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Every growth plan contains a people assumption. Most companies test it too late.
Every company has a growth plan. New markets to enter, new products to ship, new clients to win, new capacity to build. Somewhere there is a deck, and in that deck is a description of what the company intends to become over the next eighteen months.
Read that deck closely and you will find revenue targets, timelines, competitive positioning, and capital requirements. What you will rarely find is a serious accounting of the people required to make any of it happen, because the people conversation is scheduled for later. First the company decides what it wants. Then, separately, somewhere further down the org chart and several weeks after the announcement, someone starts working out how to staff it.
The assumption underneath that sequence is that talent is available on request. That once the strategy is set and the headcount is approved, the right people can be summoned in roughly the quantity and timeframe the plan assumed. It is an assumption nobody would state out loud in a board meeting, because stated out loud it sounds absurd. But it is baked into how almost every company sequences its own decisions.
The growth plan was never just a growth plan. It was a hiring plan wearing a strategy deck as a costume. Someone should have said so before the ink dried, and the people best equipped to say it were not in the room.
Growth plans are secretly hiring plans
Look at how growth actually gets executed rather than how it gets announced. A new market requires salespeople who can sell into it before the brand means anything there. A new product requires engineers and product talent who were not on the org chart last quarter. A new facility requires operators and technicians drawn from a local labor market that has never heard of you. Winning more work than last year requires enough capable people to deliver what you promised, not just enough signatures to promise it.
Every one of those sentences describes a talent problem before it describes anything else.
The airline industry ran the most vivid version of this experiment in public. Coming out of the pandemic, demand returned faster than crews did. Major carriers hired roughly 13,000 pilots in 2022 and again in 2023, something on the order of 250% above their pre-pandemic pace, and they drew most of them from the captain ranks of their own regional partners. The regionals, stripped of the people who fly the aircraft, could not operate what they already owned. Reporting from that period describes something like 500 regional aircraft sitting on the ground for lack of crews, roughly 150 of them at United's regional partners alone. One network carrier pulled regional service out of 29 airports in a single year. Across 2019 to 2022, 161 airports lost more than a quarter of their commercial flights.
Consider what that means. The aircraft existed. The routes existed. The demand existed and was rising. The capital had already been spent, the gates already leased, the schedules already published. The binding constraint on growth was not money, or equipment, or market appetite. It was whether a specific number of qualified humans would be in specific seats on specific mornings. They were not, so the planes stayed on the tarmac and the growth simply did not happen.
The same shape shows up wherever the required skills take years to build. The US submarine industrial base is a striking case: the money has been appropriated, the strategic commitment made, the delivery cadence publicly set at roughly 2.33 Virginia-class boats a year to sustain the fleet and supply Australia under AUKUS. The constraint is welders, pipefitters, and nuclear-certified machinists. The industry is looking at something like 100,000 trade hires over a decade, with billions in federal money aimed specifically at workforce development, because the one thing you cannot do with a nuclear-certified machinist is produce one on a deadline.
Strategy without the capacity to execute it is not strategy. It is a wish list with a budget attached.
The people assumption hardens before TA sees it
Here is the sequence nearly every company runs without ever deciding to run it.
Leadership decides what the company will become. Finance approves the headcount required to become it. A hiring manager, several steps removed from the original conversation and working from a job description that predates it, translates that headcount into a requisition. TA receives the requisition and begins.
By the time TA hears about the plan, it is not a plan anymore. It is an order, with a date attached that was set by someone who did not consult the talent market before setting it. And when the market declines to cooperate, when the role sits open for five months or gets filled in a panic by whoever was available rather than whoever was right, everyone is surprised. Nobody traces the failure back to the moment months earlier when the people who could have said "this will be the hard part" were not asked.
This is The Usual Way at its most respectable. No one did anything obviously wrong. Every step was reasonable given the step before it. And the cumulative effect is a function positioned as the fulfillment department for decisions it should have helped shape.
Fulfillment departments do not get invited to strategy conversations. They get handed orders and blamed for delivery times.
There is already a Chief Growth Officer
Somebody in every company already does this job, whether or not the title exists on anyone's business card. It is whoever gets to say where growth will actually come from, what will constrain it, what it will cost to pursue, and what could derail it before it starts.
