For years, many Talent teams were measured on hiring activity: time-to-fill, agency reduction, stakeholder satisfaction, and recruitment delivery. Executive teams, however, assess Talent through a very different lens: revenue impact, productivity, workforce risk, scalability, operating leverage, and margin performance.

This session explores the Commercial Uplift required for Talent leaders to operate credibly in financially driven environments.

Derek will unpack how boards and executive teams think about workforce investment decisions, why EBITDA matters to Talent leaders, and how hiring conversations change when vacancies are framed in terms of lost revenue, utilisation constraints, customer impact, and operational bottlenecks.

Using practical examples, Derek will contrast “old Talent thinking” versus modern commercial Talent leadership, showing how the same workforce challenge can be positioned very differently at executive level.