A division president drops a problem on your desk. "We can't find this person," he says. "The market doesn't have them." Well, you can go on and run the search that he ordered, or you can do the one thing that turns you from the person who fills his reqs into the person that he calls first. Most HR leaders never even see the choice. And in the next 15 minutes, I'll make sure that you do.
Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is where HR executives stop running the function and start operating at high altitude so that they can become their CEO's most indispensable business advisor. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and today we're going to be talking about the talent constraint that isn't real and what it quietly reveals about you.
And here's the part that no one really talks about. Every time a leader hands you a talent shortage and you go on to work it, you've answered a question that he didn't even know he was asking. Are you the function that takes the order, or are you the one that diagnoses the problem? Because a large share of the shortages that land on your desk were built by the business itself. And it can't see that from the inside. And whether you catch that is the difference between filling a role and changing how your CEO sees your seat.
If you've ever run a search you quietly doubted against a role description that you didn't write, you know the feeling I'm talking about. And by the end, you're going to have a four-step diagnostic that you can run this week and a way to bring the finding to your CEO that moves you from being the service arm of the org chart to a voice in the debate.
And here's what I want to show you today: why accepting a stated talent constraint quietly casts you as the service function. How to tell a real market shortage from a problem the business built itself before you burn a year on it. And what to do this week to turn one stuck search into the thing that earns your CEO's trust.
But before we get into it, I want to say a quick thank you. Shout out this week to Renetta from Columbus, Ohio. Thanks for being a part of this community. And for everyone tuning in, whether you're listening in Helsinki or Sacramento, I appreciate you being here. All right, let's get into this.
Now, I know that you already know the feeling. A leader that you respect tells you the talent doesn't exist, and something in you goes along with it before you've even checked on a single thing. Here's how it normally arrives. The division president comes in and they're prepared. The market doesn't have this person that they really, really need. Developing someone internally takes 18 months. You don't have that time. The business is stuck, and the ask lands on your desk already formed. Search harder, pay more, wait longer. The constraint shows up as a given, external. It's fixed. Nothing to do with anything inside the business.
And you nodded. It made sense. Accepting the constraint is the path of least resistance, no friction. And you look responsive. But watch what that nod actually did. It answered his real question for him. You're the function that takes the order and then gets to work.
Right now, the whole field is handing you permission to nod. ManpowerGroup's latest read has about 72% of employers saying that they can't find the talent that they need. And for the first time, the hardest role to fill anywhere is anything to do with AI in the description. The story everywhere is that scarcity is structural. It's bigger than any one company.
And to be fair, sometimes it is. Some skill combinations really are rare, and planning around genuine scarcity is honest work. But that's not every role. Treat every stated shortage as real, and you're going to spend years finding the problems that the business built itself. Because the most common constraints live in one place that the market report never looks. It's inside your own org chart. A role that was designed, maybe at the wrong level. A performance standard that maybe slipped right to where the gap sits. A profile that's 20% specification and 80% accumulated preference from stakeholders who never actually agreed on what the priorities were to begin with. Those are design problems in supply problem costumes. And no amount of searching or paying will touch them.
Now, we talked a couple weeks back about redesigning the work before you hire anybody. This is that very same muscle. It's pointed maybe one step earlier, at the constraint itself. And here's what I think makes it yours to catch. The cause is almost always invisible from inside the function that has the gap. The business can't see it. The person who can is the one who questions the story before executing it. Now, that person is operating a level up. That person is you on any day you decide to be.
So let's name the traps. And underneath each one, the mechanism I think that keeps producing it. First trap is role design. A role gets defined by accumulation. Responsibilities layer on year after year until the job sits at a level that matches no real-life person in the market. You search for somebody who can do all of it for you, and you get a very tiny pool. The mechanism is simple. No one ever reset the scope. So rebuild the role into something coherent, and amazingly, the talent tends to appear.
The second trap is performance tolerance, and it's harder to see, at least it has been for me. When an organization accepts underperformance in a critical seat long enough, it decides the bar can't be met at all, because otherwise we would have met it. But what really happened is the role adapted around the person. The team redistributed the work. Adjacent roles absorbed scope, expectations compressed to fit what the incumbent could actually deliver. And then when they leave and the gap opens up, it's like the distance between the shrunken role and the one the business actually needs. That gap was built in-house.
Now, notice that that's the same force that produced the first trap. Both are the organization quietly shaping a role around the person in the seat, when the work should have set the shape to begin with.
