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For The Future Indicative, Ep 9 Part 2
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome to The Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is resourcing.
KATE MORGAN
“People are your greatest asset. They absolutely can be your competitive advantage. They will be your competitive advantage. They can also be your greatest liability.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Kate Morgan, founder and CEO of the recruiting management consulting and HR services firm, Boston Human Capital Partners, or BostonHCP. Kate is all about human capital. So much so, she wrote a book about it in 2025 called Custom-Fit, a guide to hiring talent for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
In her book, Kate defined human capital as the economic value of your employees to your business. When you hire wisely, your team will create a competitive advantage in your market. But resourcing is like a scalpel. One bad hire can kill a company, so resourcing takes precision. All the more fallible in a world of AI, rising unemployment, and companies juggling the knowledge transfer and talent gap between generations.
I’ve known Kate for a couple years, and she practices what she preaches in her book, Custom-Fit. So I asked her to tell me the secret to resourcing success: not only for her clients, but also as an employer herself.
KATE MORGAN
“We’re on seven preferred VC vendor lists. And I still have to be very careful with making sure that I understand what their real problem is, what they’re really struggling with.
You don’t want the doctor to come in and go, ‘Yeah, your knees hurt. Let me just give you this.’ You want your doctor to ask you, ‘How did it happen? When does it hurt?’
We need to understand where their true challenges are, and more than just: ‘I need to put a body in a seat when it comes to talent acquisition.’
I really need to understand what it is that is driving that role. And what does success mean bringing that person in?”
ALEX EFFGEN
This reminds me of a Henny Youngman joke: A patient goes to the doctor and says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.”
The doctor says, “Then don’t do that!” Kate would disagree. She’s not some headhunter on commission. She is a consultant who can’t fill the role required unless she understands the bigger picture: the value her clients provide their markets, and how the role to be filled meets a need missing in that value.
For BostonHCP, that requires defining who they work for.
KATE MORGAN
“We’re very specific on our ICP: our ideal customer profile. We know what it looks like. I don’t ever consider myself a salesperson because I really want to understand their pain points. Every business pundit is like, ‘No, you’re supposed to sell and push and push and push and then you get the close and all that.’
I’m going to praise up a guy on my team, Ben, who just started, and he was actually a content developer before. He started with a client and within two weeks found the person and then they hired that person.
A gentleman who’s never recruited before, but because of all the process of methodology, and he subscribes to our core values, made him like a fuel injected resource for us.
And the best story was, this client had actually worked with an agency five weeks before. Got a couple of resumes. They were contingency recruiters as opposed to being more advisory.
And he’s like, ‘The first couple of people were so bad I couldn’t even spend the time.’
We got on board and like I said, within two weeks they found the person that they were going to move forward with.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Kate mentioned that Ben “subscribes to our core values,” and that made him “a fuel injected resource for us.” Over the last couple months I’ve given a lot of thought to core values, thanks in part to Kate’s book. What we hold as values makes us special. Makes us accountable. Makes us a resource.
Sounds like we have a case study for my framework.
You spell the word business with the letter S three times. But I argue it takes four of them for a business to be in business:
SPECIALIZE: What is this?
SELL: Who needs this?
SECURE: What can disrupt this?
SCALE: How do we expand this?
Every business must address these four categories, and every function in a business must align with them as well. Kate puts her core values at the heart of resourcing talent. And BostonHCP maps the talent they find against the core values of the VCs and startups that hire them. But what happens when a company doesn’t know what it stands for?
KATE MORGAN
“If you’re a true founder you’re seeing so many different things and you’re trying to triangulate them. It’s hard. We’re in the throes of doing a core values workshop. And we came out with some beautiful things. One of them was, ‘Comfort with the ambiguity.’ That speaks volumes particularly when we start looking at younger generations that have grown up in highly curated social environments. And I said in 30 days let’s revisit them.
Well, they reverted back to the fluffy core values that we see where it’s a narrative. And the CEO, who’s the founder, stepped up and he’s like, ‘Yeah, but Kate, I’m having my kickoff and I can’t bring the ones you brought to the table and stand in front of my company, and tell them to be comfortable with ambiguity.’
He’s looking to be more of the inspirational leader. Ironically though, when we look at younger generations, they’re not looking for words of aspiration. They’re telling me, ‘Tell me what you want me to conform to, so I can operate within those parameters.’
