Why great recruiters speak the language of outcomes!
Welcome to the second edition of the Partnering Recruiter
In the first edition of The Partnering Recruiter, we explored why recruiters need to understand the businesses they recruit for. That first edition was deliberately a little conceptual because it needed to be.
Before we can talk about stakeholder influence, executive communication or business partnering, we first need to understand the organisation itself.
How it makes money? How it creates value? (do you know the difference between making money and value?) What are the strategic priorities?
This edition takes the next step because understanding the business is one thing but understanding how different functions contribute to that business is where things start becoming much more practical and valuable for you.
Human behaviour dictates we gravitate towards what we feel comfortable with. I’ve been managing recruiters for 15 years and it happens a lot where recruiters become very comfortable speaking the language of candidates but are far less comfortable speaking the language of leaders.
It’s not because recruiters aren't capable of it, it's a simple and very human explanation.
Candidates generally feel safer.
When you're talking to a candidate, you're usually discussing careers, motivations, skills and opportunities. If the conversation doesn't go perfectly, the consequences are relatively limited.
Stakeholders are different.
When you're sitting with a Head of Engineering, Sales Director or ExCo member, you're talking to somebody who can directly influence how you're perceived inside the organisation. The stakes feel higher and when the stakes feel higher, people naturally retreat into territory where they feel more confident. For recruiters, that's often process, vacancy updates, pipeline reports, interview feedback or recruitment metrics.
All useful but not generally the things leaders care about. Leaders care about outcomes.
Taking Software Engineering as an example. If you're recruiting engineers, you'll probably spend time understanding:
programming languages
cloud platforms
architecture
development methodologies
technical capability
And that's important. Without that knowledge you can’t assess talent or build credibility with candidates. But the Head of Engineering isn't spending their day thinking about Java or Kubernetes. They're thinking about:
product delivery
engineering productivity
technical debt
customer experience
roadmap execution
Outcomes.
The same thing happens in Sales. Recruiters become comfortable talking about:
SDRs
Account Executives
pipeline generation
territory planning
Sales leaders are thinking about:
revenue attainment
conversion rates
sales productivity
market growth
Again, outcomes.
And this is where recruiters need to make a shift. Don’t think only about jobs. Start thinking about why those jobs exist. Every role exists to help a department achieve an outcome. Every department exists to help the business achieve an outcome. The recruiters who understand that chain become significantly more valuable.
You might be thinking: "Why does any of this matter?" After all, recruiters have built successful careers for years operating primarily at a process and delivery level. Historically, being good at sourcing, process management, candidate engagement and delivery execution could create a very successful recruitment career.
What you need to ask yourself isn’t whether that was true, it is whether that will continue to be true. Technology is already reshaping many of the activities recruiters have traditionally spent most of their time doing.
Sourcing platforms are becoming increasingly intelligent (go and look at metaview.ai and their sourcing platform - i'm not sponsored it's just a good tool), CV screening and matching technology continues to improve. Scheduling is increasingly automated. Even elements of initial interviewing and information gathering are becoming technology-enabled if you want to go that far.
None of this means your job is disappearing but it is going to change and it does raise an important question.
If technology continues to get better at recruitment activities, how do you continue to create value?
The answer increasingly lies in judgement, influence, commercial understanding, stakeholder engagement, relationship building and credibility. A recruiter who simply manages process will increasingly find themselves competing with technology. The recruiter who helps leaders make better decisions becomes significantly harder to replace.
A few years ago, I was supporting the hiring of a Chief of Staff role for an exco member. During the process, a senior leader from a direct competitor applied and on paper, it looked incredibly attractive.
They had sector experience, domain expertise, recognised brands on their CV and significant leadership experience. Our exco member was understandably excited and their thinking was straightforward:
"Imagine bringing all of that experience into the organisation."
The issue wasn’t whether they would bring some great experience to the team and the organisation. The issue was that the role had been created to provide a very specific outcome. The reality our exec was stretched, too many initiatives, too many priorities, too many stakeholders. They didn’t need sector and domain expertise as that existed in the team in buckets. They needed someone who could create the bandwidth they needed to execute more effectively.
We had to reframe the discussion around outcomes rather than backgrounds and in doing so the conversation changed completely.
The strongest candidate was no longer the person with the most impressive industry experience. It was the person best positioned to deliver what the role actually existed to achieve.
