Sun Tzu, Art of War in Talent Acquisition

Sun Tzu was an ancient Chinese general and his Art of War is the oldest military treatise in the world.

Sun Tzu said; - Raising 100,000 men and marching them a long distance will bring heavy losses and drain the resources of the state.

Men will drop exhausted on the highways.

It will cost 1,000 ounces of silver a day.

There will be problems at home and abroad.

Up to 700,000 families will be negatively affected. (Chapter 13:1)

Waging war costs money. It uses up your resources. It takes people away from their regular jobs.

So, one of Sun Tzu’s major goals was to avoid war altogether or reduce the cost and an essential part of his strategy was the use of spies.

In Chapter 13:27, he said that a wise general will use “the highest intelligence of the army for spying.” Here’s the reason; if a spy can identify the most important targets and tell you how to get to them, it spares you the cost of throwing a big army into the fray without knowing exactly where you’re going. So, in effect the spy leads the army. He tells the generals where to go.

How does this relate to talent acquisition? If you put a posting on a job portal, you’ll get many resumes. Most of them are going to be irrelevant, and nevertheless, internal HR will have to spend time sorting them out.

The person you’re after, however, might not even be looking for a job. He might not be searching the job portals and it’s likely that no one is telling him about the posting either. So, all of your time and effort are wasted, the position remains unfilled, and the required work remains undone.

On the other hand, you can hire a recruitment agency who will go out and identify good people and then reach them.

Which path is most likely to reach the right targets faster? And which is going to be cheaper in the end?

Hostile armies can face each other for years, striving for the victory which is decided in a single day. This being so, to remain in ignorance of the enemy’s condition simply because one grudges the outlay of 100 ounces of silver in honors and payments, is the height of inhumanity. (13:2)

And what is the most important kind of intelligence? According to Sun Tzu in Chapter 13:20 they are names.

Whether the object be to crush an army, to storm a city, or to assassinate an individual, it is always necessary to begin by finding out the names of the attendants, the aides-de-camp, and door-keepers and sentries of the general in command. Our spies must be commissioned to ascertain these. (13:20)

Cutting cost on talent acquisition is only going to postpone opportunities to meet talents you’re pursuing.

Types of Spies

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says that reliable information has to come from the horse’s mouth.

Knowledge of the enemy’s dispositions can only be obtained from other men. (13:6)

In talent acquisition, this is a vote for phone sourcing. The internet isn’t necessarily going to give you up-to-date information. Calling a corporation will. Instead of finding the footprints of people who were once with a corporation, you’ll speak to someone who will tell you who is there today.

This doesn’t mean that Sun Tzu would refuse to use the Internet. In fact, he simply distinguished between different types of spies. Some were simply closer to the action.

Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies. (13:7)

The local spy would be the person who was simply in the neighbourhood of the enemy.

In our case, that could be an agency who sells to your target firm or a customer who knows a few sales reps and customer service people. Or a sales rep who knows a few people in his customer’s company.

An inward spy is someone working for a competitor. Imagine that person knows people who are going to lose their jobs in the near future. He might tell you who they are in order to help them.

Converted spies are spooks who become double agents on your behalf. Sun Tzu considered them to be the most important sources of information:

The enemy’s spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away, and comfortably housed. Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.

It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies.

It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.

Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be used on appointed occasions.

The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy; and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy. Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality. (13:21-25)

In our context, however, this doesn’t seem too relevant. We might want to think of them as any kind of turncoat, for instance, someone who joins your corporation and gives you the names of the best people at his old company. This is not much different from the inward spy.

Doomed spies are people you know are going to get caught. You might even expose them yourself so you feed them phony information which they then divulge to your opponents.

The closest we come to this is the plausible deniability of recruitment firms who provide to the company that wants to hire people from its direct competition without giving the other side a reason to counterattack.

“Oh, we didn’t recruit him,” the CEO says to his angry key competitor. “He came to us.”

Of course, it was through a 3rd party recruitment firm who was never actually told to go after people in the most relevant firms.

A surviving spy is someone who manages to go into enemy territory and come back with the info.

In other words, anyone who does what they’re paid for. If you don’t deliver the goods, you’re not going to survive very long.

Sun Tzu says that the combination of the information from the different sources of information is the secret sauce of intelligence gathering.

When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called divine manipulation of the threads. It is the sovereign’s most precious Faculty. (13:8)

The various spies are ignorant of each other and the general is the only one who has the big picture created by all of the information from the individual channels combined. Only he has the power to guide one spy with information gathered from another.

One can imagine a talent acquisition manager who has Sun Tzu’s dedication to the use of spies hiring both an Internet source and a phone source to work on the same jobs. If he’s sharp and finds some good sources, he might want to keep those sources of information for himself alone. He wouldn’t even tell them about each other and if he thought that news from one would help the other, he would make himself the middleman and carry suggestions to each of them himself, thereby becoming the “divine manipulator of the threads.”

Should We Be Doing This?

The goal of all war is not destruction but gain and Sun Tzu warns leaders not to fight just because they are angry.

No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique. (12:18)

Likewise, the goal of talent acquisition is not breaking up teams. We help to build corporations that need talent and expertise. To do that we connect people with companies that are willing and able to offer them the most growth and stability for their work and the best opportunities. 

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