Recruiting is Business (Take One)

Recruiting is business. It is not a separate specialty unto itself; it is not a unique parallel universe where the rules of business physics don’t apply. Recruiting, staffing, talent acquisition (whatever you want to call it) must be measured as a P & L function wherever it exists. Recruiting must deliver sustainable competitive advantage to its customers. Period. Everything else is just icing or noise.

If a recruiting organization does not have a true P&L focus then it will either be outsourced to someone that does, or become an administrative function that everyone avoids. It will be like the hiring manager getting coffee or refilling the paper in the copy machine: just another administrative task that you can’t afford to hire anybody to take off your hands.

This doesn't force recruiting's square peg into capitalism's round hole. Recruiting has all the qualities of a P&L function. Its transactions are valued and unique, people are willing to pay for them, and there is ongoing competition for its market's dollars. In fact, recruiting provides competitive advantage to its customers, just like sales does. Recruiting is a sales function, and as such it delivers top-line (not bottom line) results.

This is not the “people are our number one asset” punch-phrase thrown around by companies to justify their government agency approach to the HR function. I am talking about having measurable impact on the customer, true value delivered, and competitive advantage against the other purveyors in the market (hiring manager’s themselves, RPO’s, agencies, etc.).

Sustainable competitive advantage is a function of the consistently scalable capability to maximize the market’s valuation of the creativity of your human assets. This is the business / financial method of saying “People are our number one asset.” Notice it doesn’t say “Because you can fog a mirror you have value.” It says “The business has an asset. It is all the possible ‘talents’ that it can legally connect to. If the business wants to make money to return value to shareholders (the purpose of the corporation), then it will maximize the ongoing value of that asset by figuring out a way to continuously extract value from it. That value is creativity applied towards one or more of three meta-tasks: continuously improving the efficiency of core processes, maximizing the effectiveness of the services / products delivered, and / or creating an emotional connection with the buying population.”