The learning here is that recruitment delivery focuses on who fits the brief. Business partnership challenges whether the brief is solving the right problem in the first place and that's a very different conversation. It's a conversation that only happens when you've built enough understanding and credibility to ask it.
Next time you're speaking to a senior leader, think about what's important to them but also something I feel it’s important for recruiters to understand is:
Hiring managers don't care about your metrics.
They care about the outcomes your metrics enable.
A hiring manager doesn't care that the time-to-hire is reduced by ten days - they care that the team was fully staffed earlier.
They care that a product is launched on time.
They care that customer demand was met.
They care that revenue targets were achieved.
A stakeholder doesn't care that candidate experience increased by fifteen points - they care that higher quality candidates accepted offers, joined the organisation engaged and stayed longer.
The metric matters to you but it's the outcome that creates value.
Strong recruiters learn how to translate recruitment activity into business impact. That is one of the key differences between being a delivery recruiter and a business partner.
So what can you do with this? I'd encourage you to complete a simple exercise.
Pick one department that you support regularly.
Then answer five questions:
How does this department create value?
What metrics matter most to its leaders?
What challenges keep those leaders awake at night?
What capability gaps exist today?
What does exceptional performance look like?
If you can't confidently answer those questions, you've probably found your next development opportunity.
For TA Leaders and Managers, there's a practical takeaway too.
Invite leaders from different functions into your team meetings.
But don't ask them to talk about recruitment.
Ask them to explain:
how the department creates value
how success is measured
what challenges they're facing
what good performance looks like
where talent has the biggest impact
The objective isn't to turn recruiters into engineers, salespeople or finance professionals but to help recruiters understand enough to ask better questions, challenge constructively and connect hiring activity to business outcomes.
Confidence comes from understanding, understanding creates credibility and credibility creates influence. Influence is what allows recruiters to move beyond process and into genuine business partnership.
In the next edition we'll explore stakeholder influence itself.
Because understanding the business and understanding the function is only half of the equation.
You still need to influence people.
And that's where things start getting really fun!
P.S. If you try the five-question exercise, I'd genuinely love to hear what you discover. The gaps you uncover are often far more valuable than the answers you already know.
The Partnering Recruiter
It All Begins Here
Welcome to the first installment of the Partnering Recruiter Newsletter
Unless you’ve been living under a rock and given that you work in or around TA, I’ll assume that’s probably not the case, you’ll know there has understandably been a huge focus across recruitment and talent acquisition on technology, automation, AI and process efficiency.
We can see that technology is already reshaping large parts of recruitment delivery: Sourcing, scheduling, workflow management, candidate communication, information gathering, screening and administrative coordination are all areas where AI and automation are already impacting. These areas are the “low hanging fruit” for tech.
To be clear, I'm a tech advocate and my view is that the best TA professionals in 2, 5 or 10 years time will be those who have embraced tech and evolved into something far more valuable than many recruiter roles look like today. In 2021 I launched one of the first global automated hiring processes for Just Eat. We launched a “Hi-Tech Hi-Touch” process which reinvested the time that automation freed up for recruiters into delivering a greater candidate experience and in turn significant commercial benefits.
Technology is going to continue to transform how we do our jobs and that is a good thing. One of the unintended consequences of that evolution is that it increases the importance of the capabilities technology cannot easily replicate:
Judgement
Influence
Commerciality
Stakeholder Engagement
Relationship Building
Organisational Credibility
In many ways, the more recruitment delivery becomes automated, the more valuable strong business partnering capability becomes.
Now I'm going to ask how much training you have had on the above subjects? If you have had some training here I would say that you’re in the minority. I will guess though you’ve had lots of training on systems, sourcing, process, tools and all the other mechanics of the recruitment process.
Here’s a bit of brutal truth about why that is…
Firstly your organisation has likely invested a lot into tech. Getting a return on investment is important. Ensuring that you’re properly trained and using that tech to the best of its ability is vital - Linkedin Recruiter is expensive so you get training on how to source and outreach using it - Linkedin has a vested interest in you being successful in using their platform. No denying that training on these aren't important but why no training or development in these other skills?
Because they aren't black and white. Systems training is often straightforward: you press X and you get Y… building commercial acumen, stakeholder engagement - these other skills don’t have a clear return on investment.
Time for another honesty bomb…
Training these skills and more importantly implementing them into your day to day job are hard. However, learn and implement them and your importance in an organisation will be rapidly elevated!
So where do I think recruiters should start if they genuinely want to become stronger business partners?
