You're sitting in a meeting to talk about strategy next quarter. Ideas are flying. People are talking over each other. Every so often someone scrawls something on a whiteboard. Then they start talking about dates and "quick wins." Estimates get thrown out, which inspires another furious rush of discussion.

You keep trying to interject. You lost two engineers a month ago. Another one has put in his notice. You hired a bright kid a week ago, but he's going to need time to ramp up. You keep trying to say that hiring needs to be the focus of any new strategy, because nothing's getting done if you don't have the engineers to do it. You keep trying to raise this point and get the group to talk about how you can redouble your recruiting efforts, but everybody wants to talk about "establishing social media channels" and "improving our performance marketing network."

So finally, you sigh, and raising your voices a couple notches, you say:

"There is no way we're doing to do ANY OF THIS SHIT with our current staff."

The room quiets down. All heads turn to you.

Then the CEO says, "All right, let's talk about recruiting."