A Talentist: What is a Candidate?

(Warning: Philosophical flight of fancy. Ideas may seem larger than they actually are.)

What is a candidate? A customer? A contractor? An employee? A temp? What is the difference between them? Are we asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? And are we hurting our effectiveness by believing that there are fundamental differences between each of these groups?

Each of these descriptors are people. One person may be many of these descriptions, all at the same time. A person can both want to work for you, and buy your products, and buy your stock. There is no contradiction in any of these actions: each is entirely consistent with the other.

Each is consistent in that there is a value-for-value exchange. The candidate gives you their time and attention in return for you providing them with an opportunity: to sell you their talent (or be sold on the opportunity). The customer provides you with their time, attention and capital in order to get a product or service. No opportunity, no product…. No people.

In all cases people make an investment of time, attention and / or capital in order to get a return that is greater than what they gave up. That is, by definition, what capitalism is. And that is why Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” is such a great ordering motive in chaotic human systems. We exchange value, each of us believing we got more than we gave.

There have been many attempts to describe candidates as consumers or "internal customers". But those descriptors speak directly or subtly to a belief in the insubstantial and mercurial nature of the transaction. This is not the case. The transaction is substantial. It can end up absorbing most of our life, and much of our time and attention. So the only logical language to describe the value-for-value transaction of two parties in the creative age is that of investment. I will give you something that I find valuable based on the probability that I will get something more substantial and valuable in return. My time, attention and capital are all invested capital at risk to the possibility that your job will be crap, your product will be defective or your company will go bust.

Like any investor I calculate risk based on the information available, my experience and my emotional comfort. You lie to me and you increase the risk of the transaction. You may get my investment today, but that will be the last time. If you want the repeat business (as in: I continue to buy your products or I continue to be interested in your jobs or I continue to show up for work), then you will continue to return more value to me than the investment I made. And since a candidate is a customer is a consumer is a client is a day trader is an employee, you better understand that from the time I first gain consciousness of you, you need to be selling your value to me in way that is credible and verifiable. You best be selling and reducing my risk all the time.

This is more than just idle philosophical musings. The assumption that you, as a consumer or candidate or employer, is captive to me because you need me more than I need you is at the very heart of how we do our business. It is a bankrupt business framework in an era of increased information velocity, corporate transparency and dependence on game-changing talent.

At the simplest level, the "we are all investors" framework shows that most HCM systems just aren’t made to be effective in negotiating, managing and optimizing ongoing investment transactions. Most HCM systems are designed to decrease cost and risk, and you can’t maximize value from an investor by first protecting yourself from them. The possibility of return is directly proportional to the amount of risk you are willing to engage in.

But even more than technology, seeing all nodes in your network as investors in the opportunity of your success (both individually and corporately) leads to a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between all the parties in the network. Put simply, since most companies still can’t define value clearly, and since most companies can’t define an individual’s contribution of value to the shareholders, it is pretty tough to argue that we can determine who the bad investors are at an early stage of the overall transaction. This puts a special burden on all of us to keep reaching out and figuring out how to utilize every last human capital investor that comes our way.

The risk of missing the opportunity of any particular node is far greater than the risk of spending time and attention on someone that ends up not investing.