This post first appeared on John’s Try Harder is Not a Strategy LinkedIn Newsletter. 

I don't recall the first time I heard the phrase "Choose Your Hard," but it hit me hard back in 2009. I was peak unhealthy and worried about the world (my kids were young, my small business was <5 years old in the worst economy of my adult life, and our home value and assets all dropped by 40% or more). And like a lot of us, I knew the kinds of things I controlled and could do to change things up, but didn't really want to do the hard things, like getting to a healthy weight. Exercise was really hard when I was 65 pounds overweight. But so was living with the extra weight.

This isn't a post about physical health and how I chose the hard work of getting healthy. It's a post about our "choose our hard" moment as a function.

I won't paste in all the hiring stats here that are troubling - but I will say that in my 30 years in the TA space, I've never seen this kind money flowing into technology over people, the insanely high volume of applicants per req, the high workloads of recruiters, and the decrease in demand for "safe" jobs like software engineers.

I've been thinking, writing, and speaking about the opportunities that lay ahead for the recruiter role, and believe the Talent Advisor role will be the only recruiter role that'll get funded. But the window of opportunity to secure funding for existing and new req-owning recruiting team roles is fleeting. And this is where TA leaders need to choose their hard.

It's time to have the real conversations with our CHROs and CFOs and Heads of Sales, Engineering, Customer Support, etc so that we can demonstrate - through a business lens - how we can impact what they care about. Not with a generic argument about how recruiters are in the relationship business, and how many candidates still prefer human connection over bots. I still think that's true for many roles. But a hard conversation about how our human work in the talent space gets them measurably better business outcomes.

For this year, it'll be a choose your hard + lead or be led opportunity for TA leaders.

I love the work many TA leaders are doing to elevate their recruitment teams to talent advisors, to engage in deeper, more holistic root issues conversations around new hire quality, internal mobility, compensation, onboarding, and the impact those kinds of things are having on revenue, costs, and capacity.

I'm inspired by TA leaders who are leading more conversations around workforce planning - not just how many hires, what kind, where, when, and priorities, but the hard work of shaping the skills needed, org design, what AI can and can't do (yet), how our competencies for quality need to evolve, how compensation and job content need to evolve to get the right talent, and how we need to finally employ a more integrated buy vs build vs bot conversation with execs.

Some TA leaders will certainly read this and say,

"...that's not really my job - we primarily fill open reqs, treat the hiring manager as the customer, and look to HR to lead around role and org makeup."

But that's very 2019 thinking, in my opinion. We have to choose the harder conversations to demonstrate value now. We have to run to the fire, and lead. We have to deliver a segmented strategy, using AI where it makes sense, and fielding the right human team where needed. We have to step into a bigger role, and more business aligned role, and that may require getting out of our traditional "lane" and into HRBP territory, finance territory, and HRIS territory.

Are you already doing this? Are you choosing the hard conversations now? Please share what you're doing and what you think the "hard" now is and should be.

p.s. Have you heard a version of this quote before? I think it first came from Jerzy Gregorek, the Olympic weight lifting champion. It seems especially relevant now.

Hard choices now, easy life later. Easy choices now, hard life later.