When a talent problem is not a talent problem
Sometimes the requisition is not the problem. It is where the problem becomes visible.
A company can have thousands of open roles and still not have a recruiting problem.
That sounds counterintuitive. Open roles are usually treated as a talent acquisition issue. Add recruiters. Increase sourcing. Spend more on job boards. Push harder on time to fill.
But before doing any of that, there is a more important question.
Are these actually open roles?
1. We started with the business, not the requisitions
We recently looked closely at the field hiring environment of a large consumer business. On the surface, the challenge looked familiar. Too many openings. Roles staying open too long. A talent team struggling to keep pace. The obvious answer would have been more recruiting capacity. It was also the wrong place to start.
The company itself was performing in several important areas. Its strategy was clear. Parts of the business were growing. Margins were improving. Investments were being made. The issue was not a lack of direction. The issue was whether the talent infrastructure underneath that strategy could actually support it.
So we started digging. Not just into recruiting activity, but into what the data was actually saying. And fairly quickly, the story changed.
The number of reported open roles moved dramatically during the review, with no corresponding hiring event that explained the change. A significant portion of the requisitions lacked basic categorization. Nearly half of the field leadership roles we examined had been open for more than a year. At that point, this was no longer simply a conversation about recruiting productivity. It was a conversation about operating discipline.
2. An old requisition is not necessarily an open job
A requisition sitting in a system can represent a genuine vacancy that needs to be filled. It can also represent a role that is no longer funded. A position a manager has stopped prioritizing. A duplicate. A posting being kept alive for pipeline purposes. A job that has changed. Or simply something no one has formally closed.
Those scenarios look identical if all leadership sees is a dashboard showing thousands of open positions. They are not identical financially or operationally.
"If nobody stops to determine what is real, the organization can begin spending money to solve a problem it has not actually defined."
3. Then we put a dollar value against standing still
Once we understood the underlying issue, we looked at what it could be costing the business. The estimated annual value at risk was more than $59.7 million. Approximately $50.4 million of that represented estimated performance exposure associated with unfilled field leadership positions. Another $4.1 million to $4.4 million represented estimated annual job board spend, including spend supporting postings that were not necessarily real, active openings.
And simply staffing the recruiting organization to a conventional sustainable workload would have required an estimated $5.1 million annually.
That last number matters. Because "hire more recruiters" would have been a perfectly reasonable recommendation if we had only looked at recruiter workload. It would also have meant spending millions of dollars to put more people into a system whose underlying problem had not yet been fixed.
4. Good talent advice is not always more talent
This is where we think the role of a talent partner has to be bigger than filling the request that lands on the desk. Sometimes the client needs recruiters. Sometimes they need search. Sometimes they need better technology. And sometimes the most valuable thing you can tell them is: do not spend that money yet.
In this case, the economics made that especially clear. The analysis estimated that closing the revenue related portion of the gap could move projected growth from 0.76% to 2.12%, bringing performance back inside the company's own stated growth range. That is no longer a recruiting metric. That is a business conversation.
The takeaway
This is what we mean when we say we are a talent company. We know recruiting. We know search. But knowing talent means knowing when recruiting is the answer and when it is simply where a different problem has surfaced.
The job is not to sell the client the biggest solution. It is to understand the business well enough to recommend the right one. Sometimes that means helping a company hire. Sometimes it means helping them understand why they cannot hire. And sometimes it means finding millions of dollars hiding behind a number everyone assumed was just an HR problem.
That is when a talent problem is not a talent problem.
Not sure how many of your open roles are real?
We will help you separate genuine vacancies from system noise, and show you where the business is actually exposed before you spend on capacity.
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