Are You Waging a War ‘for’ Talent – or a War ‘on’ Talent?

At the risk of stating the obvious, I edit a website about recruiting. At the risk of stating something even more obvious, this means I spend a fair portion of my day reading articles that people have written about recruiting.

One subject that pops up quite often in these articles about recruiting is the “war for talent.” If you’re reading this article right now, you probably know what that is, but if you’re a newcomer to the recruiting industry or a job seeker who happened upon this article in the course of some Web browsing, here’s a helpful explanation, courtesy of talent development expert George Klemp :

“The term War for Talent  comes from a late-’90s warning from McKinsey & Co. that alerted business[es] to a coming talent shortage and urged companies to prioritize talent strategies around recruiting, retaining, and developing key employees.”

When we talk about a war for talent, we’re talking about the fact that, in today’s economy, organizations have to compete against one another in order to attract the best and brightest employees. The war, then, is a battle between employers, with employees as the prize.

A curious thing happens, however, when people write about the war for talent: They often refer to it as the war on talent. Seriously: The number of times I’ve had to replace “on” with “for” while editing articles for this site is actually alarming.

Of course, this error may be nothing more than a grammatical habit. We’re all accustomed to phrases like the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs.” Perhaps we’re all so used to “war” being followed by “on” that we accidentally call it the “war on talent” instead of the “war for talent.”

That’s plausible, but I don’t know if it’s sufficient to explain this phenomenon of mass misnaming. As I said above, I’ve encountered the “war on talent” more times than I can count. It doesn’t seem to matter who is writing the articles: recruiters, entrepreneurs, techies, HR pros, and even job seekers themselves – all have been guilty of writing about the “war on talent,” when they (presumably) meant the “war for talent.”

My theory – and perhaps I’m reading too far into things, but still – is that this isn’t just a prepositional mistake. I think it may be a bit of a Freudian slip.

Were it just the “war on talent” typo, I could probably let it slide and chalk it up to grammatical habit. But there are a couple of other common rhetorical tactics I see when editing that, I think, give credence to my Freudian slip hypothesis.

First, when people write about workers, they often refer to the workers as “talent.” This is kind of dehumanizing, isn’t it? “Talent” is not a person – it’s the resource that a person brings to a company, the resource that the employer hopes to leverage.

Strictly speaking, referring to people as “talent” isn’t a grammatical error, but it is a curious practice. When we call people “talent,” we’re objectifying them. We’re downplaying their humanity and elevating their status as a resource for the company. (Don’t even get me started on the ugly paradox of the phrase “human resources.”)

Second, people have a nasty habit of talking about companies in human terms. A company is not a person, it’s a thing. So, when we talk about a company, we should call that company “it,” as in, “What is Recruiter.com? Well, it’s a website that …”

Instead, when writing about a company, people will often refer to the company as “they” or “we,” as in, “At Recruiter.com, we …” or “Oh, Recruiter.com? They run a website that …”

So, we have this odd situation where the companies are spoken of in humanizing terms, and employees – you know, the actual people – are spoken of in nonhuman, objectifying terms.

So, what am I getting at here?

I think all three of these rhetorical choices – even if they happen “unconsciously” or “erroneously – are symptoms of a much larger problem. We’ve got it all mixed up, people. We’ve placed the disembodied companies ahead of the human beings who actually run the companies. Our organizations wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the living, breathing employees who come to work every day andmake the company exist.

But, when we talk about employers and employees, the language we use suggests that we don’t actually see things this way. Instead, our language strongly implies that we see the companies as primary, and the employees – i.e., the “talent” – as so much coal to be thrown into the company to power its engine.

Our companies are not engines that run on employee fuel. Our companies are simply team names we use to refer to our employees. Our companies exist on paper, but our employees exist in the real world.

All of this brings me back to the “war on talent.” See, I think this is the most insidious error of all. Dehumanizing employees and affording way too much weight to companies is one thing, but when we start talking about a “war on talent,” I think we’re revealing how we really feel about our employees. They’re either for us, or they’re against us. We can either use them, or we can throw them away.

So, stop for a second and think. Are you always talking about the war for talent? Do you agree with the prevailing wisdom that winning this war means treating employees well and providing them with real value? Maybe you think you believe this, but go back and look through your emails, your blog posts, your tweets: How many times have you called it the war on talent, even accidentally?

Go further. Be honest with yourself. Stand in a quiet room behind closed doors and dig deep: How do you really view employees? Are they people, or “talent”? Is the legal fiction of your company’s “personhood” more important to you than the employees who actually give “life” to that “corporate person”?

You may not even realize it, but it may turn out that you have some pretty poisonous ideas brewing in your head. I don’t even mean in the ethical sense that you see people as means instead of ends (though I do think this is a problem). What I mean is, how do you really expect to win the war for talent when, deep down, you’re actually waging a war on talent?

Employees are the prize. Your competitors who can remember that it’s a war for talent – rather than a war on talent – are the companies that will succeed in earning these prizes.

And you? Well, your engine’s gonna run out of coal real soon.