Your corproate growth plan is really a hiring plan in disguise.

Chief Growth Officer

(a posture, not title)

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Definition: the talent leader who treats the company's growth commitments as talent commitments, and who routes what they know about the talent market to the place where those commitments get made — before the date hardens.

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This is not a claim on sales strategy, the product roadmap, or marketing's positioning. If your company has an actual CGO in commercial, this is not a turf fight with them. It is narrower and harder to dismiss: of the questions that define a growth conversation, what will constrain this increasingly has a people answer, and the people who know that answer are systematically absent when it gets asked.

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That is not a hierarchy problem. It is an information routing problem, and it is expensive.

You have read the deck. Everyone has. New markets, new products, new capacity, new clients, eighteen months of ambition rendered in clean typography. Revenue targets, timelines, competitive positioning, capital requirements.

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What you will not find anywhere in it is a serious account of the people all of it depends on, because the people conversation was scheduled for later. Later means after the date was announced. Later means you.

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Underneath that sequence sits an assumption nobody would say out loud in a board meeting: that talent is available on request. That once the strategy is set and the headcount approved, the right humans can be summoned in roughly the number and timeframe the plan imagined.

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Sometimes that holds. When it does not, it fails late and expensively. Coming out of the pandemic, major airlines hired roughly 13,000 pilots two years running, pulling most of them from the captain ranks of their own regional partners. Around 500 regional aircraft then sat on the ground for want of crews. The planes existed. The routes existed. The demand existed and was climbing. The capital was long since spent. The only thing missing was whether specific qualified people would be in specific seats on specific mornings.

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The growth plan was never only a growth plan. It was a hiring plan wearing a strategy deck as a costume.

Here is the part worth holding onto. The case for moving you upstream is not that recruiters deserve more respect. It is that you already hold information the planning process needs and cannot get anywhere else. Which profiles exist in real numbers. Where compensation is actually moving, months before the survey confirms it. Which competitors are circling the same twelve people. Which requirement quietly shrank the pool to nine candidates nationally. Why the strong ones walked. Which offer beat yours, and on what.

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Right now most of that dies in your notes, your ATS fields, and a Slack thread nobody reads twice.

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TA doesn’t become more strategic by being invited to more meetings. It becomes more strategic when it starts taking responsibility for whether the business can acquire the talent required to grow.

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The Idea

Every Company Already Has a Chief Growth Officer. It’s Just Not in TA (Yet)

Growth depends on having the people to deliver it. If TA owns that constraint, it may already be doing a growth job without calling it one.

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The CMO Has a Growth Seat. TA Doesn’t. That’s Not Marketing’s Fault.

Marketing learned to connect its work to revenue. TA can do the same, but not by asking to be seen differently. It starts by changing what the function takes responsibility for.

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Stop Asking to Be Strategic. Start Owning the Word Growth.

“Strategic” is vague enough to mean almost anything. Growth is not. This is the argument for replacing the pursuit of status with ownership of a business outcome.

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The Job

What the Chief Growth Officer in TA Actually Does

The title is provocative. The work is practical. Here’s what changes when a TA leader starts looking at hiring through the lens of business capacity, competitive advantage and growth.

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Nobody Is Going to Hand You the Chief Growth Officer Job. Start Doing It.

You don’t need a new title, a reorg or permission from the executive team. You can start changing the questions you ask, the problems you solve and the outcomes you own now.

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The Recruiter’s Guide to Becoming a Chief Growth Officer

Growth thinking shouldn’t stop with the head of TA. This is what it looks like when an individual recruiter starts connecting every search, conversation and hire to what the business is trying to accomplish.

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Make the Business See It

Your CFO Thinks Talent Is a Cost Center. Here’s the Meeting That Changes That.

You won’t change the CFO’s mind by defending recruiting spend. Change the conversation by showing where talent limits revenue, capacity and the company’s ability to execute its plans.

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Six Questions to Ask Your Talent Leader Before You Approve the Growth Plan

A growth plan built without a talent plan is partly a hope. These six questions help leaders expose the hiring assumptions hiding inside the numbers before they become growth constraints.

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Do the Work Differently

The Chief Growth Officer’s Guide to the Requisition Review

A requisition review shouldn’t just ask how quickly you can fill the role. It should ask why the role matters, what happens if you miss, and whether the hiring strategy is strong enough for the business outcome attached to it.

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The Chief Growth Officer’s Guide to the Offer Call

The offer call isn’t the end of recruiting. It’s the moment the business either secures the talent it needs or loses it. Here’s how that conversation changes when you treat the candidate’s decision as a growth outcome.

The seat has been empty this whole time.

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There will be no announcement. No title change. No calendar invite explaining that talent is now a growth function. Nobody is going to reorganize your company around a job description that does not exist yet.

That is not a reason to wait. It is the reason not to.

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If you want help building the talent market evidence that makes the argument for you, that is the work we do.

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