Let me be precise about what I am and am not claiming, because this idea gets misread quickly.
I am not arguing that TA should run sales strategy, own the product roadmap, or take market positioning away from marketing. Those functions do growth work that TA is not equipped to do and should not attempt. If your company has an actual Chief Growth Officer sitting in commercial or marketing, this is not a turf claim against them, and walking into their office with a printout of this article will not go well.
The argument is narrower and harder to dismiss. Of the four questions that define the growth conversation, one of them, what will constrain this, has an answer that is increasingly about people, and the function with the deepest knowledge of that constraint is systematically absent when the question gets asked. That is not a hierarchy problem. It is an information routing problem, and it is expensive.
TA rarely speaks the language that gets you routed correctly. Most TA leaders can tell you requisition counts, time to fill, and offer acceptance rates. Far fewer can tell you which of the company's stated growth bets are currently at risk because the talent required to execute them does not exist in sufficient numbers, will not exist for three quarters, or is being actively courted by two competitors making the identical bet at the identical moment.
That second sentence is the one that gets you into the room. Nobody hands it out. It gets earned by being the person who says it first, and says it early enough to matter.
Hiring is a growth lever, not an HR process
Some of the problem is that TA describes its own work in terms that make it sound like maintenance, and then wonders why it is treated like maintenance.
Filling jobs is a description of process. Increasing the organization's capacity to do things it currently cannot do is a description of growth. These are the same activity. Only one of them sounds like something the business should care about, and it is not the one on most TA dashboards.
The deeper issue is which costs get counted. A company will track cost per hire to two decimal places while carrying, entirely unmeasured, the cost of the capacity it does not have. What is it worth, per week, that the implementation team is three people short and the customer onboarding queue is growing? What does the delayed product launch cost when the two senior engineers required to ship it are still theoretical? Those numbers are usually larger than the entire recruiting budget, and almost nobody calculates them, which means the expensive problem stays invisible while the cheap one gets optimized.
This is the shift the whole idea rests on: hiring is not a service the business consumes. It is a lever the business pulls to become capable of something, and levers get discussed during planning rather than after it. When the work gets framed this way, employer brand stops being a communications deliverable and starts being what it actually is: the reason the right person picks you over the competitor pulling the same lever at the same time.
TA already owns the missing intelligence
The case for moving TA upstream is not that recruiters deserve more status. It is that TA already has access to information the planning process needs.
TA knows what the external market will and will not give the company. Which profiles exist in meaningful numbers. Where compensation is moving. Which competitors are chasing the same people. Which requirements make a role dramatically harder. What candidates keep objecting to. Which offers the company loses and what the winner offered instead.
That is not merely recruiting information. It is information about whether a growth assumption is executable.
The opportunity is to route it differently.
Instead of waiting for a requisition and reporting how difficult it is, forecast the constraint before the requisition exists. Instead of reporting requisition counts, show which growth bets are on track and which are exposed. Instead of quietly accepting a role that cannot win as designed, put the tradeoffs in front of the business while they are still cheap to change. Instead of treating candidate attraction as a communications task, treat it as a competitive-market question: why would the people this plan depends on choose us?
A TA leader operating this way does not need to own sales strategy, product strategy, or the growth plan itself. They need to own the talent-market truth inside it.
That is a much narrower claim than “TA should be strategic,” and a much more useful one. The business does not need another function asking to be included. It needs someone who can say, early and with evidence, “this part of the plan depends on people we are currently unlikely to get, and here are the choices available.”
Notice that most of this is not new work. It is work TA already does, moved upstream by a few months, synthesized instead of scattered, and translated into the terms the business uses to make decisions.
The seat is already empty
The uncomfortable part is that nobody is going to reorganize the company around a job description that does not exist yet. There will be no announcement, no title change, no calendar invite explaining that talent is now a growth function.
That is not a reason to wait. It is the reason not to, and it is the subject of the next piece in this series: influence in a company runs in the opposite direction from how TA assumes, and the title has never been the thing that got anyone into the room.
Every company already has a Chief Growth Officer. Right now, in most of them, the person who understands the constraint best is not in the conversation where the constraint gets decided. The only real question is whether TA keeps waiting for an invitation, or notices that the seat has been empty this whole time.
