Who writes this
Piotr Knapik
I run talent acquisition operations and transformation for a global technology company: the operating model, the capacity and cost behind it, and the numbers the executive committee sees. Before that, agency recruitment, then leading an executive search and search & selection branch.
I have sold recruitment and I have bought it. This letter exists because most writing about the function is produced by people doing neither.
What you will find here is the operating side: what a hire actually costs once it leaves the ATS, how much load a recruiter can hold, how a talent function is structured and staffed as it grows, what recruiters will need to be good at as more of the work is automated, and how a diversity strategy survives its second year. Some of it arrives with a model attached. All of it comes from running the thing.
Not all of it is mine. Every so often I hand a letter to somebody who has rebuilt something and can say what it cost, published under their own name and held to the same editorial standard as the rest. If that is you, there are three ways in.
Written in a personal capacity. Nothing here represents an employer's position.
What changes as the unit gets bigger
Not a career history. Hiring work does not scale, it changes: every step up in the unit of work replaces the thing you are optimising.
- 01One requisitionSpeed. Fill it, and fill it before somebody else does.
- 02One deskConversion. The pipeline arithmetic that decides whether the month lands.
- 03An agency branch and its P&LMargin. Which roles are worth taking, and which quietly lose money.
- 04A regionCapacity. How much work the people you already have can absorb.
- 05A business group's hiring strategyThe shape of the workforce. Which capabilities get built, bought or borrowed, and where they sit.
- 06A global functionThe operating model itself. At this size the process is the product, and nobody writes that part down.
I have worked at every one of these levels, and that is the only reason I can write about the last one. Everything above it is written about constantly. The operating model is not, because the people who own one are usually too busy running it.
Read what the function actually looks like from the inside.