Talent P&L: The Simple Model That Turns Recruiting Into Money (Not Vibes)

If you’ve ever walked into a leadership meeting armed with dashboards—beautiful dashboards, color-coded dashboards, dashboards so polished they should come with a microfiber cloth—and watched everyone’s eyes glaze over… you’ve met the hard truth: leaders don’t fund dashboards. They fund P&Ls.

That’s the premise of this three-part video series on the Talent P&L: a practical way to translate hiring into money, not vibes, not “candidate experience,” but money.

And once you can do that, you stop being the person who asks for budget and become the person who protects the plan.

This post is the “director’s cut” without the math homework: the key ideas, where they fit, and why they change the conversation. (Then you can watch the videos for the step-by-step.)

The Talent P&L in one sentence

A Talent P&L is a document with two sections: the costs you can reduce and the value you can create, plus one big number at the bottom—your net impact. “That’s the whole game.”

Not because leaders are cruel robots. Because the P&L answers the only two questions they reliably care about in the boardroom:

1. What is this costing us?
2. What happens if we fix it?

So the goal here isn’t precision. It’s credibility. And that means directionally correct math, documented assumptions, and a clean story.

Watch Video 1: Why Talent teams need a P&L

Link: https://youtu.be/AomTb_fCKnY

Video 2: Build it fast. No PhD math required.

The build is intentionally unglamorous: open a Google Sheet, create an inputs tab, and collect a short list of numbers that already exist (or should). “No PhD math, no analytics team required.”

The standout move is how you frame value. The series makes “vacancy cost savings” the headline: vacancy cost per day × days reduced × hires in that role family.

Then you run three scenarios because leadership loves scenario planning: conservative (7 days faster), base (14), aggressive (21).

This is the Moneyball lesson applied to recruiting: stop arguing about whether your spreadsheet is “perfect” and start showing where the constraints are, what they cost, and what happens when you relieve them.

Watch Video 2: How to build your Talent P&L

Link: https://youtu.be/xLvsVtYdIyc

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Video 3: Use it to change the conversation (and your seat at the table)

A Talent P&L sitting in a folder is just office décor.

The point is to stop being treated like a service desk and start being treated like a growth partner.

So the series gives you something most TA leaders never get: a positioning statement you can repeat until it stops feeling “cringe” and starts feeling true:

“We are not here to collect applicants… We are here to protect throughput and growth by making critical roles easier to fill.”

Then comes the simplest executive narrative imaginable—the three-slide talk track: the constraint, the cost, the fix.

And because recruiting is where spreadsheets go to die, it also shows how to translate messy realities into decision math—like offer declines. There’s always a penalty (time, money, or both), and you can model it without pretending you’re writing a dissertation.

This is also where employer branding gets dragged out of the “pretty content calendar” corner and made to behave like what it should be: a conversion system tied to cost and value.

Watch Video 3: How to present it to leadership

Link: https://youtu.be/YTHxiTqkJD8

The takeaway

If you build this, you don’t need to “sell” recruiting anymore. You let the numbers defend you.  

You walk into the room speaking the language leadership already uses to place bets.

And that’s the real promise of the Talent P&L: not better reporting—better standing.

So:

1. Watch the full three-part Talent P&L series (start here): https://youtu.be/AomTb_fCKnY
2. If you want more help becoming more choosable—and building the story that makes the Talent P&L hit harder—check out Employer Brand Labs.
3. And grab Becoming Choosable on Amazon.

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