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A note for the person forwarding this: send it without a cover note arguing your case. The piece makes the argument, and it lands better arriving from you than as something you wrote about yourself. Be ready for question six, which is the one that will actually get asked, and answer it with a specific example rather than a general grievance. If you cannot yet answer questions two, three, and five, that is the work — and it is worth doing before the meeting rather than after it.
Your plan has people in it. These questions test whether that part is real.
This one is written for executives rather than talent teams. If you run a business unit, a P&L, or a company, the plan you are about to approve almost certainly depends on people who do not currently work for you.
That dependency is usually the least examined assumption in the entire plan. Revenue assumptions get modeled. Capital gets scrutinized. Timelines get debated. The people required to execute all of it are typically handled as a headcount number in a spreadsheet, on the working assumption that once approved, the humans will arrive in roughly the quantity and timeframe the plan implies.
Sometimes they do. When they do not, it is expensive, late, and difficult to recover, because talent constraints surface slowly and then all at once. TSMC committed something on the order of $40 billion to its Arizona fabrication plants and then pushed production back by about a year, citing a shortage of workers with the specific skills to install semiconductor equipment. The capital was never the constraint.
The questions below take about twenty minutes and are worth asking before the date hardens rather than after. A note in advance: none of them is a budget request, and none of them requires your talent leader to ask you for anything. They are diagnostic. If the answers are good, you have confirmed a real plan. If they are not, you have found the weakest assumption in it while there is still time to do something.
1. Which parts of this plan depend on hiring, and how many people?
Deceptively basic, and frequently unanswered. The point is to convert an abstraction into a list: this market entry needs eleven salespeople, this product needs six engineers, this facility needs forty operators by the date on the announcement.
A good answer ties specific commitments to specific roles and quantities, and distinguishes between hires that must land before the milestone and hires that can follow it.
A weak answer describes total headcount for the year without connecting any of it to what the business has publicly committed to doing.
2. Do those people exist in the numbers and locations we need, and who else is competing for them?
This is the question that separates a plan from a wish. Somewhere in your organization there should be a view of the external labor market that is more rigorous than "recruiting is hard right now."
A good answer cites evidence: roughly how many people with this profile exist within reach of the location or working model, which companies are currently hiring the same profile, what those companies are paying, and where your compensation sits against them.
A weak answer is a confident assurance that the roles will be filled, or a reference to the number of applications the company received last quarter. Application volume tells you almost nothing about whether you can hire the people you specifically need.
3. Given our current conversion rates, what does the timeline actually produce?
You have committed to a date. Your hiring process has a historical throughput. Multiply one by the other and you get a forecast, which is a very different object from a target.
A good answer sounds like arithmetic and is willing to be uncomfortable: "The launch assumes nineteen field engineers productive by June. At our current sourcing-to-offer conversion and our current band, we will have somewhere between nine and twelve. Here are three ways to close that gap and what each one costs."
A weak answer restates the target as though repeating it makes it more achievable, or reports activity — requisitions opened, interviews scheduled — without connecting any of it to the date.
4. Why would the right person choose us over their alternative?
Every person you need is currently employed somewhere else, will be recruited by several companies this year, and is comparing your role against real options. The answer to this question is what determines your conversion rate, your salary premium, and your offer acceptance rate simultaneously.
A good answer is specific enough to be tested and honest enough to include a tradeoff: what this role offers that competitors do not, what evidence supports the claim, and what the person gives up by choosing you.
A weak answer is a list of adjectives that would be equally true of your three closest competitors: great culture, strong benefits, collaborative team, meaningful work. If the answer takes more than a sentence to give, or could be published by a competitor without editing, that is the finding.
5. What are we currently paying to work around this?
The cost of being hard to choose does not appear in the recruiting budget. It shows up elsewhere, in categories nobody connects back to talent: agency and RPO fees, salary premiums paid above band to close candidates, advertising spend compensating for weak conversion, overtime and contractor costs covering seats that stayed empty, and the revenue delay from capacity that arrived late.
American hospitals lived a vivid version of this. As nurse staffing collapsed, contract labor rose from roughly 2% of total labor expense to around 11%, with contract nurse hourly rates roughly doubling while staff wages moved a fraction of that. It was universally discussed as a contract labor problem. It was also, unmistakably, an attraction and retention problem that had become expensive enough to reshape operating margins.
A good answer shows the categories, with ranges rather than false precision, and is candid about which numbers are estimates.
A weak answer reports cost per hire, which measures the efficiency of the recruiting function and tells you nothing about what the constraint is costing the business.
6. What would you have told us if we had asked before we set this date?
The most useful question on the list, and the one most likely to produce a genuinely uncomfortable silence.
In most companies the sequence runs: leadership decides, finance approves, a requisition gets written, and talent acquisition finds out when the order arrives. By then the date is fixed and the only available response is effort. If your talent leader has been operating in that sequence, they have almost certainly known about problems they had no standing to raise.
A good answer is specific and slightly awkward: the level is wrong for the market, the band is below what these people are paid, this profile does not exist within an hour of the site, this role is really two jobs.
A weak answer is "we'll make it work." That answer is not reassurance. It is a description of who is going to absorb the risk you just created.
What to do with the answers
If your talent leader can answer these well, you have someone capable of contributing to the growth conversation and you should move them upstream of it. The cost of that change is a recurring meeting.
If they cannot answer them yet, that is worth knowing too, and it is usually a structural problem rather than a personal one. Most talent functions have never been asked these questions and have therefore never been resourced or expected to answer them. Asking consistently is what produces the capability, generally faster than anyone expects.
Either way, the assumption being tested is not really about the talent function. It is whether the plan you are approving is executable by the people who will have to execute it. That is a growth question, and it belongs to whoever owns the plan.
