Pitching trade publications directly. Most trade outlets, Talent Signal News included, accept unsolicited pitches from people not already on an editor's radar.
- Industry podcasts. Podcast hosts are often easier to reach than journalists and are always looking for a guest with a specific story.
- Speaking and panels. Conference talks and webinars are a common way editors first notice a potential source.
How to Pitch Yourself to a Trade Publication
Skip the general bio. Editors respond to:
- Who you are: role, company, and why it's relevant.
- The one specific thing you can speak to: a decision you made, a result you can quantify, a contrarian view grounded in your own work (e.g. why you replaced a resume screen with a validated assessment, or what a bad-hire postmortem actually revealed about your process).
- Why now: a news hook, an early trend, or a lesson from something that just happened.
Keep it to a few sentences. A pitch that reads like a press release about your company, rather than a claim only you can make, gets skipped fastest.
Contributing to Talent Signal News
Talent Signal News covers hiring assessment and evidence-based selection, and regularly interviews talent acquisition leaders, HR executives, industrial-organizational psychologists and hiring practitioners. Participation is free. There is no placement fee. Pitch yourself at https://www.talentsignalnews.com/pitch-us.