What happens when the person who understands why people choose companies gets to decide what kind of company to build?
Imagine a professional services firm that's struggling to grow. The market is crowded, competitors offer essentially the same services, and customers have a hard time telling anyone apart. Most contracts eventually come down to price, which means margins are thin and winning more business doesn't necessarily mean making more money.
The executive team has a sensible plan: Improve utilization, reduce delivery costs, streamline operations, and find ways to make the firm more competitive on bids. There's nothing wrong with that approach. It's the sort of thing that any CEO who came from operations or finance would appreciate and embrace.
Now imagine the company has just appointed a new CEO. And, for reasons that would make an interesting article of their own, that CEO was previously the company's employer brand manager. (Gasp!)
Most CEOs have spent their careers learning how to allocate capital, improve operations, grow revenue, and manage risk. Our new CEO has spent years studying something different: why people choose one company over another, what makes a company attractive to particular kinds of talent, and what those people hope to accomplish when they get there.
So they look at the firm's problem and ask a different question.
Instead of asking how to deliver the same services more cheaply, they ask what the company would need to become capable of delivering something its competitors can't.
They identify a valuable, specialized corner of the market where the firm currently lacks the expertise and credibility to compete. Then they propose recruiting three of the most respected specialists in that field.
The CFO is understandably horrified. These people are expensive, margins are already thin, and there's no guarantee that hiring them will produce a single new contract. But the CEO isn't proposing three more salaries to support the existing business. They're proposing an investment in becoming a different kind of business.
It's a serious bet. The firm redirects money it might otherwise have spent expanding its existing services and accepts the possibility of lower profits while the new practice develops.
Those three people bring expertise, judgment, relationships, and reputations. Combined with the firm's existing capabilities, they make entirely new kinds of work possible.
Before long, the company is bidding on projects it couldn't have considered six months earlier. It can command higher rates because it can solve problems its old competitors can't. And because it's doing more interesting, sophisticated work, other talented specialists start paying attention.
The company has escaped the price war by becoming a different kind of competitor.
And it started with three hires.
The hiring made a different strategy possible.
Most businesses develop a strategy and then hire the people required to execute it. Leadership chooses the markets, products, and growth targets. Workforce planning translates those decisions into headcount, capabilities, and budgets.
Strategy comes first. Talent follows.
Our employer brand CEO understands that the relationship works in both directions.
The people a company attracts determine not only how well it can execute its strategy, but also which strategies it can realistically pursue.
Those three specialists didn't just make the professional services firm better at its existing business. They made a different business possible.
And here's what makes this so important: the opportunities those people create aren't necessarily visible before they arrive.
An exceptional hire might make an entire division more valuable. Someone's expertise might reveal a customer problem nobody else in the company knew existed. Two people with complementary skills might develop a service the business had never considered offering.
The value of these people isn't limited to the work they personally produce. It's also in what their presence makes possible for everyone around them.
But there's a catch. You can't develop a strategy around an opportunity you don't know exists. And most companies have built systems that make discovering those opportunities surprisingly difficult.
The opportunities that never reach the CEO
Consider a manufacturing company whose leadership has spent months trying to improve margins on its equipment.
Meanwhile, a recruiter interviews a product leader who helped another manufacturer turn equipment diagnostics into a profitable predictive maintenance service. It's an interesting background, but the open position requires experience with the company's existing product line. The candidate doesn't quite fit, so the conversation ends.
A few days later, the executive team meets to discuss growth. They debate pricing, production efficiency, and opportunities to sell more equipment.
Nobody in that meeting knows the company just spoke with someone who might have helped it develop an entirely different revenue stream.
That's how a strategic possibility disappears without anyone ever deciding against it.
Most hiring systems are designed to answer a perfectly reasonable question: Can this person do the job we've already decided needs doing?
But that question also limits what we get to discover. We recruit against known requirements, evaluate against existing roles, and reward candidates for demonstrating that they've done something similar before.
The process is excellent at finding people to execute the current strategy. It's considerably less useful at identifying people who might make a different strategy possible.
And this isn't simply a recruiting problem.
Leadership makes strategic decisions based on the capabilities it knows the organization possesses or believes it can acquire. If a capability doesn't fit the current organizational structure, or nobody has thought to look for it, the opportunities it might unlock can remain invisible.
Our employer brand CEO has spent a career looking at the company from the perspective of the people who might choose to work there. They know that talented people aren't merely looking for somewhere to apply their existing skills. They're looking for opportunities to do things they couldn't do somewhere else.
What if that knowledge were brought into strategic planning, rather than used only after the strategy had been decided?
What if part of evaluating a growth opportunity meant asking which people could make it possible, whether those people would choose this company, and what might become possible once they arrived?
The strategic plan describes what leadership can currently imagine. The people a company attracts can expand that imagination.
And then the company starts attracting different people.
Return to our professional services firm.
A year ago, it was another reasonably competent company fighting for contracts on price. Today, it's working on sophisticated projects with respected specialists, solving problems that other firms can't.
That's a very different proposition for someone considering where to take their career.
People who wouldn't have considered the company before now see an opportunity to do interesting work alongside people they admire. Some of them bring additional expertise, relationships, and ideas that make the business even more capable.
Which opens the door to more opportunities. Which makes the company attractive to another group of people.
This is the advantage our employer brand CEO understood from the beginning.
The company you build determines who wants to work there. The people who choose to work there help determine what the company can become. And what the company becomes changes who wants to work there next.
It's not a recruiting campaign. It's a way for a business to become progressively more capable and, potentially, more competitive.
Of course, the cycle isn't automatic. Hiring expensive specialists doesn't guarantee demand for their services, and assembling impressive people doesn't excuse bad strategy. The business still needs disciplined investment, customers willing to pay, and an environment where people's capabilities can actually be put to use. Our CEO hasn't eliminated business risk. They've simply recognized a category of investment that traditional planning can underestimate.
Maybe we've been thinking about employer branding backward.
Imagine how differently our imaginary CEO would approach a conversation about talent.
Instead of asking only how to fill the positions needed to achieve next year's growth targets, they'd also ask what kinds of people could make entirely different growth targets possible.
Instead of treating employer branding as the work of making the company attractive to candidates, they'd see it as part of understanding what kind of company they need to build to attract the people who could change its future.
And instead of seeing hiring primarily as a cost of executing strategy, they'd recognize that acquiring the right capabilities can itself be a source of strategic advantage.
For those of us in talent acquisition and employer branding, that's a much bigger conversation than the one we're accustomed to having.
We've spent years explaining how our work helps companies find the people they need to execute their business strategies. We can point to faster hiring, lower costs, stronger pipelines, and better retention. Those are valuable outcomes, but they don't capture the full potential of what we do.
Because the real opportunity isn't always to help a company execute its existing strategy more effectively.
Sometimes it's to help the company become capable of pursuing a strategy that wasn't possible before.
Our imaginary CEO didn't win by finding a more compelling way to describe the business. They won by changing what the business was capable of becoming.
And maybe that's the most valuable thing an employer brand leader could bring to the CEO's office: an understanding that the people who choose your company don't just determine how well you execute your plans.
They help determine which plans you get to make.