And here's the third trap: it's altitude. And it looks the most legitimate of all of them. And look, the ask is for a senior director because that's what the comp band allows and the org chart recommends. The real need might be the VP-level operator who can decide its scope without escalating everything. The requirement is accurate as far as that goes. The role was just never designed to attract the person who actually can solve the problem.
And here's the question that cuts through all three. On your stuck search, what did that role require five years ago? And what does it require now? And are they the same? Because if the answer drifted down, the business quietly lowered the bar and called it a market. That's a decision, by the way, that you can reverse.
So here's the shift. And honestly, it's less about the searches than about the seat that you're in today. We treat talent conversations and constraints as facts about the world. The market has this person or it doesn't. It's binary. But a constraint is really just a claim. And every claim that lands on your desk is an invitation to do one of two things. Accept it and go execute, or test it and find out what's actually true.
So sit with that fork for a minute and figure out what it decides. You can accept the constraint, run the search, and you've defined your seat as the place where requests go to get filled. Test the constraint, find the problem the business couldn't see, bring it back with a fix, and you've defined your seat as the place the business goes to think. So the same request. Two completely different jobs, and it's how you think about your response.
Okay, so put these two leaders side by side. One is going to spend a lot of time sourcing against a role that no one ever validated and might not actually exist in the wild. The other one is going to be spending an afternoon really focused in on the job definition itself, and they're going to reopen the search in the morning. The CEO is going to see the first one as a cost. The CEO is going to see the second one as the reason the problems get solved. And that's architect work. It's not service delivery. And it's the difference between executing someone else's design and owning the conditions that produced the constraint. And by the way, it's one of the clearest places the CHRO gets to prove that it belongs inside the business, embedded in how it actually runs.
The playbook. This is where we get practical. Three moves that you can make this upcoming week. Play number one: challenge the framing without triggering a defense. And I know that's hard. When a leader says that the market doesn't have the person, don't hand back, "I don't think this is really a supply problem." That makes the other person wrong and it buys you a fight. Don't do that. Say instead, "Walk me through what we've seen in the search so far. What profiles came through? Where did candidates fall short? And what does that tell us about the actual gap?" Like, that posture opens up the conversation. The other one closes it. Curiosity is the tool here. And it's sharper than it sounds. It is how you challenge the story without spending the relationship.
Play two is you've got to put the role definition on the table before you ask anyone to go look at talent. So the way I do that is I ask three questions. Who actually wrote it, and when? How many stakeholders' requirements is it really carrying? And does the level of the role actually match the work? Most stalled searches, in my experience, they all trace back to that upfront definition. Requirements piled across levels, specs that no one reconciled, comp bands misaligned to the real scope. Resetting the definition and then relaunching, man, that beats sourcing against a profile that matches no real person.
Number three is you've got to run the supply check last. The reflex when someone says shortage is to go see what the market has. Do that only after you've really worked on the role definition, the tolerance audit, the level check. A supply check against a role that no one validated gives you the most expensive answer there is. It tells you a constraint is real when you built the constraint yourself. Correct the definition first, then go look at the market.
Now, every one of those plays does the same thing. It lets you walk into your boss's office carrying a diagnosis. That's the move that changes how you get seen.
So here's this week's climb. Take your longest-running open search, or the gap the business has been managing around for six months or more. And before another dollar goes into a search, put the role definition on the table. Ask yourself to spec the role — how many stakeholders it's carrying, whether the level of the role matches the level of the work, the decision rights, and the outcomes. If the definition survives that, the constraint's probably real. And if it doesn't, you just found the constraint, and it was never the market. One search, one look, and a decision about what kind of HR leader you're going to be in the middle of it.
If you take one thing away from today, let it be this: every stated talent constraint is a quiet test. Take the order and you stay the service function. Diagnose the problem, and you become the leader that they call first.
Okay, let me bring this home for you. I promised you three things at the top. Why accepting a stated constraint quietly casts you as the service function. How to tell a real shortage from a problem the business built itself. And what to do this week to turn one stuck search into a thing that earns you the CEO and the business's trust. That's the whole move. The diagnostic is cheap. The seat it earns you is not.
And one more thing before I let you go. One thing. Whatever you're wrestling with right now, you don't have to do it alone. Come spend 30 minutes with me. Bring a real problem, and we'll get to the bottom of it and try to find your next step together. It's free to just talk through. Links in the show notes. And I really hope that you reach out.
And that's the summit for today. And I want to thank you for climbing with me, for being a part of a community of HR leaders who refuse to just run the function, who are here to operate at altitude and to become their CEO's most indispensable business advisor. Till next time, keep raising the bar. Keep testing the constraint before you fund it, and keep on climbing.