And when you come up with these core values and then you say this is how you must operate. You must have these things. When you can do that, you’re all speaking the same language. And when you do that, when it starts to self-police, then you have norms. And with those norms, you get psychological safety. And that to me is, like, the most beautiful thing.”
ALEX EFFGEN
In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the poet John Keats echoes a Classical maxim:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Well, perhaps that’s not the only thing you need to know. The Future Indicative is a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. If we are resourcing, if we are managing talent. Human capital. Then that means our first category–SPECIALIZE–needs to focus on the personalities and the narratives. But what if the narratives no longer involve personalities?
KATE MORGAN
“We’re seeing a lot of small businesses that are outsourcing their lead gen for business development, and they’re all AI agents. And that’s why mine and everybody else’s inbox is getting bombarded with spammy AI, because you have founders that are like, ‘I don’t think I’m ready to hire a salesperson. I’ll just go with this outsource firm to find these leads and it’ll be great.’
And they’re spending tens of thousands of dollars and coming up empty.
And I talk to all of these accelerators that I coach and they’re like, ‘Yeah, we tried it. And it was a bunch of money. And then I had to fight to get out of the contract, but I’m still over the barrel for $30 grand.’ ”
ALEX EFFGEN
As every industry tries to find savings (money, time, resources) with the deployment of artificial intelligence, the question of value needs to be considered in the face of major social forces.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2024 only 23.2% of the labor force were 55 and older. Most Baby Boomers have reached the age of retirement, and so have older Gen X. With Millennials and Zoomers assuming a larger role in the US labor force, and Gen Alpha heading into high school, corporations must balance knowledge against the price of lost competence. For instance, experts project an industry like insurance could face costs up to $124 billion annually through mispriced risks, inefficient processes, and missed opportunities, brought on by the talent gap.
KATE MORGAN
“I don’t want to come across as a curmudgeon. What’s the female version of a curmudgeon? AI is really being pushed down everybody’s throat. And yes, we use it. We use it to optimize. But particularly in SMB world, there’s just consultants, and companies, and every podcast, like, everywhere you go it’s all about you have to be using AI. You know, we have all these small startups that do recruiting software and they’re like, ‘You should be AI-ing this.’
Go do it. Go AI, because the amount of knowledge that we have. AI can’t do what we do. AI, I don’t think, can really take the place of connections. One-on-one connections. Anything that touches people probably isn’t a good thing.
It’s sort of like a luxury hotel. When I’m leaving and I’m in a hurry, yeah, I just want to have a drop box to put the keys in because I don’t want to deal with people. But I do want to have concierge, and I would never want an AI concierge. I want somebody to read my tone. I want them to see the inflection, you know, whether it’s facial or just in my communication. You don’t get that with AI.”
ALEX EFFGEN
And Kate, how do you SELL your services in the face of these major technological and social sea changes?
KATE MORGAN
“So there’s a gentleman, Greg Crabtree. He wrote Simple Numbers. And…So you have to remember, 99.9% of businesses in the US are considered small business.
99.9%. That’s insane.
Point one are the Metas of the world and those big tech type companies. The rest of us are just out here flailing around.
And so he said, ‘If you had started a company in the last 10 years, all you had to do is put a shingle outside and people were coming and they were buying from you. Now we’re in a street fight.’
And I love that because that’s exactly what it was. Because in my world of talent acquisition, there’s all of these folks that flock to it, because they can make easy money. But they actually don’t know how to develop relationships.
So we saw one after another, all of these companies that just flamed out in the last three or four years. The challenge is if you’re a Millennial and you haven’t really experienced hard times, you don’t know how to operate. You don’t know how to have the emotional intelligence to really look at the challenge and the problem that people are trying to solve. So they come at it full forced, really aggressive, and they misunderstand everything. They lose the awareness of the moment. The holistic view. All of these things that actually could get them to the other side.
So it’s kind of weird that, you know, we were sitting around waiting for some of our competitors to die off…They did, and we’re stronger for it than ever. I think we grew 17% last year. And this year we’ll probably grow 20.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of The Future Indicative’s Resourcing episode. In Part 2 we’ll identify the strengths (and weaknesses) of CEOs addressing the talent gap, as well as the weakness (and strength) of the next generations competing with AI.
While opinions expressed are solely our own, we hope you find in them the strength to deal with the world’s present weakness. If you’ve heard something you like, then contact us. And if you’ve heard something you dislike, then contact us. We are a resource to enhance your talent. On behalf of Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. And we appreciate your time.
