The People MBA Manifesto (2025)

Bryan Adams and James Ellis 

The identification, hiring and retention of talent is the only way companies grow and thrive.

But businesses assume hiring requires a job description, a job board and a little time before the floodgates of talent open forth for the company to select from.

With 30 years of experience between us, we’ve watched this fractious relationship between talent acquisition and the rest of the business. And what’s surprising is how little that relationship has changed.

Talent acquisition, at its best, is a team sport, where leaders, hiring managers, advocates and recruiters align on what narratives are most useful to the company and who needs to get them. Working together, hiring managers and advocates can talk about the company to their function-specific networks, creating air cover for recruiting’s ground game. Together, they hire the people who ideate better products and features, build offerings customers want, sell and service them more effectively and efficiently, and generally make the company more successful.

But when teams aren’t aligned, when hiring managers toss outdated expectations and requirements over the fence to recruiters and expecting miracles while steadily shrinking their budget, recruiting becomes rote. A means of hiring good-enough people in the cheapest way possible instead of 

The relationship between business and recruiting is like the relationship between plants, sunshine, food and water. Get the relationship  wrong and the plant withers. Get it right and it will need to be put in a bigger pot in short order.

That relationship needs more than just a hope and a dream. It requires the willingness to do hard work,  but also a strategic direction. Hence, the manifesto for truly impactful and demonstrably effective business-focused hiring.

This is far more than a manifesto for our new project The People MBA. We believe that this should be the manifesto of every person and team involved in finding and keeping talented people within the company.

If you know that your value to the company is far more than manning the ATS and playing waitstaff to hiring managers, decide for yourself if these ideas resonate, and how we tell the business world about them.

The Business Growth Manifesto

One: Nothing in a business happens without people. Thus, investing in attracting better talent, getting them better aligned and focused and keeping them longer gives your company its best chance to succeed. 

Two: Know your priorities. Your people matter more than what you sell: Services are 100% people driven, and products get stale unless people invent new ones.

Three: A strong employer brand attracts the right people. It gets the right people together, aligns them to a shared purpose or process and retains them longer. It isn’t just about skills, it’s about working style, alignment to the culture and mission, and the rewards everyone is working towards (things candidates need to know to make a decision, but are nowhere to be found on your career site).

Four: Showing your difference as an employer lets people choose you. Without clear and credible differentiation, it’s a coin toss. The reason people work there doesn’t have to be pretty or supportive. It reflects reality. EB works by changing people’s minds about why people work there.

Five: The reason people work there isn’t stated. It is lived by everyone. Or it dies. This isn’t window dressing or a whitewash. It doesn’t come from motivational posters and all-hands rallies. This is revealing your company’s DNA where how you do anything is how you do everything.

Six: Your candidates and your employees are begging for this. Joining your company to be crystal clear why someone should work there, almost as much as your leaders want it.

Seven: Employer branding is business critical. Increasing interest and demand by a higher quality of talent grows companies, thus it is the domain of business and should be taught in biz school

Eight: It doesn’t just happen. Like any smart business strategy, It needs a champion, someone who can speak to leadership, the business, human resources, legal, marketing and recruiting about the value of this work. It needs someone to be accountable for results and a commitment from leadership.

This isn’t about “recruiting better.” This is taking an employer brand-forward approach to business growth. Which means asking leaders such as yourself to consider the value of who you are hiring. But it is also asking recruiters and recruiting leaders to think like business leaders and to be accountable for results.

Together, recruiting and leadership can develop new ways to make your business grow.

And if this is how you’d like your business to see its talent and people functions, subscribe to The People’s MBA, where we aren’t delivering advice, we’re sharing deliverables. From calculators and scripts, to templates and checklists, The People MBA will help you get your seat at the table. Subscribe today!