It’s Time Recruiters Got a Seat at the (Boardroom) Table

Let’s be honest – nobody got into recruiting because they wanted to study balance sheets, right?!

Most of us started because we like people. We like solving puzzles. We like seeing the impact of helping someone land a great job. But here’s the problem: that alone isn’t enough anymore.

As AI hoovers up more of the process work – the sourcing, the scheduling, the screening – what’s left for recruiters is the stuff that machines can’t touch: influence, judgment, and strategic partnership. And you don’t get to play at that level if you can’t speak the language of business.

That’s what this is about. Business acumen. The skill that quietly separates the recruiters who get invited into real conversations… from the ones who just manage requisitions.

Why This Matters Right Now

I genuinely don’t think it’s an understatement to say that recruiting is changing at a pace we’ve never seen before. 

AI has stormed into our world and consumed a lot of the process stuff already – the scheduling, the screening, the matching, even the writing of job specs. What it hasn’t touched (and likely won’t, as we covered last week) is the influencing part. The advising part. The stuff where you sit across from a hiring manager, or a candidate, or a finance leader, and you guide a decision.

That’s the future of this job. But influence doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You only influence when people believe you understand their world. Their business. Their pressures. Their goals. And if you can’t connect hiring decisions to revenue, margin, market growth, risk or cost control, you’re not influencing anyone. You’re just filling roles.

Learn more: What Happens to Hiring After Everything Goes AI

The Layers of Business Acumen Recruiters Need

Now, when I say business acumen, I don’t mean you need to do an actual MBA. You don’t need to sit through lectures on corporate finance or Porter’s Five Forces! But you do need commercial fluency. There are really three levels to this:

1. General business knowledge

This is how companies work. Profit margins, supply and demand, what a balance sheet is, how companies scale or don’t scale, the basics of business models and strategy. The stuff you’d get from any decent business book.

2. Your company’s business

Who are your customers? Where does your revenue come from? Who are your competitors? What’s happening in your market? Where’s growth coming from? This is where you start sounding like someone who knows why your organization even exists.

3. The business unit you support

This is where it gets real. You need to understand the department you’re recruiting for: their KPIs, their pain points, the skill gaps they’re panicking about, what keeps them up at night.

If you don’t get all three layers, you’re walking into every conversation half-blind.

How I Learned this the Old-Fashioned Way

When I started in recruitment – back in the late 90s agency world – business acumen wasn’t some fancy theory. It was survival. I wasn’t on the phone reading out job specs. I was in the factories, the warehouses, the offices. I took days off to drive around Ireland visiting clients. I toured Heinz’s frozen meals factory in Dundalk. I sat in Moffett Engineering watching how they made forklifts that slide into the back of trucks. I walked the Coca-Cola concentrate facility.

I wanted to understand how they made money. How operations worked. What made their businesses tick. I wasn’t being virtuous about this – I was being curious. And here’s the thing: that curiosity became fluency. And that fluency created trust.

Hiring managers listened to me because I knew their world. Candidates trusted me because I could talk about why one company was a better move than another. And not because of perks or salary options, but because I understood where the business was going. 

That’s commercial fluency. That’s influence.

Why So Many Recruiters Don’t Build it Anymore

Today, most corporate recruiting teams have unintentionally designed business acumen out of the job. You’ve got your sourcers, your coordinators, your recruiters, your specialists. You get 40 open reqs thrown at you and you’re measured on time-to-fill. You’re spread across multiple functions and never fully embedded anywhere. You’re not in the meetings where sales forecasts are discussed, or where new market expansions are debated.

And so you stay in the recruiting lane. You execute, but you don’t influence.

Part of this comes from corporate structures. But part of it is historical too. In the agency world, business acumen often meant higher commission – you could make serious money if you knew your clients’ businesses inside out. Many of those people either stayed in agency or got poached into leadership roles, HRBPs, sales, operations – anywhere their commercial skillset translated.

In corporate recruiting, however, we’ve often hired people to be excellent recruiters. But we haven’t taught them to be business people. That’s starting to bite.

How Leaders Can Fix This (and Why They Must)

Look, bottom line – if you want your recruiters to operate like true advisors, you have to create the environment where business acumen actually grows. That means:

• Aligning recruiters to business units long-term so they actually get to know the departments they serve.

• Fixing KPIs that reward advisory impact and not just speed.

• Embedding recruiters in business meetings even when no hiring is happening.

• Setting up mentorships with people in sales, finance, operations.

• Rotations early in careers so recruiters see multiple functions up close before they specialize.

• And yes – formal training. (SocialTalent has got something pretty exciting coming on that front very soon!)

Business Acumen is Your Career Multiplier

Here’s the other bit nobody tells recruiters: business acumen doesn’t just make you better at recruiting. It makes you highly transferable. 

You want to move into HRBP, leadership, operations, sales? Commercial fluency opens those doors. And as AI keeps automating the administrative work, the value sits entirely in judgment, influence, and context. If you’re not fluent in how your business works, you’re just not credible at that table. Simple as that.

The Bottom Line

Business acumen isn’t optional anymore. It’s not some nice-to-have soft skill. It’s the price of admission for what recruiters are becoming.

The good news? You can build it. Some of it comes from learning. A lot of it comes from curiosity, from asking questions, from showing up to meetings you weren’t even invited to yet.

The future of recruiting is sitting at the business table. The only question is whether you’ll be able to speak the language once you’re there.