You have channels for acquiring customers and nothing equivalent for acquiring people.

TL;DR: Most companies can describe exactly where their next hundred customers come from and have no answer at all for where their next ten employees come from. Posting a job and waiting is not a channel, and it is getting worse as AI makes every application look identical. At scale the two constraints that actually bind are capital and people, which means a company eventually has to build a real acquisition function for both.

Ask a founder where the next hundred customers come from and you get a real answer. Paid, referral, partnerships, outbound, a specific event that works. They know the cost of each one, roughly what it converts at, and which one they would lean on if they had to grow faster next quarter.

Ask the same founder where the next ten employees come from and the answer is a shrug and a job board.

That asymmetry is strange when you look at it directly. Nobody would run a business where customer acquisition meant posting an ad and hoping. Yet that is exactly how most companies handle the input that determines whether anything else works.

It has been survivable because mass-advertised job fulfillment mostly worked. You wrote a post, it went out, résumés came back, and enough of them were real that the process produced someone. I think that era is ending, and the thing killing it is the same thing that killed cold outreach.

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth being precise about it.

Candidates run their résumés through AI that tailors each one to the posting. We run those résumés through AI that surfaces the closest match. Our AI is in a grotesque circle with their AI, and a perfect match now tells you nothing, because producing a perfect match costs the candidate nothing.

We went through a hiring cycle recently where people got on the call and asked which company this was again. They had applied without knowing where. That is not a lazy candidate. That is a system where applying costs nothing, so nobody bothers to aim.

So the filter is gone. Not overloaded. Gone. And when a filter disappears, the answer is not a better filter, it is a different source. This is the same thing that happened when email open rates collapsed and everyone discovered that the businesses still growing were the ones with an owned audience rather than a bigger list.

In our tax preparation business we have three recruiters. In our business services company we have several internal recruiters. Not an HR department that also handles hiring. Recruiters, whose job is to find people the way a sales team finds customers.

I would put the threshold around one or two hires a month. Below that, hiring is an event and you can treat it like one. Above it, hiring is a process running continuously, and a process running continuously without an owner is a process that produces whatever it happens to produce.

Two things make this work that are worth stating plainly. The first is that the function belongs near the work, not near HR. A recruiter who sits inside the business unit learns what good actually looks like in that unit. HR, in my experience, tends to become the drama department. It is usually not a high production, high output function, and asking it to also own your most important input is asking it to be something it is not.

The second is that a recruiter is a salesperson. Same skill, different product. They are sourcing, qualifying, and closing, against a candidate who has other options, and treating that as administrative work is why so many companies think they cannot hire when what they actually cannot do is sell.

I do not think every business needs this at full scale, and I am genuinely unsure where the line sits. Is there a fractional version, someone who owns the channel for two days a week? Does that work, or does the relationship-building fall apart the moment it is part-time? I do not have a clean answer yet.

Here is where this goes if you follow it far enough.

At scale, all businesses become banks and they become recruiting agencies whether they want to or not. Not because anyone plans it, but because those are the two biggest constraints that bind. Capital allocation and people. Everything else can be bought, outsourced, automated, or deferred. Those two you have to actually solve.

Most founders build serious capability on the capital side eventually. They learn to model, to raise, to allocate, to think about the cost of money. Almost nobody builds the equivalent on the people side, and then they are surprised when growth stalls at exactly the point where the constraint switches from money to bodies.

The tell is simple. If you can name your customer acquisition channels and cannot name your employee acquisition channels, you have one of the two constraints covered and are hoping about the other.

When we look at a business that has stopped scaling, this is one of the first places we go, because it is usually mistaken for something else. The founder thinks they have a hiring problem. What they have is a sourcing problem wearing a hiring problem's clothes, and no amount of interview process fixes a pipeline that was never built.

The diagnostic is not complicated. Write down where your last ten hires came from. If most of them trace to a job board, an inbound application, or someone who happened to know someone, you do not have a channel. You have luck with a spreadsheet.

Then ask the harder version: which parts of this business currently run on you finding the right person, personally, when a seat opens? That is the same question as asking where the business still depends on you, just pointed at the input side instead of the output side. The Leverage Scorecard walks that in a few minutes, free, and it will tell you where you are still the channel.

Because that is what this comes down to. In most companies that have not built this, the employee acquisition channel is the founder. It works, right up until the month it needs to work twice.

— Roland

Replacing people with AI isn't always the win it looks like.

Saving money is easy, Keeping customers is harder.

I've watched companies aggressively automate customer support, only to discover they optimized the wrong metric.

The savings looked great on paper. The customer experience didn't.

The goal isn't to remove humans from your business. It's to remove yourself from the day-to-day while protecting the parts customers actually value.

Those are two very different strategies.

Want to see where AI helps your business... and where it hurts it? Watch the video below.