HR Unlocked: Stories, Trends and Insights - Using your TA strategy to drive business performance
Introduction
Welcome to the first edition of HR Unlocked: Stories, Trends, and Insights, a series dedicated to Talent Acquisition (TA) and HR leaders. In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, TA has transformed from a support function into a strategic driver of business success. Whether you're navigating workforce trends, striving to align TA with business objectives, or looking for fresh perspectives, this series will deliver actionable insights — while having a bit of fun along the way.
I'm Dave Procter, Director of Talent Advisory at The IN Group. With our team of 350+ consultants working across multiple brands, we partner with HR & TA leaders to help attract and retain the best talent possible. This series draws from our collective business experience, as well as my own personal extensive experience working with HR leaders, and my current MBA research on how talent strategies drive business performance. Together, we'll explore how TA leaders can position themselves as key strategic partners and demonstrate measurable business impact through data-driven approaches and forward-thinking talent strategies.
The Strategic Disconnect
A striking observation in today's business landscape is the absence of Chief People Officers (CPOs) in CEO succession planning. Despite the oft-repeated mantra that people are a company's most valuable asset, no CEO in the FTSE250 or Fortune 500 has ever been appointed directly from the CPO seat. This disconnect raises crucial questions about how we position and measure the impact of people leadership in organisations.
When we examine what CEOs truly care about, three fundamental objectives emerge: attracting and retaining the right customers, ensuring sufficient cash flow for strategic initiatives, and building teams with the right skills in the right roles. Despite people being one of these three pillars, HR leaders often struggle to gain the same strategic recognition as their C-suite peers. The solution may lie in learning from another discipline that has successfully made this transition: Marketing.
The Marketing Parallel: A Blueprint for HR
Marketing's evolution offers valuable lessons for HR leaders, particularly in two critical areas: metrics and strategic value creation. Over the past three decades, marketers have mastered the art of demonstrating value through concrete metrics. Modern annual reports routinely feature marketing measurements like cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value, and return on marketing investment. These metrics tell a compelling story of marketing's direct impact on business performance.
In contrast, HR discussions in annual reports often default to vague statements about people being the company's most important asset, without substantiating this claim through meaningful metrics. Progressive HR leaders are changing this narrative by developing sophisticated measurements of talent acquisition and management effectiveness. They're tracking not just basic hiring metrics, but deeper indicators of how talent strategies drive business performance.
The strategic value creation story is equally important. Just as marketing demonstrates how brand building creates long-term value, HR needs to show how talent strategy drives sustainable competitive advantage. This involves sophisticated approaches to skill portfolio management, talent market positioning, and strategic workforce planning that align directly with business objectives.
The Counter-Cyclical Advantage
Historical evidence consistently shows that organisations investing during downturns often emerge stronger, and this principle applies equally to talent strategy. Traditional thinking suggests that TA is crucial during boom times when competition for talent is fierce, but less important during downturns when hiring slows. This view fundamentally misunderstands the strategic opportunity that market uncertainty presents.
During downturns, forward-thinking organisations have unique opportunities to build competitive advantage through talent strategy. When competitors reduce their hiring efforts, organisations can access high-quality talent that might otherwise be unavailable. They can build critical capabilities at lower cost and position themselves for accelerated growth during recovery. Perhaps most importantly, they can strengthen their employer brand when others are quiet.
Case Study: The Power of Counter-Cyclical Talent Strategy
The 2008 financial crisis provides a compelling example of this principle in action. While many organisations dramatically reduced their talent investment, companies like Amazon and Netflix took a different approach. By maintaining or even increasing their investment in key talent areas, these organisations were able to acquire critical technical talent from struggling competitors, accelerate innovation during the downturn, and emerge stronger with enhanced capabilities.
This counter-cyclical approach created sustainable competitive advantages that extended well beyond the recovery period. These companies didn't just survive the downturn; they used it as an opportunity to transform their capabilities and market position through strategic talent acquisition.
Looking Ahead
As we continue this series, we'll explore deeper aspects of strategic talent acquisition, including building data-driven TA strategies, forecasting future skill demands, and measuring TA's business impact. We'll examine how innovative approaches to talent acquisition and development can create lasting competitive advantage.
For now, consider how your TA function currently measures and communicates its business impact. What opportunities exist to demonstrate strategic value beyond traditional HR metrics? How could your talent strategy create competitive advantage during market uncertainty? These questions will guide our exploration of TA's evolving strategic role.
Stay tuned for our next edition, where we'll dive deeper into aligning TA with business strategy and explore innovative approaches to talent metrics.
Dave Procter is Director of Talent Advisory at The IN Group, where he partners with organisations to transform their talent acquisition strategies. His upcoming MBA research focuses on quantifying the business impact of strategic talent acquisition.