My belief is it starts with understanding the business itself. Not just the recruitment process. Not just the hiring managers. Not just the org chart. The actual business.
Think about how the organisation actually makes money… the answer isn’t always as obvious as it sounds.
Consider 2 examples - brands you will absolutely know.
McDonalds and Coca Cola.
Obviously McDonalds sell burgers and Coca Cola sell soft drinks but is that how they make their money?
Yes and No.
Important here is to differentiate between revenue and profit. McDonalds Corporation makes the majority of their profits from buying and renting the land that the restaurants sit on to franchisees who then also pay royalties. Typical profit margins from franchisees are between 80 - 90%, whereas company-owned restaurants operate closer to 10 - 20%.
Coca Cola is similar in that it does sell Coca-Cola products directly however bottling plants are expensive to run. The higher-margin part of the business is often selling syrup concentrate to bottling companies.
Taking a slightly different view you can look at a consulting firm. That firm may be famous for being a consulting and advisory firm. Consulting services are constrained by billable hours which bring a significant labour/talent cost. That firm is likely to make more money from services that are scalable such as managed services or products or services that they have built themselves which they are able to sell at much higher margins.
The point here is to improve your partnering skills to start you need to get to know your business.
That’s the theoretical but how do you start to create some actions around that.
If your company produces an annual report - read it. You don’t need to read it cover to cover with the scrutiny of a market analyst but familiarise yourself with some of the key elements or use your favourite AI interface to summarise it and tell you what you need to know. What is useful to understand is:
The CEO/Strategic report
Business Model information
Organisational Risks
People Insight
Financial Highlights
Ask to spend time with your stakeholders to understand how what they do drives value to the organisation. Whether they will take that time usually comes down to framing. If you position this as just you wanting to get knowledge of the business you're unlikely to get the time. If you consider the principle of "What's In It For Me” (WIIFM - we’ll explore this more in a future newsletter) and root your request in enabling them somehow you’re far more likely to get the outcome you want. Make sure the time isn’t just about recruitment. Take genuine interest in what they do but more importantly what value they create.
Talk to your manager - tell them that you want to understand more about how the organisation works and importantly tell them why you want that. They should be able to either give you things to read or contacts to talk to in the organisation. It may even be that they invite someone who can explain more about how the business “works” to talk in your team meeting. (I've been the manager that's been asked and it also makes you genuinely stand out from your peers in a good way!)
Why does all of this matter so much?
Because the better you understand how the business operates commercially the better you’ll be able to understand the various departments that you’ll support. Better understanding leads to a greater ability to judge, challenge and support. In the next edition we’ll start to break down how understanding at the organisational level allows you greater understanding at a departmental level meaning you’ll be able to start connecting hiring decisions to impact.
That is where recruiters begin moving from transactional delivery into genuine business partnership.
One thing I want to do with this newsletter is to ensure that as well as helping recruiters it also supports TA Leaders and Managers to support and develop their own teams.
When I speak to organisations about building commercial acumen within their teams I start with building a high level understanding of the business. Recruiters at this stage don’t need to read a balance sheet or P&L to be able to understand the commercial drivers of a business. Gaining a real world understanding of how the business generates revenue and profit is the starting point.
In any manager role, TA or otherwise part of your role is to give the team aircover to be able to deliver what they need to. Whether that’s shielding from undue pressure from stakeholders or enough time away from delivery to be able to develop new knowledge and skills. I recognise there are pressures with recruiters carrying heavy req loads and those reqs are getting a greater level of applications than almost ever before. However unless you allow a break from the hamster wheel there will be no downstream development and for you no return on any developmental investment. Development in soft skills can enable your recruiters to unlock bottlenecks that you get pulled into creating a much faster flowing process with fewer managerial interventions.
This first edition has been about creating understanding at an organisational level. In the next edition I will take a further step by looking at how you can start translating organisational knowledge into departmental and individual stakeholder understanding.
Understanding how the business makes money is one thing. Understanding how different functions contribute to those outcomes and how talent impacts their success is where recruitment conversations start becoming genuinely commercial.
The recruiters who become genuinely indispensable internally are rarely the ones who simply understand recruitment best. They’re usually the ones who best understand the business they recruit for.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this first edition of the Partnering Recruiter. If there are any specific challenges you have that you’d like me to explore please let me know and I will try to cover them in future editions - I can also respond directly if you want immediate support too. info@talentperform.co.uk
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