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Skip to main contentMay 01, 2025
Ever thought about which jobs make the biggest difference in your company?
Every position contributes its part. But which ones drive outsized impact? Identifying and prioritizing these roles is a sharp strategic move.
It helps you manage your resources in the short term—knowing who to pay what, where upskilling will make the biggest difference, and how to focus your recruitment efforts. And it lets you see how your employees’ skills stack up to the competencies their roles demand.
But it’s also a matter of forward-looking strategy. Since the function of critical roles tends to align closely with long-term strategic objectives, investing in them helps fortify your business for the future.
“You need to decide how you’ll differentiate yourself, what you want to be known for, and how you’ll become the best in the world at what you do,” says Korn Ferry’s Scott Erker. “From there, you must invest in the roles and the people who can consistently drive your strategy.”
Crucially, those roles won’t look the same for every company—not even for related companies in the same industry.
What does this look like in practice?
Take a budget airline versus a premium one. On the surface, they might seem to have similar talent needs.
They certainly would have many roles in common, like technicians, pilots, and flight attendants. But a bit of critical role analysis reveals their distinct talent priorities.
For a budget airline that operates on thin profit margins, cost efficiency and operational reliability are top priorities. In contrast, a luxury airline competes on service excellence and brand reputation.
Critical roles for the budget airline might include revenue optimization specialists. These employees balance competitive pricing with keeping finances sustainable. They also directly influence profitability by optimizing seat sales and need technical skills that may be difficult to cultivate internally.
The premium airline, however, relies on hospitality professionals with expertise in luxury service. They foster long-term customer loyalty and drive higher ticket prices by catering to affluent travelers. But they can be challenging to recruit and retain since they come from ultra high-end service industries.
Knowing which roles are critical, as opposed to merely necessary for operations, helps these airlines assess skill gaps and focus their talent strategies where it matters most.
It’s not just a matter of gut instinct or even experience.
That’s because the roles that drive competitive advantage aren’t always the most visible or the ones with the highest headcount. These roles may operate in the background, influencing key outcomes in ways that aren’t obvious.
There are three key dimensions to critical roles:
Strategic value is a role’s importance in achieving long-term business objectives. Think five, 10, or 20 years into the future—which roles are indispensable for your long-term strategy?
“These are the roles that help you transform and adapt to change, and the roles that are going to be most important for future success,” says Korn Ferry’s Karin Visser.
If you run a luxury fashion brand, highly skilled designers and brand strategists may be more critical than warehouse staff. That’s because long-term success depends on creativity, trendsetting, and brand prestige.
But if you run a global e-commerce retailer, then it’s likely that speed and fulfillment accuracy are what will drive your competitive advantage. That means warehouse logistics specialists and supply chain managers are more critical than designers.
While planning for the future is critical, organizations obviously also need to perform well in the here and now. The business value dimension measures a role’s immediate impact on profitability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
This dimension tends to identify roles that aren’t particularly flashy but are crucial for sustaining your operations.
“Keeping your business profitable gives you the firm foundation you need to innovate,” says Visser. “You can’t focus solely on new ideas at the expense of day-to-day operational excellence.”
Let’s say your business is selling innovative household appliances. The quality assurance manager in your warehouse is responsible for making sure every kettle, toaster, and dishwasher that makes its way to your customers’ homes is of a quality you can stand behind.
This individual may not be driving innovation, but they help keep the lights on, and that can be just as important.
Even if a role is strategically and operationally important, organizations must consider how difficult it is to hire or develop talent for it. The role value dimension accounts for two key factors:
To use an example that’s top-of-mind for many industries, AI talent is highly specialized, difficult to develop internally, and in short supply. Given this specialty’s immense role value, businesses must aggressively compete for top talent or invest heavily in internal upskilling programs.
Thinking through these three dimensions will be valuable for many organizations, but for complex talent structures, it can help to formalize the process.
Korn Ferry’s Critical Role Index (CRI) uses the concepts of strategic, business, and role value to score and rank roles within an organization.
The CRI is tied into a data-driven set of digital tools called the Talent Suite. This includes the Profile Manager, which contains more than 10,000 “success profiles.” These are templates that cover the key skills, responsibilities, competencies, motivational drivers, and personality traits needed for success in each job.
Since each responsibility in a profile is mapped to strategic priorities, companies can quickly assess which roles matter for which objectives. It’s like a recipe book for talent—except instead of baking cookies, you’re assembling high-performing teams using detailed talent management metrics.
Organizations can either customize success profiles to fit their needs or map their existing roles to the templates, including different levels of proficiency within a role, like a junior versus senior accountant.
And like all Korn Ferry products, the talent metrics used with the CRI are grounded in broad, deep IP—that is, billions of data points from decades of consulting expertise in every major industry around the world.
“Companies are looking for a crystal ball to predict the future,” says Erker. “While no tool can do that perfectly, the CRI is a structured way to anticipate talent needs and make informed workforce decisions.”
Once you've identified your critical roles, the next step is to assess whether your current team members' skills match the demands of their positions and whether additional training or recruitment is needed.
Check out our article, Future-Proof Your Organization with the Workforce Skills Needed, to explore how skills assessments must evolve alongside your business needs.
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