.png)
Your corproate growth plan is really a hiring plan in disguise.
That makes you the Chief Growth Officer.
Somebody in your company decides where growth comes from and what will constrain it. Increasingly, the constraint is people. The function that knows the most about that constraint is usually the last one asked.
A job nobody will hand you
Chief Growth Officer
(a posture, not title)
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.
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.
That is not a hierarchy problem. It is an information routing problem, and it is expensive.
Somebody already decided
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right now most of that dies in your notes, your ATS fields, and a Slack thread nobody reads twice.
[Go deep→] (Every Company Already Has a Chief Growth Officer. It's Just Not in TA — Yet.)
You are already sitting on it
Six moments in every hiring cycle that get treated as process, and are actually the best talent market intelligence your company will ever produce. Same conversations you are already having. A different question asked of them.
1. The Requisition Review A requisition is a request to spend company money creating capacity. Almost nobody reviews it that way. Three possible outcomes, not one.
2. The Intake Meeting Stop gathering requirements. Start shaping the decision. Bring the market into the room and give the hiring manager something useful to disagree with.
3. The Job Post Not paperwork. A competitive argument submitted into a market, against the other four tabs open in the reader's browser. Includes the red pen test.
4. The Exit Interview The person leaving just finished a competitive evaluation of you as an employer, with full information on both sides. Then someone asked them about the benefits portal.
Knowing it is not the job
Intelligence that stays inside the talent function changes nothing. You can be right about the constraint for three straight quarters and still get handed the same impossible date in the fourth.
This is the harder half. Getting what you know in front of the people who set the commitments, early enough that choices still exist.
Nobody Is Going to Hand You the Chief Growth Officer Job. Start Doing It. Influence does not arrive first. Evidence does. The difference between "we have 47 open roles" and a sentence that forces someone to make a decision.
Your CFO Thinks Talent Is a Cost Center. Here's the Meeting That Changes That. You cannot hand someone an expense report every quarter and then act surprised when they treat you like an expense. Where the cost of being hard to choose is currently filed.
The CMO Has a Growth Seat. TA Doesn't. That's Not Marketing's Fault. Marketing did not win its seat by being appreciated. It built a discipline that made leaving it out expensive. What employer branding borrowed from marketing, and what it left behind.
Stop Asking to Be "Strategic." Start Owning the Word "Growth." "Strategic" cannot be disproved, which is exactly why it has never worked for you. Growth is a word the business already funds, and a criterion you can actually make decisions with.
Do not argue.
Forward this.
Six Questions to Ask Your Talent Leader Before You Approve the Growth Plan
Six diagnostic questions, each with what a good answer sounds like and what a weak one sounds like. None of them is a budget request. None of them requires you to ask for anything.
Send it rather than quoting it. It lands better arriving from you than as something you wrote about yourself. Then be ready for question six, because that is the one they will actually ask.
Two halves of the same fight
Choosable answers how a company should compete for talent. Make your differentiated value specific, provable, and visible wherever people are deciding.
Chief Growth Officer answers who inside the building has to own and defend that advantage, and how they get into the conversation early enough for it to count.
You can have the sharpest positioning in your category and still lose, quietly, because you were not in the planning meeting on the Tuesday the date got set.
“There were no surprises in what James shared from his findings, but rather a clarity we previously had trouble defining for ourselves. For a subject that has an ROI that is often hard to quantify, James helped put things in terms that would help create buy-in from other key members of the organization.”
-Ashley S., Head of TA
Keep going
Related pieces already on the site that belong in this conversation:
Nobody is coming to ask you
The seat has been empty this whole time.
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.
If you want help building the talent market evidence that makes the argument for you, that is the work we do.
Our Clients
The cheapest way to fix your pipeline is to stop sounding like everyone else.