Why Talent Acquisition Leaders Need to Secure a Seat at the Executive Table

by James Galvin, CEO of Starcircle

Corporate talent acquisition (TA) leaders who know what it takes to establish a strategic TA function, transform TA for its new position, and apply modern measures to performance have already achieved executive buy-in. They’ve secured their spot in organisational-level management hierarchies. Those that haven’t need to realise why they should and how to get a seat at the table.

To better understand the issue, I gathered insights from industry-leading experts Matt Valentino, VP of Global Talent, DoorDash, and Brian Merical, builder of world-class sales teams for global brands, including Allegis Group and 360Learning.  Here’s what I learned.

Why does it matter? Benefits to business and TA teams alike

Securing a seat at the executive table means literally being in the room or on the call when top-level meetings occur. It means providing the C-Suite with regular updates and having a flow of information between executive teams. It entails asking questions and finding out what’s important to stakeholders.

For a positive impact on business, involving TA brings myriad benefits. It can help with sales and revenue forecasting. Sales teams can adjust their KPIs or redistribute resources accordingly if they know about unmet hiring needs. Being in the know facilitates better communication between sales and customers.

TA’s ability to predict when recruits will enter the business brings positive practical impacts too. Revenue officers, in particular, can direct resources to better meet the bottom line when armed with TA insights. Shifting and injecting new personnel in response to burgeoning demand prevents service or product delivery interruptions—vital delivery which guarantees continual revenue streams.

When executives buy into the TA team’s strategic role in making key decisions, the TA team benefits too. Decisions like moving production, relocating services, or opening in new geographies where talent is more readily available make the job of sourcing and hiring quicker and easier.

Having a seat at the table also means TA is kept in the loop. Knowing about upcoming or long-term business goals and participating in planning discussions opens the door to a new way of working. A forward-looking, proactive, and considered way that doesn’t have TA scrambling to fill vacancies at the last minute. A way that allows TA to plan for and implement optimal hiring practices. A way that means TA can identify and secure the best candidates in advance.

How to secure your seat

The best way to secure your seat is to make yourself valuable. Tell the people who need to know precisely what they need to know in terms they’ll understand. Adding value looks different in practice depending on your organisation, but here are some guiding principles.

Provide insights to the executive teams that allow them to make better or different business decisions. Different stakeholders have different priorities, so you need to prove your worth to a range of players. CFOs focus on costs and revenues. In contrast, R&D execs are more invested in the skillsets of hires. Just like editing a CV to be job specific, you need to tailor your communications to captivate your varying audience.

Make data less complex so all stakeholders can understand and engage with it and fully appreciate the subtle details and their implications. Ensure reporting is regular, clean, simple, and jargon-free. Or, as Matt Valentino says: “Be brief! Be bright! Be gone!” Asking what department heads want in their reports is an easy way of ensuring the information you give them is highly relevant and well received.

Tie TA data to organisational drivers. Contextualise TA’s usefulness in terms of business outcomes. Explain how TA will contribute to meeting corporate objectives like sales and customer service KPIs, productivity measures like release dates, and financial targets such as revenue streams. This way, you integrate and align TA with all corporate functions.

Demonstrate the value of TA through ROI data. Measure and track all successes, but don’t just present metrics like time to fill, cost to hire, and churn rates discreetly. Frame these achievements in terms of how they’ve led to better business outcomes such as higher quality hires, costs saved, boosted productivity, and faster ramp-up times. Show that TA achievements are critical to overall business success.

Having a seat at the table reconceptionalises the transactional nature of TA to one of alignment and mutuality. It transforms TA from being a provider to a strategic partner. But you’ll never get a seat unless you prove you’re adding value to the company.

Securing a seat isn’t easy or instantaneous. It can take several steps. Cumulative successes will see you winning over managers and executives in the chain. Execs who champion your worth and become advocates to ensure your seat is front and centre for the foreseeable future.

About the author

James Galvin, CEO of Starcircle, the Irish talent sourcing engine that helps companies scale by accessing pipelines of undiscovered talent