The Most Undervalued Function

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Talent acquisition. Org design. Employee relations. Inside a company these sit under a department nobody outside the department fully understands. Outside one, they are the specific reason a company scaling from forty people to a hundred keeps making expensive mistakes it cannot name.

In twenty years of advisory work I have not found a function less aware of its own market value than HR.

Stephanie N. is an HR Director with more than twenty years in talent acquisition and organizational design. She had been meaning to build something on the side for two years before she started. What changed was not motivation. It was finally seeing the sequence broken into weeks rather than treated as one large undefined project.

There is a specific reason HR undervalues itself more than finance or operations do, and it is structural rather than personal.

Finance produces artifacts. A model, a forecast, a close. Operations produces observable outcomes. Throughput, cost, defect rates. HR produces the absence of problems that were never allowed to happen: the reorg that did not lose half the team, the hire that did not have to be made twice, the dispute that never became a lawsuit.

This is the same outcome bias I wrote about a few weeks ago, applied to a function where almost the entire output is prevention. Decision researchers have found that people judge decisions by how they turn out rather than by how sound the decision-making was at the time. HR work is judged by an absence, and an absence is hard to point at in a resume, let alone an invoice.

"I work in HR" sounds like one job. From a client's side, it is at least four different problems, and they do not pay the same. Here is how to tell which one is yours.

1. The slow hire. Roles take twice as long to fill as they should and nobody has mapped why. How you know it is you: you can name the exact stage where candidates stall, and you have fixed it before without being asked.

2. The onboarding gap. New people take months to become useful because nobody owns the handoff between HR and the hiring manager. How you know it is you: you built the workaround that currently holds it together.

3. The outgrown structure. The company scaled and the org chart did not, so reporting lines now make no sense. How you know it is you: you can describe the structural problem in one sentence and most people cannot.

4. The quiet exposure. Documentation, classification, or process gaps that have not caused a problem yet. How you know it is you: you have flagged something a company did not want to hear, and you were right.

Stephanie's offer took three drafts across four days. The first two described her background. The third described a problem she had watched three different companies struggle with:

"Onboarding that takes twice as long as it should, because nobody owns the handoff between HR and the hiring manager."

Your version, using whichever of the four you recognized above:

"[Specific people problem] that [specific measurable consequence], because [specific structural cause nobody owns]."

The structure matters more than the wording. Problem, consequence, cause. A founder reading it should recognize their own company without having to translate.

Her list took one evening: fourteen names, mostly former colleagues from two prior companies. Former colleagues and former clients only, people from organizations already left, never current-company contacts.

Messages went out across five days. Two replies came back within forty-eight hours, both polite declines, timing was not right. A third went quiet. A fourth turned into a short call that did not lead anywhere. The fifth sat unanswered for twelve days.

On day fifteen she sent the follow-up. One sentence. The reply came the same afternoon. A conversation followed the next week, and a signed engagement followed that, twenty-six days after the first name went on her list.

"I kept waiting to feel ready," she said. "The list didn't require ready. It required a Tuesday evening."

Pick which of the four you recognized fastest, then write your version of the sentence: problem, consequence, cause. Write it three times. The first will sound like your job description, which is the normal starting point rather than a failure.

From the first name on her list to a signed first engagement. That was her timeline, not a benchmark. Among the corporate professionals I have worked with directly, the variation on this is wide.

A negotiation book by a former hostage negotiator, which sounds like an odd recommendation for HR people until you notice that the core technique is making the other person feel understood before you ask for anything. That is most of what good HR work already is. Worth reading before your first pricing conversation, because the same technique applies and most people improvise it badly.

In my experience, the functions that prevent problems get valued only after the cost of not doing it becomes visible.

That is true inside a company, where the reorg that went smoothly generates no story worth telling. It stops being true the moment a company without that function tries to grow past the point where informal handling works. Then the absence becomes extremely visible, and expensive.

P.S. If you are in HR and have ever described your work as "people stuff," hit reply and tell me what it actually prevents. That sentence is usually where the offer is hiding.

A few things I've built, if any of them are useful this week.

No pressure on any of it. Take what's useful, skip the rest.

This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Any figures, projections, or outcomes mentioned are examples based on individual circumstances, not guarantees, your results will vary. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making retirement or income decisions.

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